In the past year or so of being exposed to hundreds of conversations about AI, I’ve heard plenty of pros and cons from both sides of the debate, some more confusing than others. Maybe one of the most baffling “benefits” of generative AI is that it is said to make art accessible to people who aren’t artistically inclined. If you can come up with some semblance of an idea for an image, you can just plug the idea into an AI art generator, wait a few seconds, and bam! You’ve “made art” and are therefore an “artist.” Your participation in the act of creation can start and end with the dictation of an idea to a machine that will steal bits and pieces of other people’s work in order to sell you on the illusion that you’ve made something.
When it comes to recognizing what we should value about art, we’ve kind of lost the plot, and there are probably plenty of ways to start picking that issue apart. One thing that really stands out to me, however, is the idea of depicting “art” as “inaccessible” to most of the population.
To be clear, I’m not talking about the art industry, but rather the creation of art itself. Why have some of us started to view it as something that only a select few can engage in? Reading and hearing conversations about the topic has led me to realize that some of us are equating “art” with perfectly executed copies of the images in our heads. Without the help of generative AI, I guess it is true that executing that vision is “inaccessible” to most of us.
I would argue, however, that this is an incredibly inaccurate way of viewing artistic creation. The art we make, at its core, should not be dictated by perfectionistic standards.
History has shown us that art is beautiful in its expansiveness. Cave paintings and carvings, some of our earliest records of art, were crude, simplistic attempts made by people who wanted to communicate things like religion and symbolism. It is true that, over time, some people have refined their craft and worked towards “mastery” of their art, but others have continued traditions of simplicity that we might call “amateur” today.
What these works of art all have in common is that they are the result of a human process of bringing an idea to life through personal efforts to physically convey what someone saw or imagined. To me, this is where the value lies, and I think that it’s something we instinctively recognize.
A handmade card with smudged ink, clashing colors, and a slightly off-center image will always feel more like a work of art than a printed card (or e-card) with an AI-generated design, no matter how perfectly cohesive and advanced that design appears to be. There is something enticing about artwork created by humans – about the idea that they took an idea into their own two hands and worked to bring it to life. AI cannot replicate the soul behind an art piece. Unlike the technical aspects of other people’s work, this is something it cannot steal.
For those of us who would not be considered experts at any form of visual art (myself included), the tendency to value AI art over our own partially stems from a fear of being a beginner. In a culture that worships convenience and a constant striving for perfection, it makes complete sense that someone could fall into the trap of believing that making impressive-looking art needs to be convenient to be accessible. However, if you can put a pencil to paper, drawing is entirely accessible to you. If you can mold clay into any sort of shape at all, sculpting is entirely accessible to you. If you can drag a paintbrush against a canvas and leave a mark (I’m guessing you know where I’m going with this), then congratulations! Painting is entirely accessible to you.
If all that you know how to draw, sculpt or paint right now is a simple object that looks as if your six-year-old cousin could’ve done it in better detail, then you are already making art that’s more artistic than anything an AI generator could mix up and spit out. Besides, creating visual art is a learned skill, and if you really want to improve at it, you absolutely can. Your personal, authentic creations are inherently far more valuable than any visuals a machine could ever generate.
And, if you really need a high-quality image to be created sooner than you can learn how to do it, pay someone else to create their own interpretation of your vision. Help the people who make the art you enjoy to afford to continue doing it. Please, please don’t feed the cycle of soulless machines stealing from people who create their own works. It’s not art if it isn’t human, and there are far better options.
