The art world is no stranger to controversy, but the rise of generative AI has sparked a new debate about the ethics and authenticity of art.
As AI-generated art advances, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish it from work created by human hands. The question now is, how long will it be before AI art becomes unrecognizable to the human eye?
The Rise of AI Art
Publicly available AI image generation tools, like Midjourney and DALL-E 2, have caused a stir among artists, designers, and art fans.
Critics argue that technology has advanced so rapidly due to the hoarding of art and images available on the internet, without proper credit or compensation to the artists whose work has been used.
The Culmination of Human Skill
Some artists believe that AI art is unethical because it disregards the “knowledge” of everyone involved when collecting data.
“This tool is specifically designed to replace concept artists like us,” says concept artist Jared Kryszewski, who designed the memorable AI doll for the movie “M3GAN / Megan”.
Several artists have expressed their anger against the use of their work in the tool without prior explanation or consent.
Identifying AI Art
The ability to distinguish AI-generated art from human art is becoming more challenging, with many artists believing it won’t be long before the general public can no longer tell the difference.
Although there are still little cues that ordinary people use to discern AI art, such as dead eyes, too many fingers, and strange finger shapes, several of the artists interviewed for this article believe that these signs will become less noticeable as technology advances.
Looking at the Whole Design
If you want to tell AI images apart, you should look at the design as a whole. 3D character artist Dan Edel says, “At first glance, the imagery is beautiful and detailed, but often there is no logic behind it.”
Artists may use such compositions as clues when identifying AI art. Artist John Ramsey says AI images lack intentionality, and that AI doesn’t have an empirical foundation of what a person is, what a tree is, and what a hand is.
Collaborative Art
Some artists have embraced generative AI as a tool for creativity. Artist Ellie Pretz incorporates various forms of generative AI into her artwork and describes the work exhibited in San Francisco as “AI collaborative art”.
In the near future, most people won’t be able to discern AI art without the help of a computer consistently, says artist Ari Merenciano, who works at Google Creative Lab.
The Future of AI Art
As generative AI proliferates, the detection of AI-generated content is likely to become a hot topic in the future. The rapid development of tools for generating images and text has been the focus of attention so far, but tools for generating AI voices are also on the horizon.
The most important thing will be figuring out what’s real and what’s fake, says Merenciano, but it will be a service, not a human eye.
Conclusion
Art generated by generative AI is advancing at an astonishing pace, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish it from human-created art. The ethical implications of AI art are still being debated, but as technology advances, the ability to discern AI art from human art will become more challenging.
However, some artists have embraced generative AI as a tool for creativity, suggesting that the future of art may involve collaboration between humans and AI creativity.