Don’t call it AI art
Not another piece about AI! Haven’t we suffered enough this year?
Look, you’re right. I hate that I can’t open the fridge without hearing about AI, too. But bear with me. If nothing else, this will be short. And I promise I’m not going to try turn you off generative AI. People more knowledgeable than me already covered the environmental, labour, and copyright issues, the technical limitations, and the craven individuals and corporations operating the largest models. If these arguments didn’t convince you, nothing I say will. That’s alright.
I ask you for one thing and one thing only: don’t use the term AI art.
Call it AI content. Or AI-generated images, videos, text. Call it AI slop for all I care. Anything but art. Art is fundamentally human. It is craft expressed with technical, intellectual, and emotional intent of its creator. A computer does not express itself and it does not intend. So it stands to reason it does not create art.
People who’d like to call themselves AI artists (sic) or prompt engineers would like us to believe AI is a tool like any other. Except with tools, the artist creates the outcome. With AI, the outcome is computed by a model, through an algorithm you cannot inspect, trained on data you cannot access. Your intent is erased and replaced with a vague approximation. And to top it off, it’s done using someone else’s craft.
I promised to keep things short so if you need further explanation for why AI cannot create art, read Ted Chiang’s famous essay. My beef is semantic. I want to kill the phrase AI art. Because I see it used too often, even by people who agree with all of the above but are resigned to its widespread acceptance.
We don’t have to accept it.
To AI companies, generative content is just a business use case. An avenue for growth. They don’t give a shit about art. But we should! Every time we say AI art, we cede a little bit of ground to them. We allow output from a big calculator to be in the same category as works crafted with intent. It is an insult to artists and, at a risk of sounding melodramatic, a devaluation of something that tethers us to our humanity in an increasingly digitised, increasingly automated world. What does it say about us if we cannot show solidarity with artists even in such a miniscule way like refusing to acknowledge AI output as art?
I’m one of those sorry sods with a degree in culture studies (audience boos). All those years ago in uni I had to read about eighty different definitions of art and the one that stuck with me the most was that art is anything that people believe to be art. If this ever includes AI content, we will have failed artists tremendously. They deserve better.
