Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has seen an explosion in recent years. First with chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is a text-based AI that can do anything from providing a recipe, explaining the history of pre-bronze China, or even just entertaining by role-playing as headmaster Dumbedore over text. It legitimized the idea of AI as a serious technology with both practical uses and limitless potential.

 

Then, came StableDiffusion, a text-to-image program created by the company StabilityAI. Though these programs weren’t the first in this domain, they represented a stark contrast, a clear before-and-after, and if one was paying attention, it was obvious there would be consequences never seen before. And that is where much of the push-back against these programs have come from - technology always has consequences.

 

Northwestern Michigan College (NMC), home to a large number of artists, is one of those weird places where it is both being used by students and faculty, as well as being disavowed and criticized by the same.

 

“There's the blatant exploitation of workers, there's the environmental concerns. And then, it comes down to the artists. There’s a lot of artists who do not consent to their art being used,” said NMC student Thursday Maurer.

 

This is an issue that has come up a lot, and has yet to be resolved. In order for these models to be trained, they must consume the art of thousands of artists, and in almost all cases, this has happened without their consent.

 

“The technology is developing faster than we can make laws for. We’re only just starting to get laws for AI,” said Maurer.

 

And as it stands, every AI model that generates art is going to require art created by humans in order to train, and from what we’ve seen so far, these Silicon Valley tech companies don’t seem interested in respecting artists' consent, nor compensating them for their work being used in their programs.

 

Randolph Mellick, a technical instructor of drawing at NMC, shared that he too was also concerned about the ethical dilemma of whose art the program was trained, but he had even greater concerns with the way the programs “understood” art to begin with.

 

“Art teaches us to see. We were first taught to see by painting and drawing, and then we were taught to see by photographs, and AI is being taught to see by photographs, and I think photographic-type seeing is an impoverishment. So, I think about it as an evil force. It’s essentially a mechanical force that’s hobbling us to use our own eyes,” said Mellick.

 

Though he worries about the potential for people's work to be stolen, he is even more worried about art itself being hurt by the very nature of the product that these models produce, and he’s not wrong. Stable Diffusion was trained on 2.3 billion images, mostly photographs of real things. Only a subset of these images were actual drawings.

 

“I think AI encodes photographic modes of seeing. People don’t think of photography as interpretive, and they’re more willing to grant drawing something more interpretive,” said Mellick.

 

Because of that, AI art programs often have more utility for photographic uses than drawings or paintings.

 

Another issue artists often take issue with is the ease of creation that art allows. Even if AI art is capable of creating something as good as a human with a simple prompt, it begs the question of what determines the quality of a piece of art.

 

“Yeah … Jackson Pollack’s famous drip painting, he made it in a day. I think lightning can strike; I think there’s lead-up time, and there’s effort that just goes into the whole thing. But I think that’s pretty hard to explain … But that’s pretty hard to sustain, because some people spend their whole lives to produce something, and it’s garbage, so there’s some standard other than just how hard someone worked to make it,” said Mellick

 

However, Maurer has another perspective, “That effort you put in is part of your humanity. As people, as humans, we only have so much time, and what we decide to use that time on - it matters. Not only to us, but the people in our lives, the people we care about. I think that time is valuable, and that effort is valuable, you are quite literally giving a piece of yourself away, every time you put time into something.”

 

With the rise of AI, the word “product” is more commonly used as a synonym for “art.”

 

“Like, what are you looking for? Are you looking to create something to give this idea or thought meaning? Or are you just looking to make a product? Are you looking for consumerism?” Questioned Maurer.

 

In a consumerist-based economy, artists often create to produce something that can be sold. AI art can be seen as an extension of that consumerist drive within the “art marketplace”.

 

With these criticisms in mind, it is also important to understand that neither Randy, nor Thursday have ever used AI in any of their art work, and that they do not plan to. On the other hand, Caroline Schafer-Hills, a faculty instructor for various Visual Communications classes, as well as the design advisor of the NMC student magazine, thinks it can be both useful, and dangerous.

 

“I’m afraid to embrace AI art, because I’m worried that the more trust we give it, the more potential there is for humanity to be exploited in a way. I think I put up a barrier, and am afraid to appreciate it, because I don’t want it to take away what humans do, and what we are capable of, in humanity, especially in the Humanities, which is the field we’re in,” explained Schafer-Hills.

 

She is not an outward observer though, along with the students at the NMC magazine, published an issue in 2023 about future technologies fittingly named “FUTUROLOGY.” In it, they experimented heavily with AI art using a wide range of AI programs such as Midjourney, DALL-E, Lensa, and Wombo. The staff experimented with crafting prompts and employing visual metaphors in order to get the looks they wanted, and they even employed AI programs to create synthetic self-portraits.

 

As for the dangers this technology posed, Caroline explains in FUTUROLOGY that “Our progress in the 21st century suggests that we rush toward technology with open arms, even though our life with ever-accelerating technology takes unexpected tolls on us. For years, we have worried as a collective society that our tech usage patterns might get out of control, and that the very advancements that were meant to make our lives easier might be doing the opposite.”

 

But not all of the magazine’s staff use AI. August Newell, a student and NMC magazine staff member said “I never want to use AI art programs. I’m afraid of what it can do to artists. I’m afraid that it will devalue or take away from artists' jobs.”

 

Art is arguably Humanity’s most defining trait -  that, and technology. And never before in human history have the two merged, and yet been at odds, to such a degree. And this is likely no coincidence: the word technology originally comes from the ancient Greek word Techne, which means both craft, and art. To the Greeks, fire was both a technology, and an art form. The same is true today, and these two are probably inexorably linked, and one will always affect the other. Since this is a new technology, and a new art form, the consequences of it long-term remain unclear, and the question remains: will artists use AI technology to create more art? Or will AI use the artists? This is something artists must answer themselves.