Why I'm against AI "art"

A few semesters back, I took Computational Creativity and liked it. Our group project was a GPT-3-based interview chatbot, and in retrospect, I'm glad I didn't do a project with AI art. 

At the time, I was simply interested in possibility. What are the limits of what computers can do? That's why I found it interesting. I wanted to get good at making art myself, and also understand how AI art creation worked from the perspective of deep learning. I worked a lot with prompt engineering in that class. It's something of an art itself, but very different from the process of drawing, digital painting, or 3D modeling in Maya or Blender. 

We did talk about the ethics of AI art, but unfortunately, my consistent tendency to dissociate and fly away to Magical Fairy Rainbow Skittles Unicorn-Filled Sexy La-La-Land during lectures ascertained that I can't remember the arguments that were presented. 

Ultimately, the problem isn't with the risk of job loss to artists. Don't get me wrong, that IS a problem. I'm trying to launch an independent art career alongside my normal career as a TD/code guy. I don't want that screwed up. But that's not the MAIN problem. 

The issue is the weird Wall-E-esque dystopia that AI art zealots are trying to push. If made a reality, this will ultimately result in the loss of the individual. 

AI, in its present incarnation, is not actually intelligent. We do not have Marvin the Paranoid Android. It's all neural networks. Even if consciousness is an emergent property, and thus inherent in all matter, that says nothing about actual intelligence. We're not at singularity. AI in its present form is merely a composition of mathematical processes, far simpler than what actually goes on inside the human brain (which no one fully understands yet anyway). 

It can't talk to you. It can't fall in love or make a friend. It has no hopes, dreams, or wishes. It is a composition of electrical current in transistors that is discretized to 1s and 0s. Like all computers. As a result, when it makes art, it isn't expressing anything. 

Yes, you could argue that it's a macrocosm of our society itself, some sort of external, automated representation of our collective psyche. But art is first and foremost about the individual, and there is no individual here. Not the AI, at least. 

Now, you could argue that the prompt engineer is the individual in this equation. More on that in a minute. 

AI art can create at record speed. Frameworks such as PyTorch run on your GPU, and hardware is always improving. And its output looks pretty damn good, unfortunately. You know what this means? It's not about the job loss. That can be rectified in other ways, a la UBI (though if it instead leads to a future where only manual labor jobs are available, which are boring and I completely suck at, screw it I'm out, and it really irritates me when people throw around UBI when making a living is not the actual problem). Rather, it's about the loss of the individual. 

Steven Zapata talks about this in his "Argument Against Image AIs" video on YouTube. Eventually, the prompt engineer will no longer be a necessary part of the neural network. At some point, I do believe that they will be able to train themselves, and spit out art without any human input. It's not that much of a stretch, especially as people continue to use them and thus train them -- they get "smarter" while still having no original soul of their own. 

When the prompt engineer is out of the equation, and AI art can be produced at rapid speed, your creations will be irrelevant. The idea for the anime you have, or the visual novel that you want to code up, or your indie game dev career. Your own fantastical creations. Your fantasy worlds. Your beloved characters. The painting you want to make of two lovers holding hands under some bizarre alien night sky. Your thoughts, dreams, passions, and hopes -- they will be lost amidst a sea of art that was created by a soulless machine. A machine that has never known heartbreak, loss, or joy. No one, no other human other than those in your immediate circles if you're lucky, will notice you. AI will have already created everything they could ever want. You, as a person with your own feelings and thoughts, will never be known. 

Ergo, the loss of the individual. 

This is why I'm against AI art. 

Writers should be worried too because AI is coming for our stories next, though this might be harder to train because we usually require people to purchase our writing before they can view it. So, maybe it will not be so bad. I do think it would be amusing to see a story-writing bot trained on FanFiction.net or Archive of Our Own. 

Remember, these companies do not care about you. They only care about profits. Many higher-ups in such businesses are full-blown sociopaths, due to the nature of the job and how one acquires it. They are incapable of caring for you by definition. They could not do so even if they desired to. And they don't. 

Artists, regardless of your skill level, do not stop learning and creating. It's the only tool we have to fight back -- other than legal wars, but if those fail, then our weapon is to keep creating. Devs, there's nothing wrong with researching and exploring the possibilities of neural nets -- but I do struggle with this because I now believe that these tools should never have been made available to the public. 

Also, this is a WAY different situation than the advent of Houdini or something. Don't even try to compare it to that. 

I'm not anti-progress. I love technology. I am against the destruction of individuality. Screw those creepy collectivistic weirdos who would voluntarily join the Borg. 

Kristen Pham, in her Guardians of the Boundary series, has a universe in which all boring tasks are automated. That way, people can focus on what's actually important to them, like creating. This is what we should have focused on. Not automating the things that bring people joy and light. I don't feel any expression of myself as an individual when I unclog my toilet. Why couldn't we have focused on automating that?