When I was a kid my dad borrowed a computer and on that computer there was a programme called “Dazzle”. Dazzle used mathematics and procedural randomness to create patterns in motion, it was little more than a screensaver but it was the first time I was able to experiment with software like this. Sure, I enjoyed splashing paint about as much as any kid but now I was able to put in a few prompts and see this beautiful vibrant dance. It was art and it inspired me to pursue digital art as a vocation. The latest tool of this medium is the post-conceptual “generative art” or what we’re now colloquially calling “AI Art” - a term I object to as reductive branding but none the less what we’re all calling it. (Ed. Gaffen actually found the Dazzle software on archive.org while reviewing this piece, here) For years now, I’ve been fascinated with the various projects that sought to map out brainwaves and align them with concepts and images. These projects have mostly been research into “dream recording” or communications systems for disabled peoples but it’s the idea of manifesting the image in your mind without the barriers of physical skill or resource intrigues me the most. For me this technology, much like any automation can and should be used to liberate us from toil and servitude. However, we live in the capitalist system and it is a sick poison that obfuscates truth and sows divide rather than liberate the working class. The technology is under the control of the state, capital, and fascistic propagandists, presents a clear and present threat to labour, social welfare, and the collective political and cultural health of everyone on the planet. The the discussion on AI is broad and sweeping with many positive and negative arguments, but where I find a critical objection is how people respond to generative art, even when framed entirely in some utopia socialist vision. I am told, “anything involving AI is not Art”. This line of reasoning then driven home with absolute hostility. The train of thought seems to be to scumbully people into not using it, so we see each and every piece of artwork even suspected of involving AI Art in it’s creation being barraged with the kind of hostility we usually save for Tories and Nazis. These digital vanguards of the pencil, are quick to barrage anyone they can find with the most abusive antagonism and for what, someone used AI to mock up a reference to a classic poster for their event? It is frankly absurd and I hate these absolutist positions, counter to any logic or acceptance of reality. If we act this way, we reduce our capacity to respond in a serious manner and protect ourselves both industrially and culturally. Now automation should liberate. For twenty years, I’ve been using various bits of software that do just that. Whether that’s Illustrator or Procreate, we have been systematically creating packages, processes, and toolsets that mean you can create in moments what used to take a team days. I firmly believe that this is the democratisation of art, albeit existing dubiously within capitalism at the expense of labour. (You don’t need the type pool or a team of draftsmen if you’ve got Open Office and Gimp.) Even by 2020 if you spoke to anyone about “AI Art”, the attitude for “never going to happen”, despite the ever increasing artistic works from around the world. The present reality was still, for the vast majority of people, some distant whim science fiction. Then in January 2021, OpenAI’s DALL-E was launched, at first, generative art was a curious toy, on the consumer level there were a few websites that offered a sample and overwhelmingly they created a near surreal dream-like image. At the start of the following year in February Midjourney launch their self-titled software, in August 2022 Stability AI launched Stable Diffusion and suddenly people began to see the possibilities. It was a difficult time, global pandemics, war, corporate profiteering, the quick pace of technology caught the vast majority of people unaware. They simply were not ready for a world where automatic systems could source complex data for you or that drones would be children’s toys and a most horrific trauma inducing weapon of war. In September Dall-E 2 launched, and was specifically highlighted for using public data. “AI-Art” now looked the business and tho people were torn between whether it was a toy or threat, that it used public data without consent or compensation of the artists was fucky to say the least. In November 2022 Tencent launched “Different Dimension Me” (most likely on the back of Stable Diffusion) and suddenly all the artists who did “Manga of you PFP” art commissions lost their entire market. This coincided with the launch of ChatGPT, which blew up instantly. This for me was the point at which I noticed AI-Art was growing beyond the tech and art spaces. DDMe and ChatGPT were everywhere and for all of their bugs and failures they changed the generalised perception of AI overnight, from your average Joe and corporates both. By December the “Anti-AI Art” protest began to ramp up, tho silent when automation saw tens of thousands of blue collar jobs vapourise, suddenly now the artists were threatened it was time for swift action! Sure, intially somewhat built upon some shakey understanding of the tech but ultimately fueled by some genuine concerns. essentially: Fair arguments in my mind, but also... - It can’t do hands. It will never be good enough and it lessens us all. Now these, these arguments I find iffy and I’m going to start with them. I want to say very clearly here I am neither “Anti-Ai” or “Pro-AI”, what I am is aware that it is a tool, and that as a tool, it is what we use it for, but I’ve encountered a slew of “Anti-Ai” talking points which I feel it’s important to address, which I will do so in as concise a manner as possible. Now I don’t address every point, and fly paste the ones I do. I am quite aware people are going to take the worst possible reading of any hazy element of this but that is on you, not I. Then the models improve. Suddenly “it can’t do hands” became ah look at the indiscriminate lighting, lack of focus, uniform textures, flat angles, and so on. Hyper critical examination of what was usually just some silly meme image or event flyer. Like have you no idea how absurd your hostility and faux-art criticism sounds? Please for the love of god, look at the artistic merit of your average meme, shitpost, or rave event through the 00’s. No one gives a fuck that it can’t do hands, especially when it can, much better than me at least. The other counter to this argument is people laying this accusation out as a broad sweeping cheapening of art. That if we tolerate this low quality result in our precious beautiful field, we allow in the soulless, the sterile, in inauthentic. We are reduced! It’s just a technical toy and cannot and will never be used for real art! Alfred Stieglitz and F. Holland Day, two deeply artistic photographers sought to change that. They meet with derision from even amongst their photographic fraternity. Amongst a small peer group they developed new photographic techniques to expand their art even tho it would be sometimes before it would be appreciated by society en-masse as such. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edouard Boubat and Robert Doisneau, changed this, and changed it they did due to a development of technology. The 35mm camera allowed them to wander the streets and capture moments of joy and develop what we now call “candid photography” and “photo-journalism”. It was the same story for film. Film, for some thirty years of it’s infancy was seen less as an art form and more as a vulgar novelty, just some cheap entertainment. This started to change with News Reels and Actuality films and tho there were some attempts to portray art in film through the 1900’s -20’s it was was only with the works of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock that the relationship began to change. Yet “art”? No, this is just in today's parlance, content and slop, we couldn’t possibly consider it as something as noble as “art”. It wasn’t until “The Miracle” a segment of the film “L’amore” was banned by New York, which led to a Supreme Court case in 1952 that established film as legally protected art. My point is this, art is more than the medium, it is the purpose, the form, the viewpoint, the technical skill, and the emotive driver. “Art” is more than our little bastions, how many times do we have to do this? I remember keenly being told that my “little cartoon doodles are not art”. To highlight my objection I’mma pull up three pretty well known quotes. “It’s not my fault you can’t doodle” The Tiktok artist and influence says from his New York loft apartment, denouncing people who use AI art. The sheer liberal elitism of it is galling. I first saw this video a couple of days after a friend shared with me the artworks his class had made. He teaches neglected children, and tear aways. The kind of kids that linger outside Premier and who you are afraid to make eye contact with. They’ve just had a hell of a day, creating for the first time in their lives. These kids have never made anything more than a doodle and for the first time they are able to translate what they have in their heads onto the canvas. This is the democratisation of art. Art should be for everyone, not just those with innate talent, the time to develop the skill sets, or the finances to support a luxury hobby. You need to get rid of your romantic vision of the struggling artist and just let the kids make some art with whatever tool they can, let it inspire them to become more and more hands on. Every time a child discovers they can create it’s fucking beautiful, regardless of the medium they use. “If you’re using it to cosplay as an artist...” says another who views it as quick, cheap and soulless, as she uses software on her tablet to fill in the colours, straighten her mark making, reduced hours of painting to twenty minutes work. Her medium is digital art, and more love to her, here work is beautiful and valid but in my ear I remember when I was first studying art, I told my teacher I was into the artwork of Autumn Whitehurst (a digital artist) and I was told that “real art doesn’t use computers, that’s cheating”. It’s just the same regurgitated ire. Heck this is like Bob Ross being denounce as a cheap trader of speed techniques, painting “soulless”, “formulaic” and “thoughtless” images as he brought the joys of painting to millions who would never of thought “is art for me?” Well it is! and however you discover that, it’s great! OK, There are important questions to ask ourselves around the degree of human authorship and the nature of our separation from the processes we replicate with our digital methods. Whether you’re using Halftone filters and Riso overlays, Brush packages and all manner of toolsets to make your workflow easier and better, what you are in fact doing is reducing the labour time, material assets, and skill set development time, in order to create the vision in your head or the image for the client. Please note, rather than destroy the traditional arts, the opposite has happened. More people paint now than ever, they create with physical and digital medias, while some might use generative art as a quick toy, others have made it their medium and they are artists. “ It’s an insult to life itself...” Hayao Miyazaki said this aftyer viewing some early AI artwork. Only it wasn’t AI but a completely different technology and the animation in question was of a zombie monster, this shortly after he recently buried a good friend, he later gave an interview where he expressed clearly that he felt the animation in question was insensitive to those living with disabilities. I can’t speak for Miyazaki (who as far as I’m aware hasn’t said anything about AI Artwork since) but I do know that Studio Ghibli developed Toonz, the premier bit of software that helps animators improve their workflow and they utilise 3D modelling and computer generated animations in their work. Sure there are distinct scenes that the team labour on for over year, but this is not the entirety and like any sensible creator of media they use the tools at hand, more to the point they innovate away from “picking up a pencil” mentality, especially when it can improve the workflow and ultimately the lives of the staff. Pick up a Pencil? Break free from your romanticised visions and return to Earth. It’s not art because it’s not created by a human with intent. “Art” is all around us. It can be found generated through natural processes over aeons or the rusting of barrels on wasteland over decades as much as it is can be Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers, or Klien’s IKB. There are entire art movements that seek to remove human consciousness from the process or add in elements of universal chaos, order, physics, pattern and discord. From Automatic drawing to motion painting, “Art” cuts through as something more than a classical depiction of the world around us of some deliberate emotive style. “Art” has been found in political manifestos, documentive works, in reflection of technical drawings, in old advertisements, and captured moments of deep pain. Life stuff. People have given art brushes to dogs, pigs, elephants, the wind, robotic automatons, and digital programs. They have found great beauty and wonder in the results. We have the work Jakob Grosse-Ophoff, Patrick Tresset, Sougwen Chung and So Kanno who all use automation to manifest powerful works and this is before we look at the procedural artists such as Soham Sona, Liza Daly and Ryoji Ikeda. I find this an appalling lack of depth, to me, artists find a deep fascination with every device and tool, when photo-copiers became commonplace artists experimented and placed with them, creating fantastic collages, people like David Carson, Tibor Kalman, Stefan Saigmeister, and Peter Bil’ak all took the technology around them, ever changing as it was, and played with it, toyed with it, sometimes to sell a moment, sometimes to sell a product, but always enriching us with “Art”. As the digital age came upon us, thousands of new artists became obsessed with the the liminal spaces between the analogue and the digital. We went from ASCII artwork to glitch moshing, from the sound of trackers to the democratisation of sequencers with Music 2000. Long before Midjourney and all that, “AI” artwork was already becoming a point of interest for artists. Heck even in the infant years they were noticing the hallucinations, dream states, Moebius-like landscapes and Cronenbergian nightmares and began exploring this. It’s what artists do. What would be a passing toy for some, would for others become obsession. Pretty soon we have works like Mosaic Virus by Anna Ridler or The Entropy Gardens by Refik Anadol. Go look them up, follow up some other names. Deep dive. Challenge your conception of “Art”. It’s just a few prompts. “AI Art” can make a passable image pretty quickly. It can be used as a content mill. Sure. For passing users, this is all it is, a quick toy, similar to “mememaker” or any of those old sites that apply a filter to your photographs. For others not so much, it’s a tool and one they use to hone their work. Let me take you through the creation of a short reel such as this piece by the artist Hari Ren. First they researched locations and imagery to suit, a combination of local knowledge and crowd sourcing ideas. Having found a location suitable to lay the back drop he digitally painted the 20 layer matte base, utilising photo-composition and over-painting. These layers were then cut up with someone of them being given seamless textures to aid the flow of the animation. For this they used Photoshop, Firefly, and Rebelle. For the bird they took footage of a blackbird and exported some 250 frames and gave them a unified painted look using a batch process using a single seed Stable Diffusion Forge. The eyes were hand painted and added to each frame using Photoshop. The scene was then layed up using Pixijs, the artist taught themselves Object Movement Sprite Animation, Displacement Maps and Particle Animation and used some 400 lines of code. Finally they recorded the scene down in OBS and synced up the score to marry up. This was ten hours work, perhaps seven of them spent researching and skill up on the techniques they wanted to use. So let’s say about three hours for a solo project such as this, stripping off all the additional labour. If he were to do this ten years ago, this would have been days of work. Thirty years ago more like three weeks. The AI here, is used here as a a tool to aid the artist. It’s no different from using any of the plethora of settings, tools, filters, or scripts found in any piece of software. No one lost their job and no one was force to spend weeks of their life on a small project. Saying “AI is just a few prompts” is like saying La Charité is just a few brush strokes or Susie Smoking was just pointing a camera. We shouldn’t strip away the consideration, intent, and skill of digital creatives simply because lay persons can get a nice passable piece with a Insta filter, paint a nice ombre, toy with the presets or, dare I say, type in a few prompts. Support real artists... Let’s take the situation of my friend who has spent years working on his card game only to hit a road block, he isn’t an artist. He’s using a card template we’ve built together, my time given out of mutual aid but if I was charging would have been around £200 at a living wage. He requires artwork to populate his game. If he was to go to Artstation, he would first have to pay them over £500 a year for the pleasure of looking for a freelance artist, who then, would be looking at charging hundreds if not thousands per piece of artwork. Ok so perhaps Artstation is a bit too professional. Let’s look at Deviant Art. It is, frankly, a sea of low quality, manga and furry fandom slop, generally catering to fan art or NSFW of your OC that very often looks at around £50 to £100 for a single full body in colour. Scrawl through all the dross and you might find someone who isn't a bot, who has the specific style, how long has that taken you? Are they even free? Do they even want the gig? I have years of experience using these and other platforms and generally I’ve paid around £100 to £200 for A3 sheets of concept art and between £500 and £1000 for final pieces and I’ll be honest with you a good 25% of the time, the artist has just ghosted me halfway through the job. He can’t afford to take that risk. There is absolutely no way he can ever afford to make his game. I don’t believe that is right, especially with the tech right there. It might be uncomfortable to hear but it’s the truth, there are huge barriers to access for the vast majority of people, let alone those who consider themselves “in” the art space. Some of the leading voices of the “Anti AI-Art” movement wouldn’t look at you unless you waved thousands at them, but hey you can sure as shit go spend £50 buying a print from a vanity press or grab their stickers from Red Bubble, Inkthreadable, or any number of commercial ventures. They don’t even hate AI-Art like they want you too, they hate that corporates mined data without paying them and to balance this out we’ve reduced ourselves to some reactionary natalism and technophobia. It’s got to the point we’re screaming at people trying to scum bully them into not using AI. No nuance, no critical concern, just venom and absolute aggression, 0-100. The other side and frankly the main body of the most actively antagonistic on social medias, and any AI artist can confirm this, are “Anti AI Art” people are those who are trying to trade of low-tier commodity illustrations. It is they who had to most to lose when you could just make some pseudo-private software make salacious pictures of your OC. I imagine the past two years have been very difficult for my creatives in the low-tier fantasy porn market and frankly I couldn’t care less. They have cut a uncomfortable and temporary market niche reaping the rewards of commodity generation on the back of fellow workers who never had the time to learn or make. The same can be said of the “Draw your pet/gran/kids in anime” artists tho funnily enough, much like the professional freelancers, are fewer and further between when it comes to firebrand replies on social media posts. The means of production should be all of ours and we can’t break from capital as we actively reject the tools that would liberate us from the cannibalistic frenzy that is survival economics. The solution to this? Compensation. That’s right, those freelancers and professionals driving this ire, they wanted to get paid. They want libraries to give them royalties when their art style is used. The result? Services like “Tess”, an Generative AI Artwork service which compensates the artists. So want access to art for that one off project without having to spend 5 years developing the skill sets but don’t want everyone moaning at you on the internet? For $80USD a month you get 600 generations. Woo. Have you got $80 a month? Saying this, I believe that an artist’s personal style is a finger print, it is vital and important on a deep level. Truly. When we reflect that style we should pay homage to those that inspire, but we do this out of consideration and peer ship, not because of capital. It’s bemusing to see the leftists and Anarchists who gleefully endorse stealing from local businesses and the petty bourgeoisie suddenly spitting rage if you make a picture in the style of Ghibli. Man, fuck Ghibli, They are richer than Captain Kirk, you are entirely within your rights to steal their style. Overwhelmingly, despite being great lovers of art and creativity itself, our milieu did not give one diddly shite about copyright and IP prior to this loaded discussion on AI Art. It’s obnoxious to suddenly find ourselves gatekeeping horizontal exchanges under quasi-fascistic attitudes of security and property. There is a difference between big corporates sacking staff to be replaced by automation, and your mate Iolo making a fun poster of a unicorn and a raccoon decking a Tory in the style of Vermeer, Stop being so reductionist. Sure it’s not nice when people you don’t like use your stuff but that’s the nature of a liberated playing field. Fuck commercial elements praying upon the working class, but that is a problem with capitalism and we shouldn’t pursue liberal assimilationist solutions to this threat, we should take revolutionary action both defensively and offensively. Still, corporations are trying to find the solve like with Adobe’s “Firefly” which ostensibly sources it’s data ethically without undermining anyone's copyright. ... with questionable success. ... no one will paint ever again! As more people were freed from the terrible suffering of industrial labour, the more they would take to pencil and brush and express. Eventually technology would start to fill some of the gaps and allow us to do more and in new ways, and each step on the way, some technological marvel has changed the game, and now with have this most powerful tool of automation and it threatens liberty and oppression both, the opposite should be true! Automation can/should serve the community and liberate us from excess labour, a tool to make life easier but this is the opposite of what it is in fact being employed to do, we shouldn’t be ignorant of this. The techno-fetishists appeal for a better world by undermining our capacity to face the imminent realities and threat to labour. Still, this shouldn’t lead us to knee jerk absolutes. They threaten, AI will replace the artists! Did industrial bread manufacture replace the Baker? No. The artists will be fine. What it will do is change our relationships with the artists we support and the nature of the artistic field to one built not on commodity generation but relationships. I don’t know how much you interact with artists but I’ll tell you this, the digital era has been hell. Back what when if you wanted an artist for your product you would buy a copy of CONTACT or similar that had profiles of all the artists in their books, sort of like an Argos catalogue of creatives. You’d find one, commission your Christmas cards or whatever and pay them, usually a pretty decent amount. With the digital age came saturation and the commodification was rife. Whether it’s Deviant Art, Art Station, Fiver, or a variety of industry sites, you can be sure to have a feeding frenzy of desperate artists, bots, disappearing labour, international labour exploitation, middleman job farming, and an absolute lack of quality. Since AI came about, a huge amount of that has disappeared. There is no profit to be made as the market for “content art” has dried up. People can quickly make content, so they do. What you will find now is greater and stronger community building around artists. There are fewer of them but the relationships, even within capital, are more more equitable and mutually beneficial. For graphic designers, for all of the AI poster makers and business card makers there are, the real threat to our livelihood came with the automated design makers, things like WordPress and GoDaddy allowing you to make your own websites in minutes, and Canva essentially gutting much of the jobbing work for editorial designers. Canva gets nearly a million downloads a month. That’s a million people getting in touch with graphic design. A million graphic design jobs that don’t happen sure, but heck, maybe these users are just using the tools for a presentation or a one off birthday card, maybe they’ll fall in love with it and try out different tools. It’s wonderful, and it’s immensely liberating for our communities they they can access such a resource without having to pay some web designer or graphic artists thousands for the pleasure. Now, even within capital, creatives are having to stop relying on their gate kept skill sets and have to actually work on their relationships with fellow workers and exploring their specific passion and artistic form. The result it that people support people more. Yes of course, fuck these corporates and I truly feel for those struggling to survive under capitalism, I’m right there too, broke as fuck, but our concerns should be building up free and open source alternatives not barriers to access. What we need to work for here is practices which are beneficial to the artists and user both, and we do this through organised labour and counter-development of open source toolsets, both defensive and offensive in the struggle against malpractice (such as Glaze and Nightshade) but also in developing toolsets, repositories and software built on egalitarian principles and for egalitarian purpose. Stop engaging with capitalism, stop using their platforms, stop allowing yourselves to be used as a tool for commodity. Future repository building should be built on a socialist principle with consent and recognition at the heart of it. Breaking free of capitalism and all of it’s nastiness would allow us to treat AI Art as the novelty and/or tool it is depending on usage. In the mean time Meta data and digital watermarking can be used not only to safeguard and limit malinformation but also to share inspiration points. I’d love to be able to click an image and see “This artwork uses to style of XYZ” and discover new people. Artists shouldn’t have to survive by commodifying their existence and output and the sooner we can manifest a space liberated from this the better. AI is killing the planet. So let’s ground ourselves a little. The numbers for water and power usage of “AI” data centres varies wildly depending on the specific task, the age of the facility, and it’s supporting infrastructure. However a pretty generally agreed upon figure GPT-3 places it around 1 litre per 10-100 queries. Chat GPT estimates a typical query uses .0003Kwh while Google AI operates around. 0.0029 kWh, some x10 the power usage of a standard search at around .0003kWh (which is suspicious since they’ve been saying the same for 20 years.) Something like Stable Diffusion generating a single image (less efficient than batch processing which is the overwhelming use case) uses 0.0001–0.0005 kWh per image at home or 0.01–0.05 kWh per image using data centres. Water usage something like 0.05 and .5 litres. Now let’s put that into perspective: Here is the rub, these corporate giants are already investing in a variety of technologies to reduce their cooling needs, water usage, and renewables for power sources, not out of any ethics but profit. These extracts of data sourced across 2019-2024 are probably old hat. Meanwhile artists are still using paper, we’re still using acid baths, we’re still using spray glue, lino for prints, endless inks and paints of dubious provenance and of course our computers, usually running high end graphics cards and powered by who knows what. We absolutely have a problem the way in which we allow corporates to generate power and cool data centres, but if you have a problem with AI based on this, but absolutely no issue with 3D artists spending 30 hours making a model and then spending yet more time rendering it your reasoning is highly dubious and malformed. Especially when we consider that much of these objections occur online using platforms which consume ridiculous levels of power and when considering the large position of at home consumer use of Stable Diffusion which doesn’t come with any of the aforementioned concerns. It’s just slop. Mind you, we now take 1.8 trillion photos are each year. The vast majority of this is uploaded to social medias, right alongside all the memes, edits, stitches etc. According to Facebook’s estimates, the company processes around 500 terabytes of data every day. This is one of the core issues of the day, but it’s one that has existed long before the advent of AI, Trump rode to victory on a wave of photoshopped slop and Zero Punctuation was moaning about a “sea of shit” on Youtube back in 2007 as he stepped away into a curated space. Ultimately this is what happens when billions of people go from near isolation and a lack of the materials to generate and share their thoughts, beliefs, and arts, to having the entire world as a stage. It occurred long before Web 3.0 and it’s sinkhole concentrations of web traffic, back in the 90’s with Geocities and Diary-x, Faceparty and Myspace, a thousands little spaces where each of us, alone in the digital void called out trying to find each other and pursue the promises of the digital age. It can make everything so busy, and often feel like a corporate void of noise, but this is why it’s important for us to create bastions of curated spaces across the digital ether. Reclaim cyberspace and reject social medias, that we’re not doing that is more on us than anything else, the corps ain’t gunna do it for us. This saturation of content is something artists have explored for some 80 years at least, I have no simplistic philosophic answers for you there really. Fascists, (entirely ignorant of the Futurist Manifesto which gave birth to their movement) are overwhemingly in favour of simplistic reductive saturation, they fucking love AI Art. For the first time ever they don’t have to rely on a few pissant cartoonists, they can make whatever nonsense they like and boy do they. You don’t have to spend years being a liberal artist, feminised by the Jewry of the world and their globalist post modern interests, you can stay a real man defending traditionalist masculine virtues and make a pretty picture that argues your position more than your monosyllabic brain ever could. Oorah! More sinister tho congruent, the paedophilic, perverted, and patriarchal throngs have used this technology, and especially the two-year window sans-regulation to produce the obscene, particularly highlighted in Korea and India, the same is true the world over. Disgusting images of family members, work collogues, and celebrities have filled the hard drives of men and boys the world over. These sick sons of bitches mind you, were making Photoshop fakes, 3D Models, computer games and cartoon drawings long before AI. I’m pretty sure it’s a near universal truth that each technologic marvel humanity has ever manifested has been used by the powerful to abuse the weak, on a governmental, corporate, and personal level. Still, by January 2021 we had the groundwork of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity and by 2024 a solid chunk of the generative art programmes are digitally watermarking generations. Legal and civil bodies will ultimately deal with the ramifications of people using technology to create abusive content or misinformation, and our generalised tech literacy will help us with the rest. Government and industry regulators round the world are spooling up their legal frameworks to deal with the new menance and make sure itdoes what they want it too. There are more “anarchistic” solutions to such criminality and social harm but we’re far from that, and really when it comes to art, given we still live in a capital age, the concern of most is really about intellectual property and who is getting paid. Is there percentage of human-authorship that over-rides the machine? If artistic styles can be licenced, what does that mean for the wider art world? If you generative an image using your own performance but with a Makoto Shinkai prompt, should he get royalties? What about if you develop a model using your own artwork, does Stability AI have sui generis rights or perhaps even co-authorship on everything generated using Stable Diffusion? These are complex questions we have to ask ourselves, the answers unlikely to be simple. Tess and similar projects show us that arts community is quite happy with Generative Art once there is adequate consent framework and financial compensations and artists are already making packages for people to use. Similar to photography and cinema, the legal framework depends on society’s willingness to consider it within popular understanding of art practices and while we reduce ourselves down to a basic understanding, equating Generative art, in it’s entirety to some reiteration of an Instagram or Photoshop filter, we remove the very real human authorship from countless more. I don’t think we should underminer their artistic agency. I see absolutely no utility in these absoluteist positions and the “bullying” manner of the conversation. We need to consider the differant usages cases, purpose, and method of artworks various and avoid reductive tones. I’m not keen on exchanging liberty for security and I don’t think we should replace the democratisation of art with this human essentialist rot. Doing so you undermine your fellow workers and you create a social paradigm that removes this fantastic tool from us, but keeps it in the hands of the state and capital. If anything, what we should be doing is taking it and making it better. Seize the means of production, and generation. There are very real concerns, I didn’t even get to the need for a just transition for my fellow workers but ultimately it’s like this: Worried about jobs? Your problem is Capitalism. Concerned about the resource usage? Check your figures and confront our movements failings and work harder towards more egalitarian and renewable infrastructure. I believe in us. I know this isn’t going to happen with the immediacy we require. The revolutionary moment little more than smoke in the wind, I get it, but it’s with objectivism and truth, not reactionary hyperbolic rage and political absolutes and dogma that we lay the foundations for a better world. Whether you like it or no, generative art is here to stay, so learn to confront it’s misuse earnestly and effectively.
Artists have been toying around with “AI Art” since the advent of the technology back in the 50’s and 60’s, sure, by the late 90’s the procedural Dazzle I was amazed by as a child was replaced with Electric Sheep a collaborative abstract artwork founded by Scott Draves, which leans a little bit towards pseudo-spiritual sacred geometry and fractalism of Alex Grey for my tastes but is none the less deeply curious bit of self-developing AI which would use user input to generate “sheep”. It was, (and remains) a captivating exploration of artificial “consciousness”.
By 2017, AI Art is become more commonplace, with a variety of software and tools springing forth. Neural style transfer (NST) systems allow used to blend art styles into their own photographs and while a novelty for some, for others it quickly becomes a tool or creation. Outside of a small crowd, no one cared.
- The lack of consent and respect for copyright in the repositories.
- The lack of compensation for usage and generative art using someone’s style.
- Corporations will employ less artists and/or expect high volumes of output, probably of a lower standard.
- It’s not art, but a technical toy and insulting to see it posted alongside things art that took effort.
- It’s not Art because it is not created by a human with intent.
It can’t do hands...
It can’t draw hands, and that’s OK, but for this infant technology to have such a failing for enough to condemn it and laugh with all the self-esteem of any elitist vanguard and preserver of the righteous path.
Literally months later.
It’s not art...
These days, we understand the photograph to be an art form, very few would question this. However from 1839 to 1930’s it was overwhelmingly seen as a vulgar toy, a technical curiosity at best, later developing into tool for documentation. “Art”, No. That’s paintings, something with some human effort and purpose. Not mearly just pointing a camera and pressing a button. That’s just lazy, where is the skill. Even the stunning works of Pictorialist Léonard Misonne were seen as little more than mimicry.
Just pick up a pencil...
Telling someone to go “pick up a pencil” is like telling an electronic artists to pick up the violin. Stop being a snob with your art mate, it’s all just pretty colours and lines to express hearts and minds.
I’ve never heard an artist say this until recently and it is the most absurd notion.
Sure, ok. Sometimes. I think a good analogy is how Instagram gave people the capacity to create complex filters with a few button clicks and stole weekend funds of a million student graphic designers with hooky copies of Photoshop.
In my personal, professional, and political lives I commission art regularly. I am a graphic designer and a publisher by trade and I make my own art and help empower others to get theirs out there. I absolutely believe in supporting my fellow artists and put my words, action, and finances behind that. Saying this, have you ever tried to commission a piece of artwork?
What about Copyright?
I’ll be honest with you, I couldn’t give a fuck about copyright.
It used to be that there was perhaps a few hundred artists, working for the patreons and guilds. For almost every last one, it was a vocation, not expression. Slowly this changed, our relationship with art became more purposeful. Tho it would later become the linchpin of commercialisation and propaganda, it would first flood our hearts and tell our stories.
You know what, forgive me fellow designers... this is a good thing.
I’ve heard it suggested multiple times with varying figures that “Each AI image uses the petrol it takes to drive 100 miles” and when I question this I’ve been barraged with accusations of being a tech-fetishist, anti-human, anti-art and even racist and classist. This is a sick poison to reason. The “bully them into silence” mentality mixed in with the weaponised use of loaded language. I find the whole thing reflective of the fascistic manner and pretty vile when I find it in Anarchist spaces.
- My computer probably uses in the region of 3 to 5 kWh a day.
- Your average burger with the trimmings uses some 3,000 litres of water.
- In the UK, water companies leak a trillion litres per year due to faulty pipes.
- A piece of A4 copy paper has an average around 10 litres of water and some 0.9kWh.
- A single socket server running Minecraft might easily run at 20kWh.
- The original Shrek movie required five million rendering hours, probably drawing about 70 - 100 kWh; Shrek Forever After, consumed over 45 million rendering hours
Sure, people you don’t like can now make images you don’t like easier. Sure people have a new toy and they are playing with it. I read the other day that AI has taken just one and a half years to produce 15 billion images, the same as it took Photographers 150 Years. No wonder so much of it is “slop”, a term popularised by the AI Art community btw to identity the tendency for low effort, soulless content, that people would popularise as they played with the new toy. Those numbers are huge.
AI Art is inherently evil
Do you agree with everything that’s ever been printed? Some of the most obscene things have been photographed, there are endless propaganda reels, each wave of technology has provided liberation and oppression in increased volume. We live within capital and the early days of any technology are wild and heedy, particularly that which has a quick route to market and profit to be found is giving the consumer the capacity to generate no renditions. Recent examples would be drones, e-cigs and 3D printing. The free market spews force faster that state regulations and industry leaders can impose “best standards and practice” and we all have to collectively decide what the new paradigms are, and where best to balance our liberties with our well being and securities
To Sum up
The long and short of this of this is that capitalism is a disease that is profiteering of the labour of the working class and continues to do so with the benefits of the latest technological developments. We should be conscious of this and considered in how we respond.
Berating artists for using AI in their workflow because you don’t like how MAGA cultists use it, well I can’t help but feel this is reductive collective response, similar to how the state appeals for our liberties to be restricted based on the mear idea of a security threat It’s banning all guns because someone did a shooting.
Worried about fascist messaging? Your problem is Fascism.
You say, “it has no soul” and I ask since when does the hammer have to have soul?
Organise!
Monday 23.6.2025