What good is AI to artists?

And is it possible to create an equitable model for the future?

Yesterday I received an email about leveraging AI to create prompt libraries from the software company I use to do all my podcast editing- which I love for the record. My gut reaction was one of disgust, but I had no real idea what they were talking about so I decided I would read on and educate myself rather than being a reactive luddite.

After reading the post, it’s still a bit murky as to what this prompt library thing is, but my best understanding is that it is a new type of Pinterest board where you save your queries to Chat GPT for things like images for your articles and ideas for your various creative projects. The example the author used was how to get AI-generated images to help inspire her Sci-Fi writing, but they could also be used to illustrate articles or other content.

Technology is a tool so, like a hammer that can be used both to build a house, hit someone over the head, and, metaphorically speaking make strides toward world peace, its possibilities are endless. That the author uses Chat GPT to inspire her writing is a creative and fun use of the tool. It offers a jumping-off point for creations and investigations of her own.

However, her simple how-to article lacks any criticality of the problems of Chat GPT, which cannibalizes the work of others to produce its results. The article in its straightforwardness asks its audience to accept the use of this technology as a fait accompli and not something to question, or challenge. It’s a common tech world erasure of the complicated inequities that are inherent in the software’s creation, and as a result, every byproduct of it.

As with most things in the tech world that cause those of us who are not CEOs and Founders to roll our eyes, these AI programs are answering the question of how fast can we get this done and for how little, instead of more introspective questions like, should we do this, and what would be the most equitable way to solve our problems?

Take, for example, the Chat GPT results in the author’s prompt library of a simple command like “low shutter speed photography,” with no expectation of subject matter. The results?

Before you scroll down, humor me and try to guess what you think the results are. A misty landscape? A baseball player mid-throw? A golden retriever running through a grassy meadow?

If you guessed two photos of white women in sexy red dresses, you would be right!

That even AI has a male gaze is nothing new.

Patriarchy aside, one of the other immediate problems is the program’s co-opting of living artists’ and writers’ content to train the AI. For example, I have no idea how these images were produced. Are they the work of one photographer or an amalgamation of a bunch of photos of women in red dresses?

This past winter a group of well-known authors sued both Chat GPT and OpenAI for using their novels to train the tools. Just this morning, The Art Newspaper released a story about the 16,000 uncredited artists whose work was used in creating content for MidJourney which brands itself as similar to OpenAI.

A particularly telling excerpt from the article in which a Midjourney developer “sarcastically addresses the issue of copyright, saying that ‘all you have to do is just use those scraped datasets and the [sic] conveniently forget what you used to train the model. Boom legal problems solved forever’. (Four members of the group responded to this with an enthusiastically affirmative “100” emoji.)”

Why this feels so scary to me is because unlike using the random graphic here and there for your PowerPoint presentation, these tools are incredibly powerful and widely used by the entire globe. They are setting a precedent that once in place will be very hard to reverse. My mind can’t even start to get around how these thousands of artists and writers will be fairly compensated. The only thing I can think of is hopefully they will accrue some good karma for being part of this new exploration in human history, and get their dues some other way.

What I want to say to anyone reading this who unquestionably supports or develops a AI tool like Open AI and Chat GPT is that artists, designers, and illustrators are not just a roadblock in the way of maximizing profits and producing massive amounts of content.

My conviction that artists and creativity are essential to life is reinforced by something Rick Rubin writes in his latest book The Creative Act: A Way of Being: “The ability to look deeply is at the root of creativity, to see past the ordinary and mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible. “ That is what artists can do, and what all humans have to do to grow and evolve. The point is in the learning and the processing, not the mass-producing.

Let’s all think about how these types of speed hacks, as appealing as they are to us busy entrepreneurs and creative folks, have a lasting impact on our creative and cultural ecosystem. More is not always more. Let’s sloowwww down.

Also, I am super open to having a thoughtful conversation with anyone who is really pro-Chat GPT and similar tools. Maybe I am misunderstanding how people are wanting to use them. I have heard from my friend Nikki Nolan who hosts The Disability Bandwidth podcast that they can be very supportive to the neuro-divergent, so if you know about this stuff please reach out! I don’t pretend to be an expert, but I also don’t currently see a model that does not exploit the work of underpaid and underacknowledged artists. To be continued…