I still remember in my art history class when my professor showed us J.M.W. Turner’s “The Slave Ship.” The painting is a brilliant array of colors and teeters on the edge of abstract, but the longer we looked at it, a sunset came into focus, then a ship in the distance and then, when we really looked, bound legs appeared in the ocean.
Turner was an abolitionist and created the piece during the Romanticism movement of art which is characterized by imaginative, emotional and thought-provoking pieces. “The Slave Ship” is a depiction of the desire for freedom amidst a scene of turmoil and seemingly impending judgment. His moving piece was completely defined by his personal anger about enslavement and motivation to abolish it.
It is hard to define what art is, but “The Slave Ship” defines what art does: manifests an artist’s emotions, feelings, beliefs, values and morals. Artificial intelligence (AI) does not have any of those things.
Creating art using AI simply makes no sense. It strips away all the things that give art soul, minimizing it to simply an aesthetic creation. For a creator, art goes far deeper than that; art represents who they are, poured into one piece. When creating art, the artist loses themselves when they relinquish control to AI.
With the creation of the image-generation AI Midjourney, artists like Jason M. Allen, originally a video game designer, have experimented using these mediums in their art.
Allen’s “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” (Space Opera Theater) portrays a stage where women in orange dresses surround a woman draped in a white flowy garment. She walks towards a sun-like circle casting a light from outside.
I will be the first to say it is beautiful, but that does not dispute the idea that AI took Allen’s personal bias from the piece. Let’s say that Allen hand-painted something similar to “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.” There would be harsher brushstrokes that he may have made because he was angrier one day compared to the others. There could be tiny oddities in his lines and shapes and possible preferences in how he mixed colors on the palette versus the canvas. By using AI, all these elements of artistic personality are gone.
CNN reported that after winning an art competition, Allen was unable to copyright his work since it was made with Midjourney. The internet pointed out the overt irony in his complaints about this.
Allen told CNN that he spent over 80 hours prompting Midjourney to create 900 different pieces before making edits on photoshop and printing the top three paintings.
To say that because he used AI, Allen did not work hard would be false. Despite his hard work, Allen’s authorship of the piece was washed out by his AI. So many tiny artistic choices were neglected in favor of artificial creation, and these minute details are what make art.
Alyn Carson is an artist with synesthesia, a condition where two or more senses are linked. For her, numbers have their own colors and colors emit specific sounds and smells.
Carson created a piece to hang in her dining room based on colors that smelled like her favorite scent of a low tide, PBS reported. Shafts of various colors slid across the 80-inch canvas. She is the only person who could have made that painting, the only one that associated the smell of the tide with those shades and placed that exact pressure on the canvas to create those slats of color.
Artists with synesthesia exemplify exactly what art represents. An artist’s experiences are meant to inform every part of their creations. Yes, AI can create something beautiful, but it cannot replicate the emotions that fuel the artistic decisions we make. As an inherently creative species, we cannot let AI take that from us.
