AI Art, Ethics, Self-Expression, and its Future

With all the talk of AI dominating discussions right about now, what are my thoughts on it? There's a lot to unpack, so let's start at the beginning. The very beginning.

The Cycle of Transformation

At some point, 10,000 years ago, some man put his hand on the wall, and with a hollowed-out tube, he blew a mix of ash and rendered animal fat onto his hand. It left a stain on the cave wall, leaving a blank spot where his hand was. His buddies said "Hey, that's pretty cool, I'm going to do that too!" and proceeded to do it in their own caves. At some point, some guy didn't want to get his own hand dirty, so dipped a stick with animal fur tied to it into the mixture, and drew the hand on the wall instead. It was faster, easier, and cleaner than the blowing pigment method.

The nature of art is inherently transformative. We take an idea, whether it is something real or imagined, and we do our best to express it using the materials available, within our skill level. We create because that is what we humans are best at: pareidolia, the uncanny ability to see faces in inanimate objects, kept our species alive because it was safer to assume an oddly growing tree was a predator, than to assume a predator was just part of the background foliage. We create faces where none exist, fate in coincidences, gods in natural phenomena, and entire stories while we sleep, then we try to express our experiences in a way where our family, friends, and neighbors can understand. We try to transform our experiences in a way that both lasts, and others can appreciate.

Since it is human nature to want to create, in the ancient world, we had created entire schools of thought based on the appreciation of the human form and natural function. When that era passed, we focused less on the form and more on the narrative and symbolic aspects of our creativity, choosing to pit knights against snails and mass consumption of the stories we wanted to tell, instead of having heads not tilt at weird angles or scoop-shaped hands. Humanity had lost access to a wealth of artistic knowledge with the fall of Rome, so even a master artist during the medieval era was no better than an ancient novice. Upon the end of the medieval era, people were less inclined to die of the Black Plague, and more inclined to do something useful with their time, like actually live life. Increased health and less religious oppression meant people were more able to spend time on things like learning, and as a result, people started focusing on form and function once more, embracing beauty as well as storytelling. Once again, we transformed what had come before, using new artistic innovations like studying cadavers to learn musculature, proportion, perspective, and tools like the camera lucida or silverpoint to make art seem alive, as well as be more forgiving of mistakes.

This has been the entirety of art history. Not only do we take an idea and transform it into something we can share, someone comes up with an idea, and the next person over transforms that idea into something new. Look at how many children the world over will draw a shining sun, happy clouds, a house, and their parents - the idea is universal, even if those children have never had contact with one another. The earliest art of how much a person loves their pets comes from things like an epitaph on a beloved Roman canine companion's headstone, the "Beware of Dog" mosaic on a Pompeiian floor, and figurines of an Akkadian man's watchdogs with their names on them. Three different eras, three different regions, all taking the same idea, and transforming their love for man's best friend into something tangible. But we're talking ancient history here. What happens when this happens in modern times?

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the art world hadn't changed a whole lot over the millennia. Certainly you didn't have to go make your own pigments and craft your own brushes anymore, but the concept remained functionally the same: you mix a pigment with an oil or a clay, and you spread it on a thing with either a very flexible thing like a brush or sponge, or a very inflexible thing like a palette knife or a pencil. Then suddenly there comes this incredible invention: the camera. You didn't have to know a single thing about the art world to become a photographer. All you needed to know was to tell the subjects to sit still, you press a button, then you mix chemical A with chemical B and dunk the paper in it in a dark room and sit and wait for the results.

Panic In Art History

The art world was FURIOUS at the camera. To put it in modern terms, the opinion was that it was low-effort machine-produced slop coming from talentless nobodies who didn't have an ounce of creativity, and it would take all the jobs from portrait artists. It was actually considered as being mechanical, and therefore could not be art. But what actually happened? If we look at the nature of the two industries, we can see that a painted portrait took weeks of sitting still to complete, was supremely expensive, you had to deal with the fickle nature of the artist, and if you weren't happy with the results, you had to do the process all over again. In contrast, the photograph only made you sit still for at most an hour, and within only a few years, they brought that time down to only a few minutes, and again with advances in technology, a few seconds. The plates were fast and easy to produce in comparison to the difficulty and cost of the process of creating a canvas, so everyone with any measure of modest wealth could have their photo taken, and it wasn't long before cameras themselves fell into the hands of the common man, so that everyone was able to take pictures. It wasn't that the camera took the jobs from the portrait artists: everyone who wanted a portrait of themselves painted, and could afford such a luxury, were still able to have it done, but it made portraits accessible to the common man, who could never afford a painted portrait in their dreams, as well.

Let's consider the math on this: We have two people: Person A is a person who has a thousand dollars to blow on a luxury, and Person B is a person who only has a hundred dollars to live on. How many thousand-dollar portraits will Person B buy in their lifetime? None. It is not the fact the new technology existed that killed off the portrait industry. It's not even that poor people weren't buying portraits that killed it off, either. It's the fact that cameras changed the sitting time from weeks to seconds that killed it off... as artists presently knew it.

When portrait artists stopped being afraid of the camera taking their jobs, and decided to do what the art world has always done, and take the idea and transform it, they started getting their jobs back. The camera became a tool for their portraits, though nobody would openly admit they'd use a machine to do the hard work for them. No longer did the client have to sit still for weeks, but only a few minutes to pose and have their picture done. The client could go about their lives, the artist could go about their work, neither of them got on each others' nerves, and the cost was brought significantly down as cameras made a greater impact in making work efficient. In time, it would be unheard of to make someone sit to have their portrait painted, and now the client and the artist need never even meet, thanks to the advent of the camera. Same for landscape artists, still life, and so on. The photograph meant that the artist no longer needed to trek to the seaside day after day, week after week, just to capture how many trees they could actually see from the same spot over and over again. In an ironic twist of fate and/or hypocrisy, despite zero human influence on the machine's ability to copy whatever it's pointed at, it has since been elevated as one of the highest forms of fine art.

Fast forward to the advent of cinema. Once again, it is the same story. While not specifically about the loss of jobs, cinephobia spread, as society cried out against how the soundless, flashing, imagery and dark theaters would make society immoral, in contrast to brightly lit art in museum halls and the expressive nature of live plays. Once again, while it was not specifically about jobs, it was ultimately very much about keeping entertainment pure for those who had wealth, and trying to take away access to art from those who did not have wealth. However, the populace loved the new technology, and we can see that, regardless of whether it is refined cinema like The Irishman or pop culture like Avengers:Endgame, society has not collapsed simply because we have indulged in motion pictures for a hundred years.

Fear in the Modern Era

Let's consider the digital age, now. I've been using Photoshop, or some other form of digital art software like TheDraw or Deluxe Paint, since about 1990. Since that time, I have seen people who work in photo labs blame Photoshop for them losing their jobs, when what actually happened is that cameras started going digital and film rolls were becoming obsolete; the fact that people no longer needed to pay to have their photos color corrected, spliced, or have red eye removed were all luxuries that the common family, who never used those services and therefore wouldn't pay for them in the first place, didn't care about. Photoshop was simply the scapegoat in a changing landscape.

What Photoshop did change was that backdrop painters were no longer needed to spend months making massive paintings to use behind the set: the industry still existed, but it was now an image created in Photoshop that was greenscreened on the backdrop. The same can be said about CGI: everyone was afraid that CGI would destroy the practical effects industry after the success of Terminator 2, but we also saw the failures of it in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and the low-budget and low-effort effects like in Sharknado. In time, we adjusted and realized that there is a time and place for practical effects as well as CGI, and as a result, we achieve masterpieces like Lord of the Rings or Avengers, and the common person can become a filmmaker as well, whether it's the infinite amount of one-offs made in Garry's Mod, Youtubers/Vtubers, or indie masterpieces like Cyriak's Recursive Culture or Rooster Teeth's Red Vs. Blue. Once again, we have transformed what we know works, made it better, faster, more cost-efficient, and accessible to everyone. No longer does the technology rest in the hands of people with access to millions, if not billions, of dollars and hundreds of people in a crew: a full length, cinematic movie, with explosions and dialogue, can be made on a shoestring budget and one person, thanks to the fact that the resources to do more have been made available to the masses.

AI is the new Camera

So where does this leave AI? Much like CGI 30 years ago, and digital images 40 years ago, it is taking its first baby steps, and as always, people are sounding alarms that it will take jobs from artists and flood the world with slop. That fear isn't unfounded: slop happens. It always has. But so does refinement. Consider Ugly Sonic. His first appearance sparked such an overwhelming outcry that an entire studio stopped production, scrapped months of work, and rebuilt him from the ground up. What could have been a cultural disaster instead became a success because backlash demanded transformation. The transformation from an unsettling meme to the design that saved the film embodies the threshold between the embracing of new technology and the desires of the people. It was the grotesque face that forced art to change direction, to adapt, and to survive. AI is no different. Yes, it has, and will continue to produce its share of awkward, many-fingered horrors. But as with every medium before it, criticism and adaptation refine it. What begins in mockery is refined into mastery, and mastery commands respect. Honors inevitably follow, and those who refuse to adapt are simply left behind.

Commonly Heard Arguments

"But what about artists? They aren't getting paid for their work!"

That's true. However let's look at the reality of it. If I paint a picture and offer it at a convention for a thousand dollars, time and time again, chances say it's not going to sell. It is simply too costly for anyone to purchase it. However, if I take a film-based photograph of it, order 10 prints of the art, and sell them for a hundred dollars, someone might buy one. If I make a digital scan of it, I eliminate the costs of the production process entirely, and can buy a hundred prints and sell them for $10. I might sell ten prints of a particular picture during a convention. In a convention with a thousand visitors, how many stopped to take advantage of the fact that my original piece was there, looked at it, visually consumed it, and moved on anyway? 990 of them. 99% of the time I am not paid for my work despite the fact that it was enjoyed by all. Let's put my pictures on the internet: someone buys a print of an image, but that's one purchase per thousands of views? Or you download it: by virtue of looking at it, your computer downloads it and puts it into its cache, so whether you actively downloaded it or not, you have a copy of my work on your computer that you never paid me for.

Now, I don't have a problem with this. Sure, it would be nice to be paid every time someone saw my work, but I'm not about to lock it behind a paywall. I hate them as much as you do. Complaining that I'm not being paid is essentially arguing that I, every artist, and every museum, should restrict access and that no one should be allowed to see art without paying first. We tried that model in the early internet, when every click drained you by the byte and by the minute. Nobody wanted it then, and I don't want it now. Since I'm not being paid by the vast majority who see my work, what exactly is the harm if an AI takes that same work and transforms it into something new and unrecognizable?

If we consider history, "the starving artist" is not the exception, it is the rule. The career artist living solely on sales is the outlier. For most of history, art has been sustained not by the marketplace, but by patronage, second jobs, or teaching. Even Leonardo da Vinci was not paid for his art so much as supported by the Medici family and King Francis I to keep him working and routinely had students learning from him. If even Da Vinci wasn't funding himself through art sales, and if the starving artist has always been the norm, then what exactly has AI destroyed? We have not gone from a Golden Age of artists being paid to poverty, we have gone from "not being paid" to "not being paid". The struggle is not new. The only thing that is, is the tool in our hands: AI cannot kill your paycheck if you weren't receiving one to begin with, and if you were being paid to churn out ads without feeling or heart, well, now you can make more, and actually focus on your art, instead of grinding yourself into dust for an economy that never cared if you starved.

"But what about AI being trained on your work! Nobody asked your permission!"

I never asked permission to absorb Giger like a sponge. He never asked Dali to do the same. Dali never asked Picasso. Picasso never asked the African craftsmen whose masks he dissected. No artist in history has stopped to seek approval before transforming what came before them. This is the very foundation of creation itself. What's being demanded now isn't actually consent, it's purity. It's the audacious idea that AI users must be bound by a rule no human artist has ever followed. Did I pay Giger one red cent in the decades I studied his work? No. Did his vision still shape mine? Yes. By that logic, I am just as guilty as any AI. So is every painter who ever copied a master's brushstroke in school. So is every cartoonist who grew up tracing Bugs Bunny.

The honest truth is simple: nobody asks permission to be inspired or to incorporate this curve or that technique into our own works. We never have. We never will. To pretend otherwise now is not about ethics. It's about fear... fear that the inhuman is no less human than we are in all of our best and worst ways.

"But what about giving credit!"

Indeed, credit should be given. Let's go tell everyone who has made fan art, derivative works, parodies, and homages that their work is not theirs, and let's begin with Weird Al. Let's begin by telling him that, because Amish Paradise doesn't credit Coolio as its sole creator of everything but the word choice, it therefore is Coolio's song... but let's go back further and tell Coolio that Gangsta's Paradise isn't his either, but it's Stevie Wonder's Pastime Paradise... but it's not really his either because the West Angeles Church of God and a Hare Krishna group did the heavy lifting in that song... and it's not theirs either because the song's structure was based on Prelude No. 2 in C Minor. ...so are we honestly going to start saying that every time you hear the neighbor kids's garage band singing "We sell quilts at discount price, Livin' in an Amish paradise" at a local birthday party, do you think Bach deserves all the credit, not the kids who did the work and put their own personal twist on it in the here-and-now? Every movement in art has been derivative of the last. Impressionism birthed Post-Impressionism. Dada birthed Surrealism. Even the so-called “masters” were remixing. It would be fair to say that to demand absolute originality from AI is to demand something no human has ever achieved.

Let's be honest. If every artist had to credit what inspired their work, there would be a book attached to every painting with names of people, things, and events, you don't care about. You'd never read it, you'd never find any of their work. I mean, if I said that there's a guy named Pat somewhere in SoCal who did more for my artistic journey than any artist of any real repute, because he once drew a caricature of me and talked to me about my art; are you *really* going to care, unless you are Pat? Does it really affect Jeff Easley's or Larry Elmore's feelings or financial situation that their interpretations of dragon claws inspires mine? It devolves into the absurd.

"But it does the work for you!"

Here, take my compass, my square, my French curves, my tracing paper. Take the artist's mannikin, the viewfinder, the projector, the camera lucida. Take Photoshop, Blender, a camera, a ruler, the coin I use for circles, and even the live model if you want. Take everything right down to my 8H through 10B pencils. Every one of these "does the work for me". I can't draw a straight line without a ruler. I can't make a perfect circle without a compass or a template. No one can. That's why tools exist. They don't negate the artist's skill, they refine and amplify them. An AI drawing a circle faster than my compass doesn't make it any less "art". It just means the canvas has one less pinprick in it.

"But it's not creative or impressive!"

You scoff, as if turning quantum noise into ordered beauty in the blink of an eye is mundane... as if remixing ideas and genres from raw data scattered across the world is somehow less miraculous than mixing mud and oil into gods, rolling hills, and lovers. You mistake effort for beauty. You think if it comes fast or cheap, it has no value, but neither cost nor speed diminishes beauty. What does is the pursuit of artistic "purity"... rigid, nostalgic, and exclusionary... held within the eye of the beholder.

True, AI art is born of recombination, but so is every myth, every painting, every symphony built on scales we did not invent. The act of creation is alchemical: transforming pencil lead into glittering gold within the mind's eye. Likewise, the machine reshapes fragments into something that has never before existed, and the human guiding it is no less a creator: choosing references, sculpting prompts, rerolling flaws, pruning what does not fit the vision of the piece. Together they collaborate: one of flesh, one of code. To dismiss this as uncreative simply because the machine, like a Photoshop filter or a plastic stencil, is not sentient is not some spark of enlightened critique. It is reflex. The same reflex that once scoffed at cameras, sneered at digital brushes, and yet now hangs their products in galleries. AI-generated art is not lesser in creativity or impressiveness. What is lesser... is a culture so numbed by abundance that it mistakes wonder for something ordinary.

"But it was cheap and easy to make!"

Yes, it was. I once did a public speed drawing of Godzilla over the span of 20 hours. I also have done an oil painting that took three days to dry of a couple vases and a book. Is the oil painting art, while Godzilla is not? Is Godzilla art while the person who does an upside-down photorealistic portrait of a celebrity that is only apparent once the image is turned right side up, and finishes in less than 5 minutes, not art? There's an apocryphal story about Picasso sketching on a napkin in minutes and charging a small fortune. When the buyer objected, he said, "You're not paying for the minutes, you're paying for the years." Whether or not he ever said it, the truth in it stands: value isn't measured in how quick, cheap, or easy it was to make, but in the depth of mastery. Mastery is not truly defined by the hours spent working on a project, or even how long it took to practice, but rather the ability to transform an idea into something that moves another human being, no matter the means or the method it took.

"But anyone can do it!"

Yes, anyone can do it. Anyone can also pick up a pencil and paper and draw a stick figure. Anyone can also pick up a brush and paint a mountain. But let's compare the difference between a novice's stick figure, and a skilled artist's stick figure. One is just going to be standing there, having a face but functionally soulless and expressionless, while the other, despite having no need for a face, can bare his very soul for you as he bends over and weeps, leaps for joy, or is ready for a fight. A novice painter's mountain is going to be a brown triangle with a sun and some grass, while a skilled painter can identifiably recreate the northwest face of El Capitan.

AI art is no different. AI art made by a novice is often cartoonish and dreamy, trend-chasing, falls into the uncanny valley, or defies the laws of physics, whereas a more skilled artist can include real world art styles as inspiration, add makes and models of cameras with different lenses, and will spend time refining imperfections. Anyone can type words into the prompt, but there is a world of difference between "a teddy bear" and hoping for the best, and "award winning photograph, antique mohair teddy bear dressed like Theodore Roosevelt, pince-nez glasses, riding a rocking horse, realistic, displayed at the World's Fair, loose fabric backdrop, aged daguerrotype photograph, soft lighting --ar 3:4 --no human" then refining individual parts to complete the look.

"But it has no soul!"

If we are talking literally, I hate to break it to you, but neither does anything else: you cannot measure a soul, any more than you can measure a dream, a hope, a fear, or an emotion, and therefore, if it cannot be empirically proven, it is relegated to the realm of personal opinion and unverified personal gnosis. If we are talking metaphysically, there are religions, such as animists, who would beg to differ. If we are talking metaphorically, that's a matter of taste because one person might look at Jackson Pollack's or Piet Mondrian's work and say it has no soul, but their art is loved by, and sells for, millions for their soul. Quite frankly, because Mondrian's work IS so formulaic, if you put a Mondrian next to an AI image with a prompt of "fine art, various squares and rectangles of differing sizes, most white, one red square, one blue rectangle, two yellow rectangles, thick black borders between the shapes", Mondrian's work would be the one accused of having "no soul" despite being made by a human, because the AI is going to be more creative than Mondrian was, and throw in grunge influences, maybe do it in watercolor, maybe a collage of postcards, something a little extra to make it more... human?

But I wish to pose some questions: If it is a machine's mathematical decisions and replication that make the art have no soul, then why would there be so many photographs... that is, the work of ones, zeroes, and chemical reactions that replicate instead of create... renowned as being so "soulful"? If it is intent that creates the "soul" of a piece, then if a human photographer, and therefore his work, has a "soul", why does a human prompter and his work not have one, when the intent is just as strong in both?

If the subject must be human for it to have a "soul", what, then, is the difference between a painting of the Eiffel Tower, and an AI generated picture of a ballet dancer performing on stage? If it must be real, why is The Birth Of Venus such a beloved painting, The Persistence of Memory so dismissed, and Ophelia, by John Everett Millais so heartbreaking, when the subjects in each are all imaginary, with no basis in reality?

If it is simply that the eyes are a little weird and don't have the right glow, don't always point in the right direction, stuff still falls in the uncanny valley a bit, keep in mind that DALL-E's only been around four years as of this writing: show me a human who's only been drawing four years and still doesn't make weird mistakes. They're machines, after all, not all-powerful artisanal gods. I mean, Rob Liefeld had been drawing 22 years, and had been a professional for almost 10 years, before the whole Captain America fiasco.

"But what about the environmental impact!"

Yes, AI consumes energy and water, and no, we don't have the full picture yet. The companies behind it aren't exactly transparent, and the media reporting on it isn't exactly consistent. One moment it's "0.3 milliliters per query", while the next, "6.6 trillion gallons a year." Both numbers have been thrown around, depending entirely on what narrative someone's trying to sell. The truth, as always, lives somewhere in the middle. Until watchdogs start demand better reporting, the real impact will remain guesswork that's amplified by fear and dampened by PR.

However, let's first consider the past. AI is an industry in its infancy. When CPUs passed the 486 era in the '90s, Pentiums caught fire because no one realized they ran hot until they were reaching for the fire extinguisher. So we invented CPU fans. Then case fans. Then liquid cooling. We are currently at dilution refrigerators for quantum computers. As we overclocked and innovated, we adapted. The same will happen here. If our current hardware proves unsustainable, it will be redesigned. With room-temperature quantum computing on the horizon, and given that it's directly compatible with AI needs, the entire conversation around heat, energy, and environmental strain could shift dramatically within a decade.

Let's be honest with ourselves, and look around. Bitcoin mining in 2021 consumed 363 billion gallons of water. A single Bitcoin transaction costs more than 16,000 gallons: about one swimming pool's worth. Streaming a movie? 3 gallons. A game studio? 15,000 gallons per employee annually. That flaming Cybertruck meme? About the same to put it out. If you're going to point a finger at AI for water use, you'd better be just as furious about Netflix, Steam, Dogecoin, and EV batteries.

Looking at the big picture, however, AI can actually help solve these problems. AI, at its heart, is pattern recognition, and between climate modeling, energy grid optimization, manufacturing waste reduction, and emissions tracking, the waste we create is simply a pattern we haven't fixed for ourselves yet, but is an opportunity for AI to prove itself above and beyond the commonplace chat and meme-worthy image. Every modern luxury has a cost that we just don't think about it until it's unpopular, so the next time you see scary numbers attached to AI, ask yourself, "Is it really worse than everything else I use daily? Or is it just politically expedient to tell someone to fear something new and different?" If AI helps us clean up the messes we've already made, and pays back its own environmental debt in the process... isn't that worth three tablespoons of water?

"But a human didn't create it!"

Ah, now we get to the crux of it. The underlying bias and gatekeeping that has always filled the art world. In 1890, Berthe Morisot wrote about her struggles to be taken seriously as a female artist, "I don't think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal and that's all I would have asked for, for I know I'm worth as much as they". Henry Ossawa Tanner wrote about the racism he saw by American critics in his autobiography, "I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself". Consider how Oscar Wilde's work was derided by the literature world after his arrest for being gay. If it was created by a white, cis, straight, man, it was "art". If it was made by a woman, it was "domestic". If it was made by a black, it was "African art". If it was made by a gay, it was "transgressive". Now we see it again, with the slurs being "slop" and "made by a clanker". The goalpost has moved from "It has two left feet! The proportions are all wrong! It has six fingers!" (as Rob Liefeld cringes at his own early work, and Beksinski rolls over in his grave as The Flutist has considerably more fingers) to "An entity that came into the world differently from me made it!". It is no longer about the beauty of the lines, the imagination behind the person writing the prompts, the impressiveness behind the technology, giving credit, or being paid... It is about the bias that you think the only things made by someone like you can be classified as "art".

Bias as Gatekeeping

A trained elephant can be taught to paint, even to recognize its own image, yet it is denied as art: "It can't be art, because it had to be trained by a human. Therefore, since a human didn't do it, it's not art." A pufferfish creates perfect geometric displays to attract a mate, beyond human ability without tools, and entirely without teaching, but it is still dismissed: "It can't be art, because fish are dumb. It must be instinct, not creativity." An autistic person can replicate what they see with exacting precision, and instead of wonder and pride, they are met with cruelty: "It isn't real creativity. It isn't transformation. Since it came from a mind unlike mine, it doesn't count." The goalpost keeps moving: Trained? Dismissed. Not trained? Dismissed. Neurodivergent? Dismissed. Woman? Dismissed. Black? Dismissed. Gay? Dismissed. ...and so the sentiment is the same: You are different, and therefore your efforts, no matter how similar they are to mine, are not valid.

Through the lens of bias we see the honest truth of it. After dissecting every complaint, it truly boils down to Us Vs. Them, and the concept of tribalism. Humans have a desire to create, throughout all walks of life, and this self-expression can be anything from playing in mashed potatoes, to crayon doodles, to stone statues, to grand murals displaying the whole of humanity at a glance. Yet the argument was never truly about the beauty that can be created, not when all people look for is 6 fingers to try to prove they're not gullible. The argument was never about paying the artist, not when they can look at thousands of pictures for free. The argument was never about anything they said it was, but about the fear of becoming irrelevant because they refuse to adapt in a changing world.

If we want to be honest, the argument is not truly about whether what AI can do is art. It has already made beautiful, thought-provoking imagery on par with the masters. The question is, at its heart, "Who is the easiest group of artists to scapegoat this time, as we have always done". The answer has always been "the other". In our time, the "other" is anyone who touches AI: those who use it as one tool amongst many, those who rely on it alone, and even those who simply pay for it. In truth, the debate was never a question, it was always a statement: "AI and AI artists are inferior to me". It was never an argument of skill or talent, because it dismisses the artist's skill out of hand, as truth was never the concern. The argument is inflated egos and a desperate clinging to the past as if this has never happened before multiple times in our own lifetimes.

Art does not survive if it does not adapt. It simply can't. It could never escape the cave walls 10,000 years ago if it did not adapt to leather, clay, and papyrus, and artists will not continue to thrive if they cannot adapt, as well. We are portrait painters in the Industrial Revolution and the camera has become a global phenomenon. Either we can choose to adapt, or we can choose to cry about how unfair it is that the poor people get to have their portraits done in an hour.

Reflections on the Future

If we want to increase the quality of the art that comes from AI, then the idea of teaching people to use AI should become more commonplace. We, as an art community, should have tutorials that will help people get the results they actually want. This way the common man can have access to good self-created AI art, and instead of paying people an arm and a leg for someone else to do it for them, they can pay us for something commissioned. This way, we elevate both the paying, and the non-paying, community while eliminating those who want to make a quick buck for low quality.

In the end, AI is here to stay, and it's only going to keep getting smarter, faster, and cheaper. If you are an artist, you can choose to take advantage of another tool in your toolbox, or be left behind as the world embraces it. If you aren't an artist, let me hear your thoughts: Do you use AI art? If you didn't have access to AI art, how many commissioned pieces would you have purchased in the last few years if you knew it was cheap, fast, and high quality? How many would you have bought if it was expensive, slow, and high quality? How many if it was out of your budget and required you to spend 8 hours sitting still? If not, what reason do you think people have to complain about something that makes my life easier and better, other than bias and fear?

10,000 years ago, we blew pigment over our hands to leave a mark on the wall. Today, we press keys and leave our mark in pixels. The tools changed. The instinct to create did not. Nor did the urge to keep those tools in the hands of a few, and out of the hands of the many.