Vol 3 No 3 | Oct-Dec 2023
Real Art
Story by Soham Dey | Art by Stuti Mamen
AI and jobs
The recent explosion in popular and easily available AI tools such as ChatGPT have brought forth a whole range of apprehensions and fears. Is AI going to take over all jobs? Can it do what humans do but better? Are we going to be replaced?
This story in Comixense was inspired by a lecture the writer attended in college, in which the professor spoke about this very topic. The class discussed what jobs were more likely to be replaced and what would be retained. The professor proposed that in most fields, only the extremely highly skilled would remain – the large bulk of people who perform at an average level would be replaced by AI which could produce the same work at a much faster speed. This applied to art and creative jobs as well, which sprung the idea for the future world of the comic, where a vast majority of mainstream art has become AI-generated and only a certain elite brand of classical art remains ‘human’.
Generative AI and art
Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce various types of content, including text, imagery, audio and synthetic data. Popular examples today include platforms such as OpenAI’s DALL- E and Midjourney, on which you can use text-based prompts to create photos and visuals of different styles. Although AI-generated art has been around for many years, these powerful tools have only exploded in the last few years, leading to a new trend of AI art. In recent years, AI art has been used to generate mind-bending music videos and award-winning artwork.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/learning/are-ai-generated-pictures-art.html
Jason M. Allen’s AI-generated artwork “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” that won an art fair in Colorado, USA.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html
Source: https://openai.com/dall-e-2
Issues around the use of AI in the arts
However, AI art has sparked major debate in the creative world. Since tools like DALL-E and Midjourney use countless images off the internet as data to learn from, many artists feel that AI-generated art is ‘cheating’, ‘copying’, and essentially robbing hard-working human artists of their original artwork. Digital artists across the world have spoken up against it, calling for bans and boycotts. A major recent example of this can be seen in the entertainment industry, in the ongoing strike of the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in Hollywood, one of the demands of which is the limiting of the use of AI in the screenwriting process.
Protesters outside Paramount Pictures studios during the Hollywood writers strike on May 4, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.(Getty Images via AFP)
However, AI art may have its merits. It makes high-quality digital art incredibly accessible and can genuinely lead to very creative works.
The AI art scene is still in its nascent stage and only time will tell if it will prove to be a useful and creative tool for artists or become an automated factory tool used to mass produce works of art.
