The Risk Of Artificial Intelligence In Art
Why are artists putting down the paintbrush and picking up pitchforks? A. I (Artificial intelligence) has splashed into the world of Music and Colors with mixed reviews—fear of Artificial Intelligence decimating the job market isn't anything futuristic or avant-garde; according to a report from the World Economic Forum, 85 million jobs will be replaced by machines with AI by the year 2025. Theorists speculate that fields such as Information technology (IT), Finance, Marketing, and Transportation will take the most significant blows. These fields are well known for being mundane, so the thought of Artificial Intelligence disrupting the art world has always seemed unattainable. But, some beg the question, how can A.I imitate imagination and creativity. Listed below are two examples of how A.I have entered the world of art.
Music:
FN Meka, an augmented reality artist, released a debut single, "Florida Water," via Capitol on August 12. That Tuesday, the label cut ties with the project after receiving backlash for the character's use of digital blackface. This digital blackface would also be accompanied by content that seemed to mock the black experience; this included themes of incarceration and police brutality. FN Meka was created by Brandon Le and his company Factory New. Anthony Martini, a music professional who's managed the likes of Tyga, Lil Dicky, and more in his career, was also named a co-creator. In an interview with Revolt, Martini stated that FN Meka was, in fact, primarily an anonymous human rapper — "he's a Black guy" — and "not this malicious plan of white executives. It's no different from managing a human artist, except that it's digital." He added that the team behind FN Meka was "actually one of the most diverse teams you can get — I'm the only white person involved." The rapper behind the voice of FN Meka, Kyle the hooligan, claims that he was never paid for his work and was promised equity in the character but, in return, gained nothing. Yet another example of the music industry mismanaging and scamming artists, but what if the creators could cut out the middleman? With tools like ChatGPT, that could have been made possible. ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a chatbot developed by OpenAI. Its abilities include solving math problems, churning out college essays, and writing research papers. So how far off is the A.I of ChatGPT from writing raps or any other genre of music? An optimist would state that Le and Martini were just a couple of steps away from breaking ground in the music industry; we should be glad they didn't.
Visual Arts:
On August 25, Jason Allen announced he'd won first place at the Colorado State Fair by submitting a piece of art called "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial," which was generated using Ai technology. Upon hearing this news, the art community took a stand. For years artists have been told that their profession would take them nowhere and that they'd never be able to make a living in the field; you could imagine their dissatisfaction upon finding out it took Allen little to no effort to create his piece and win a $300 cash prize. A painting that would take an artist months to complete was finished in a matter of seconds without lifting a paintbrush. The program Allen used to create his piece is called Midjourney, just one of the many upcoming programs that allow a user to create art with just a few words. According to sources, the piece was submitted under the digital art category, which states that digital art refers to works that use "digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process," so why are artists up in arms? The problem with Midjorney and other programs like DALLE is that they use two kinds of technology: CLIP and unCLIP. CLIP is trained to understand and recognize images, and unCLIP is trained to understand and recognize the language. When given a prompt, CLIP will conceptualize what the image is supposed to look like, and unCLIP will then take that conception and generate options for how the picture might appear. The underlying problem is that Midjourney and DALLE need references to generate these images and relies on data it gathers from the internet to make it happen. Obscure prompts given to Midjorney or DALLE might create some fascinating pieces but add a particular artist name or style, and that's another can of worms. With the wrong prompt, these programs could potentially plagiarize another artist's work for no cost, driving an already fierce job market lower into the ground. Technology is a double edge sword and should be approached as such; on the one hand, individuals who aren't skilled in the field of art now have a new means to express themselves, but on the other hand, they walk a fine line between innocent creative expression and plagiarism especially if they mean to profit off of their generated images. We should be cognitive of how we use these tools and the artist it will affect.