While an artist uses a lifetime of experience and carefully honed technical skills to create their art, Artificial Intelligence (AI) art programs like DALL·E 2 and Dream can generate artwork in mere seconds based on short text prompts from users. In response, artists have expressed both excitement and concern.
Junior Agna Soneji, an AP Art and Design student, carefully crafts the composition and color in her art carefully to convey emotion, she said. AI doesn’t put the same emotion and background in its art, she said.
“I don’t think it has the authenticity of art,” Soneji said. “It doesn’t have the meaningfulness we find in art.”
Artists and hand-made artwork may become undervalued because people can now generate art on their own on the internet, Soneji said. Copyright issues are another concern because AI-generated art is generated from existing human artwork that may have been used without artists’ permission, she said.
“I think they’ve ripped off artists and have just cut-and-pasted pieces, and that should (violate) copyright because you’re using other people’s art to make something out of a computer,” Soneji said. “Just like you can’t use ChatGPT for an essay, that’s what you’re doing for art. It’s ripping it off and saying it’s your own.”
Ceramics teacher Jeff Albrecht has spent the last decade selling artwork in galleries in Hawaii and around the world, he said. People buy his art because of the emotions he instills in it based on his experiences and the subsequent connection that people make with it, he said.
“If I go into my studio and it takes me two nights to work on a piece, it’s really a culmination of all those years and all those projects that I’ve played around (with) and explored,” Albrecht said. “Really, paintings take me 50 years. The next year, they’ll take me 51 years. It’s a process, and it’s a journey.”
Just like some of Albrecht’s clients prefer purchasing his original paintings instead of a print, there will always be people in the world who value a one-of-a-kind artwork touched by a human, Albrecht said. As a result, he is not concerned about AI replacing artists, he said.
“There are billions of people on the planet,” Albrecht said. “I know that no matter what happens with AI, I’m never going to have one of my paintings in everyone’s house. … Since that market is never going to be oversaturated with my artwork, why am I concerned about AI, which is a totally different vertical in the art world?”
AI is a powerful tool that is already integrated into platforms like Photoshop, and Albrecht may even consider using it to make art in the future, he said. In this changing art world, Albrecht’s recommendation for artists is to try different types of art instead of specializing in a single area that AI could easily take over, and to be cautious when posting pictures of artwork online to avoid unwanted additions to AI databases, he added.
“Those are some of the challenges you’ve got to be aware of, and you can’t let them stop you (from making or selling art),” Albrecht said. “You adjust and you adapt.”
On the other hand, AI can be a tool to make art more accessible by encouraging people who aren’t as technically skilled to make art, drawing teacher Hyemin Jo said.
“There are always going to be people who appreciate traditional art, so I don’t think it’s going to take away their (artists’) jobs,” Jo said. “But by making art a lot more approachable to a larger population, it actually opens the door for more people instead of closing (them).”
Jo compared users who generate AI art to Marcel Duchamp, an artist who found a urinal and signed it with a made-up signature, creating a controversial yet revolutionary piece of art that museums still showcase today, she said. People debate whether his work was art because he did not make the urinal from scratch, Jo said. However, she views his work as art, she said.
“I think just coming up with a creative idea and showing it visually itself is already an art,” Jo said.
Image two: AI art generated on Dream with the prompt “An acrylic painting of a flying American flag in extreme colors,” with art style set to “Expressionism” and allowance of “Minor influence” from Albrecht’s “Forever Flying” painting. (Courtesy of Savan Bollu | The Union)