It is difficult for most of us today to picture a world without robot-run industries, some of the most common being automotive and consumer goods. However, many of us never expected robots to have the potential to go beyond simple manual labor and take over intellectual jobs in which humans excel, such as the art industry. Does this level of artificial intelligence (AI) take comfort and convenience too far?
An image generator robot called Stable Diffusion was recently trained to analyze pieces from artist Greg Rutwokski and was able to successfully “learn” his style and replicate similar pieces. Rutwokski’s art became so buried within the robot’s work that they were nearly indistinguishable. This puts into question both the appreciation of human skills and the meaningful aspects of human-created art.
The motive behind art generators is to promote efficiency and perfection through art pieces. This looks good on paper, but when it personally affects the lives and careers of human artists, we realize its threat.
Other AIs have even been known to copy the signatures of the original artist from the pieces on which they are trained- sometimes even without consent from the artists. This has led to a great decline in artists, such as Rutwoski, producing and revealing their new art out of fear of the works losing their originality. As a result, artists have lost both income and notoriety.
Luckily, there has been some recent backlash for this unexpected movement. A team of researchers at the University of Chicago designed “Glaze” — a computerized tool whose goal is to prohibit AIs from memorizing an artist’s individual style, making discreet changes down to the pixel-level that prevent AIs from recognizing images and therefore stealing proprietary works.
Glaze has proven to be successful in many scenarios, but the team admitted that the tool could easily be overridden by regulations or other AIs and therefore does not have a flawless success rate. It is alarming that it had to be taken to this level in order to take back consent from an entity that was human-created in the first place.
It seems ironic that we now have a need to protect human creativity from entities that were conceived by human creativity. The beauty of art is in its creator. Dehumanizing the creator could depersonalize the art, which could in turn cause us to lose sight of how we truly rely on art as an escape from the bustle of the real world. Though robots and AI have excelled in making our world more efficient and practical, it seems that there are some industries that would lose their luster if they evolved to be robot-dominated and rid of human emotion.
