It's not easy to be a famous artist. It's really, really hard. But imagine anyone could create groundbreaking art from their living room. Would this diminish the value of art? Would this wreak havoc on the art community? But first, what is this questionable innovation?
To answer that, let's take a look at the framed print below, especially its unusual signature at the bottom right:
This piece of art (Edmund de Belamy) wasn't created by a person, in the traditional sense. The signature is a line of code from an artificial intelligence program used to generate this artwork. The subject depicted isn't a real person either; it's the result of an algorithm churning through thousands of portraits and digitalized paintings from the last several centuries.
What's even more surprising, this artwork was sold at a New York auction house for $432,500 USD in 2018. The algorithm that produced it was programmed by 17-year-old Robbie Barrat, a computer science enthusiast in West Virginia.
How can a computer make art?
Art is, by definition, a creative field. It feels impossible that a machine can emulate human artistic ability, but AI is different. Instead of sequentially following instructions, AI is a "black box," an algorithm that takes input, scans through it for patterns, and outputs something new.
In the case of creating art, an algorithm would take in thousands, if not tens of thousands, of example artworks created by people. The exact details of the process that the program takes to get an end result from the example data are mostly unknown, but we do know that it looks for certain patterns in the data.
For example, it could see that most portraits have a round set of pixels of a different color than the background, those being the subject's head. The algorithm would continue to extrapolate an immense number of trends, in the same way, leading to something as detailed as this image:
Most AI images are created using prompts that specify things like lighting, art style, resolution, and, most importantly, the subject. In the image above, the Stable Diffusion algorithm has so much data to refer back on that it knows what Vikings, gray beards, and portraits of old men look like.
Speaking of portraits, some AI-generated faces are scarily indistinguishable from real images. Take a look at these below:
You may have heard of the website ThisPersonDoesNotExist on the news. It's a site that generates a new "face" using AI every time you reload the page. They look so convincing that you wouldn't know it wasn't real at first glance. If you are curious about how to tell the difference between AI and real images, here's a cool article.
Because AI isn't perfect, it's key to look for odd color streaks, unusual asymmetry, and strange backgrounds. If the background looks a little funny or surreal, that's a pretty sure sign the image wasn't taken from real life. (Make your own AI art here!)
Is AI art real "art"?
There is no easy answer to this question. Some critics of AI art say that there is no creativity expressed in the artwork by its creator. In other words, if I were to type a few phrases into an art-generating algorithm, I would not be considered an "artist" because the data that the algorithm drew from was already pre-made art. In that case, would the programmer who wrote the code for the algorithm be the "artist"? Some say no because the programmer didn't create any art; they just made a tool that pulls from existing art.
On the other hand, according to Stephen Marche, the rise of AI-generated art is analogous to the rise of photography as an art form. Around the late 1800s and early 1900s, photographers were widely not considered artists because they just operated a picture-taking mechanism at scenic locations.
Nowadays, photography is generally considered art due to the skill required to envision a good photo, find the best location, and tweak the camera settings. Making AI art is similar in how creators must find the best combination of keywords and the right algorithm to make something unique.
Photography didn't cause paintings and drawings to die out—they thrived alongside each other over time. Personally, I predict that AI will do the same. While the algorithms will surely improve in the coming years and decades, I don't imagine they will replace art created by people. Although AI art can look fascinating, paintings, drawings, and real photos have a certain charm to them that AI may never replicate.
Questions to think about:
Should the price that a piece of artwork sells for correlate with the effort it took to create it? If so, why do you think Edmund de Belamy sold for so much?
Do you think there will be any harmful implications of a computer being able to create nearly indistinguishable fake human faces from reality?
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