The Genuine Threat To All Art By AI

Introduction

I saw this Instagram post from Francesco Simone Savi and it got me thinking about how AI is seeping into all art creation. Months ago I was alerted to an article where an artist was saying they were under threat from AI generated art. I replied to it is the article below.

My argument was that AI is a tool for non-artists. My “art” is in my writing, and on Vocal we need to have an image for our published stories, and we can find free ones online on sites such as Pixabay and Unsplash (the Vocal default) and credit whoever created them.

One of the problems here is that if we see something on Google many people see images as free public domain. I once used an image and forgot to credit the creator and was publicly berated for it, despite me adding a credit when it was pointed out.

I started using Night Cafe to create my images so that I would never infringe copyright again. I have used something taken from an Instagram post as the header for this article, but there is a link back to the source.

And so to the point of this article.

AI May Be Dangerous To Creators

Any power tool can be dangerous if used recklessly. A few weeks ago a friend sent me a poem about Whitby. I asked if he was going to publish it anywhere, he said no but I could use it, and so I did and credited him.He then messaged me and said I should credit the real author. I went back to his message and saw that he had said it was generated using AI.

I had published the poem on Vocal so I thought I would come clean and say this was generated via AI. It does not have many reads but you can read it below.

Now this was getting very close to my creative home. I have seen advertisements for software that will write your blog posts, and now this was AI generated poetry.

On Vocal we have had issues with plagiarism but AI generated writing is a whole new universe.I know how the artist feels, but my argument is that AI generated art is quite random. I don’t believe the AI art generators can create an accurately defined image from your text, there are a lot of random factors in there.

When I generate AI art for my Vocal stories I do not feel I am threatening any artist, however if I was an art buyer and suddenly stopped because self generated art was cheaper then that would be something for artists I bought from to worry about. The thing is I personally do not buy art so I feel my position on AI art is justified and I wrote about it in the piece below.

My worry on AI generated writing is that because AI generations are so quick, we could see platforms like Vocal flooded and I can’t see any protection against it. At best moderators can say they think something is AI generated, but how can that be proved? Plagiarism is easily provable, but AI generated text? I was fooled by someone who wasn’t even trying to fool me, it was my fault for not reading the message properly.

Conclusion

We are on the edge of the unknown here. If Story Generation is that fast someone could hit their fiftieth story on their first day on Vocal. I hope someone would be suspicious but what could you say? I think I once posted five stories in a day, but if someone gets away with flooding Vocal and making money from it without being picked up then we may be in for a bumpy ride.