The Rise of A.I. Art
The Ethical Dilemma the Art Industry is Facing
A Fascinating Article Written
By Kiera Xinyue Huang
In recent years, AI-generated artworks have gained momentum, with representative works such as Portrait of the Marquis de Bellamy, created by Obvious Art Collective using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), selling for $432,500 at Christie’s 2018. These works blur the line between human creativity and machine logic, sparking interest.
However, while the innovation of AI art is striking, it has also prompted a re-examination of traditional notions of creativity. Historically AI-generated art has blurred the role of the creator, sparking discussions about who should be honoured for creating and who should have the rights to the artwork.
Ethical dilemmas:
One of the central debates in AI-generated art is about authorship. Unlike traditional artists who have direct control over the creative process, creators of AI art are often guides, modulating algorithms rather than drawing every stroke and pixel themselves. In this case, the artist is more like a curator, selecting the dataset, tweaking the inputs, and ultimately influencing the direction of the output. So, should the honor of the creator go to the human operator or the machine that generates the final visual?
While AI artists argue that their use of datasets is similar to human artists drawing inspiration from art history, unauthorized use on a large scale raises unprecedented ethical challenges. Without proper acknowledgment or compensation, this practice undoubtedly raises concerns about the rights of the creators of the mined works.
Take DeepDream, for example, a neural network developed by Google to recognize patterns in images. While these surreal, dreamlike images generated by AI have attracted attention and acclaim, they are based on a large dataset created by human artists. As a result, it has been argued that the original art creators used to train the AI should receive some form of recognition or compensation. This debate has become increasingly urgent as AI-generated works enter the commercial art market.
The reception of AI-generated artworks in galleries and museums has been mixed. On the one hand, many viewers are fascinated by their novelty, which challenges traditional perceptions of creativity, originality, and artistic genius. However, traditional art critics and conservatives in the art world are sometimes skeptical of these works, questioning whether AI-generated artworks can inspire emotion or give profound meaning in the same way as art created by humans.
Conclusion:
AI-generated artworks challenge long-held assumptions about authorship, creativity, and ownership. As technology advances, artists, curators, and policymakers must come together to confront the ethical issues surrounding the use of AI as a creative tool, including the rights of human creators who are embedded in datasets. While AI art is still a relatively new phenomenon, its growing influence suggests that these discussions will become more intense in the future.
Ultimately, the future of AI art depends not only on the capabilities of the technology but also on how we as a society respond to the ethical issues it raises. As AI continues to reshape the art world, questions about who has the right to creativity itself become more urgent and complex than ever.