Is it ethical to use AI to 'finish' a dead artist's unfinished work or is that just disrespectful?

I keep seeing people defend those AI-completed paintings of Van Gogh and da Vinci as 'honoring their legacy' but wasn't the whole point of art that it's a personal expression, so by letting a machine fill in the blanks you're just guessing what someone else would have made, and doesn't that actually cheapen the original artist's intent in a way that other forms of fan art don't?

2 comments

2 Comments

phoenix_martin4012d agoTop Commenter

Have you ever tried to finish a project someone else started, even a small one? I had a buddy who passed away mid-restoration of a 1967 Mustang, and his family asked me to finish it. I spent weeks agonizing over every bolt and wire, trying to guess what he would have wanted, and in the end I realized I was just making my own choices and calling them his. That's exactly what these AI completions feel like to me, no matter how good the technology gets, you're not honoring the artist's intent, you're just filling in gaps with your own best guess and slapping their name on it.

spencer_gonzalez112d ago

You're looking at it from the wrong angle. A dead artist's unfinished work is just that - unfinished. Leaving it to rot in a drawer or museum archive isn't honoring anyone. Using AI to complete it gets that work out into the world where people can actually see and engage with it, which is way more respectful than letting it collect dust. The whole "artist's intent" argument falls apart when you realize that most great artists changed their minds constantly. Van Gogh repainted over his own canvases, da Vinci left half his stuff unfinished. Their intent was to create something, and AI finishing it is closer to that intent than just leaving it dead in the water. Plus, the AI isn't guessing randomly - it's trained on the artist's actual body of work, so the guesses are educated by their own style. Calling it disrespectful assumes the artist wouldn't have wanted their vision completed, which is a pretty arrogant assumption to make for someone you never met.