Saw a local artist at a market last week who said AI art is just 'fancy clip art'

I was at the arts market in Portland and got talking to a painter at her booth. She told me, 'All that AI stuff is just fancy clip art, it doesn't count as real art.' That really stuck with me because it feels like a huge misunderstanding. The AI isn't just copying and pasting clip art, it's making new images from patterns it learned from millions of pictures, many of which were made by artists without their permission. That's the part people keep getting wrong. It's not about the output looking like clip art, it's about where the data came from. Has anyone else had a conversation like this that changed how you see the ethics?

3 comments

3 Comments

quinnm777d ago

Yeah that stolen bricks line from Kai is exactly it. I tried explaining the data thing to a photographer friend and he just kept saying the images looked cheap. You gotta stop talking about how it looks. Next time someone says that, ask them straight up if they'd be okay with their own work being used to train a system without pay or credit. That usually cuts through the clip art talk real fast.

eva_moore7d ago

My friend's song got used in a training set.

kai_burns737d ago

Spot this attitude everywhere now, not just with art. People see a new tool and only judge the surface result, calling it cheap or fake. They totally miss the hidden system behind it, how it was built by taking work without asking. It's like only talking about how a building looks while ignoring it was made with stolen bricks. That painter is focused on the wrong thing, the style of the output. The real problem is the foundation it's built on.