The AI Artist Paradox

Depending on your levels of credulity, neophilia, and taste your view of AI generated imagery is likely to fall into one of these two categories:

  1. It’s a sophisticated parlor trick with the beguiling ability to synthesize discrete phenomena into a seamless canvas. The output is derivative by definition, since it is based directly on a corpus of prior art.
  2. It’s the work of a nascent intelligence able to make creative decisions based on some form of conscious/lived experience. The output can be profound, whimsical, even self-effacing… or it definitely will be in next month’s 0.0.17 release…

The purpose of this post isn’t to establish which of these two camps is correct. That would be to invite some of the worst discourse the internet has to offer. Go to r/aiwars for a hit on that crack pipe.

Instead, I want to dispute the veracity of the AI artist: the person who claims the identity of “artist” based on their application of the technology characterized as either (1) or (2). Because, in either case, their claim is false.

1. “It’s Just A Tool”

First, let’s make the conservative estimate that contemporary AI art generators are merely (1). Their generation of art is an automated process not incorporating agency on the part of the generator.

“Indeed,” self-styled AI artists subscribing to (1) will tell you. “The generator itself is just a tool, like a paint brush. It is I, the wielder of the tool, that creates the art.” Never mind the fact that painter/decorators are rarely equipped, or willing, to capture the zeitgeist while applying a second coat of mold-resistant acrylic.

The tool in question is the now ubiquitous prompt: a text box into which you type commands. Where the generator exercises no agency, the prompt is no more than a seed number: a starting point for triggering a predetermined process devised by its original creator. It’s just a process that happens to:

  1. take natural language as input and
  2. incorporate probabilistic factors, resulting in deceptively “human” variability, in its output.

Prompting such a generator doesn’t make you an artist any more than filling out any other text field makes you a web designer or developer. You are interacting with someone else’s artifice. They have tailored this artifice to you. You’re just the consumer.

In the case of (1), the generator is the artwork and the generator’s creator is the artist. A button-down wearing mathematician in the employ of a billionaire pedophile is probably not how you picture an artist, but that’s hardly the point. They made the robot; you just press its buttons.

2. “It’s A New Kind Of Being”

If we are to believe contemporary or future AI image generators can or will correspond with (2), the dynamic between the involved parties changes.

We expect a bona fide artificial intelligence to be (given the incorporation of the term intelligence) much more than just a very complex routine or algorithm. It acts autonomously and—at least partly—in its own interest. It approaches sentience. If, while prompting, you believe that’s what you are interacting with, you can no longer claim it’s merely a tool. To do so would either be disingenuous or deeply problematic.

Where it has agency, it also has ownership. If it’s doing the creative work, and you’re not, it’s the artist. You’re just the commissioner or curator. Given the typically uninspired application of prompting, to either save money or make a quick buck, slave driver is probably a better analogy.

So what’s the AI artist paradox? It’s that by either having or lacking intelligence (1 or 2), AI-based art generators preclude the existence of so-called “AI artists”. By manifesting either an artwork or an artist, the AI monopolizes artistic contribution.

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