At the time of my writing this October 7th, 2023, a viral reddit post to /r/midjourney of some AI art has inspired a slew of spin-offs and a huge number of views and replies.
These have really led me to question some of my exuberance and optimism that I had for AI art initially when I started making it with neural style transfer and stylegan, then moved up to fine-tuning disco diffusion. Until recently I had held out hope that, that lowering the barrier to entry for making art and self expression would be a wonderful thing, and that it would make the world a more beautiful place. This sentiment was generally shared among the smallish community of brilliant ML researchers and developers that were laying the foundations, conceptually, of the powerful generative tools we have today.
I have been an artist and musician my whole life, in addition to being a programmer and many other things, almost all of which I taught myself, having been given the luxury of plenty of unsupervised alone time growing up and the curse of insatiable curiosity about how things work. I think that it has given me a really unique, unconstrained and deeply intuitive grasp of these skills, so I don't feel like I missed out on much by forgoing the usual institutional education.
There are a few drawbacks to the route I took, and one of them is that nobody ever explained to me the concept of creating responsibly. I feel like this particular theme, while mostly harmless and entertaining to many on one level, is, on another, pretty offensive and full of harmful stereotypes that probably have affected people you know or care about, if they haven't ever directly affected you -- and the callous gleeful disregard for any consideration of that is pretty troubling to me.
There is one reason art should be hard to learn to make well, and it's the same reason it should take a long time to make anything half way decent... because this gives the artist time to consider the potential impact of the art they are creating will likely have on the audience, how it might be interpreted differently than the artist intended and whether or not that might warrant changes or abandoning the concept altogether.
This is an important part of the process that I am afraid we may lose if we're not careful. The ability of art to evoke an emotional response in an audience is more powerful than you think, and just because something isn't objectionable or offensive to you or your friends doesn't mean it's okay to. I urge my fellow AI artists to use it responsibly and think hard about whether or not what you are creating is something that you'd want to be remembered for or associated with.
Most of all, though, if none of what I've said so far has struck a chord with you, then try and see it this way: If we want to be taken seriously and treated no differently than traditional artists, we need to start behaving a little more maturely. What exactly do I mean by that? *I'm not trying to say that anyone need censor themself... many great artists most effective and memorable works are controversial or provocative, but you'll notice that they are most often using the attention that these qualities draw to their work to highlight a political or social issue and drive change for a more humanitarian society.
I assure you this is a major part of why AI art is not more readily accepted by the traditional art-appreciating world. That is something I would like as much as anyone here to see change, and it's going to take all of us growing up a little for that to ever be a possibility.
Go ahead, call me a Karen. You'll only be proving my point (just ask anyone named "Karen" if you don't understand why.)