Untitled

     I’ve been doing art on and off for more than 20 years now. I started off using pencil and paper like most visual artist, and whatever misplaced crayons & markers I could get my hands on. I taught myself to paint by smearing blades of grass and flowers across dry paper. To mix the colors, I used my own spit as a base moisturizer to mix the colors. And when I wanted to add texture to said paintings, I used the dirt from outside to add grains of texture to the paintings. Eventually my Grandmother allowed me to keep a few plastic butter knives as tools to use when I painted. Once I made enough money from regular 9-5 jobs and the odd commission on and off, I was able to afford a Cintiq to make work digitally. But to my surprise, the skills I accumulated over the years were not as easily transferable as I had hoped. So, I was forced to teach myself to draw and paint all over again with new, more expensive equipment. I could not afford to go to an art school, so I trained myself as much as I could whenever I had time.

     The current state of A.I. “Art” (from what I’ve been able to gather) uses tools that can learn by studying previously made images. But in studying images created by illustrators & painters, it is learning their styles as well. So, if you want a Picaso painting, just give the A.I. as much Picaso to study as you can find, and it will be able to produce new Picaso paintings at will. The problem with this is that once a visual artist dies, their style dies with them. The only Picaso paintings that exist are the one’s he made before he passed, so anything created in his style with A.I. would be expressly against his will. In short, when the artist dies, their style dies with them. That is part of what makes their work valuable, the scarcity of it.

     I am not against the idea of A.I. “Art” as a concept, I think it can be a powerful tool for visual arts in the future. If it were possible to give these tools my artwork and mine alone and have them create pieces without taking the work of other artists, I would definitely be interested. Or if I could give companies permission to use my style and be paid for it, that would be fine as well. But as of right now, it just seems to be a tool to bypass the training of being an artist to steal the accumulated skills developed over time by human artists. Not to mention the sacrifices that are made in that time in the form of finances, time, health (physical & mental), etc. It just feels like all the time of training and sacrifice aren’t worth it if someone can just upload your work into a machine and create something brand new, in your style, against your wishes, without having made any of those sacrifices.