I was arguing with my mom about AI art the other day. I talked about wanting to make a comic, but not having time to draw everything because I'd want it to be really long and thought out. She said something like: "what if you just plan it and use AI to generate all the art for it."
My first response was really just to get angry. The way she suggested it as such an acceptable thing to do really bothered me. I argued that AI isn't human and I'd be losing all the soul in doing it that way. She didn't get it, since, to her, it'd still be my ideas or whatnot and AI is just a "tool" I could use to make the thing I wanted.
Then, I tried to talk about the environmental impact of AI. That didn't work either.
I think it was then that I realized the most simple thing I had forgotten to mention by simply regurgitating the common anti-AI arguments (which I of course believe in, but at the end of the day that's not what bothered me most).
What I brought up was how, simply, I enjoy art—and the process of creating—so much! Why would I give up the step of the process I enjoy most just for some AI slop to speed up the end product for me (and do it awfully - but that's the thing, it's not always going to be awful, which is oh so scary)?
I love drawing, I love the process of creating things and planning them out, and what hurt most about her suggestion was how she felt it so trivial to suggest taking that step of the process away from me. She wanted to replace this thing I loved most with a robot, for the sake of efficiency.
We live in a product-driven world. Consumerism, fast fashion: everything is meant to be a product consumed, quickly used then discarded. In "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," E.P. Thompson discusses how the industrial revolution marked a shift from task- to time-based work. Before, people would make money by how many products they could create. Products were artisanal and crafted. But once industrialization occurred and everything became mechanized, time became directly proportional to money. If you spent five hours at a machine, you would make five times the money and produce five times the product than you would have having spent one hour working.
That is to say, this industrialized world has now spiraled into a all-consuming capitalist system where we value the end product and ease of production over all else: AI art is easy to produce, and easy to consume (it's everywhere).
But: I believe that as a society we should put more of an innate value into creation. Drawing brings me so much joy, and generative AI is a morally corrupt mechanism that could steal the absolute joy of creating from future generations.
In my time drawing and posting art online, I have come to love every type of art. I find "beginner" art endearing and absolutely wonderful; you can just feel the effort and earnestness put into each piece and the whole conceit of calling some art "good" and some art "bad" is just so pretentious to me.
I hope we can all enjoy creating, and the shared humanity that we spread through it. My favorite part of drawing has always been connecting with others through it, and there's something so existential about that quintessential human aspect being stripped away from it.
