Thoughts on AI in the Arts
Quoted in part in the Post Star article, “AI in the Arts: Does It Belong,” by Andrew Valenza, published April 02, 2024. Read the full article here.
Should AI in the arts be a flash-in-the-pan, a fad, where creatives can play for a time in mediums outside their usual bailiwick, there is something to be said for the excitement it offers. It is a glimpse into the mind of authors, many of whom use AI-generated art to create portraits of their characters and settings that they then share on social media. Think of it like a visual tour of that goes beyond the page. In the realm of the visual arts, admirers can walk the streets of Van Gogh’s café and wonder at the turn of his starry, starry skies. For fun, for free, it is an extra that can be beautiful, thrilling, and inspiring.
But AI-generated art and writing is theft when based on foundations that are not in the public domain. These seemingly harmless conglomerates of someone else’s creations do not result in royalties to the original artist when those images are used to sell books, shirts, coffee mugs, prints, and so on. From authors whose words were stolen to train an AI program, someone else is profiting off plagiarism.
The question has been debated in my writing community about whether it is acceptable for small press and indie authors, who cannot afford cover artists to create original images, to use free AI services to piece together their own covers. However, those same starving authors are no different than the starving artists whose work product has been filched.
Worse is the impact AI-generated writing has had on the marketplace. First, a number of entrepreneurs have churned out a library of AI-generated writings for profit. Even when the AI is trained from their own previous scribblings, it is still recycled words at best, and self-plagiarism in reality, that is mass-produced. The more titles a producer lists on a major selling site, the more readily the algorithm redirects potential readers to their catalogue. This devolves into a glut in the marketplace that shuts out actual authors putting in real hours producing new material, a process that naturally cannot match a computer program’s speed.
More insidious are the large publishing houses seeking to replace authors with these faux materials. Authors and literary agents have seen publishing contracts that are dependent on the author consenting to their manuscript being used to train AI. These terms mean no future revenue for that author, even though it is their work being sold under multiple titles. Most authors work a “day job” to pay the bills, and the Top Five publishing houses control roughly eighty percent of the industry, meaning that’s a lot of heavy-hitting corporate types piling onto the already unfair pressures creatives face.
Supporters of AI will ask: why shouldn't people profit off of using AI tech to produce sellable books and art? That is a skill in and of itself. But at what cost? The vitriol unleashed in the public square of social media against AI-produced work-for-profit can be so powerful, it nearly destroyed the career of individuals who were unaware that the cover art or subsidiary sales attached to their materials were based on stolen goods.
So, while AI is the cool, new toy that is fun to take for a spin down the creative highway, that hot commodity is still a vehicle built from black-market bits.