AI and Art : Stop being a bully

There are loud bullies in the art world that are taking AI governance into their own hands.

The Art of the world up until now has come from the heads of creative individuals that do not shy away from what they feel compelled to do. I believe that art comes from the emotional mind. Those artists are passionate people which makes them very special, and very different from analytical people on the other side of the scale.

When those emotional people latch onto an idea, their passion can take a good concept and radicalize it to the point of non sensical virtue signally that bullies everybody that is not in line with their now radical view. This is happening all over the creative world currently and we are going to dive into it in todays episode.

The creative world has split into three visible camps: people using AI openly as a production tool, people using it quietly in the background, and people refusing it as a matter of ethics, identity, and community trust. The last group is increasingly loud and has become the bullies in the creative world.

I know this first hand as my girlfriend is in some of these artistic sub-cultures. She makes hand made candles based on romance and fantasy books that she has read. The candles are book accurate in terms of smell. If the author says a character, place or scene smells a certain way then she recreates that smell in a candle.

She reads A LOT of books and gets excited about making a character that she loves into a smell so she has currently over 130 different characters in her candle library. This is a very small, one person passion project. She has built a local name for herself in book stores and does a lot of vending events.

I tell you all this because now, the temperature in the book / candle community for AI has reached a boiling point. To be a vendor you have to sign something that says you do not use AI. Some are also scouring old posts and pieces people have done in the past to see if/when they have used it. It is a good ole fashion witch hunt!

My girlfriend has used AI in the past for backgrounds on posts on IG. When you are a one person shop, time saving measures that don’t impact the product are certainly welcomed by the artist. That said, the bullies have come out and This has cost her an opportunity to vend at certain places because someone associated with the vending opportunity saw a post from a month previous that had been generated by AI.

Now, obviously I have a biased opinion on this personally, but my job is to provide perspective and wisdom to the AI community so here we go. 

The passionate art protectors have a great point from a governance standpoint. I believe the solution here is in the lettuce leaves. Just like there is a difference between organic lettuce non-gmo and conventional lettuce there is also a difference between AI generated art and Human generated art.

While I have never checked if there are people who bully others for what salad they eat (Im sure there are those people out there) the basic nature of having the choice is important. We have governance, rules, around what is organic and what isn’t. I can buy organic, non GMO or I can by conventional. I have the choice based on the label to know the difference. In the art world, instead of bullying people that use AI, let’s create a standard. I propose 3 categories. Human only, Ancillary AI, and AI friendly. 

Human Only would be never any use of AI. No AI for ideas, ways to do something, marketing, finding locations to vend, nothing ever. This would be verified by the community and if smart, the artist. The artist can take the time to show each part of processes which will help build trust and a story for the brand.

Ancillary AI label would be the use of AI in anything that is not related to the direct making of the art itself. Need help responding to a customer email, making a background for an IG post, or use AI for creative conversations. You do not however use AI in the actually making of the art itself. This is also proven by story telling of the artist.

Lastly, AI friendly would say you are open to using the tool of AI at any point of the creative process. You are looking for a color match in a piece of art, you want to copy exactly ideas it gives, the whole 9. This is assumed if there is no other label on it. I believe some of the venom and bullying that happens in these creative circles is out of fear. Fear that AI will take their jobs and create better art.

My goal here with the AI steward is to give governance options that put humans first but don’t try to control what happens because of fear. The fact of the matter is AI is a good tool, and people should be free to use it. Let’s just increase the communication around the use of it so the free market can choose with trust where they want to spend their money.