As part of our ongoing series exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and creativity - taken from our Art, AI, and the Future of Creativity report, in association with ArtTactic - we speak with media theorist Alex Estorick, Editor-in-Chief at Right Click Save.
With AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney rapidly transforming artistic practice, Alex provides a critical perspective on how generative AI is challenging long-held notions of originality, and redefining ownership in the digital age. He explores the legal and ethical implications of AI-generated art, the potential for technology to democratise creativity, and why, despite increasing automation, human ingenuity remains central to the future of culture.
AI is transforming the creative landscape, but how do you see it influencing traditional ideas of originality and authenticity in art?
If we are talking about generative AI (rather than general AI) in the form of text, image, or video generators then the first question is: what data has been used to train the models? At a time when anyone can right-click and save an image produced by someone else, or scrape large volumes of images in the case of machines, visual culture is to some extent up for grabs.
Of course, this challenges copyright and other legal regimes that seek to protect creators and owners. However, for Felix Stalder, this pattern of appropriating or remixing others’ content – what he calls “referentiality” – is essential to the digital condition. Generative AI doesn’t alter that principle, though it does accelerate and mask the process by which artists’ output can be exploited. What the popularity of NFTs proved is that even in a context where digital images can be experienced by everyone, people still want to own an authentic “original”.
With generative AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney becoming more accessible, what impact do you think this has on artistic practice? Does it empower artists or risk deskilling them?
Right now, machine learning platforms such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are becoming increasingly popular as creative tools for all artists to develop their ideas and speed up the production process. One popular refrain right now is “creativity is the productivity of the future,” the premise being that, if production is less of a burden on creators, then they can focus on the quality of the concept behind a work since their primary role is in setting the envelope within which the machine operates.
One could argue that, like the camera, such tools deskill artists in some sense. However, if photography liberated painters from the need to represent an “objective” reality, then artists working with machine learning can also challenge canonical forms of creativity.
Do you think AI is helping to make art more accessible to a wider audience? And if so, why is this important- not just artistically, but culturally and societally?
The internet took art to a wider audience by allowing people to experience images without needing to be in their physical presence. The COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone under lockdown to experience the art they didn’t have in their homes through online platforms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this accelerated the desire to own digital art, challenging its artificial segregation from traditional fine art (much of which uses digital tools), while also challenging traditional galleries that were forced to sell work online.
The aforementioned generative AI platforms represent a new creative tool that is widely available to anyone with an internet connection. They provide a novel and seductive mode of “creating” new (or remixing old) digital content at a time when many people are still unfamiliar with software, for example Adobe Illustrator, that commercial artists have used for decades. At a time when the market for (code-based) generative art is growing steadily, generative AI tools can help to compensate for a lack of experience with code as a creative medium.
Who do you believe truly owns the rights to AI-generated art: the artist/programmer or the AI itself?
I am not a legal expert and appropriation has been an essential component of fine art since Duchamp. However, it is clearly inappropriate and inequitable for large multinational companies to benefit from the creative labor of individual artists without compensating them for the use and reuse of their work.
Generative AI platforms, if they are trained on images that do not have a Creative Commons licence, should be forced to credit and compensate the artists whose work they have scraped and retrain their algorithms.
There’s a lot of debate - and fear - around AI’s impact on the art market. Do you think these concerns are justified, or should we be looking at AI’s potential in a different way?
If anything, the use of generative AI as a creative tool is evidence of the ability of humans and machines to collaborate successfully. I certainly support posthumanism insofar as it rejects anthropocentrism and reimagines humans, non-humans, and nature within one inclusive, mutually supportive ecosystem.
