No Excuses for AI Art

There’s no room for compromise between working artists and those who seek to innovate them out of existence

by Hazel Zorn

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When Jason Allen’s AI-generated artwork won first place in the Colorado State Fair’s digital arts competition, he told the Washington Post that Midjourney was just a tool like a paintbrush. Allen had previously had issues with AI artwork until he figured out that he could use it to make money and win glory (he cited “spiritual reasons”). Now he scolded AI art detractors for their “denial and fear” of new technology.

A more thorough summation of Allen’s espoused view can be found in a writeup by Jason Sanford on AI-generated art and writing. “It’s not machine learning tools that threaten writers and artists,” writes Sanford. “It’s how the larger system around us will use these tools that’s the threat.” Careful qualifications like this one signal that despite his optimism about the technology, he sees the powers at play and knows that creatives are in a vulnerable position. The piece presents many viewpoints on AI before deciding in favor of it, thus demonstrating that his endorsement of it is well-founded.

Tech optimists like Sanford are determined to see AI art generators in a positive light, but their argument relies on a mistaken assumption: the AI generator isn’t the problem, it’s the people with power who are the problem. It is just a tool, they try to reassure us, and a tool is neutral. This view is widespread. But the people who created these tools were not neutral. They did not, as Sanford claims, have good intentions. This technology exists for a reason, and it isn’t to serve artists, but to replace them.

Serious proponents of AI art don’t try to compare it to paintbrushes and pencils. Instead, they point to digital tools like Photoshop or developments in photography. This is still a categorical mistake. It’s true that these tools can change the way an artist works, but the artist remains inextricable from the process, because this kind of tool is only useful in the hands of someone with the skill to use it properly. The powers that be can’t use Photoshop to cut artists out of the equation, but they can with AI, and they will.

In a capitalist system, the function of an AI artwork generator can only be to grind working artists into dust and to take away what little subsistence they can wrangle from the market. The fears of artists are well founded: Tor Books and Bloomsbury Publishing have both now used AI-generated covers for bestselling books. The need to increase profits by reducing labor costs is a fundamental feature of capitalism, and new technology is exploited to that end whenever possible, as we’ve seen play out in nearly every industry. It is willfully naive to expect artists to be treated differently than any other workers under the same circumstances.

Since so many other jobs have already been replaced by machines, maybe it’s fair to ask, why should artists get to be special? Many dreams are crushed by soul-sucking jobs. Many talents go uncultivated for lack of luck or privilege. So instead of sympathy when working artists’ livelihoods are threatened, there’s an instinctual reaction from some corners: Fuck the artists. They can be miserable like the rest of us.

James Marriott gives voice to this resentment in a pathetic article for The Times, titled “AI spells trouble for creatives—about time too.” Here we see a textbook case of the way capitalism domesticates its subjects, turning them into willing toadies. Marriott excuses the immiseration of one group of people by virtue of another’s, which could only serve to ensure the perpetuation of misery all around. This toxic line of thinking severely misconstrues, perhaps deliberately, the nature of the power relationships that dictate the conditions of working people.

There’s another crucial factor in all this that’s been overlooked by the Sanfords and the Marriotts of the world alike. AI doesn’t just rob artists of work opportunities; it actively steals from their existing work. Researchers have been able to ascertain that AI generators pull from images that are publicly viewable but not permissively licensed. While most of the world understands a piece of AI artwork to be something that’s been wholly created out of thin air, what it really is is an amalgamation of bits and pieces of actual art, disassembled and rearranged into something ostensibly new. Whether or not the result of this algorithmic shell game can be said to have any artistic merit of its own, it only exists as a product of the labor of old-fashioned human artists who receive no compensation for it.

Is it art? Some people certainly seem quite impressed by it. As we know, taste is subjective, but any aesthetic concerns we may have are ultimately beside the point. When a human being creates art that is mediocre or downright bad, they’ve still done something valuable with their time. It is laudable for a person to spend time making bad art until they get better. A machine isn’t capable of finding personal enrichment in creativity. All it can accomplish is to rob us of the chance to have that experience for ourselves. Sanford et al. may brand us as Luddite cynics, but if so they’ve failed to consider that our kind of optimism points in a different direction: toward a future where people are liberated from unfulfilling work and all are free to create.

This technology exists for a reason, and it isn’t to serve artists, but to replace them.

The broader fight over technology under capitalism is a fight between the capitalist and the worker, fueled by conflicting motivations for technological advancement. Workers want technology to free them from work so that they can reclaim their time. Capitalists want technology to free them from paying workers. 

In theory, as people become free from toilsome wage labor, they will spend more time doing self-directed and creative work. Karl Marx wrote that when machinery reduces the “necessary labor of society to a minimum, [it then] corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.” But in reality thus far, the reduction of labor by automation has only corresponded with the loss of wages for workers.

Now, in an absurd twist, we’re faced with the automation of not just necessary labor, but the very work that we strive and fight for the freedom to do. There is no liberatory potential in automating away creative jobs, not even in theory. Unlike the machines that take over dangerous tasks in factories and ports, AI art generators have no upside to offer the worker, only more hardship.

This technology was not created to be a toy for the enjoyment of the everyday person. Anyone who finds something to like about it is experiencing a secondary effect that is largely irrelevant to its true purpose. Naturally, those who stand to materially benefit from it are happy to promote it as a fun tool that regular folks can use to make their own art. Art has now been “democratized” they say, because now anyone can be an artist, thanks to AI. This framing offers a perfect shield against any material critique, and as a bonus, encouraging people to play around with these AI models also helps train them to be more proficient at imitating art.

Artists should not be expected to make peace with something that exists to replace us. Some working creatives have begun to set examples of ways to make a stand, such as author Susan Kaye Quinn, who has publicly committed to requiring a “no AI art” clause in any future contracts from magazines and publishers. And outlets like indie horror publisher Tenebrous Press have followed suit. What the market demands does not have to be endured as though it were a force of nature.

Imagine a society where human needs are met, where time is liberated, and where creative work flourishes. Do not let capitalism destroy your imagination, and do not let it convince you to abandon working artists to this new threat. 

This is not a future that we have to accept as if we were victims of an unstoppable deluge. All creatives can and must put our collective foot down. Solidarity demands it. That is the meaning of dignity.

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