“Hey, do you want to look at this painting that no one actually bothered to paint?” seems like a ridiculous question—a painting that no one has painted would surely be a blank canvas. This is the question I hear when someone shows me AI-generated ‘art’. This includes AI-generated visuals, music and any form of writing, all of which rely on the fact that someone had the idea to create something, but couldn’t find the will to go through with it. As the Internet and the world of art become more and more filled with generative artificial intelligence, I constantly find myself asking why I should care to read something nobody cared to write. Art is human expression, and while we can use AI as a tool for artists, AI ‘art’ is not real art, nor is it worth looking at.
Oxford Languages dictionary defines art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power”. Merriam-Webster’s definitions of art include, “skill acquired by experience, study or observation”, “a branch of learning,” “an occupation requiring knowledge or skill,” and “the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects”. Art is also considered a cultural universal, or something present in every culture, as well as one of the fundamental components of culture. While there is no universally agreed upon definition of art, nor consistent rule for what can be considered art and what cannot, most definitions contain similar central themes. Across the abundant interpretations of the word, art is consistently considered expressive, skilled, relating to culture, and uniquely human. Artificial intelligence does not have emotions to express. It lacks the age to be experienced, and it’s rarely described as skilled. It has no culture and certainly is not human. AI-generated art is, for lack of a better word, soulless. It can’t express emotion or imagination because AI doesn’t have any; it doesn’t reflect a culture because AI isn’t a member of a group. AI can never create art because art is inherently a human form of expression.
Although artificial intelligence doesn’t generate art, it clearly generates something. Some self-proclaimed artists argue AI is an artistic tool, and they’re not entirely wrong; however, AI still can’t create real or original art. Artists can use generative AI in a few ways outside of actually creating art, such as generating prompts for an artwork, finding ways to improve an artwork that feels like it’s missing something, or creating a list of techniques often used in a certain style. Although there’s little to nothing AI can do that an online art forum or community (or, shockingly, regular old Google) can’t, using it as a tool is still better than using it to generate its own ‘art’. An artwork made by a person who used AI to generate a prompt is still made by a person, therefore it’s still art. An image made by an AI which was prompted by a person is not made by a person and is not art. This also applies to writing, music, and even sculpture—AI can improve, but can never create. Artificial intelligence can be used in the art field as a little mechanical assistant to a skilled human artist. Humans can make art with AI assistance, but anything an AI model makes is inherently not art. With that said, I wouldn’t really recommend using AI for any artistic purposes, as its abilities are pretty much incomparable to those of an experienced human artist.
AI-generated art isn’t very good. When generative AI was first introduced to the general American public, the Internet saw plenty of images spread for the purpose of mocking artificial intelligence. People loved laughing at the cartoonish pictures of hands with fifteen fingers bending and spreading in all sorts of impossible directions. AI-generated writing was just as bad, with people posting screenshots of their conversations with the AI chatbot ChatGPT, which would often generate obviously false statements, terrible advice, and sometimes utter gibberish. Artificial intelligence models have improved since then, but ultimately, the ‘art’ is simply not very good. It’s certainly not as good as the human artists it mimics. AI art has an easily recognizable style to those who have interacted with it often enough; it’s typically cartoonish, brightly colored, and possesses an element of unintentional, uncanny surrealism. It also has inaccuracies and mistakes human artists wouldn’t usually make, such as shading with no clear light source, impossible feats of physics, and misspelled words or words that dissolve into illegible scribbles. AI-generated writing is almost equally as recognizable in the form of blog posts filled with em dashes, articles citing sources that don’t exist, and pieces of fiction that include phrases like “Of course! Here’s a story about ____!” AI-generated ‘art’ rarely passes for human work and therefore doesn’t pass for art at all. It has all the mistakes and underdeveloped style of a beginner artist with none of the emotion, expression, or culture.
Generative artificial intelligence can do a lot of things. It cannot, however, create art. Art is cultural, emotional, and inherently human. AI can never create art because it will never be human or feel human emotions and connection. Aside from that, AI-generated images and writing are full of errors humans would almost never make. Frankly, they aren’t worth my time. While some artists use generative AI as a tool, nothing it makes will ever be real art. The next time you get a creative idea, consider making it yourself instead of using artificial intelligence—it might not be perfect, but the humanity of it is exactly what will make it art.
Author’s Note:
As AI takes over the world, I think it’s important we make distinctions between what it can and can’t do. There is a bigger picture around the phrase “AI Art”, and this is my perspective of the conversation about generative AI.
Kittra Khan | 15 | Chetek, WI
