What is AI Art? And Will It Replace Artists?

AI art is any digital work generated or enhanced with AI tools: imagery, photography, video, even audio compositions. You've probably heard the fake Drake songs. Some are quite good. It's getting genuinely hard to tell what's real anymore, and with generative imagery everywhere, artists working the old-fashioned way have to push twice as hard to stand out from the wave of amateur AI prompters. Or do they?

Humans have held the paintbrush for a very long time. The oldest known figurative art is a 45,500-year-old Indonesian cave painting, apparently of a pig: the Sulawesi pigs, which researchers believe is the oldest known depiction of the animal world (PNAS).

Until now, we've been alone in that. Computer programs can create images today, but they still require a human to supply the text phrases and context that shape an accurate result.

One upside of AI art is that it spawned an occupation that was previously absent: AI prompting, meaning writing the text that generates an image or a block of AI text.

Anyone can pick up tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E 2, and generating a good image is honestly easy. It takes a real master to do it for a living, and the distinction between good and great is becoming easier to see. Companies are hiring experienced AI prompters and engineers, and demand grows as AI works its way into daily life.

The role can supplement a staggering number of microprocesses (and jobs). Estimates put the average salary for a full-time, first-year AI prompter at $100,000 to $150,000 (JobList). Bloomberg claims roles starting at $175,000 to $375,000, which seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

Other jobs feeling the immediate pressure from AI: assembly line workers, musicians, even pizza makers.

These roles usually ask for a background in computer science or programming, though not always. The work is prompting, essentially talking to generator systems to produce the most relevant, topic-specific results for each request. Most applicants have hundreds of hours of prompting with language models like ChatGPT and GPT-4. Prompts can get rather lengthy, because the more context you give, the better and more original the response.

A professional prompter helps see real-world AI applications through their challenges. Goldman Sachs recently estimated generative AI could robotize activity equivalent to 300 million full-time jobs globally, and IBM's chief executive expects AI to eliminate the need for up to 30 percent of certain white-collar roles while creating new ones (Goldberg).

Technically yes, though it's an active debate in the art world, and it depends on what you consider real. This kind of creative production has opened new possibilities, breaking traditional boundaries and challenging perceptions of what art is (Milliere).

Supporters argue AI-generated work is a legitimate form of artistic expression. They point to the creativity involved in designing and training the algorithms, and to AI's ability to explore unlimited amounts of data and land on unexpected, creative combinations (McFadden). On that view, art at its core is human expression, and AI is a tool or a collaborator in the process.

Critics question the authenticity and intentionality of generated work. They argue true art requires conscious human intention and personal expression, and that AI pieces lack the emotional depth, cultural context, and critical engagement a human artist brings (Streamlife).

Ultimately it's subjective. Art is personal. It requires cultural context, emotion, and interpretation. What counts as art encompasses an infinite range of possibility, by definition.

Commercial use of AI images is a bit of a gray area. Many platforms currently give users the right to publish their creations for any purpose (Hutchinson). Paid Midjourney accounts can create and sell their works as original, and some people are minting AI art NFTs that sell for a few hundred bucks. Before using a generator personally or commercially, do your own research and read its terms and policies.

As of June 2023 there is an opportunity to sell generated visual images, but many of the generator tools and their user databases are re-assessing whether money transactions will stay permitted.

Per the Congressional Research Service: AI programs might infringe copyright by generating outputs that resemble existing works. Under U.S. case law, copyright owners may be able to show infringement if the AI program both (1) had access to their works and (2) created substantially similar outputs.

AI-generated images are produced through a database, and that database relies on pre-existing, man-made artworks, often including photos of actual people and everyday items. Billions of trained pieces get mixed and matched to create an outcome based on the user's request. Some consider AI pieces copyrighted on those grounds, since they carry pre-existing works within them however faint the source appears (Heyler). As of now that's no legal barrier, though it very well might become one in the near future.

The suggested workaround for marketing and commercial use is to build your own foundation and database of art (Vincent). That's a faulty solution: it would likely take years and millions of image sources to develop and train, every image, drawing, and generated visual would need to be completely your own (Harvard), and it defeats the purpose, since people reach for AI generators precisely because they lack the artistic range or the technical resources to build their own (Yale).

DALL-E's guidelines specifically say do not upload images to which you do not hold appropriate usage rights (ArtLaw). With human subjects especially, the AI pulls from pictures broken down from real human faces, so any generated piece that includes a person or animal is portraying the visual life of one or more current or past living beings (Heikkila).

No. As of July 2023, AI art cannot be protected by copyright. The database used to generate the image you prompted was built from millions, if not billions, of images you do not own.

That's about it for now. The legal landscape and the conversation around it change constantly, so do your own research and stay current.