Months ago, I bought a few prints of artwork from a local artist at a pop-up market. I needed some new decorations for my new-ish office that I still hadn’t quite settled into, and I was excited to support a guy who seemed genuinely excited about his work and seemed like the type of guy I could hang out and have a beer or coffee with for a while.
I wasn’t even thinking about generative AI because it was a local artist I was meeting in person at a local event, and he seemed genuine and earnest.
I brought those pieces home, intent on framing them and hanging them on my wall for inspiration, but even as I set them down in my office, something about them bugged me.
And it kept bugging me.
I think, because I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, I let those pieces sit for a while until, recently, I bought frames for them and intended to hang them. They’d become checklist items, and I wanted to clear some of that clutter from my work space and mind. Once I had them framed and was considering the somewhat permanence of hanging them on the wall, I figured out what bugged me so much: I was suspicious these pieces had been, at least in part, created by generative AI.
I couldn’t be sure, so they sat on the floor bugging me for a while longer until I asked some friends who were like, “yeah, definitely AI.”
Obviously, we couldn’t be sure, and that’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot:
We now can’t be certain any piece of art is 100-percent human, and we never again will be able to be certain any of our art has been created ethically and with integrity.
For years, I’ve been thinking about generative AI in terms of the long-term damage it’s going to do, but our healthy, trustworthy relationship with it is already gone.
I decided to send an email to the artist. I didn’t accuse him of using AI, nor did I outright ask him. I just said, “Hey, I’m looking at this piece of yours, and it looks like there’s something strange going on here. Am I seeing what I’m seeing, or am I seeing it wrong?” His response was unsatisfying (he played dumb), and the trouble is, while I could give him the benefit of the doubt on that one piece, I kept finding bizarre choices throughout his body of work that suggested generative AI use.
I believe firmly that people are innocent until proven guilty, and I think we need to be very careful in our AI accusations because they can ruin careers. That’s why I’m not naming and shaming this guy.
But I am all but convinced he’s using generative AI in his artwork, and while it makes me sad and angry that he’s using it, I am absolutely furious he duped me and that I was naive and gullible enough to not even question it because it was a local artist who I was meeting in person and who seemed so cool.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s not using generative AI. The trouble is I can’t look at his artwork without suspecting it’s not 100-percent human, so it’s corrupted for me.
I hate this. I hate that I not only have to be vigilant as an art lover, but that I can never again know what is 100-percent human art and what isn’t. I hate that I have to approach every artist, every piece, with doubt about its origins.
I hate that you can never be certain beyond my promises and commitment that my work is 100-percent human.
Seriously, please think about this for a little bit. Think about what we’ve lost, and by “we,” I don’t just mean fiction writers or artists in general.
I mean humanity.
In all of the cosmos, one of the things that makes us special as a species is our art, and we have compromised that because we were too reckless to protect it and too eager to profit from a nascent technology we didn’t understand.
I blame the people who developed generative AI so carelessly. I blame our authorities and regulators who have so completely failed in protecting human artistry. I blame the people who have adopted AI into their creative processes without a thought about what they were actually feeding and relinquishing.
As an artist, I’ve been writing and talking about generative AI these past several years with regard to its long-term impacts to our art and culture, but I’m coming to understand, whether we lose our ability to create art or not, it’s already ruined. The required hyperawareness and the doubt about everything already means our art and culture is gutted in a way it will never, ever recover from.
And that is such a tragic shame, and every single person who has contributed to it should feel the focus of our ire. Every person using generative AI to unethically create artwork as a product to sell, who has defrauded all human artists, who has devastated local economies and raised energy prices for us all, who has robbed even themselves of their own creativity.
But they won’t.
Because even that has been taken from us.
I genuinely don’t know what to do. I evidently can’t reliably determine what is human-created and what is AI-created. I don’t feel bad about that because I think the vast majority of us can’t either. We don’t have adequate tools, and no, the watermark thing isn’t going to work because it’s easily defeated by a thesaurus and isn’t definitive anyway, meaning there will still be false positives and we can’t ever be 100-percent certain something is AI-generated. It is such a ham sandwich of an effort at a solution for something that should have been established before anyone in the public got their hands on any of that technology.
The generative AI artwork I was duped into buying? It’s in the trash where it belongs. That’s something I can do. Whenever possible, I can say “no” to it as an art enthusiast. I hope you do, too.
As a creative writer, I can commit, once again, to never using generative AI in any of my fiction, and I can explain why I am committed to that all day long, if you’re interested.
I can write. I can create.
As of now, that isn’t something generative AI can do. It’s merely capable of synthesis because it’s pathetic, and even if it could create (and one day, a general artificial intelligence probably will be capable of creation), I wouldn’t be interested because whatever it would create wouldn’t be mine.
And that’s why I write: to create art from me, to make art that is mine, to leave pieces of myself scattered across our civilization.
That I will most assuredly keep doing.
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