I thought this piece by Charlie Engman on AI art in Art in America was pretty alright, as far as these things go. Tired of reading most of the empty diatribes out there on this topic, but there were some bright points here. Will just pull out bits & pieces here:

AI art is often labeled derivative, seen as inherently secondary to the superior creativity of humans. True creative expression is posited as a sudden and novel rupture or disruption, a big bang of creativity, rather than a cumulative, collaborative process. […]

Alan Turing, the grandfather of artificial intelligence, predicted that, in the face of the mechanical reproduction of their roles, the “masters [experts with specialized knowledge or skills] would surround the whole of their work with mystery and make excuses, couched in well-chosen gibberish, whenever any dangerous suggestions were made.” Creative labor has long been shrouded in such mystery. In the context of capitalism, art has always had to appeal to mysticism to justify its fundamentally unproductive, experiential nature. It is seen as an ineffable sacred act that supersedes the other labor that attends it. This has led to a personality cult of the individual creative genius who holds exclusive ownership to some magical artistic impulse. We celebrate Jeff Koons, not the assistants and fabricators who construct his work.

It makes sense, then, that some artists would be skeptical of a technology like AI that appears to be attempting, rather successfully, to lay bare the constituent parts of expression, potentially undermining the mystique that has long protected the authority of this individual creative genius.

I like that angle around Jeff Koons and his “helpers” too. Does Koons actually fabricate much/any of “his” “art?” I have no idea, but just like I argued here with writers, most professional writing is pretty much all the time collaborative in the end. Editors, proofreaders, layout, marketing, etc. The same has been true for the workshops of major artists throughout much of history. It’s a collaborative deal with many unsung helpers, whose contributions are negated by focusing on the cult of the Heroic Artist-Capital-A above all else. It’s the wrong thing to focus on in art, and it’s part of why I don’t give that much of a shit when people sling the now familiar insult, “He’s not a real artist.” Boohoo.

More from the piece, I also super appreciate this as someone who spent years doing content moderation:

While much attention is given to the exploitation of artwork in AI training, less focus is placed on other forms of labor. For instance, OpenAI employed Kenyan workers to label harmful content such as pornography, violence, and hate speech in order to train its content moderation AI systems. These laborers were paid less than minimum wage for their challenging and often traumatizing work, which was crucial to making the AI models commercially viable. The role of such labor practices in shaping AI algorithms has been largely overlooked, while the exploitation of artwork and other expressive data in training sets dominates the AI discourse. The disparity suggests that the labor of these workers is less valuable—less inherently “human”—than the labor of art-making, even as their critical role in the machine learning process demonstrates otherwise.

Well, with how much of it I’m quoting, you may as well just go read the original. But here’s more:

To the extent that AI diminishes creativity, it is that, in the eyes of the algorithm, the output of a conventional artist (a photographer, say) and the output of anyone else (a meme shit poster, say) have the same value; they differ only in register. AI is accelerating an ongoing institutional collapse of authorship and taste. The high-culture museum has been exploded into an open-air county fair, and the elites—the masters—are scrambling to retain their special status.

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