LOS ANGELES (Noema Magazine) -- The success of photography as a medium hinged largely on early descriptions that appealed to nineteenth-century sensibilities. As European economies looked toward an industrialized future, the elevation of the photograph’s mechanical trustworthiness made it an ideologically compatible form of visual output. Separating human from camera was a necessary part of preserving the myth of the camera as an impartial form of vision. To incorporate photography into an economic landscape of creativity, however, human agency needed to ascribe to all parts of the process.
Consciously or not, proponents of AI-generated images stamp the tool with rhetoric that mirrors the democratic aspirations of the twenty-first century. Stability AI, now one of the subjects of a lawsuit filed by artists whose work appeared in their training data set, paid German nonprofit LAION to compile an open-source database with billions of images. LAION anticipated accusations of copyright infringement by invoking the spirit of democracy in descriptions of its work. The sparse amounts of information on LAION’s website emphasize its service to the public good. The “100% non-profit” and “100% free” organization is committed to the “liberat[ion]” of machine learning research. Their work facilitates “open public education,” and its recycling of existing data sets is described as “environment-friendly.”
Stability AI took a similar tack, billing itself as “AI by the people, for the people,” despite turning Stable Diffusion, their text-to-image model, into a profitable asset. That the program is easy to use is another selling point. Would-be digital artists no longer need to use expensive specialized software to produce visually interesting material.
“[They] maintain that AI art simply automates the most time-consuming parts of drawing and painting, freeing up human cognition for higher-order creativity.”
The lawsuit filed against Stable Diffusion describes the defendants’ egalitarian language as a ploy to exploit the legal gray area surrounding data sets scraped from the internet. In an interview cited by the plaintiffs, Midjourney founder Tim Holz said that to his knowledge,“every single large AI model is basically trained on stuff that’s on the internet. And that’s okay, right now. There are no laws specifically about that.” Meanwhile, communities of digital artists and their supporters claim that the reason AI-generated images are compelling at all is because they were trained with data sets that contained copyrighted material. They reject the claim that AI-generated art produces anything original and suggest it instead be thought of as a form of “twenty-first century collage.”
Because it is fast, cheap and easy to use, however, AI art continues to attract a broad user base. Lensa, an AI app that generates custom portraits for users, generated $8.2 million in the five-day period following the release of its “magic avatars” feature. The DALL-E 2 subreddit, an online forum dedicated to mastering OpenAI’s image generation platform, often echoes photography’s early attempts to be understood as a creative process. Proponents describe the process of summoning an image from the data set as “prompt engineering,” emphasizing the necessity of a human intervening by giving the AI certain prompts.
Others looking to elevate AI art’s status alongside other forms of digital art are opting for an even loftier rebrand: “synthography.” This categorization suggests a process more complex than the mechanical operation of a picture-making tool, invoking the active synthesis of disparate aesthetic elements. Like Fox Talbot and his contemporaries in the nineteenth century, “synthographers” maintain that AI art simply automates the most time-consuming parts of drawing and painting, freeing up human cognition for higher-order creativity.
Contemporary critics claim that prompt engineering and synthography aren’t emergent professions but euphemisms necessary to equate AI-generated artwork with the work of human artists. As with the development of photography as a medium, today’s debates about AI often overlook how conceptions of human creativity are themselves shaped by commercialization and labor.
“As with photography, today’s debates about AI often overlook how conceptions of human creativity are themselves shaped by commercialization and labor.”