Economic Precarity and Specter of Automation

 

LOS ANGELES (Noema Magazine) -- Viewing AI art as part of a broader pictorial history can temper fears that it is a prelude to a dystopian future. The problem with debates around AI-generated images that demonize the tool is that the displacement of human-made art doesn’t have to be an inevitability. Markets can be adjusted to mitigate unemployment in changing economic landscapes. As legal scholar Ewan McGaughey points out, 42% of English workers were redundant after WWII — and yet the U.K. managed to maintain full employment. In contemporary debates about automation, the real drivers of precarity often have more to do with the erosion of labor protections over the twentieth century. In the U.S., automation is an easy scapegoat for the gutting of worker protections. We look back on the development of the photograph as a technological transformation, not as one characterized by major waves of worker displacement. 

In the case of photography, we created a myth that cameras automated image-making in ways that were free from human interpretation. To make the photographic process legible to the forces of commercialization, however, we reframed it as a form of drawing, where human agents made marks using particles of light on a photosensitive surface.

An understanding of the technology as one that separates human from machine into distinct categories leaves little room for the messier ways we often fit together with our tools. AI-generated images will have a big impact on copyright law, but the cultural backlash against the “computers making art” overlooks the ways computation has already been incorporated into the arts. 

“Viewing AI art as part of a broader pictorial history can temper fears that it is a prelude to a dystopian future.”

When copyright was finally extended to photography in the mid-nineteenth century, it was partially to avoid opening other forms of artistic tools to scrutiny. Are artists using computer software on iPads to make seemingly hand-painted images engaged in a less creative process than those who produce the image by hand? We can certainly judge one as more meritorious than the other but claiming that one is more original is harder to defend.  

Art is much more than what is captured digitally on the internet, but the internet is an indispensable tool for artists attempting to earn a living. The proliferation of AI-generated images in online environments won’t eradicate human art wholesale, but it does represent a reshuffling of the market incentives that help creative economies flourish. Like the college essay, another genre of human creativity threatened by AI usurpation, creative “products” might become more about process than about art as a commodity. 

For historians of visual culture, the debate that AI-generated artwork has already sparked is as indicative of our current political moment as artistic movements of the past. Private tech companies that shape our political and economic landscape frame large open-source datasets as “democratic,” while the artists whose work is integrated advocate for greater property protections. In a moment when “truth” is a concept fraught with political partisanship, we can no longer seek solace in the apparent reality of a photograph. AI-image generators are perfectly capable of emulating the look of traditional photography, forcing us to confront the very human ways in which images have always been made.