There is a growing movement to ban or discourage the use of AI art, citing ethical concerns over unethical data scraping, environmental cost, and harm to the incomes of real artists. This sentiment seems most prevalent in left-leaning online spaces like reddit and bluesky. Some are even starting to associate AI art with the far-right, with one popular article declaring it to be “the new aesthetics of fascism”.
As an example of how far this movement is spreading, the subreddit for the poker roguelike video game Balatro had a kerfuffle a few months ago, when a volunteer moderator for the subreddit stated that AI art was allowed. A person on bluesky screenshotted the post, and declared that if they had known the Balatro creator was okay with AI art, they wouldn’t have bought or own the game.
In response, the creator of the game stated that “Neither Playstack nor I condone AI 'art'. I don't use it in my game, I think it does real harm to artists of all kinds. The actions of this mod do not reflect how Playstack feels or how I feel on the topic. We have removed this moderator from the moderation team.”
I bring this up not because the subreddit for an indie game is important, but because it’s not: If an indie game subreddit refuses to use AI art for ethical reasons, should the effective altruism movement be doing the same?
At the very least, the discussion should be had, and todays debate week seems like a good time to have it. And conveniently enough, it also provides a good example of the AI art usage I'm trying to gently discourage here: the announcement thread for DIY debate week has it’s own cute AI art tacked to the end:
I'm not trying to cancel Toby or Bulby here. Obviously he was just trying to spice up the post with a cute picture, and I'm not going to argue that this image is a major threat to humanity or anything. But on the other hand, not creating images like this costs very little, so if there are tangible harms then avoiding AI art could still be effective.
I’m also not saying AI art should be banned outright. Many people are trying to research the development and impact of AI, including AI images, and it would be dumb to prevent someone studying the progression of AI image models from showing AI images. So I want to clarify that I am only talking about cases like Bulby above, where the AI art is only used for illustrations or entertainment purposes.
I'll start off the debate with a few anti-AI art talking points, as well as some points on the other side. I'm personally anti-AI art, so I don't expect that I have produced the best pro-AI art arguments here.
Some arguments for avoiding AI art:
- AI art is being generated with scraped images without the consent or compensation of the original artists, and then used to undercut those artists in the marketplace. Many people, including myself, think this is highly unethical, so there is harm in normalising this practice.
- Following on, even if you don’t think AI art is majorly harmful, you may be concerned about setting a precedent: By tolerating unethical behaviour now, you might be making it easier for them to do worse things later.
- AI safety people (and AI harm people) generally see openAI as acting recklessly and dangerously, and they currently have the best AI image generation technology. Showing off their images might drive more people to use chatgpt and pay money for it, boosting their income, data, and market advantage.
- The use of AI art seems quite unpopular among real artists and creatives (although there are exceptions). By using AI art, you may be turning real artists (and their skills) away from the movement.
- Many people concerned about AI safety want to form a common front against AI companies with those concerned about short-term harms. The widespread use of AI art could hurt this effort, by giving the impression that AI safety doesn’t care about short-term harms.
- Reputationally, it might be a point of weakness: it could be pointed to as hypocrisy. “these people say they are against OpenAI, yet they are slapping Chatgpts plagiarised images all over their forum”
- There is an environmental cost to each image generated. A 2023 estimate placed it as equivalent to a full charge of a smartphone. I think it's likely that the impact of the new GPT image generator is significantly higher than this.
- AI art has negative associations with quality and is often seen as being tacky “slop”, which might hurt messaging using AI art.
- The upside of using AI art doesn't seem to be very high: subjectively it mostly seems like it's used for decorations.
Some arguments against avoiding AI art
- Some people enjoy it, and discouraging AI art might help contribute to a “fun police” atmosphere on the forum that makes it less appealing to read or participate in.
- Most of the AI art is being used in blog posts: we wouldn’t have paid artists to do this stuff anyway, so there is very little impact on an artists bottom line.
- The lack of AI art might make some articles less readable or persuasive. There are a lot of free images out there, but they are less versatile than image generators.
- Using AI art may help the average person get a better feeling and insights about AI, including what it is and isn’t good at doing.
- The stance may alienate EA from AI enthusiasts, and reputationally this would reinforce the perception of EA as luddite technology haters.
- Real art may be mistaken for AI art, which could result in people being unfairly maligned.
My strongest reason for disliking AI-generated images is that so often they look tacky, as you aptly said, or even disgustingly bad.
One of the worst parts of AI-generated art is that sometimes it looks good at a glance and then as you look at it longer, you notice some horribly wrong detail. Human art (if it's good quality) lets you enjoy the small details. It can be a pleasure to discover them. AI-generated art ruins this by punishing you for paying close attention.
But that's a matter of taste.
What I'm voting "disagree" on is that the EA Forum should have a rule or a strong social norm against using AI-generated images. I don't think people should use ugly images, whether they're AI-generated or free stock photos. But leave it up to people decide on a case-by-case basis which images are ugly and don't make it a rule about categorically banning AI-generated images.
I am trying to be open-minded to the ethical arguments against AI-generated art. I find the discourse frustratingly polarized.
For example, a lot of people are angry about the supposed environmental impact of AI-generated art, but what is the evidence of this? Anytime I've tried to look up hard numbers on how much energy AI uses, a) it's been hard to find clear, reliable information and b) the estimates I've found tend to be pretty small.
Similarly, is there evidence that AI-generated images are displacing the labour of human artists? Again, this is something I've tried to look into, but the answer isn't easy to find. There are anecdotes here and there, but it's hard to tell if there is a broader trend that is significantly affecting a large number of artists.
It's difficult to think about the topic of whether artists should need to give permission for their images to be used for AI training or should be compensated if they are. There is no precedent in copyright law to cover this because this technology is unprecedented. For the same reason, there is no precedent in societal norms. We have to decide on a new way of thinking about a new situation, without traditions to rely on.
So, if the three main ethical arguments against AI-generated art are:
-It harms the environment
-It takes income away from human artists
-AI companies should be required to get permission from artists before training AI models on their work and/or financially compensate them if they do
All three of these arguments feel really unsubstantiated to me. My impression right now is:
-Probably not
-Maybe? What's the evidence?
-Maybe? I don't know. What's the reasoning?
The main aesthetic argument against AI-generated art is of course:
-It's ugly
And I mostly agree. But those ChatGPT images in the Studio Ghibli style are absolutely beautiful. There is a 0% chance I will ever pay an artist to draw a Studio Ghibli-style picture of my cat. But I can use a computer to turn my cat into a funny, cute little drawing. And that's wonderful.
I'm a politically progressive person. I'm LGBT, I'm a feminist, I believe in social justice, I've voted for a social democratic political party multiple times, and I've been in community and in relationship with leftists a lot. I am so sick of online leftist political discourse.
I am not interested in thinking and talking about celebrities all the time. (So much online leftist discourse is about celebrities.)
I don't want to spend that much time and energy constantly re-evaluating which companies I boycott and whether there's a marginally more ethical alternative.
I don't want every discussion about every topic to be polarized, shut down, moralized, and made into a red line issue where disagreement isn't tolerated. I'm sick of hyperbolic analogies between issues like ChatGPT and serious crimes. (I could give an example I heard but it's so offensive I don't want to repeat it.)
I am fed up with leftists supporting authoritarianism, terrorism, and political assassinations. While moralizing about AI art.
So, please forgive me if I struggle to listen to all of online leftists' complaints with the charity they deserve. I am burnt out on this stuff at this point.
I don't know how to fix the offline left, but I'm personally so relieved that I don't use microblogging anymore (i.e., Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, or Threads) and that I've mostly extricated myself from online leftist discourse otherwise. It's too crazymaking for me to stomach.