Chapter 5: AI for creativity
This chapter is likely to be very controversial. Most of the time, when people think about AI's downsides, they're thinking only about this field. So I'm making an attempt here to explain as much as I can. Feel free to skip if it's not your concern.
I have to mention beforehand that, even though I'm primarily a programmer, I've been making art for a long time, too. I'm even studying graphic design right now, and my corporate jobs have been in this field. I've made digital art for two years (and will continue to do so), as well as other forms of digital and physical art since I was young. That's why I feel confident enough to talk about this topic.
But at the same time, due to not being a senior artist (only a junior graphic designer, I would say), I wouldn't go deep into the technical details. As I mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 3, you can relate what I have said (or will say) to your own expertise and see how it applies in your industry.
Ownership
One of the most common misunderstandings I've seen is related to this topic.
Even though I understand that most people don't agree with this perspective, I have to say it because I think it's the truth. The fact is, morality is just a set of contracts. You might conclude from this that morality doesn't matter that much and that we should take it easy. But I absolutely disagree with that. This definition of morality doesn't change how we should feel about it. The feeling we have toward morality is based on its usefulness, so let me explain.
Back then, before the rise of societies or communities or any form of intimacy, everyone was on their own. You had to survive not only among wild animals but among other humans as well. This was not efficient. We weren't benefiting from this system. So we embraced companionship. I bring food for us and protect us against the dangers; you take care of the house and the child. We can benefit more if we collaborate than if we go on our own. This is a very logical way of creating the concept of "trust." We trust each other because we want to benefit more. This grew to become what we know as "society." We benefit more as a society than we do as individuals pursuing our own interests. The benefit of all is the benefit of each individual. The reason we don't die from a simple cold is that we've collaborated: the doctors make medicine for society, society gives them money, and they can buy a fancy laptop and so on.
Morality is the essence of societies. We built a set of rules and contracts because we want to support and strengthen our societies. Anything immoral directly or indirectly contradicts the concept of society and therefore harms society. If you kill someone and don't get punished for it, then other people can't feel safe, so they attack first and suddenly there's anarchy going on. If you lie to someone, you might not seem to harm society, but your mindset is what matters. Over time, these lies and immoral acts can create a disaster as big as Chernobyl. This is also why I insisted on the "contradicting the concept of society" part, which I explain more in the next paragraph:
My view is that you only have to know the meaning of morality, but you shouldn't always think about it directly to reason about things. You don't need to find a direct line between a subject and your own society's stability to understand whether it's moral or not. The reason why most people have a conscience is that the biological need for morality and for keeping society alive has been built into them, the same way you have a natural tendency to form a family and have children. You can use this feeling and core understanding rather than relying too heavily on the hard-to-grasp idea of connecting every action to direct and visible harm to society.
In the end, the feelings you have about morality are all valid. I just proposed a reason for them.
This is a huge topic that has been discussed for centuries, and I don't intend to dive deeper into it. So let's wrap it up and connect it to copyright.
Just like morality, "ownership" is something that doesn't mean anything by default. It's a complete contract. The reason you say "I own this spoon" isn't that you made everything about it from scratch. You didn't create the metal from nothing. It existed in nature before you. You didn't even form the spoon yourself; you bought it from the company. But you still call yourself the true owner of it, simply because you paid for it (you sometimes pay to rent spoons as well, for example, when you're in a restaurant). And for the same reason that money is just a contract, this ownership is a contract too. If I steal the spoon from you, I don't magically become the owner of it because it's in my hands. I become a thief, and you're still the owner. We made this rule because, without it, society would collapse. Remember, when you were in a jungle, you had the so-called "ownership" over your stuff too. But everyone could take it and you couldn't do anything about it. We invented society and property laws to prevent that. We redefined what ownership means, and it's just a contract.
Artistic style and intellectual property
This applies to intellectual properties as well. Artistic rights are no different from other types of ownership.
Now I have to tell you a simple fact: "style" doesn't hold copyright. You can't sue someone for having the same artistic style as you. You can't sue someone for using the same color palette as you. And it's not something new. It has been like this forever and in all artistic categories.
Say all you want, but this fact remains for a reason. And the reason is that we have no reliable way of recognizing what a style even is, why it should "belong to you," or whether you have borrowed it from someone else. Even if you could somehow make an art style a form of intellectual property, almost all current artists would have been in legal danger. Imagine you sell a company full rights to your artwork, and now that style is theirs, so you can't use the style you have honed over the years.
Even if you didn't do it intentionally, your style still resembles that of many other artists. You simply can't claim that you have a "unique" art style. There are no unique art styles, at least not anymore. I remember that before AI, every good artist was (and some of them still are) saying that a good artist is a good thief: you steal from various people until no one can detect who you stole from. This is the same.
The only thing you can claim is your "artwork." You can copy someone's painting without copying their art style and still get sued. Now you may ask: how is it possible to copy the artwork without the art style? The answer is by changing the medium. There's a famous case called Luxembourg Copyright Case Against Jeff Dieschburg. A painter painted someone's photography. It wasn't even a one-to-one copy, but it was realistic and close enough to be recognized as a copy, which led to a lawsuit. You can even read people's reactions on that webpage to see how rude a person can be. Don't base your judgments on "the amount of work." Even if you spend 50 years copying someone's artwork, you're still committing copyright infringement (unless you have permission).
The contradiction
Let's say you made an artwork and sold it to someone. Can that person scan your artwork and put it on the internet as their own? Of course not; they're not allowed to sell your artwork while saying that they're its creator. And they don't even need to claim it; by default, they're not allowed to upload the scan to the internet at all. It's the same for other things as well. You can't scan the book you bought and post it on the internet, whether paid or free.
What do you think is the reason? You might think that, well, it damages the artist's brand and market, making the competition unfair. But why is it that you can scan and sell, let's say, a spoon? Even with a book, you can resell it on the open market. Doesn't this damage the brand, company, and market?
When you think about it long enough, a lot of these contradictions arise. You'd realize that copyright laws differ a lot, and you don't even feel like they're unjustified. They feel natural to you, although they're not very consistent.
The reason is what I explained in this chapter: ownership is a made-up concept required to sustain society. It's not something that is given to you inherently; it's something you gain by being part of society (criminal activities make you ineligible to be part of society, which is why you lose rights). It's not like all ownership rules are perfect; they change a lot.
So what makes you think AI art isn't real art? Just because most parts of it have been automated? What about generative art (not to confused with generative AI art)? What about computer art? This field has existed since the 1960s. In the same way that the Notepad application isn't an artwork but Golden Calf is, and a wooden door is not an artwork but Wooden Mirror is, a cheaply generated AI image is not an artwork, but a carefully crafted one can be.
AI and theft
If we accept that art style itself isn't protected by copyright, we can easily see how LLMs are not "based on theft." This would also make more sense when you realize you can't even prove the existence of the soul (as discussed in Chapter 2).
Now, I understand that not all people agree with me on either the soul part or, surprisingly, the style part. But what we should agree on is that "theft" is a very serious accusation. If you're going to call someone a thief, you've got to be a lot more certain than this. This mindset of accusing people of horrible things is dangerous and immoral. It's the same as a false accusation of rape, just a little less destructive. Some may say they're just calling LLMs thieves, but by doing so, you're calling all these people supporters of theft, too: the developers of the LLMs, the companies that own the LLMs and their employees, the people who use LLM APIs to build SaaS, the people who use LLMs to generate text, code, images, or anything for any reason, the people who talk enthusiastically about LLMs and invite others to use it, and even the people who use local LLMs. If you feel like I'm exaggerating, maybe you're undervaluing one of the most common criminal acts called "thievery." You don't want to just accuse people of criminal activities because you believe in ghosts, do you?
There is no morally created LLM
Large Language Models are essentially the result of training a machine on a lot of input. For example, you train the machine on 10 million images of cars, then you get an LLM that can generate accurate images of cars. The LLM doesn't hold those images; it just saves patterns, and those patterns can be used in any way possible to generate anything from scratch.
You can train an LLM on your own artworks to create art in your style, but for that LLM to be useful in the first place, it has to be trained on tons of other images. It needs all of those patterns to know what your artworks even mean. Unless you have painted millions of artworks, they wouldn't be of any use. The foundation is training the model on pre-existing data. If that is thievery to you, then there's no morally created LLM. It's like curing cancer through slavery. Even if you cured cancer through slavery, that wouldn't make you any less immoral. Remember, you don't judge based on the output.
It can't be thievery
As I explained, LLMs are created by training on other people's data. If you're one of those people who thinks this is proof that it's theft, I have a question for you: How do you think the human brain works? Why do you think our brain isn't essentially doing the same thing? This is essentially what you have to do to improve. This is what "studying" is: you copy things, from masterpieces to objects and other things. If it's a master study, you try copying the artwork while being mindful of why that artist did that specific thing. One by one, you burn patterns into your head. When you do other types of studying, you do that again. The whole premise of studying is that you learn the patterns. You don't save the image in your head and copy it every time. You learn how that image was created. You may even be able to copy that artwork, but that doesn't mean your knowledge is stolen.
Theft is a very defined concept. If I sell you a knife and you use that knife to kill someone, I'm not the one responsible. Even if you use it in 101 different ways to hurt people, that still doesn't make me your partner in crime, because the knife has a very defined purpose. Killing is just one use case, and it doesn't have anything to do with the knife itself, as one can kill with bare hands. In the same way, one can use AI to copy someone else's artwork and change it slightly, but that doesn't mean the fault is with the tool. The person doing it is at fault. There are already a ton of videos on YouTube about how to remove a watermark from an image. People have been using Photoshop to fake important documents and stamps since it was released. Why don't you feel the same way toward it, then? Just because it's harder to do so? I'd argue it's even easier and safer to use Photoshop to fake documents. If LLMs are thieves by nature, then Photoshop is definitely a thief by nature as well.
AI art
If we get past moral issues, there are still a lot of controversies around what real art is and why some people don't consider AI art to be art.
Art has two parts:
- The creative part: the idea behind the artwork, its meaning, the feeling you aim to invoke, and more.
- The technical part: the production, the use of artistic tools, and the scientific knowledge regarding composition, color theory, how to make a brushstroke, how to use your hands, and so on.
You may not like the term "technical," especially if you haven't had a job as an artist, but it is true nevertheless. It's technical because it's just some scientific knowledge, some technique that you have to learn and apply. Yes, you can combine it with creative decisions, but in the end, the two parts are separate. What you want to make and how you make it are separate parts of the same job (that can affect each other too). You might have a great idea but not know how to implement it. At the same time, you might know how to do the technical part but lack the creativity to know what to create (the hyperrealism style is essentially that).
Even the term "technical" itself comes from the ancient Greek word "techne," which meant art. Art back then was just a craft. Painters and sculptors were the same as carpenters and blacksmiths. They followed rules to create stuff. Even though they now appear to have a lot of creativity, back then it was even taboo to be creative ("A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics" by Władysław Tatarkiewicz, 1980, Chapter Three: "Art: History of the relation of art to poetry"). That said, we can see the connection clearly: the technical part is where you're doing things as objectively as possible. You're not being creative per se, but you're being an artist anyway.
This is why AI is just a tool. AI is not sentient. It can't invoke things on its own. An LLM is a pattern-based machine. It follows the patterns of your prompts. Even if you tell it "make a painting," it still needs that instruction in order to create something. If you say something else, the output changes. A human's output doesn't necessarily change in the same way.
So yes, of course you can just ask AI to create stuff and it's not called art. In the same way, a person can grab a pencil and draw lines on paper, and it's not necessarily called art. Art is intentional and deliberate, and it requires creativity, all of which can be supplied by the artist. Just as a hyperrealistic artist is still an artist, a person who uses AI can still be an artist. By common logic, the latter is actually more of an artist because the work is all about creativity and not about what "anyone can do."
Also, you might have noticed I said "the person who uses AI" instead of "AI artist." This is because AI is not a style or a medium. A key factor of a medium is that the artworks that belong to it must have something in common. When you can make absolutely any style with it, it's not reasonable to use it as a style category. AI art can still be used as a category, but only as a tool category, the same way you might call someone a Photoshop artist.
Authority over artwork
One of the biggest reasons artists (especially novice artists) are not okay with AI art tools is that they don't feel in control of the output. They feel that "it generates random stuff, it doesn't know what I want, and it's just a slop machine that creates soulless output." And then they use this argument to prove that it's the same for other people and therefore it's not real art.
You might have thought to yourself that I'm not making sense. When it comes to programming, a job that's obviously way more mechanical than art, I say you don't have authority over the output of AI. But when it comes to art which is a very intimate thing, I'm saying that AI is a tool and you can have authority over its output.
First of all, I have to say that most, if not all, of the downsides that I have mentioned could apply to other fields, including art as a business. I haven't been very professionally involved in the art industry. I was learning all the time and I was still far from actual production. So I can't claim anything about that.
Second, there's something inherently different about the nature of art that I believe makes a difference: art is random by nature. Every brushstroke is different from the next. There's a popular saying that goes, "Each time you paint something, it's a different artwork." This is essentially why traditional artworks are priced so highly. The original artwork could only be drawn once, making it rare.
This randomness is also something most artists are familiar with when making art. If you're an artist, ask yourself: how many times have you had an idea in your head, started creating it, and watched it turn out differently? Most of the time, you didn't even have a vivid idea of what it was going to look like. You built the idea while technically making it.
That's why I don't have a problem with randomness in AI art, just as the artist David Hockney didn't (rest in peace). The point is, can you control that randomness to get close to your idea? Can you control your feelings so you don't call it shit because it turned out differently from what you initially thought? Some people claim they can. Who are we to say they're lying? I thought art was a personal thing.
I'd even say this random nature of art means AI is better suited to this field than to a sensitive scientific field. Scalability and maintainability are not as big of issues in art as they are in SWE, if we can define them in some projects at all.
We're not enemies
We're all figuring out how to incorporate AI into our fields, but let's be more open to different judgments and opinions. In some fields, such as game development, one of the biggest reasons the barrier to entry was so high was that programming itself was too time-consuming, let alone the artwork, which requires years of focused, productive learning. 3D game development was almost literally a no-no for solo developers due to the insanely high barrier to entry. AI has enabled people to do things we really couldn't do before. Right or wrong, let's figure it out before calling each other names.