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10/4/23, 10:11 AM What AI art means for society, according to Yale experts - Yale Daily News 10/4/23, 10:11
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What AI art means for

society, according to Yale
experts
Will AI art elevate human creativity? Will AI be a tool or a replacement for
artists? Is AI art, art? Yale experts weigh in.
K AY L A Y U P | 2 : 0 2 A M , J A N 2 3, 2 0 2 3
STAFF REPORTER
Jessai Flores, Illustrations Editor
For “AI artists,” the art-making process involves figuring out what
string of words will generate the best image — not what colors to
mix or brush strokes to try.
Even the artistically challenged can produce decent, sometimes

recognize patterns and make decisions, these systems can complete
deceptive, images using artificial intelligence text-to-image
tasks associated with human intelligence.
generators. In a survey of 504 Yale undergraduates, respondents
could tell if art was AI-generated or human-made an average of 54 Current AI text-to-image generators, such as DALL-E 2 or
percent of the time. Midjourney, are trained to mimic human artistic ability. The
generator “learns” a particular style or aesthetic by analyzing
Yale experts — from artists to AI researchers to legal scholars —
datasets containing thousands to millions of images. By
weighed in on the impending effect of AI art on society.
understanding the relationships between visual information and
How does AI generate art? their corresponding text descriptions, the system can create its own
images in response to text prompts.
Artificial intelligence is designed to simulate human intelligence
through computer systems. Programmed to synthesize information,
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10/4/23, 10:11 AM What AI art means for society, according to Yale experts - Yale Daily News 10/4/23, 10:11 AM What AI art means for society, according to Yale experts - Yale Daily News
The following image was generated in Midjourney by submitting the are enough artists out there where there shouldn’t really be a need
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prompt: “A Yale class taught by Anderson Cooper wearing jorts.” to make AI to do that.”
Rather than a replacement, Cheng views AI as a tool, not advanced

enough to push the art field forward without human artistry. For
non-artists, Cheng explained, AI could be useful as a tool for
creative expression, however not at the cost of people who spend
their lives honing these skills.
Brennan Buck, a senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture and

a practicing architect, uses AI as a tool. During the concept stage of
a project, AI can help him colorize or upscale images. These minor
contributions have no impact on the creative or conceptual parts of
the design process, he explained.
“I think ultimately, AI is not a real threat to artists, particularly

because it can be rambunctious and you don’t have necessarily the
same control over the design from an AI generator that you might
from working with a designer,” Alex Taranto ’23, Yale Visual Artists
Collective’s treasurer, said.
Taranto admitted that AI is already impacting the art industry in

some cases. However, she would be shocked if it reached the
“celebrity” realm of art, including the Blue-Chip galleries, which sell
highly-valued work by established artists. AI is more commonly
Midjourney being used to generate art for video games and for commercial art.
In June 2022, Cosmopolitan unveiled “the world’s first” completely
Will AI be a tool or a replacement for artists? AI-generated magazine cover.
AI art is both winning art contests and sparking lawsuits, inspiring To some artists, the greatest harm posed by AI is damage to their
a mix of awe and anxiety. Some call AI art generators “anti-artist,” reputation. AI art generators are changing the way people view art,
citing the machines’ reliance on human artists’ work — obtained according to Cheng, a visual artist and computer science major.
without compensation or consent — for training. Users of AI art Artists are already viewed as a “lower class,” he said, “unless you are
generators can even directly ask the AI to generate art in the style of Van Gogh.” The act of AI replicating a skilled artists’ work creates
a human artist, such as digital artist Greg Rutkowski. the perception that art is easy to create and proliferate, and
therefore less valuable.
“All of this art is taken without the consent of these artists and the
laws that exist are not really protecting them,” Ron Cheng ’25, a “What’s more important is the utter disrespect these AI ‘artists’
Yale Visual Arts Collective board member, said. “I think that there promote against the community and art as a craft, which is already
extremely undervalued in modern day,” Kim Lagunas ’25, a student “I think in a world where it wasn’t necessarily so capitalist, so
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artist, said. consumerist, I think AI could just very naturally be something for
good,” Cheng said. “Where artists are not starving, and their work is
Artists sue AI art generators not being stolen to create something so that [others] can pay artists
even less.”
Last week, three artists filed a class-action lawsuit against top AI art
generators, including Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt. The The topic of AI is no stranger to fear and suspicion, but concern
artists claimed that the AI companies were using copyrighted over theft of artists’ work has nothing to do with AI and everything
images to train their algorithms without asking for consent or to do with distributive justice, according to Amin Ebrahimi Afrouzi,
offering compensation. a resident research scholar who researches the ethics of computing
at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project.
To Lagunas, whose art focuses on 3D modeling, AI art represents a
nonconsensual collage of other artists’ work. Lagunas described it Ebrahimi Afrouzi, who co-invented Collaborative AI, recommended
as essentially “screenshotting” artists’ work without their consent, thinking of AI as a “piece of a code,” a tool used by its owners for
then slapping it together and claiming ownership over the final specific purposes. The owners are the ones actively using someone
product. Lagunas worries about the continued advancement of AI else’s data — whether for reading, copying, manipulating or
art generating software, but sees potential for it to be helpful to collaging — to create new work. The fact that the tool used is AI is
artists if subject to the same copyright laws as music. irrelevant to the issue of copyright and to the ethics of this
technology.
“As for the concept of AI art, I find it pretty cool if it’s consensual
and credits the actual original artist,” Lagunas said. “Essentially The main question becomes how money gained from AI art should
treat it like how music [or] songs are nowadays, if an AI put be distributed between the creators of the AI and the artists whose
together all the works of the top fifty artists and amalgamated work the AI scraped.
everything together into a song and uploaded, you best believe all
those artists would get credit, commission payment and royalties.” “The answers here, as in traditional questions of copyright, will
likely differ in each case and will depend on both the degree the AI
Cheng similarly expressed a need to compensate artists for their exploits particular pieces of existing art and the use the final
contributions to the AI. While most of the current funding in AI art product is put to,” Ebrahimi Afrouzi said.
supports developing the algorithms and to pay for the processing
power to create these images, it is human art that enables AI to Buck expressed that the creative use of AI without attribution is a
achieve a certain quality. “real concern” and will change the way cultural labor is
compensated. While sampling from other work is not new to the
Cheng imagines a system where artists could submit their art into creative process, normally the sources used would be cited. By
different categories, such as oil painting. If submitting work for a contrast, it is difficult to know exactly what images AI models are
category such as “charcoal images of animals,” usage of this prompt drawing from and to what extent each individual image comes into
could be analyzed and used to distribute pay accordingly. However, play. However, he is not concerned about his own design work
he admitted that this would likely not amount to “a lot of pay” being used in these models.
because of the large number of images needed to generate each
image.
“I wouldn’t request to be pulled from the data sets,” Buck said. “I belittle” the value of such creations, no matter how sophisticated,
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think the ways that something I make might inform a new image or he noted.
something that AI hopes to create is so diffuse and sort of broad
that I’m not worried about it. That could change.” Whether art is considered both visually appealing and culturally
important is subject to bias. Vishnoi pointed to a history of humans
Could AI elevate human creativity? from one group or culture disapproving of art generated by humans
of another background, displaying a reluctance to diversity.
Buck thinks that AI is changing how artists imagine what can be
made, but would not replace the entirety of the design process. “For the last thousand years or so, art has been evolving and that’s
mostly been done by humans,” Vishnoi said. “So with AI coming
Rather than “replacing” human creativity, Buck views AI as into play, I expect things to get more creative.”
“displacing” it. The architect described AI as a form of “mediation,”
similar to other technologies like a pencil or paint, and software like Cheng, drawing on his own intuition as a digital artist, emphasized
Photoshop and 3D modeling. AI serves as a filter which humans the line between what he considers illustration versus art. While AI
“look through” and “create through,” Buck explained, and is already could represent tangible concepts through illustration, it could not
a part of cameras, software for editing photos, Google search and a create an artistic work that represents and sparks authentic
variety of other platforms that affect how humans see the world. criticism of the world. To Cheng, AI does not produce true art.
“It’s not that it is or will replace human creativity but that it will AI will raise the bar for illustration, Cheng added, with illustrators
change how humans are creative and how art is produced,” Buck no longer being able to rely on photorealistic work for fear of
said. “[AI is] another way in which what we make is filtered through comparison to AI-generated images. He referred to an artist named
all the different technologies we use.” Ben Moran who had been banned from the “r/Art” subreddit on
Reddit because moderators thought that Moran’s human-made
Nisheeth Vishnoi, A. Bartlett Giamatti professor of computer surrealist digital art was AI-generated.
science and co-founder of the Computation and Society Initiative,
thinks that AI could add to the creativity of human artists, “perhaps The value given to human creativity ranges from “menial to artistic
indirectly.” genius,” Ebrahimi Afrouzi explained. He predicts that AI art will
displace some forms of human creativity, namely the menial tasks
“It is likely that AI will discover new types of art forms which are “already relegated to stock photos.”
visually appealing,” Vishnoi said. “However, the popularity of art,
the price of art and artistic styles is a very human-driven process. “I don’t know many human artists that aspire to do the menial,
And I’m not sure how AI itself is going to enter and capture that.” which I think will be what AI ends up replacing,” Ebrahimi Afrouzi
said. “But it is true that many human artists rely on the creation of
AI is already creating “new” art, Vishnoi explained, generating the menial as a way of making ends meet and funding the truly
synthetic faces of people who do not exist, and art that does not genius. This is already a sad state of affairs and is an immense
exist. It is possible AI could discover new paradigms or types of art, burden on the possibility of human creativity.”
Vishnoi added, similar to past instances of AI algorithms which,
when trained on human-played games, had discovered As opposed to stopping the development of AI art, society should
“fundamentally new” strategies. However human artists “may try to address the status quo of artists’ dependence on menial tasks,
Ebrahimi Afrouzi argued. The pressure for artists to devote their To Ebrahimi Afrouzi, the question of whether AI art is an art is
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lives to menial art as a means of survival is counter to the complicated by conflicting definitions of art. To some, art is the
advancement of human creativity, he said, adding that funding product of human creativity, while to others, art could be an object
should be provided to help artists dedicate their time and effort to found in nature. He suggested framing the question around AI
achieving art that society truly values. itself: is AI an art or craft?
Is AI-generated art, art? Given how AI generates images, Ebrahimi Afrouzi classified AI as a
“craft.” AI art, which he described as existing in its own category, is
In August, an AI-generated piece of art called “Théâtre D’opéra unique to itself, and fundamentally different from what human
Spatial” won first place in the “digitally manipulated photography” artists create.
category at the Colorado State Fair’s art competition. It inspired
debate over AI’s evolving role in art. “So the right answer to your question is ‘no,’” Ebrahimi Afrouzi
said. “AI art is AI art.”
“I’m not sure that the jury made the wrong choice in selecting the
AI generated art, but I think it might affect how they judge future Can Yale students tell AI-generated art apart from human-
years’ competitions,” Buck said. “It might then be less about made art?
technical virtuosity and more about some other idea — the effects of
the art or what the art has to say about the world.” As AI art generators grow in sophistication, the potential to deceive
observers follows.
To Buck, AI might change how humans think about art, and what
“good art” is thought to be. A survey was created to gauge how easily Yale students could
discern whether art was generated by AI or a human. Respondents
Vishnoi compared AI art to asking ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, to write were asked to judge nine different artworks — a mixture of AI-
a short poem. While the chatbot may be able to write a better poem generated and human-made pieces. On average, the 504
than many people, this poem would not necessarily be publishable undergraduates surveyed could tell if art was AI-generated or
or a candidate for a Nobel Prize in literature. human-made an average of 54 percent of the time. This translates
to roughly five correct answers out of nine questions.
“At the highest level, art is a form of emotional communication,”
Vishnoi said. “That is incredibly complicated, and there seems to be
no straightforward way to capture it in image recognition or image
generation algorithms.”
Cheng views art as heavily dependent on the artist’s lived

experiences. AI does not analyze the world around it or come up
with its own criticism of it — it has no individual lived experience to
guide its creativity. Until a robot is built who can face
discrimination or learn how grief and loss feel, among other human
experiences, Cheng does not believe AI can replicate art.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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o opeople
e) 
This AI-generated artwork, generated with the prompt “An empty

Prompt: “Two pigs staring up at the moon, watercolor painting” (DALL-E 2)
teacup, oil painting,” tripped up 59 percent of respondents who
thought it was human-made.
The prompt, “two pigs staring up at the moon, watercolor painting,”
was plugged into DALL-E 2, an AI image generator, generating the Ken Lee’s long exposure night photo of a dragon sculpture by Ricardo Breceda in Borrego
image above. 81 percent of Yale undergraduates thought that this Springs. Lee illuminated the enormous sculpture of the dragon during the exposure. (Courtesy
image was drawn by a human. of Ken Lee)
Prompt: “A fortune-telling shiba inu reading your fate in a crystal ball, digital art” (DALL-E 2)
The human-made piece that confused the most respondents in the
survey was created by an artist named Ken Lee, who specializes in
While the previous AI artwork confused respondents, this artwork
long exposure photography and has been published in numerous
was correctly guessed to be AI-generated by 86 percent of
magazines. In a survey of 504 Yale undergraduates, 66 percent
respondents. The prompt, “a fortune-telling shiba inu reading your
thought that Lee’s artwork was AI-generated. Lee was not
fate in a crystal ball digital art,” was plugged into DALL-E 2 to
surprised.
produce the image above. Notably, the shiba inu’s left pupil is
missing, along with other minor oddities. “The photo is unusual. Let’s face it, it’s weird looking,” Lee said.
Prompt: “An empty teacup, oil painting” (DALL-E 2)

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Most people do not have knowledge of advanced techniques used by

photographers, he noted, including long exposure night
photography and light painting, and may therefore assume that art
that uses such techniques is “fake.” Lee added that some
photographers use AI to edit photos, whether for changing
backdrops or even shifting people’s poses in portraits.
“My tinge of sadness is more about the state of affairs,” Lee wrote to
the News in an email. “People already have a deep mistrust for
photography. Already, “Photoshop” is used as a verb: ‘I wonder if
that’s Photoshopped?’ In the not-so-distant future, we might say,
‘Not sure if it’s real … that could be totally Midjourneyed!’”
Lee expressed concern over the increasing mistrust and suspicion in How to tell if art is AI-generated: Tips from a perfect
society, which extends to the news, science and beyond. To Lee, AI- scorer
generated art only adds to humanity’s already present difficulty to
discern what is real from what is not.
Taranto was one of only two students to score a perfect nine-out-of-

 
nine on the survey.
According to Taranto, AI-generated work often lacks logic within

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AI-generated pieces also have a “fuzzy sort of quality” at the edges
and in the overlap of certain subjects within the composition,
Taranto explained. There are often areas of discoloration randomly
appearing in the pieces. AI art commonly defies certain
fundamentals of design, including the grid rule and the
establishment of points of focus within the piece.
Cheng further explained that AI art generators have difficulty

generating text and fine details like faces and hands.
Noting these common mistakes, student artist Cailin Hoang ’25

thinks the images generated by AI would have to be further
rendered or perfected by an artist to be believable. Until AI
advances past these issues, she said, it may encounter difficulty
being a standalone substitute for artists.
AARON is regarded as one of the first AI art generators and was

developed by Harold Cohen in the late 1960s.
KAYLA YUP  
Kayla Yup covers Science & Social Justice and the Yale New Haven Health System for the
SciTech desk. For the Arts desk, she covers anything from galleries to music. She is
majoring in Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology and History of Science,
Medicine & Public Health as a Global Health Scholar.

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10/4/23, 10:11 AM What AI art means for society, according to Yale experts - Yale Daily News 10/4/23, 10:11

What AI art means for

Jessai Flores, Illustrations Editor

Even the artistically challenged can produce decent, sometimes

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/01/23/what-ai-art-means-for-society-according-to-yale-experts/ 1/16 https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/01/23/what-ai-art-means-for-society-according-to-yale-experts/ 2/16

Rather than a replacement, Cheng views AI as a tool, not advanced

Brennan Buck, a senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture and

“I think ultimately, AI is not a real threat to artists, particularly

Taranto admitted that AI is already impacting the art industry in

Cheng views art as heavily dependent on the artist’s lived

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/01/23/what-ai-art-means-for-society-according-to-yale-experts/ 9/16 https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/01/23/what-ai-art-means-for-society-according-to-yale-experts/ 10/16

This AI-generated artwork, generated with the prompt “An empty

Prompt: “An empty teacup, oil painting” (DALL-E 2)

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/01/23/what-ai-art-means-for-society-according-to-yale-experts/ 11/16 https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/01/23/what-ai-art-means-for-society-according-to-yale-experts/ 12/16

Most people do not have knowledge of advanced techniques used by

Taranto was one of only two students to score a perfect nine-out-of-

According to Taranto, AI-generated work often lacks logic within

© YALE DAILY NEWS 2023

Cheng further explained that AI art generators have difficulty

Noting these common mistakes, student artist Cailin Hoang ’25

AARON is regarded as one of the first AI art generators and was

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