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 A Y L A Y U P 2:02 AM, JAN 23, 2023

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 deceptive, images using artificial intelligence text-to-image
generators. Yale experts — from artists to AI researchers to legal scholars — weighed in on the
impending effect of AI art on society.

How does AI generate art?

Artificial intelligence is designed to simulate human intelligence through computer systems.

Programmed to synthesize information, recognize patterns and make decisions, these systems
can complete tasks associated with human intelligence.

Current AI text-to-image generators, such as DALL-E 2 or Midjourney, are trained to mimic

human artistic ability. The generator “learns” a particular style or aesthetic by analyzing datasets
containing thousands to millions of images. By understanding the relationships between visual
information and their corresponding text descriptions, the system can create its own images in
response to text prompts.

Will AI be a tool or a replacement for artists?

AI art is both winning art contests and sparking lawsuits, inspiring a mix of awe and anxiety.
Some call AI art generators “anti-artist,” citing the machines’ reliance on human artists’ work —
obtained without compensation or consent — for training. Users of AI art generators can even
directly ask the AI to generate art in the style of a human artist, such as digital artist Greg
Rutkowski.

“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 Yale Visual Arts Collective board member, said. “I think that
there are enough artists out there where there shouldn’t really be a need 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.

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“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 being used to
generate art for video games and for commercial art. In June 2022, Cosmopolitan unveiled “the
world’s first” completely AI-generated magazine cover.

To some artists, the greatest harm posed by AI is damage to their reputation. AI art generators
are changing the way people view art, according to Cheng, a visual artist and computer science
major. Artists are already viewed as a “lower class,” he said, “unless you are Van Gogh.” The act
of AI replicating a skilled artists’ work creates the perception that art is easy to create and
proliferate, and therefore less valuable.

“What’s more important is the utter disrespect these AI ‘artists’ promote against the community
and art as a craft, which is already extremely undervalued in modern day,” Kim Lagunas ’25, a
student artist, said.

Artists sue AI art generators

Last week, three artists fled a class-action lawsuit against top AI art generators, including
Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt. The artists claimed that the AI companies were using
copyrighted images to train their algorithms without asking for consent or offering
compensation.

To Lagunas, whose art focuses on 3D modeling, AI art represents a nonconsensual collage of

other artists’ work. Lagunas described it as essentially “screenshotting” artists’ work without
their consent, then slapping it together and claiming ownership over the final product. Lagunas
worries about the continued advancement of AI art generating software, but sees potential for it
to be helpful to artists if subject to the same copyright laws as music.

“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 treat it like how music [or] songs are nowadays, if an AI put
together all the works of the top fifty artists and amalgamated everything together into a song
and uploaded, you best believe all those artists would get credit, commission payment and
royalties.”

Cheng similarly expressed a need to compensate artists for their contributions to the AI. While
most of the current funding in AI art supports developing the algorithms and to pay for the
processing power to create these images, it is human art that enables AI to achieve a certain
quality.

Cheng imagines a system where artists could submit their art into different categories, such as
oil painting. If submitting work for a category such as “charcoal images of animals,” usage of this

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prompt could be analyzed and used to distribute pay accordingly. However, he admitted that
this would likely not amount to “a lot of pay” because of the large number of images needed to
generate each image.

“I think in a world where it wasn’t necessarily so capitalist, so consumerist, I think AI could just
very naturally be something for good,” Cheng said. “Where artists are not starving, and their
work is not being stolen to create something so that [others] can pay artists even less.”
The topic of AI is no stranger to fear and suspicion, but concern over theft of artists’ work has
nothing to do with AI and everything to do with distributive justice, according to Amin Ebrahimi
Afrouzi, a resident research scholar who researches the ethics of computing at Yale Law School’s
Information Society Project.

Ebrahimi Afrouzi, who co-invented Collaborative AI, recommended thinking of AI as a “piece of

a code,” a tool used by its owners for specific purposes. The owners are the ones actively using
someone else’s data — whether for reading, copying, manipulating or collaging — to create new
work. The fact that the tool used is AI is irrelevant to the issue of copyright and to the ethics of
this technology.

The main question becomes how money gained from AI art should be distributed between the
creators of the AI and the artists whose work the AI scraped. “The answers here, as in traditional
questions of copyright, will likely differ in each case and will depend on both the degree the AI
exploits particular pieces of existing art and the use the final product is put to,” Ebrahimi
Afrouzi said.

Buck expressed that the creative use of AI without attribution is a “real concern” and will change
the way cultural labor is compensated. While sampling from other work is not new to the
creative process, normally the sources used would be cited. By contrast, it is difficult to know
exactly what images AI models are drawing from and to what extent each individual image
comes into play. However, he is not concerned about his own design work being used in these
models.

“I wouldn’t request to be pulled from the data sets,” Buck said. “I think the ways that something
I make might inform a new image or something that AI hopes to create is so diffuse and sort of
broad that I’m not worried about it. That could change.”

Could AI elevate human creativity?

Buck thinks that AI is changing how artists imagine what can be made, but would not replace
the entirety of the design process.

Rather than “replacing” human creativity, Buck views AI as “displacing” it. The architect
described AI as a form of “mediation,” similar to other technologies like a pencil or paint, and
software like Photoshop and 3D modeling. AI serves as a filter which humans “look through”
and “create through,” Buck explained, and is already a part of cameras, software for editing
photos, Google search and a variety of other platforms that affect how humans see the world.
“It’s not that it is or will replace human creativity but that it will change how humans are

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creative and how art is produced,” Buck said. “[AI is] another way in which what we make is
filtered through all the different technologies we use.”

Nisheeth Vishnoi, A. Bartlett Giamatti professor of computer science and co-founder of the
Computation and Society Initiative, thinks that AI could add to the creativity of human artists,
“perhaps indirectly.” “It is likely that AI will discover new types of art forms which are visually
appealing,” Vishnoi said. “However, the popularity of art, the price of art and artistic styles is a
very human-driven process. And I’m not sure how AI itself is going to enter and capture that.”
AI is already creating “new” art, Vishnoi explained, generating synthetic faces of people who do
not exist, and art that does not exist. It is possible AI could discover new paradigms or types of
art, Vishnoi added, similar to past instances of AI algorithms which, when trained on human-
played games, had discovered “fundamentally new” strategies. However human artists “may try
to belittle” the value of such creations, no matter how sophisticated, he noted.

Whether art is considered both visually appealing and culturally important is subject to bias.
Vishnoi pointed to a history of humans from one group or culture disapproving of art generated
by humans of another background, displaying a reluctance to diversity. “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 into play, I expect things to get more creative.”

Cheng, drawing on his own intuition as a digital artist, emphasized the line between what he
considers illustration versus art. While AI could represent tangible concepts through
illustration, it could not create an artistic work that represents and sparks authentic criticism of
the world. To Cheng, AI does not produce true art.

AI will raise the bar for illustration, Cheng added, with illustrators no longer being able to rely
on photorealistic work for fear of comparison to AI-generated images. He referred to an artist
named Ben Moran who had been banned from the “r/Art” subreddit on Reddit because
moderators thought that Moran’s human-made surrealist digital art was AI-generated.

The value given to human creativity ranges from “menial to artistic genius,” Ebrahimi Afrouzi
explained. He predicts that AI art will displace some forms of human creativity, namely the
menial tasks “already relegated to stock photos.”

“I don’t know many human artists that aspire to do the menial, 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 the menial as a way of making ends meet and funding the truly genius. This is
already a sad state of affairs and is an immense burden on the possibility of human creativity.”

As opposed to stopping the development of AI art, society should address the status quo of
artists’ dependence on menial tasks, Ebrahimi Afrouzi argued. The pressure for artists to devote
their lives to menial art as a means of survival is counter to the advancement of human
creativity, he said, adding that funding should be provided to help artists dedicate their time and
effort to achieving art that society truly values.

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