Technology is a tide that raises all boats. While not technically wrong, we often fail to mention the boats flipped over with the passengers left to drown. I’m not cynical about technological “progress” but I like to be honest about the eggs cracked to make the prodigal omelette.

Unlike people with rich social lives, I’ve been following AI and technology for most of my conscious life. As a result of my bizarre set of fascinations, it struck me how suddenly the tech agnostic art world seemed to uniformly have AI on its radar. Given the high barrier-to-entry language game around AI, few people could comprehensively define it in its many variations. AI can loosely describe an algorithm, or code that simply solves a problem like sorting data in place of a person. AI can just as easily mean a robot or complex, adaptive system that mimics animal intelligence, such as a neural network. I’m using fairly simplified definitions of these terms in the interest of brevity. You can easily see without being fairly well-read or having a computer science education, many people are probably not very familiar with these terms. Technological ignorance, it seems, is largely what’s behind the chaotic immune response of various creative communities regarding AI, NFT and other controversial topics.

From the perspective of creative types, let’s take artists for example, it’s not hard to figure out why AI is seen as a foreign invader. Artists working as hard as they do to express themselves at a high level and monetize what is essentially sending their heart to the world already have enough trouble with the daily war of art. Imagine during your grind to finally be profitable and put a roof over your head as a full-time artist, some shadowy mega-corp comes out of nowhere to essentially create counterfeits of your work to inflate its bank accounts. At this moment, this is the unfortunate reality.

As a dabbler in many creative domains, there is a striking difference in how say writers respond to AI tools compared to artists. I currently believe the difference comes down to essentially two things. 1) The relevance of economic efficiency (or EE) and 2) The emotional and psychological aspects of a work. Economic efficiency considers the quality, time and cost dimensions of a given product or service. The psychological/emotional difference between copywriting for a landing page, and somebody painting a portrait of their life partner is obviously night and day. Writers in many cases have been brow beaten into believing they are replaceable and that mostly their job is to create content at a particular level as quickly and cheaply as possible. There are of course exceptions like poetry, a slight variation on writing at large, but the race to the bottom mentality embedded in writing culture has a big impact here. The fact that many writers and other creatives have absorbed the use of AI tools comes down to the aforementioned factors. Artists fear they will be seen as obsolete if something can do what they do 80% as well at a fraction of cost and time. This sensitivity for starving artists is very relevant and pertains to certain kinds of art related work, but for many people I think their concerns are somewhat misplaced.

It’s not obvious at a certain point that someone makes $1,000 per hour because they are that many times as good as others in the space. The value of a creative work cannot be understood simply through the tangible aspects of its composition or EE. Incremental differences in execution or understanding matter, but stylization and subjectivity create great variance in preferences between people for one piece or artist over another. The things that we seek in artists and are often willing to pay a premium for are the personality, story and relatability that we can share with our friends, customers and children. While AI may become defined as something more human-like that can have its own story and meaningful, relatable experience, the AI-art we are worrying about has none of these characteristics. The AI-engineers that make these compositions are not artists in most cases and no this isn’t gatekeeping. It’s fine to be an artist with undeveloped fundamentals but someone who has no familiarity or interest in the fundamentals of art can hardily be called an art enthusiast let alone an artist.

I want to be very clear here that we really have to separate who we’re talking about in the pro AI-art space. There are those pretentious AI art bros polluting every comment section and conversation with toxic, and socially bankrupt statements they wouldn’t dare repeat in public. There are also well-meaning people that are simply looking to explore making art with AI tools, just like there are people who actually try to use NFTs responsibly. It’s easy to lump everybody together, but the people we should be most concerned with are the companies that profit off of what are essentially black hat morals, to rob value from creatives and line their pockets. I realize the socially inept engineer types aren’t all trying to rip creatives off, but the technology in the way it’s being developed with no real boundaries or healthy cross-communication is in an ethical deadzone at this moment.

My call-to-action is this – stop treating anti AI art campaigns as sufficient and start thinking as a community about how we can adapt and alter the trajectory of these technologies. Instead of having these breakthroughs act as vampires to the hard working people they stand on the backs of, how can we leverage progress for our betterment?

I’d love to hear what you guys think about these topics. Disagree? Agree? What do you think we could change in terms of how we talk about some of these topics. Leave a comment below, I will read all of them.