The Campaign to Stop the Scourge of AI "Art"

Let’s get one thing straight: art is a skill. It’s not a talent. Yes, some people have a more natural aptitude for certain things. However, all talents need practice to become skills. Painting, playing an instrument, dancing, sketching…they’re all learned skills.

I never painted or drew a thing until just a few years ago. When I decided to get sober, I found lots of comfort in focusing on such a meditative hobby. When our beloved Siberian forest cat died in the fall of 2022, I spent a week making a graphite drawing of him. I have spent hundreds of hours learning over the last 4 years, and I learn something every time I make a piece. Most times, I learn more about myself than I do the art, but that’s part of it.

When you use AI to make art, you are using a derivative, stolen aggregate of every piece of art fed into the machine. It’s not only that you’re taking the quick and lazy way, but you’re actively stealing the work of artists.

Thousands of years of art are jammed into a machine to be made into a digital, bloated foie gras. Then you type a few words, click a button, and tttthhhhbbbbtt: out splats a meaningless, vapid image that’s nothing but an agglomeration of thousands of years of actual art plus however many millions of Happy Meals and other junk AI images we shoved down its throat. Michelangelo spent four painful years painting the Sistine Chapel, and now we can’t take the time to learn to use a pencil.

It makes me insane when I ask someone about their use of AI art and they respond with something like, “Oh, I’m not creative,” or, “I can’t even draw a stick figure.”

Have you tried? I bet not. And if you have, maybe you feel ashamed of your creation because you have ridiculous expectations based on some spoon-fed, social-media-skewed view of what making art is supposed to look like. Reels and TikTok videos of condensed art don’t show you the truth of practice and study. In reality, it takes discipline, including months, years, and even decades, with thousands of failures.

Show me your failures! I’d rather see a deformed stick figure than a piece of AI trash. We’ll laugh, I’ll give you a hug and some encouragement, and you’ll feel like you learned something. If you don’t feel like trying something new today, ask someone for a piece.

AI art is not art. It’s not creative. It’s not just meaningless; it’s worse than that.

The environmental impact of AI is staggering. New data centers are being built all over the place, and the resources they consume are incomprehensible even at today’s rates. We are still learning about how much power they use, but we don’t care as long as we can have ChatGPT send our pointless drivel and make an image of a flying banana. Since Sora 2 hit the ground, we’ve learned our energy estimates were low:

While image generators used the equivalent of five seconds of microwave warming to generate a single 1,024 x 1,024 pixel image, video generators proved far more energy-intensive. To spit out a five-second clip, the researchers found that it takes the equivalent of running a microwave for over an hour. If they’re consuming far more power as the length increases, the math doesn’t look good.—Futurism.com

So, energy use is growing exponentially, and we are releasing an unregulated technology that we don’t understand at an unprecedented pace. Not to sound too alarmist, but this sounds a lot like those cheesy 80s sci-fi movies we loved so much, and it’s DISTURBINGLY close to the plot of WALL-E.

As much as I’d like to go on ruminating on the environmental impact of this new technology, you can do your own research about it. AI bugs me in general, but it’s the art that has me the most miffed.

We’re now a couple of generations into the era that provided us instant gratification. We get anything we want whenever we want without having to wait or work for it. A few clicks and stuff shows up, or we can watch any show that ever existed without considering what it takes to get it there. Almost every person I know has empirical evidence that they have ADHD without considering that our way of life may be at least partly responsible. We’re forgetting how to work for things and how the magic is in the process itself.

To top it off, we’ve been convinced that it’s necessary to monetize or commodify every fucking thing we do. We can’t make something without trying to sell it. We’re in a constant search for dopamine and for someone we’ve never met to give us a hollow form of feedback, all while continuing to line someone’s pockets with ad revenue for shit we don’t need.

I’ve had a strange relationship with the way we share our art today, and I quit social media for several months earlier this year. I still made art, and lots of it. But instead of capitalizing on it, I found immense joy in learning and creating. I’d like to offer a solution to anyone even thinking about using AI for an image.

Recently, I posted a note stating that many artists would be willing to make or share their photography and art for your articles and stories. Several artists and photographers reached out to me to confirm that they’d be happy to provide their work for nothing besides accreditation.

Personally, I’m willing to give away any piece of art I’ve ever made. I have no interest in making money from it, and I hope that doesn’t devalue anyone who is. For me, it’s worth giving a piece away rather than seeing another AI monstrosity. I’ll even learn to draw or paint you something new if time permits. It’s inspiring when someone asks if you can do something.