Is AI-generated Art Actually Art? Da Vinci Club Takes on Robots
By Ishita N, Year 10 Journalist Leader
Da Vinci Club has been covering a vast range of topics about both history and current events, with one of the most talked about ones at the moment being the rise of AI. Software such as ChatGPT, DALL-E and Ai-Da have taken the internet by storm with their essays, hyper-realistic art and human-like features veering remarkably close to those of humans. But as technology gets smarter, it opens up many questions such as what role do humans play in our future if robots can do our jobs for us, and the more immediate question of can AI-generated art be considered real art?
During our session of Da Vinci Club, we aimed to tackle this puzzling question, along with a number of others. At first, we decided that it couldn’t be as there was no nuance or emotion behind it, but as we explored the wide array of art created by computers, we started to find many artworks of a quality previously associated only with experienced artists. As we grew more and more impressed by the art we saw, we began to retract our previous statement and reconsider the prospect of computer-generated art rivalling that of humans.
AI art is generally considered as not having as much emotion as human art, along with the lack of backstory and context around it making it quite two-dimensional at first glance. However, in a survey conducted in 2017, 75% of people were unable to consistently distinguish between AI and human art accurately, which could mean that knowing whether the artist was human or not could result in bias and a different perception of the art and wasn’t actually relevant to people’s enjoyment of it.
It could be argued that AI art is still art of humans, as the AI learnt to create artwork by analysing various images from the internet and recognising patterns associated with particular trigger words and art styles, so AI art is technically a mix of many pieces of art done by humans. However the same could be said for human art, with artists gaining inspiration from other artworks and the world around us, making it impossible to create a truly original piece of art.
Overall, we decided that AI-generated art is still art because we found it as aesthetically pleasing as human art and we decided that we valued that trait over background and emotional content. But the questions don’t end there, because if AIs can create art as good as humans can, then will we need human artists in the future, and what else could AI rival us at?
Survey article:
Can you tell the difference between human art and AI art?
https://wpln.org/post/can-you-tell-the-difference-between-genuine-and-ai-generated-art/
Featured image by https://unsplash.com/@deepmind
