John Paul M. Joaquin Tech 04.12.2023 21:Apr PM EDT

AI-Generated Art: How It’s Made and Its Ethics

Technological advancements in our time are crazy fast. In just a few months, humanity went crazy with cryptocurrencies and AI in the next.

Not only that, we went from asking AI to generate photos of different things online to having conversations with them and even having them do our work for us.

Thanks to these advancements, we could finally see what we imagine in our minds in the blink of an eye, or at least a few keyboard strokes.

AI Picture Generation

You may have heard about AI art generators hitting the headlines in the past year regarding their ease of use, interesting results, and ethics, considering that many artists and experts call AI-generated artwork plagiarism. These AI art generators include NightCafe, DALL-E 2, and Deep Dream Generator.

Some of these AI art generators use machine learning algorithms and deep neural networks to generate art based on a given input, per Interesting Engineering. Others have more sophisticated AI that generates pictures so good, they look real or at least resemble the source material they are based on.

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Take, for instance, the AI-generated images India-based artist Gokul Pillai posted on their Instagram post aptly-captioned "slumdog millionaires," per Mashable SEA. The pictures Pillai posted were of some of the top millionaires and billionaires of the world, only instead of them being in their lavish domains, wearing the clothes that suit their station, they are instead portrayed as people living in poverty in third-world countries.

Donald Trump looks jaded in the image but not because of an election loss or his ongoing court trial, but because of the hardships he had to endure to live for so long. Meanwhile, Bill Gates still looks like his real-life counterpart (complete with glasses), but he looked malnourished with his ribs exposed and his stomach bloated while being topless to cool down from the harsh, dry weather he's in.

The Ethics Of AI-Generated Art

Many of the pictures Pillai posted look realistic and plausible because of a few reasons: their algorithms used real-life photos as their base and modified them to fit Pillai's input, or Pillai had the art generator modify existing pictures to get the desired result.

However, these methods may be why people, particularly expert artists, and the art community, aren't as keen to welcome the pictures and art it generates. According to Make Use Of, AI art generators learn how to make content from images found online without artists' permission or even a notification, giving rise to plagiarism and copyright violations.

Meanwhile, the University of Texas at Austin's Center for Media Management worries that AI art generators could replace human artists and threaten their livelihoods due to their convenience and affordability.

Lastly, governments have yet to introduce laws that would regulate or dictate ownership policies regarding AI-generated art.

Regardless, technology may be developing a bit too quickly for humanity to handle without overindulging itself in its creation.