‘AI-free’ is the new ‘free-range’
We’re AI accelerating where?
Generative AI has exploded in the last few years, and that boom has been heard across every spectrum of society. No longer the niche of science fiction, AI is now part of everyday life; used by your mom to generate memes or your classmate to draft their college essay.
Its strongest proponents push AI as a self-evident good, obsessively proclaiming that accelerating AI development will usher in a technological utopia, I’m not sure the final destination will be a great place to be. While the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, be wary of what they’re wishing for. You’re being delivered Prometheus’s fire and they don’t care if it burns your house down.
It is impossible to trust the intentions of AI accelerationists. Laying aside the rampant egomania, the heart of the issue is that AI is not their God, it is their product. And attached to that product are strings, able to be pulled at any time. Increasing dependency on AI is making those strings stronger; how many people are now reliant on AI for their jobs? I do not wish to become an AI marionette.
AI is causing issues
This audience is well aware that there are countless issues being brought alongside the rise of this new technology. The examples are endless: theft of artists’ work, AI bots arguing disinformation online, rampant cheating in the education system; the list goes on. However, this essay isn’t titled ‘AI is hurting us and it’s only going to get worse’. While AI will become more and more prevalent, I have hope this will be coupled with an increasing desire for things that are ‘real’. We don’t want to argue with chatbots, we want to argue with people. We don’t want to read AI articles, we want to read something actually written. We don’t want to pay for AI pictures, we want to pay for human-made art. But it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish what is and isn’t AI.
‘Free-range’ art
The revelation hit me in a grocery store. ‘Free-range’ eggs. It’s getting hard to actively choose to NOT consume AI, because AI content is getting harder to detect. But in a world where we could have an ‘AI-free’ label, I think that this could occupy a niche similar to ‘free-range’, ‘organic’, ‘vegan’, and ‘fairtrade’ to allow consumers to make an informed choice to support human content. Not everyone will care about an ‘AI-free’ label, just like not everyone cares about organic chocolate, or buying vegan. But at the moment there isn’t even the opportunity for a layperson to make that choice, especially in the art space. While AI-free artists exist they’re not easy to find. We’re fixing this by adding another tool to the anti-AI artist arsenal.
Art Regard
Art Regard is a new site providing the ‘no-AI’ label to artists for free. You upload evidence (soon to include videos) alongside your work and other artists rate whether they think it is AI or human-made. We’re just starting out and need your help to create a paradigm shift towards anti-AI artists labelling their work. A ‘no-AI’ label on only a handful of artists means the label can go unnoticed, a ‘no-AI’ label on thousands of artists means that the LACK of ‘no-AI’ label is noticed. Not only will this help us elevate real artists, it will simultaneously make people think more critically about AI content. Seeing ‘free-range’ eggs beside the ‘regular’ puts the former on a pedestal while questioning the legitimacy of the latter.
If you are an artist who wants to join the fight against AI then come join us at Art Regard. We’ve set up a discord and facebook page to help build a community of AI-free artists, so come and say hi.
No AI was used in the making of this essay.