Stop arguing over soul
Framing our argument
I believe art has soul. I don’t believe that helps us plead the case for human art.
Picture this scenario. You are in an online discussion defending AI-free art. You argue that there is something special about human art. It has a soul, borne of a real human experience, idea, or emotion which sets it apart from any output of a machine. Wonderful, we agree. The AI-proponent does not. In fact, they are thoroughly unconvinced. Worse still, you’ve now fallen into a rhetorical trap.
“Well, show me the soul in this image then?”
Now, all the AI-proponent has to do is give a single instance where you (or another artist) can’t tell whether an image was AI-generated or human art. You’ve inevitably lost; to win this we’d have to correctly identify AI-generated art every single time, whereas they only need to catch us out once. And so, that thread will have them going “See! If human art really had a distinct soul, then you [artists] would never mistake AI images for human art.” The thread now has laypeople doubting whether human art meaningfully has a soul. Could an AI create art with soul? Does soul even exist in art at all?
Don’t get lost in the soul trap. I get it, as art lovers we feel strongly about how fundamental it is to the human experience. But you are grasping at the intangible with a group of people who are so empirically driven that they are working on an app to track the most efficient times to use the bathroom. An appreciation of artistic wonder is not an assumption you can make. You are likely explaining colour to a person who closed their eyes the second your mouth opened.
The realm of online debate is a theatre. You are not arguing against someone in good faith, you may not even be arguing to a real person at all. However, your audience isn’t the AI-proponent you’re talking to. Trying to convince a machine learning engineer that AI is causing real harm to artists is futile. They know your position, but their company (and thus career) requires bulldozing through any artist protections which could limit access to model training data. I suggest we be pragmatic and try to convince the people who matter; most people are not the techies gleefully cheering the destruction of art.
A simple anti-AI position
To convince others, I believe it comes down to what you can prove. Here is an anti-AI position I think is hard to argue against:
AI-generated images should have a label, at least in the commission and selling space, and the hesitancy of many AI-artists to be transparent about AI use implies a negative intent. If you believe AI use is fine, then be upfront about how it was used. Artists generally have no issue sharing what mediums, software and equipment they use. This is in stark contrast to artists using AI tools. Here, there is a complete lack of transparency. If someone is commissioning art, it is the right of the customer to require that AI not be used. Likewise, it is the right of the artist to say no to any and all demands they deem unreasonable and reject the work. However, AI is now being used to defraud art commissions by attempting to pass off AI-generated images as human made art. Instead of rejecting the commission, we have people duplicitously using AI to complete the commissioned art. This is unethical.
“But if they can’t tell the difference, then what’s the issue?”
This doesn’t hold in any other scenario. If I bought a Rolex and discovered 6 months later that the seller had switched a replica into the original package, I would not say ‘well I couldn’t tell the difference!’. The transaction had an implicit agreement that was violated. How well what I received mimics the original is irrelevant. In the case of art, AI-free use is often an explicit request and should be respected if the artist takes the commission.
Besides, other people can often spot AI-use even if the buyer fails to notice it. I recently saw a Reddit thread where an indie game developer had commissioned art for his game, at significant cost, and was now having a PR disaster as one of the ‘artists’ had actually been using AI instead of creating the art themselves. The cost of the commission includes high skill labour; if the developer knew AI was used they explicitly stated they wouldn’t have paid for the commission and would have gone to an AI-free artist.
The cynical misrepresentation of AI-images is a real issue. An indie dev getting screwed over by an AI-user misrepresenting their work is relatable to many people; it’s more engaging to draw a parallel with that time a car mechanic screwed them over, versus pondering whether art has a soul.
If you want to help fight back against AI art, be pragmatic. Keep the soul in your art, but keep it out of the Reddit thread. If we can win the battle that AI images should be labelled, we can build off of that concession onto stronger claims.
Join us on discord
If you liked this blog, are an AI-free artist, or just want to discuss AI and art then please join me on the art regard discord. We’re trying to promote human art by helping artists get their art labelled as AI-free.