Can AI generate real art?

AI art is a touchy subject with artists.  Most of the members of my art club would say emphatically that AI images are NOT art. I follow some other artists on Facebook. One of them is a Japanese artist who has been working with AI since 2021.  It says in her bio, though, that she was a professional artist using more traditional methods for at least a decade prior to that. Her pictures are beautiful, both before and after her involvement with AI.  They are of a style, I can tell that they are the work of the same person.  But people are merciless in the comments.  They view her use of AI as plagiarism, cheating, betrayal, and so on.  A lot of the comments say that all you have to do is type in a command, that it requires no knowledge of art, and no talent.  Even I, as unfamiliar with AI as I am, know it isn't that simple. 

The author of this article, Sebastian Smee, feels that AI is not a threat to traditional artists, and that it is possible to create real art with AI. How AI is changing art and why traditional artists should embrace it - The Washington Post

Color me AI curious. 

From the article:

"Can the art world live with AI-generated art?

"Relax, everyone. It already does. Artists have been doing amazing things with artificial intelligence (AI) and its various predecessors for decades. The work is only getting better, more interesting, more exciting.

Of course, it’s easy to see why people are freaking out. The worlds of artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing things up with discombobulating speed. We suddenly have apps at our fingertips that can turn a simple verbal prompt into an image within seconds."

 

"If you’re a graphic designer or illustrator working in certain commercial fields, it’s already clear that AI will be a major disruption. Platforms like Midjourney and Stability Diffusion have built their businesses by scraping the internet for the data sets then used by their generators. That material includes the work of artists and illustrators, almost none of whom have been asked for their consent, credited or compensated."

"...These legal and ethical questions will take a while to sort out. But in the meantime, if you’re concerned about the health of art as we know it, there’s little reason to think of AI as a threat."

"Why? First, because the easier it is to get software to spew out digital imagery in response to a verbal prompt, the less interesting that imagery becomes. The same thing happened with NFTs. Invented as a device to create artificial scarcity, they were so easy to make that they instead produced the opposite of scarcity: a deluge of supply and a subsequent loss of interest."

"Second, because humans feel the pull of the physical. The more dominant the virtual becomes, the more we crave the physicality of art. That’s not just hopeful, old-style humanism. It’s a clear phenomenon. Even as the digital possibilities get greater and more sophisticated, the art world has seen an undeniable rise in the popularity of physical materials — not only paint, but also ceramics, textiles and all kinds of sculpture, all of which are undergoing a noticeable revival."

"...Physical art pulses and glows before our screen-addled eyes with a kind of talismanic intensity. So, if you’re an artist who makes sculpture, oil paintings, ceramics or textiles, if you’re into printmaking, watercolors or immersive, physical installations, you have nothing to fear.

Instead of thinking of AI-generated art as a doomsday development — a cluster bomb thrown by Big Tech into the heart of the art world — you can think of it as something with its own fascinating history, intoxicating present and unknown future. Something to be curious about." 

"...Human-machine loops are not new in art. Artists have always used technology to do things they could not do themselves or simply to see what would happen. In the late 19th century, John Singer Sargent needed a brush made from bristles, which he loaded with a particular quantity of viscous paint before dragging it across a primed canvas with different pressure and velocity to get results he wanted but could not entirely predict."

"....(Turkish AI artist )Refik Anadol likens his AI algorithms to a “thinking brush.” The important thing, he says, is “designing the brush.” “Some people believe it’s a case of ‘Hey, here’s the data, here’s AI, voilà!’” he says. “But it’s actually more challenging when you start to have some control over the system instead of having something imposed on you. That’s where the true challenge of art creation comes in.”

One of the objections to AI art that I hear is that it is just cutting up images from other people's photos or pictures and putting them together.  But that also describes collage, which is an accepted medium. It's not a medium that I use, but one of the awards at this year's club show went to a collage. There are still laws that apply to using recognizable parts of copyrighted material, and I assume that would also apply to AI art.

I could see the possibility of making an AI data base of one's own photos and pictures, and keeping it separated from other data bases to avoid the possibility of plagiarism. There shouldn't be a problem if you are using bits and pieces of your own material.

I don't see AI affecting the art that I currently do; mainly acrylic and pastel, and cyanotype landscape prints. but I can see AI being helpful for artists who do fantasy and anime.

If I find a class offering AI art, I am curious enough to look into it.