AI Art doesn't need to be sacrilegious
Prompt: "A photo of Michelangelo's sculpture of David wearing headphones djing"
Source: 1
I don't feel like doing an introduction to AI Art. It's absolutely everywhere by now and you should probably be well aware of it. My area (music) couldn't be more affected by it and ... I'm not completely against it, but I see a major problem.
In music, it's chaotic. Everyone keeps using raw AI Art like no tomorrow, more prominently on the amateur/mediocre side of it, which could be a /phew/ for some.
The problem is: I see more and more people using AI as a generators rather than tools. Conceptually, those are probably meant to be generators, right? Well.. It's really vague on what is supposed to be doing. Most of them generates awesome images one would say, but there is no mission in there as far as I can tell. There is no really an personal long-term end goal to all of this besides providing paywalled generated media, free of copyright images. From the non-artist standpoint, it's nothing more than a time saver, it has some good points for the non-artist industry, like generation of stock images or something. It's an easy way to create high quality images with no effort at all. Problem is that people use as an artistry form as well.
Transforming art in something reproducible, repeatable, disposable and homogenous kinda of makes art itself even less regarded by people. People who already can't see anything special in expression will be quickly in fatigue of all art as most they only see the "quality" aspect of the image — where most of the time AI would win — and they don't see value in creativity as us artists do. Sometimes is easy to tell if the art wasn't made by a human, but not always.
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Theatre d'Ópera Spatial, edited by J.A.
Source: 2
Game designer "J.A." won the prize of the Colorado State Fair's art competition at first place with the artwork you're seeing above. Entitled Theatre d'Ópera Spatial, the judges did know that the piece was created by the popular Midjourney service, but they allegedly didn't know what it was. J.A. wouldn't explain how it works, the same way as you wouldn't explain the full complexity of softwares like Photoshop as they're merely just tools. Personally, I think J.A. did partially the right thing. He wrote that he used this tool and he also didn't used it raw like many people do. He stated that at least 10% of the work was digitally manipulated in Photoshop. He continues saying that this was all on purpose to make a statement (critique) about AI Art.23
Now, onto the ethics, I unfortunately have a vision of what is right and what's wrong that may differ from yours. My "right" thing about this is to make clear that some artwork was not made by a human. Saying that your art was made by some AI generator online is partially the right thing. Although is much more hard to NOT know what Midjourney is today, it could still make people confused if whether you made this thing or not. I can say my artwork was made by "Alligator ProX" (made up), but you wouldn't know what it is. I don't feel ashamed of stating that artwork of some songs of mine wasn't made by a human, because it's true. I got insufficient skills to make an awesome piece of image, so I took the shortcut and used a generator to create this certain image. It's not hard to add this into your description box, or the artwork itself, but most people wouldn't do because they don't want to feel inferior or something. In a perfect world, people are honest, artists and non-artists would always credit anything that is not theirs or wasn't made by them.
This helps a lot into identifying AI work, but that wouldn't solve the major problem I threw earlier. It shouldn't be used as a generator and more like a tool to help you get towards the idea you want. There is AI artists that won't generate one good image and call it a day, they go through an entirely peculiar workflow of generating multiple instances of images by parts until it is exactly what they want, even working with hand-drew drafts so they don't get distracted by other results. Blending the parts, manipulating the image and color correcting afterwards. Adding the "human" factor to an AI-generated image it's just as artistic and creative as creating one from scratch. An artist whose don't know or dismiss how AI could be used to enhance your creativity could and, eventually will be outsmarted by somebody who does. I'm not saying that you should be like everyone else. You should use it at your advantage in your creativity, a tool that helps flesh out something that resonates with you. In every one of those cases, no one should refrain of stating that the piece wasn't completely made by a human.
My upcoming single "LoveComplex" contains AI Art. I was kinda of required to use it to fulfill my idea. The idea was to make a toy-like character with realistic lighting, like it was photographed in real life, because that's the story of this character in specific. I would have to spend a lot of money into fabricating a toy to capture her in real life. So, I used AI. More than one, generated an image with the characteristics that I defined for her in the story, using a custom LoRA to make it distinct, regenerated some parts of the image dozen times, manually added textures to her hair and clothes in Photoshop because it was too flat for my taste and made an background in Illustrator. I wouldn't say is a perfect use of AI Art, but I'm adding me to my own artwork, that's one of the points of making art in the first place.
In conclusion, people who decide to use AI tools, should make an effort into humanizing it and making use of it wisely just like any tool in any other form of art, not using like it is a disposable art factory. Being honest and declaring that the generated media itself wasn't completely made by a human is a also a good practice, because obviously, it wasn't.