ARTS | INTERVIEWS | MATIHIKO | TECH
Written by Mikaela Stroud (they/them) | @me.kaiella / @azuresparkz.art | Contributing Writer Edited by Stella Roper (they/them) | @stellyvision | Arts Editor
AI is growing fast in its development, with almost every media site involving its own built-in intelligence systems, using both image and text learning to train and expand.
Many initially saw it as a wonderful futuristic tool that would help humans relax and eliminate menial tasks from their lives. However, what began as a promise of convenience has turned into a general replacement of human creativity—first by corporations and now also by individuals.
With user-friendly applications such as Midjourney becoming mainstream, it seems that anyone can be an artist. It’s no joke that spaces are being completely saturated with AI art, and ‘artists’ are palming off their digitally generated concepts as their own when it's the amalgamation of thousands of real artists whose work has been used to train these programs without their consent.
To investigate the phenomenon, I went to a local event hosted at the Panmure Community Center called Cosmoscon, the first of its kind in the growing number of geek and pop culture art and media events developing across Tāmaki Makaurau. Other events in this vein include Auckland Zinefest, Overload, Queers & Wares and of course, the largest events in NZ across the board, Armageddon.
Many of these events have already put an overall ban on AI-assisted art to keep the community within the artist alley safe from those who wish to take advantage of the ease of AI in creating merchandise to sell. An official statement from Armageddon Expo reads, “While A.I. art does have some cool aspects to it, it is also very dependent upon existing art created by artists across the globe to create new imagery from algorithms that give no credit to the creators it is taking the metadata from.”
As I attended Cosmocon on the 22nd of February, I asked both small and large creators their opinions on the matter.
Firstly, I chatted with Hayley (@hellishrebuke), an artist who’s tabled at multiple conventions, some including Armageddon, Overload and Cosmoscon:
MS: How would you define AI?
H: It’s a tool that’s been poorly implemented and has a long way to go.
MS: Have you used AI, and if so, what for?
H: I tried one of those AI filters on a few cosplay selfies a while ago.
MS: As AI becomes more prevalent, how does that impact what you do?
H: It detracts from the hard work that goes into art. People’s art that they’ve spent hours, days, years making goes into a little program, and it rips off everything they’ve done without having the actual honed skill or talent or even the emotions/lived experience of the artist. It’s the same vibes of people who go into an art museum, point at the most heart-wrenching piece of art in the gallery and go, “I could make that”.
MS: Are there ways you can identify AI art? If so, how?
H: AI is learning fast, but it’s still not far enough to escape its uncanny valley quality. Easy things to spot are inaccurate anatomy (ie, hands, fingers, and odd proportions) and smushed together details on things like clothes (ie, contorted buttons and lace). After you become aware of these things, you can pick out consistencies of a ripped-off art style or weird backgrounds.
MS: How can you identify AI art at conventions?
H: It can be a little difficult, but when you see 5 prints that have a wildly different art style in each piece, you have a feeling something is going on. And it’s not just, “Here’s my painting style, my illustration style and my chibi style.” It’ll look like it was drawn by 5 entirely different artists.
MS: How does the presence of AI art impact the artist alley?
H: Artists can pick out AI most of the time, but the regular-degular normal convention attendee who might like art but isn’t quite used to staring at illustrations for hours on end or doesn’t have much of a deeper insight into art and its creation can’t pick it out as easily.
Particularly when it’s used to cash in on what’s popular or what’s selling, just to make a quick buck, it really affects the rest of the artist alley artists who made their art themselves. It affects sales when AI art is taking up stall space.
The second person I spoke to was Rachel (@biqq.in), another artist who’s sold their art at conventions as big as Armageddon, Big Gay Out and Melbourne based event SupaNova as well as other small scale markets.
MS: What are your immediate thoughts when I say AI?
M: Well, two thoughts come to mind when I hear ‘AI. ’ There is the dramatised version of AI you see in sci-fi media, where it has the capacity to think and have its own inner thoughts like a human. The other is the AI we have now, which is essentially just a really sophisticated filtration of data. It hadn’t invoked the image of that sci-fi intelligent lifeform until it was able to generate ‘art’ and ‘literature’ - two things that only humans were thought to be capable of.
Because of that, a lot of people defend this AI by claiming that the computer was merely taking inspiration from other works like a human. I hate this argument. Words like ‘learn’ and ‘decision-making’ are applied to its actions, but this wrongfully anthropomorphises AI. There is an input and an output, but nothing in between that is remotely similar to human-independent thought.
MS: Have you used it in the past?
R: I have only used AI in the past for coding, as it was required in my classes. Personally, I try to limit the use of AI due to environmental factors. Knowing my art has been stolen and put into other platforms without my permission and is likely being fed into AI isn’t a great thought.
MS: How does the presence of AI art impact the artist alley?
R: AI takes money away from actual artists like us who are already barely getting by. It is a shame cause general audiences will have no idea and be ignorant of the fact.
MS: Do you think AI is good for Artists or for the New Zealand economy?
R: I think AI could be more reasonable if it originates from NZ due to our more eco-friendly ways of collecting power. With having some of the most area connection to sea compared to other countries, it could provide a better alternative because we need a lot of water to cool the computers that are used for AI. It will be concerning in the future as it is expensive to run and will likely be restricted to only big companies. I think it needs to be regulated before it can help me.
Finally, I spoke to Mousse Mouse (@mousse_mouse) outside of Cosmoscon, who gave her perspective on AI as an artist who not only works in the Artist Alley, but regularly opens pop up shops that host her and her peer’s art, and owns an online shop and website as another source of income.
MS: As AI becomes more common, does that impact your work negatively or positively?
M: Honestly, AI doesn’t pose much of a threat to my artistic work. At this point, most conventions and markets ban AI art outright. If society as a whole keeps rejecting AI art, then I still have hope in pursuing an artistic career.
AI art is like pollution. Nobody wants to see it, and nobody wants to buy it, but it still somehow piles up everywhere you look.
MS: Is AI good for New Zealand?
M: AI art and literature will never be good for New Zealand. We have so many talented artists, it is a huge waste to ditch them in favour of AI. Nobody wants to walk down the street with soulless AI posters covering the walls and buses on their way to watch a movie with soulless AI visuals. Sounds like a nightmare.
I spoke with other artists regarding their thoughts on AI bans at conventions, who preferred to be anonymous, but similar sentiments arose:
H: “It’s good. Everyone should ban it.”
R: “Love the idea of AI bans. It's very unregulated at the moment.”
M: “AI art devalues a con or market’s integrity if they do not have a ban. The presence of AI art cheapens the event greatly.”
Overall, there was one overarching message:
“AI art is the death of creativity. It isn’t intuitive, it’s a system that damages the environment to regurgitate slop from creatives.”
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