Is AI art friend or foe? MSU students and faculty reflect

With a few keystrokes and the click of a button, Generative Artificial Intelligence can be used for a multitude of things, including creating “art.” The images are designed by inputting prompts into AI programs like Chat GPT, which uses all of the pre-existing artwork and knowledge that has been fed into it to come up with something new.

This creates many concerns for artists, especially those who make their living in the art field. Many artists fear that generative AI threatens their job security and makes them “replaceable” in the eyes of employers.

Michigan State University graphic design professor Zachary Kaiser worries about the future of his students, who have expressed concerns to him about finding jobs in graphic design after they graduate.

“If you can replace a graphic designer with an artificial intelligence and he makes bad designs, it doesn’t really matter because it’s cheaper … and that’s what really matters,” Kaiser said.

Kaiser explained that his students feel enormous pressure to make their portfolios extraordinarily good in order to get even a low-paying job in the art world. He added that not only artists are on the line, but also museum and gallerists, critics and reviewers and everyone else involved in the art world.

“I worry about the livelihoods of my students, I worry about the job market, but I also worry about bigger picture things like who do we believe we are when we have something we call even ‘artificial intelligence,'” Kaiser said. “Even that nomenclature has built into it some really serious assumptions about the human condition and what it means to be a person.”

Highlighting the wider effects on the environment and society, Kaiser explained that AI affects many different aspects of our future and everyday life.

“I worry that the conversation is bracketing the function of the technology from all the other things it’s connected to,” Kaiser said. “I think that’s like a huge concern to me is that we’re just not asking ourselves a really important question, which is, ‘does it have to exist in the first place?'”

Zoology freshman Max Taylor, who draws and creates art digitally on a tablet in her spare time, doesn’t like the way generative AI uses the work of human artists without their consent. She believes that some regulations should be imposed on AI to make its work more ethical and fair to the artists. While he doesn’t think it should be banned entirely, Taylor doesn’t like the way AI-generated images are being used in place of human-made artwork.

“I just think it takes away from the human creativity of art,” Taylor said. “It’s just creating something quickly with no thought behind it.”

However, there are some artists who choose to look on the bright side of the presence of generative AI in the art world. Electronic art and intermedia professor Lorelei d’Andriole uses AI in some of her exercises with her students. It all started when she was teaching MSU’s first transgender studies course, where she had students input vocabulary words from their textbooks into an AI art generator to see what the results would be.

“Most of the time when I assign an AI art task to my students, it’s more about the critical analysis I’m asking them to do with it,” d’Andriol explained. “It’s more like, ‘Hey, look at what happens when you use the tool and then write about it,’ and like, ‘What’s the significance of this and the ethics of this.'”

While d’Andriol acknowledges the downsides of artificial intelligence and the threat it poses to artistic jobs, she also seeks to complicate these ideas and dig deeper beyond that fear. She highlighted the potential of generative AI as a learning tool for students and simply as a fun interactive program to better understand technology as it develops.

“I think the AI ​​… is as evil as a pencil,” d’Andriol said. “Pencils have produced some amazing works… They have also produced some very wicked documents and books. So I think every technology takes the morality of its inventor.