00:00 Artificial intelligence.
00:03 In September 2022, at the Colorado State Fair in the USA,
00:07 Jason Allen won the first prize in the digital category
00:11 for a painting called 'Theatre for the spatial'.
00:14 This sparked an outburst.
00:15 This award, which is relatively unknown outside Colorado,
00:22 would have gone unnoticed, but for Jason Allen.
00:25 The cause of the outrage?
00:27 Allen used Midjourney, an AI program to create the painting.
00:31 Artists called Jason a cheater,
00:32 because most of them used other digital illustrators for their entries.
00:36 So the question is, can an AI-generated image be considered art?
00:40 But before we answer that question, we need to ask, what is art?
00:44 A simple Google search would give you this definition,
00:52 the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination.
00:57 Right there, in the first line, human creative skill and imagination.
01:01 But humans built AI, and AI models learn from art that is created by humans.
01:06 So, do AI-generated images qualify as art?
01:10 In order to get a perspective on the matter,
01:12 I decided to speak to Ravi Kumar Kashi,
01:15 a Bengaluru-based visual artist with over 20 years' experience
01:18 in the fields of painting, sculpting and photography.
01:22 Till the time when AI can go bonkers and start creating on its own,
01:28 there is still a human agency that is involved.
01:32 There are two parts, right?
01:34 You have a human mind, human imagination,
01:37 then you have a tool which will make it happen.
01:40 So here, instead of the conventional tools,
01:44 we're using an AI tool.
01:47 Of course, that is bringing in its own intelligence,
01:51 if you want to call it in a very limited way.
01:54 But still, it's a tool.
01:56 So, I would accept it.
01:58 So, art that is generated by artificial intelligence
02:01 is art in its own right.
02:02 It cannot be compared to traditional art forms as we know them today,
02:06 or art that is created by humans.
02:08 We cannot apply the same principles that we use to judge a work of art
02:11 that is created by humans to AI-generated art.
02:18 But art is more than the medium it employs,
02:21 whether it is a painting or AI-generated art.
02:24 I do feel that there are certain things that need to happen
02:33 to make something a work of art.
02:34 And I think a large part of that is to sort of, in some ways,
02:41 push boundaries of what has existed till now.
02:45 Pushing boundaries to make people have an experience, an encounter,
02:49 that they probably haven't had earlier.
02:51 So, that makes them sort of think and reflect on the artwork
02:56 and what it's trying to communicate.
02:57 So, of course, every image generated by AI cannot be called art,
03:09 just as every photograph ever taken cannot be called a lens-based artwork.
03:13 I think it's more of these social sharing channels
03:18 which have started calling everything that is made
03:22 with a prompt-to-image-based generation system, like #AIart,
03:28 which I think is a bit problematic
03:29 because it then loses the nuance of what a work of art means.
03:39 It's been made quite clear to me that whether something is art or not
03:43 simply doesn't depend on the medium used to generate it.
03:46 So, why did Jason Allen's Colorado State Fair prize cause such an outburst?
03:51 Because there's a key difference.
03:53 Learning an art form is an emotional experience.
03:55 It takes years of passionate hard work for an artist to develop their skill.
04:02 AI is a machine.
04:07 It doesn't possess the ability for great passion or emotion.
04:10 Moreover, it produces images within seconds,
04:13 while a human would take years to develop skill and refine it
04:16 and produce something they find acceptable.
04:18 What generative AI has done is it has made visual expression easily accessible.
04:26 In the previous video, I showed you what I drew based on a text prompt
04:30 versus what a few minutes on an AI tool could do.
04:36 This process, which continues to amaze all of us, also produces fear.
04:40 One worldwide concern is that AI could soon replace all of us by taking our jobs.
04:45 The other is that the cornerstone of human expression, art, literature,
04:50 could soon be taken over by AI as well.
04:52 Art is sort of that deeper engagement with a certain subject
04:56 that really lets you create a work of art.
04:59 I think that is still very much relevant.
05:02 That aside, there are still a couple of very real concerns
05:05 that the emergence of AI image generation raises.
05:08 In the last video, we spoke about datasets.
05:11 A dataset contains millions of images that AI models refer to and learn.
05:16 The problem is that a lot of AI models learn from images
05:19 that might be sourced from the internet,
05:21 or they could learn from famous pieces of art.
05:24 AI tools do not discriminate when reproducing an image
05:27 when you or I give it a prompt.
05:28 So, potentially, I could ask an AI model to generate an image
05:32 that's in the style of Van Gogh.
05:33 But Van Gogh spent several years developing his style,
05:37 and now I can produce it simply by using his name in my prompt.
05:40 Or even more worryingly,
05:42 I could ask for an image with Starry Night as the prompt,
05:45 and the result could very well end up with parts from the Dutchman's famous art.
05:48 There are many tools which can make your image look like Van Gogh's image.
05:55 He used to paint in a certain very staccato kind of colour application.
05:59 So, they're bringing that surficial level of treatment.
06:05 So, it cannot really replicate what the kind of response that Van Gogh had
06:14 looking at a flower or a chair or a landscape.
06:17 That is not possible.
06:19 In the last video, I tried to compare how a human learns an art
06:22 as opposed to how a machine does.
06:24 And that comparison made it very clear to me that the two processes are similar.
06:28 We learn by observing examples,
06:30 and our style is an amalgam of everything we have observed.
06:33 I'm doing a certain kind of work because I'm living in this moment.
06:42 Because I've seen what has happened before me.
06:44 I may not copy-copy them, but I have kind of digested the earlier artists.
06:56 I respond in a sense. Of course, I transform, I change and all that.
07:00 But still, I'm sitting on their shoulder to look at the world in a different way.
07:06 So, if I cannot be accused of creating an artwork that is inspired by everything
07:10 I have seen and digested over the years,
07:12 how can an AI tool be accused of this?
07:15 Human artists have data sets too.
07:17 They're just not as defined.
07:19 Regardless, contemporary artists are affected by the potency of AI art
07:23 to create something they could potentially lose money to.
07:25 Copyright laws are still to catch up with AI.
07:28 To the artists, I would say that if it's possible,
07:31 just avoid using names specially of your contemporary peers.
07:37 Because they haven't really given consent to being used in the training of AI algorithms.
07:44 Let's say the tech platforms were actually putting these systems out.
07:48 I think one way for them to look at this is to avoid, as much as possible,
07:54 using artworks of artists, specially artists who are currently continuing to practice.
08:01 The other problem with AI data sets is that they contain biases.
08:06 That if I were to search for a soft, kind human being, the images are of women.
08:15 Or if I were to search for a photo of a married couple on their wedding day,
08:23 they're all heterosexual, white couples.
08:27 So can we use this in some ways as an opportunity to also,
08:32 you know, more meaningfully and more consciously create ecosystems
08:39 that allow for creation of data sets and trained AI algorithms
08:43 that have more representation of different populations,
08:47 different beliefs, etc. included in them?
08:52 We don't live in a world where artificial intelligence has taken over
08:55 and is working on its own agency.
08:57 We're still the ones using AI as a tool to bring our vision to reality.
09:01 And so it is upon us to engage with AI in a manner that furthers this evolution
09:06 and helps us do things that would have proven impossible a few years ago.
09:10 In this video, I tried to explore the connection between human creativity and AI art.
09:15 I tried to address some of the ethical and moral concerns that the emergence of AI raises.
09:19 And we heard both sides, traditional art forms as well as AI art.
09:24 In the next video, we'll be exploring another form of AI art generation called Deepfakes.
09:28 This is a technology through which anyone, anywhere can make anyone say anything.
09:34 No, I buy you out, you don't buy me out.
09:36 And it has the potential to be incredibly dangerous.
09:39 Subscribe to make sure you don't miss it.
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