Why This Online Archivist Isn't Feeling Much Angst About AI-Generated Art
The rise of the creative machines–AI routines that can generate original pictures in response to simple descriptions of the desired image–isn’t something to fear, according to a longtime scholar of digital culture.
“I am no more scared of this than I am of the fill tool,” Jason Scott said in a talk at The Atlantic Festival(Opens in a new window) in Washington, comparing AI image generators like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion to features in Adobe Photoshop. “Or the clone brush.”
Scott, an archivist and curator at the Internet Archive(Opens in a new window), treated the audience to a slideshow of AI illustrations drawn for such requests as “a lion using a laptop, in the style of an old tapestry" or “Godzilla at the signing of the Declaration of Independence." The results generated by these tools, all trained on vast databases of published art, looked both silly and showed a marvelous level of detail.
Later, he staged a live demo of DALL-E. It ably fielded a request for "the moment the dinosaurs went extinct, in the style of Art Nouveau,” but the images it generated for “people at the Atlantic Festival having a great time, in the style of Edward Hopper" evoked yacht rock instead of a Washington magazine’s conference.
“I can't get angry at this toy,” Scott told his onstage interviewer, Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance–warning a moment later that “this toy won't stay neutral.”
His concern isn’t that these tools will snuff out human creativity or put human artists out of work–although he did cite examples of people using AI image generators for such repetitive real-world tasks as creating textures for video games.
Instead, Scott fears that today’s AI angst will lead to a replay of past instances of creators of
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