Alec Adams Art

Do I use AI in any part of my art process?

Fuck no.

Let’s talk about that.

How is generative AI created? Generative AI is trained on and built from stolen work. Full stop.

Tech companies scoured the internet for every painting, every book, article, drawing, photograph, social media post (even personal photos of you and your kids), chat messages, search history, emails, your google docs and MORE to build their training data. ALL without any permission. That’s called theft.

If I stole lumber from my neighbor’s yard to build my bookshelf I would still be a thief and my neighbors would be taking me to court or busting my kneecaps.

In terms of making artwork, using AI is a non-starter for me, even as reference. Putting aside its uncanny, wonky output, there is another glaring issue I have with it. There is no way for me to know what the AI is using as its sources and how much of it has been used for anything it generates. If I were to use it to make an image, I could be walking directly into a plagiarism minefield. I already know it’s been trained on stolen copyrighted material and people’s personal photos. Why would I trust its output to be anything approaching original?

So what if they made an AI and it was trained on only my work or it was never trained on anything stolen?

Welp, two things about that.

One: There is an AI built like that and it doesn’t work very well, because the only reason generative AI works as well as it does is because it was trained on millions of other people’s stolen work and data. It also doesn’t solve any of the other problems I have with it.

Two: I love making art. Why would I want the AI to make my art for me?

Moving on.

Another reason why I don’t use generative AI is that algorithms already make too many decisions* for us. What we watch on YouTube, what and who we see on social media, which ads we get assaulted with, what we are shown in our internet searches, etc. AI is just another algorithm. Currently “AI” is just being used as a marketing term to bait investors and misinform customers/general public. It doesn’t think. It’s not intelligent. It is just a very expensive, sophisticated pattern recognition and regurgitation algorithm.

Making decisions is a critical part of making art. What color to use, how to place the subject in the composition, where the lighting is coming from, what am I trying to communicate... You get the idea. I do not want or need a fancy algorithm making those choices for me. If you allow a bot to make those decisions* for you, your own decision-making skills and critical thinking will atrophy. If your skills go to shit you will become dependent on using their software, be stuck paying a monthly fee to use it and eventually be more easily replaced by it. That is by design by the way.

*AI is not really “deciding” anything. It’s more like a random die roll based on a prompt and data points, but hey, I just don’t feel like splitting that many hairs right now.

I’ve also heard the argument before that “AI learns just like humans do.” No, it doesn’t. I can prove it too. I can still learn things when I study a glazed or nightshaded image. AI gets poisoned by it because it doesn’t even “look at” the image the way a person does, let alone “learn” from it.

This version of “AI” is NOT the Johnny Five, Data from Star Trek or the Terminator. It’s image and text generators hooked up to chat bots funded by billionaire assholes who want to cut skilled laborers out of their profit margin. And no, the irony (hypocrisy?) of me making Terminator art to go along with this opinion piece is not lost on me.

“There is no ethical way to use major AI image generators. All of them are built for the purpose of deskilling, dis-empowering and replacing real, human artists.”- Molly Crabapple speaking to LA Times

It immeasurably benefits tech companies if we become reliant on their AI to make our work. Their hope is for mass adoption of their software and for us to not be able to live our lives let alone create artwork without it. Even in the short term companies are attempting to use AI to replace their workers. People are being forced to train their own AI replacements and then losing their jobs. Why would I want to support my own replacement by using their fancy little algorithm to make my art?

Speaking of the vile idea of gen AI making my art. It’s no longer going to be my art if a bot is just making it for me… That would make me the client, not the artist. You know what I like? Being an artist. I love making stuff and I am definitely not going to hand any part of that over to a corporate-owned clanker so I can be freed up to… to… Actually, what is the end game here for me as an artist? To churn out worse work faster? Skipping the part of the work that I love and that actually grows my skill as an artist?

No, fucking, thanks.

All of this is plenty of reason why I don’t use AI in my studio work or my writing (or anything else).

Anyway, here are some additional “highlights” of why I have no interest in using this technology.

I associate AI images and video with scams. Every day, I see scams that use gen AI images, text, or video, whether it be ads for a fake robot puppy, an impossible home gadget, scam crochet patterns, hastily slapped together AI slop being sold as stock “art,” or fascist propaganda emulating the look of Miyazaki. For me, AI just communicates lazy, cheap, and scam. I sure as hell don’t want my artwork to be associated with any of that.

The power and water usage needed to run AI data centers is destructive to the environment and is causing the cost of utilities near data centers to skyrocket. The argument that this will all be solved in some hypothetical future is a load of horseshit. We live in the present. How about they solve those problems BEFORE they start building dozens of shopping-mall-sized data centers in every damn state?

Another big beef I have is that this technology just isn’t even ready to be used yet. It’s unfinished and being pushed out with no meaningful guardrails. It is consistently wrong and even dangerous to some users.

Google’s AI overview gave a recipe for spaghetti that included gasoline as an ingredient and told users it’s healthy to eat rocks. This is a pretty good example of how AI just chops up already existing information scraped from the internet (including silly nonsense from the Onion) and presents it as fact devoid of any context or sources.

An AI agent deleted a company’s entire database and all of their backups. Well, I sure don’t want anything like that near any of my personal data or banking, or managing my projects.

Vulnerable people’s lives are being upended by AI psychosis and AI chat bots are encouraging others in crisis to end their lives.

So, with that out of the way, here are some last thoughts on this topic before this gets even longer.

I’ve heard arguments like “the cat’s out of the bag” and “we can’t put the genie back in the bottle.” These people tell me there is nothing we can do about this, so we might as well just be on board with using it.

This is a lazy take.

Regulations CAN be put in place to better control its use. Companies can be forced to delete their data sets and rebuild without using stolen work. Data centers can be held to higher standards to avoid harming the environment. Legislation can be made to have these billion (trillion?) dollar companies foot the bill for the insane cost of utilities due to their campus-sized data centers.

Right now, at very least, I can do one thing.

Not use AI.

Anyway, that’s why I don’t use AI in my studio practice or anything else for that matter.

If you read this far, thanks so much! You’re awesome!

-Alec

PS: Everything written above is just my opinion and is not an invitation for an argument or debate about it.

Extra Bonus: “You’ll be left behind!” Just like I was with NFTs or 3D televisions? Yeah, whatever man.