AI illustrations. They are everywhere online these days, if your Facebook feed is anything like mine. And you can see why. It takes seconds to make a cartoon using AI, compared with the hours (trust me) that it takes an actual human cartoonist (this human cartoonist, at least!).
First thing to say: the ethics around AI are complicated, and I’m not going to make any general pronouncements (you’ll be glad to hear) about the technology in general. But as an artist I do have views on AI art in particular.
So, why not use AI to make a picture for your [thing you need a picture for]? Well, here’s my perspective. There’s a number of things to dislike about AI illustrations, and reasons not to use them:
- They look terrible. There’s the obvious things, like the wrong numbers of fingers on a hand, the cliched (yet inconsistent) style, and quite often the yellowish tinge. But it’s more than that: AI really can’t do composition, for instance, meaning that an image is quite likely to say things you really didn’t mean it to. There’s examples of pages that show up in my feed that are posting cartoons they really haven’t bothered to think through, and are saying things they really don’t intend.
- There’s an ethical element. AI models are trained on real artists work, those creators not giving permission or being compensated in any way. Essentially: from my point of view – it’s theft.
- There’s an environmental issue. Data centres use a huge amount of water and power, and the current stats for this are only set to increase astronomically. In a time of climate crisis we need to drastically reduce energy use, most especially when it’s non-essential.
- Other people notice if you post AI artwork. Use of AI artwork on a page / book / website / magazine says more about the person posting it and their values than they realise.
- Real human creators and craftspeople are worth supporting. Every use of an AI image is a vote against genuine artists.
The response from people who use AI is often ‘It’s the real world we live in now – get with it’, or similar. But to me that just doesn’t wash. Just because lots of people are doing something doesn’t make it right, and doesn’t make it something you are obligated to join in with.
So, here’s my request. Please resist use of AI for creation of images. Please don’t support (for example) Facebook pages that use it by liking or following. And when, inevitably, someone says ‘we could use AI illustrations for our church magazine’ please be the person who votes against!
Thank you to everyone who supports real artists – we really appreciate you.
