What horror awaits the art institution?

Was interested to see this article on Vice Today: Here’s How Art Schools Are Dealing With The Rise of AI Generators. It inspired me to summarize some of the points arising in the article and to provide some thoughts on each:

Allow the use of AI Generators in class but issue guidelines to how students can use them.

Ok, but I think this will soon seem really outdated, like for your collage assignment you can use images manipulated in Photoshop but only if you don’t use the Healing Brush tool.

Art made using AI Generators should not / never be legitimized as a craft.

We have to make a distinction between the “one and done” quickie image-maker approach (stereotype?) that I think most people have in mind when they think of art made with an AI generator. Press a button and you have your illustration: pop the illustration in to your book and you are DONE, how cool, and it’s free!

But this isn’t how most artists are working (or will ultimately work) with this technology. (First of all there are artists working in about a zillion different ways with AI), but I think it’s like any other kind of artistic engagement with technology: Artists working with new technologies are generally focused on the medium as a conceptual framework, exploring the potential of the medium through the medium itself. Or alternately, using technologies to expose social and political limitations of technologies and systems. So yeah it should be legitimized. And weirdly, “craft” might actually be the right term here - there is real skill required to collaborate with these generators in order to articulate a specific result. BTW I think the term “prompt craft” should be killed if it isn’t dead already.

Artists need skills that go beyond being able to type a prompt into a generator.

Der.

We think there’s a risk that an art student will type “a phrase into a text prompt” and turn it in as their own work.

I see zero risk of this happening with a single text prompt. Can you imagine someone passing in an AI generated fake pastel picture of a cat or something?

“Masterful work! However the reductive quality of the figurative-narrative line-space matrix spatially undermines the substructure.”

Art schools should be aiming to teach artists to be independent of specific tools.

They do this already. If we’re looking at it as a tool, then it is no different than any other tool, and the prevailing wisdom is to encourage platform agnoticism. Plus generally art schools don’t incorporate the actual learning of the software into curriculum because they are too busy with the business of instilling criticality and curiosity into uncompromising 20 year old minds (jk), so this would probably be like that.

AI is a tool that students should be encouraged to explore.

I think so, yes. Not everyone wants to work with technology in their art practice but if I were in art school right now I’d be super pissed if my instructors weren’t paying attention to the massive cultural shifts that AI has the potential to trigger in society and culture that will inevitably transform the way art is created, presented, and understood.

There are different art worlds.

Yes, I think the world of game artists for example would have a completely different take on all of this.

Faculty should be able to set their own policy on the use or framing of AI in art production or practice.

Of course it’s their job to think everything through on their own terms. I would hope though that on this subject we end up with more nuance than just sending the message that these technologies are to be feared or ignored.

Some faculty are not familiar with concepts of algorithmic production.

Nothing has ever been truer.

We should watch out for incoming students who have produced their entire portfolio using an AI generator.

This is a ridiculous concept. Check back in a year and see if this has ever even come close to happening in a “I’m a huge faker” way.

Wombo (for example) can free the mind in a way that spurs human creation.

I would say that art has always been in a unique position when it comes to new technologies because technologies can assist, deepen and augment human creativity and expression. But even more basic is that artists look at things to find inspiration. Consider it like today’s plein air painting or something, where viewing a figure that has 12 sausages for fingers shakes something loose in your imagination. What could be wrong with that?