This time we’re going to be talking AI. The evil technology that’s going to see us all out of work, penniless and potentially working as slaves to a race of malevolent robots gods before the year is out!
Or are we and is it? Should we even be worried about it?
I’d like to present an alternative theory. That AI may very kill many of the current creative businesses. But that could be a good thing…
Hang on to your hats because my alternative view of the whole AI argument includes Jesus Christ, Milli Vanilli, Canadian Prog Rock, the 1930’s philosophical systems of Objectivism and Ethical Egoism AND even a bit of heavy metal. Yep, it’s going to be a bit of a ride!
WHAT IS AI ART?
AI art is art that has been created using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. It can refer to a variety of different forms of art, including visual art (such as paintings or sculptures), music, and literature, that have been created or assisted by AI. Some examples of AI art include:
- Generative art: Art that has been created using AI algorithms that generate unique images or patterns.
- AI-assisted art: Art that has been created using AI tools or techniques to assist the artist in the creative process.
- AI-generated art: Art that has been created entirely by AI algorithms without any human input.
AI art can be created using a variety of different techniques, including machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision. The use of AI in art has the potential to enable artists to create new and unique forms of art that would not have been possible using traditional techniques.
IS AI REALLY ORIGINAL?
AI’s originality is questionable at best. As it is possible for AI-generated art to infringe on image copyrights. If an AI model is trained on a dataset of images that are protected by copyright for instance. At least one AI data set that I learnt of scraped 5.6 billion images illegally from the internet to make its database!
And then if the output of that model is substantially similar to one of the images in the training dataset, then the AI-generated image could potentially be considered a copyright infringement.
However, the question of whether AI-generated art infringes on copyrights is still an open legal question, and it is not yet clear how courts will handle these types of cases. Some have argued that AI-generated art should be considered a form of fair use, while others believe that it should be treated the same as any other type of copyrighted material.
Ultimately, the question of whether AI-generated art infringes on copyrights will depend on the specific circumstances of each case, including the nature of the AI-generated art and the underlying copyrighted material, as well as the laws of the jurisdiction in which the case is being heard.
HOW AND WHEN WILL THIS AFFECT TATTOOING?
We’re currently standing at the very beginning of this technology appearing in our beloved art form/craft. And, just like many the technological advances that have come before it, it is initially being use (in some cases, but not all) by fakers who are standing on the shoulders of giants hoping to pass off AI generated images as works of human art done by themselves. But, this is often the case with emerging technologies that are initially misused by people looking for low effort, high reward shortcuts.
Let’s be real for a second, most of these people are going to use AI to make instant SEO friendly blog posts to earn affiliate money and low quality Etsy shop merch for their side hustles. NOT art.
If we put aside for a second the questionable ethics of this and look at it purely as a technology I think it’s safe to assume that – like other technologies that we now use all the time to create our art – it will eventually mature into a tool used by real human creatives to generate initial rough ideas that can then be used as reference images or preliminary ‘sketches’ to create new and exciting unseen forms and genres. Just like our digital cameras, drawing tablets and image manipulation software.
It is important to consider that AI is very different from the tools we currently have though.
Our current creative tools all require an artists skillset to use them to create. Whereas AI does not. No knowledge of the creative process is required. You simply type in a description of the thing you want and out pops a ‘finished’ piece of ‘original’ art.
LESSONS WE CAN LEARN FROM OTHER ARTFORMS?
Tattooing has, until very recently, not really been affected in the same way that other more financially prosperous art forms have. Our industry was – until a couple of decades ago – actually quite small compared to something like the money making behemoths that are the music or film businesses for instance. Until we all ‘went Hollywood’ we were naturally protected from the kind of dodgy business dealing and shady characters that make up most of these industries because we simply weren’t worth ripping off or faking your way into. But we can look to those industries for indicators of a possible version of our futures. Some of which has already started.
For instance:
- Companies begin to offer endorsements to artists in order to leverage their appeal to sell more products
- Large corporations form and start buying up smaller brands to create monopolies that control promotion and distribution for their products
Sound familiar? It should because these kinds of things happened a long time ago in Hollywood and Nashville and they’re beginning to happen in Tattooing right now. So I think it’s fair to assume that the problems of these other industries will likely become the problems of the future for the Tattoo Industry.
We’ve taken too much for granted, And all the time it had grown
From techno seeds we first planted, Evolved a mind of its own
– Metal Gods. Judas Priest.
METAL GODS
We’ve already seen the quality and individuality of other creative forms eroded by advances in technology. Because Googles AI currently has a reading age of the average 12 year old. Journalists and writers like myself are forced to ‘dumb down’ our writing in order for it to get a good SEO score in Google’s search’
Both Music and movies are actually measurably worse in the digital age. In 2012 a group of researchers undertook a quantitative analysis of nearly half a million songs to look for widespread changes in music’s character over the years. Joan Serrà, a postdoctoral scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, concluded that, after peaking in the 1960s, timbral variety has been in steady decline to the present day.
That implies a homogenisation of the overall timbral palette, which could point to less diversity in instrumentation and recording techniques. Similarly, the pitch content of music has shrivelled somewhat. Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod by their predecessors and contemporaries.
In one of his recent youtube videos Rick Beato – an American YouTube personality, multi-instrumentalist, music producer and educator. Interviewed Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. He and Rick Beato talked about the impact of AI on learning to play instruments and effect on the music industry with Corgan concluding that AI systems will completely dominate music in the next 3 – 20 years
In a later video, Beato theorises that the music industry’s financially motivated bias towards ‘sameness’ and reliance on digital technologies to make up for the lacking abilities of the otherwise photogenic and ‘sellable’ (but talentless and tone deaf) popstars have made it easier for AI to replace them. Because they all do actually sound exactly the same. And this is a problem that Tattooing as an art form could have to face up to in the coming years if AI is going to make artists out of everyone.
IT’S ALL THE FAULT OF ‘THE SUITS’ AND ‘THE TECHS’
We’ve all heard this argument before. The ‘Money Makers’ or ‘The Suits’ love it. They don’t want creatives. We’re difficult to deal with and we just don’t understand ‘The Business’. They’d prefer a bunch of beautiful ‘popcorn’ poster children that will do as they are told and understand that their role is simply to help with sales of ‘The Product’. And, of course that’s true. Up to a point.
It’s true that the Suits love the social media/instagram effect/algorithm that is skewed towards rewarding mass appeal. Because it makes marketing really easy. If you’ve ‘liked’ it before so you’ll like it again and again and again and again and again. But it can be seen that we all lose interest in this approach after a while. When no new stories are being told and no new songs are being sung we get bored and move on. Sticking to ‘what works’ to keep investors happy creates limitations and bad content. Just take a look at the death slide that is Netflix’s rapidly dwindling subscriber numbers. The appalling quality of their recent Resident Evil remake a clear indicator that sticking to formulas doesn’t always deliver.
As for ‘The Techs’, it is my understanding that large numbers of people within the machine learning community are as against AI being released into the wild at this point as we are. AI art is NOT their attempt to destroy our livelihoods it is in fact a tiny step along the path to AGI. Artificial General Intelligence, if it can be achieved could be the greatest thing man has ever done. Imagine a Trillion Nikola Teslas with the sum of all human knowledge at their fingertips tasks with solving the worlds energy problems? Imagine how quickly we could solve some of the worlds biggest problems? Knowing this you should understand why teaching a computer to draw is simply part of teaching it to be a super genius that could save the world! Sadly, it has been released and monetised too early by the ever present greedy, investors looking to make a quick buck.
THE MODERN VERSION OF FAME
We, the artists are not completely blameless of course and – just like our musician brothers and sisters – we need to start taking a long hard look in the mirror before we start putting the blame on everyone else.
Because we – very often – do it to ourselves by chasing the modern version of fame. Social Media has changed the way we all perceive the world and our place in it. Fame is now the goal. But prior to this, it was simply a by-product of being really good at something that connected with lots of others.
Fame was something that happened because you did work that spoke to people and people wanted to know about your work. Fame was not something that could be directly pursued or achieved. Rather, fame was often the result of hard work and talent in a particular field, whether it be acting, music, sports, or something else.
Social media has affected how we all perceive fame and these days it’s the goal and not the destination. This makes the fame hungry amongst us easy to manipulate and ready to compromise their ‘art’ in any way at all in order to achieve that goal. Being famous by any means necessary.
The insta-famous tattoo artists who essentially repeat the same tattoo over and over again and call it a ‘style’ are just like the k-pop factories that churn out the same act with different faces. But they aren’t totally to blame. Our society has shifted towards the society described by Neil Peart in the lyrics to Rush’s 1976 song/album- 2112.
Pronounced “twenty-one twelve” it was inspired by Ayn Rand’s 1937 dystopian fictional novella Anthem, the plot of which bears several similarities to songs Lyrics. “2112” tells a story set in the city of Megadon “where individualism and creativity are outlawed with the population controlled by a cabal of malevolent Priests who reside in the Temples of Syrinx”.By 2112, the world is controlled by the priests who take orders from giant banks of computers inside the temple.Music is unknown in this world absent of creativity and individuality.
“We’ve taken care of everything,
The words you read, the songs you sing
The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes
We are the priests of the Temples of Syrinx,
Our great computers fill the hallowed halls
Don’t annoy us further, We have our work to do.
Just think about the average, What use have they for you?”
If our industry continues on the path of rewarding the medium, mass appeal artists and not the inventive, individual ones we will all find ourself in a slow race to the bottom.
And by doing so we’ll allow technology to replace us in exactly the same way that musicians and actors can be replaced because the less individual we become the easier it is for AI systems to emulate what we do. Because we become predictable and programmable.
MAYBE AI REPLACING US IS THE BEST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN
If you agree with my assessment of the state of our art form. Then you’ll probably agree that our once great temple is now akin to a flea market full of rampant plagiarism that’s been taken over by nothing more than a bunch of charlatans, salesman, con artists and snake charmers.
So maybe it’s time we cleaned house. Just like Jesus expelling the merchants and the money changers from the Temple, that is recounted in all four canonical gospels of the New Testament. A scene that is a common motif in Christian art, apparently.
In this light, AI could actually the best thing that could happen to the industry. My hunch is that as AI takes over music and the ‘Money Changers’ finally get full control of ‘the product’ turning modern music into nothing more than 15 second Tik-Tok Jingles. All perfectly targeted at the correct demographic to fully optimise sales in all markets. People will get bored. Really, really bored. And they’ll stop listening.
Eventually they’ll realise that they preferred the music when it was made by musicians. By Humans that make it. Because art, true art, is a deeply emotional and intuitive process that involves learning. Not only your craft but about self. That’s what speaks to people.
Sometimes, just like vinyl, the only way to show someone how great something is, is to take it away. You don’t know what you has until it’s gone. And that end could be the very thing that will free artists from the money makers once and for all.
So yes, I think AI could be very damaging to the art in our craft but not the craft itself. It may – in fact – be the thing that saves our art form from suffering the same woes that the music business has had to suffer in recent decades by serving to shine a light on the charlatans and allow us to ‘clean house’ before it gets too bad.
Thankfully, you can’t mime a tattoo, but you might be able to lip-sync some ‘art’ in the short term. But only in the short term. Just ask Milli Vanilli.
It’s more likely that the thing that kills the big business version of the art form will be the same thing that allows us, the people to compete with the big brands. If as is predicted chat GPT kills google it’s strangle hold will be released. And if the technology goes on to eventually show everyone what 2112 style big business art actually looks like they’ll get bored.
Then we, who are traditionally kept out of the loop because we just don’t have the funds to access the tools to ‘get trending’ or promote our products will once again be in demand to make real art.
In closing I honestly don’t think AI or any other technology will kill Tattooing now or anytime soon. As long as we stay original and make things that are hard to automate or programme.
Stay Human, stay original and you’ll survive.