No Balance: Why We Should Reject AI In The Arts

Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It has colonised our phones and workspaces, and is seeking to expand its grip over our lives even further. We use it to proofread our essays (and write them), check code, transform medical research, and make just about everything across society more efficient. As a result, AI has come to be seen as the essential ingredient that we must cram into every corner of society. 

I am not someone who sees AI as an essential ingredient. In fact, I mostly despise AI and the excessive attempts to cram it onto our phones, plaster it across our screens, and put it just about anywhere possible. In this moment, regardless of whether we want it or whether it provides any material benefit, everything must be AI, but do you really need an AI assistant in your car/fridge/etc? Do you need these assistants to conduct what is effectively a google search, while using exponentially more resources? These are all huge concerns that I have with AI, but one is more pressing still: artificial intelligence and its impact on the arts. 

The arts are a sacred space, and have been for centuries (I know this because I inhabit the space - I create illustrations (such as all of Europinion’s cover arts) and have, alongside politics, studied art for years). I don’t think saying the arts are sacred is a lofty argument to make, after all, the arts and their outputs are a uniquely expressive format, one that is uniquely centred around the human experience. Art, music and every other creative endeavour has value because of this, and only because of this. When an LLM produces a song, even if it is indeed catchy and can top the charts, does it actually have any meaning or merit? This is something that should preoccupy us all, and something we should fight to keep sacred. 

To more fully understand AI, and my deep concerns with its presence in the arts, we should start by understanding the product we are talking about. AI at its essence is largely, if not exclusively, the product of theft. The models you rely on, and the tools which aid ‘AI powered creativity’, are built on the exploitation of the arts and the creatives who inhabit these industries. The tools which allow you to seamlessly create an image or video from the prompt you want are possible only because the companies which own these models have scraped and pillaged online spaces. These companies have fed our art, music and literature into the AI wood chipper and produced a product that relies, insatiably, on our work.

Both internally and externally, AI is a product that relies on work it can’t afford to pay for - just look to the way hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books were fed into LLMs or the way OpenAI’s ChatGPT produced carbon copies of the intellectual property Hayao Miyazaki had so long sought to protect. For its entire existence AI and its LLMs have, without consent, been chewing up the outputs of the arts to create a product, a product that is marketed as if it was trained on prestigiously selected works. 

Without creatives, and their exploitation by huge AI companies, there would be no AI art, no AI music, and no tools with which people can ‘enhance’ and supposedly ‘democratise’ creativity with. When we permit artificial intelligence, and the ‘tools’ it brings with it, in the creative arena, we are tacitly accepting that huge companies can thieve whatever they want, free of traditional legal constraints and norms. The reality, the very foundation, of these products is that they were built by excluding the industry where vast swathes of the content that trains AI’s LLMs come from. 

A product like this, created at the expense of the art, music, film and more, is hardly going to be one that respects the industry, and makes the comparisons between a supermarket and an organic grocery store laughable. The reality is more akin to comparisons between corporations that use improper market tactics to undercut other business and impose themselves on the market. AI will seek to empty the arts of value, turning it into an equation of mere cost-benefit analysis, driving everyone to think only of cost, and make the output irrelevant. It will not be something people will have the luxury to escape, so say goodbye to models, editors, illustrators, photographers, and everyone else who enriches society with their work.

Most importantly, the idea we can (and will) strike a balance with AI in the arts is fanciful. You might say ‘oh they should just pay you for your work’, which works, until we recognise companies that have never, and will never, respect creativity will not suddenly shed their values overnight. If we permit this technology's entry into the arts, we will inevitably start a process where it comes back for more and more. It will be a process that spares no one. What will be a balance or ‘tiering’ today, will tilt into something else tomorrow. AI’s normalisation in the industry will open up a slippery slope, which eventually changes the notion of art so fundamentally that we will lose the very choice that the proponents of AI shout about to justify AI’s entry to this industry. Who needs any kind of human induced cost anymore anyway? AI will not simply stop once the photoshoot lead-times are more efficient or the costs on an ad campaign are cut down, it will slowly (or quickly) eradicate the entire chain of creatives within the ecosystem - an ecosystem that is a powerhouse of Britain. 

When creatives decry AI and its ability to kill the industry, they are not decrying technological change. We have always celebrated the democratisation of the arts, the ability of technology to make the arts cheaper, more efficient, and more accessible. AI is not that. It is not a technological wonder, it is theft - a product so antithetical to the core of the arts it should be allowed nowhere near it. To negotiate with a product that has never treated the arts with respect or deference, will lead us nowhere good. In fact, it will ensure the companies that oversee these supposed tools of creation come back for more. We should certainly fight for the way we want AI to interact with our creativity in art, music and more, and so we should be fighting to make it a pariah for as long as we can.

In this moment, and in the future, with AI able to replace ‘true’ art and the creatives behind it, we will have to fight the idea that AI has a place in the arts. We will have to do this over and over. Rather than capitulating everything straight away, we should fight for a world in which there is endless choice, and space for a thriving ecosystem of creatives (something which is quickly shrinking today, and a phenomenon AI will make far worse). AI will dramatically narrow the confines of the artistic world, if we let it. So we shouldn’t. 

When we reduce the arts to mere cost-benefit analysis, it is a damning indictment on society. When we believe AI will simply exist to make the arts more efficient we are extremely naive. When we normalise theft under the guise of fair use, we denigrate the creators of art. When we state human made art should become a ‘status signal’, we perpetuate, even worsen, the very inaccessibility to the arts we seek to eradicate. I produce art every day, and I love the arts, I cannot in good conscience say I want to let AI and its exploitative nature run rampant across an industry that makes the world so exciting to live in.

Illustration: Will Allen/Europinion