The Legitimacy of AI Art Tools

Statistically, 90% of your LinkedIn feed is now "prompt engineers" pretending they went to art school.

Artists often disparage AI art itself for being derivative to a rudimentary, crippling degree and see it as something to be avoided. But what about AI tools? Can they be used to our advantage? Is it worth using them? 

Are the AI art tools democratizing art, or killing the craft?

The answer is a little complicated. Say you have an image that you created but lost the original copy of, so all you have left is a smaller version of the original. In that scenario, it’s not entirely out of the question to use AI to upscale it, right? In fact, many Adobe products like Photoshop have these features built in, so there’s no avoiding it.

The fact of the matter is, many of these tools are getting rolled into the very products that we use to shape and refine our artwork. We either have to move with the times and find ways to use them ethically or remain Luddites.

At TERAVARNA, we get some artwork that’s either entirely AI or refined with AI, and we have to ask ourselves difficult questions. Do we accept this as artwork?

Again, the answer is complicated. I have seen artists use images produced from neural networks; soupy, dream-like collage-ish images, and use them as a reference for their oil paintings. Conversely, I’ve also seen people type in a sentence and have AI churn out an image for them. This is to say that there are degrees to using AI in your artistic process. Some people have mastered using it as a tool, a natural stepping stone, while others rely on it heavily as a crutch.

The scenario I stated earlier for upscaling lost art is one that I find myself in more often than I’d like. My thoughts on it personally? I have tried upscaling my own art using AI, and I’m just not happy with the results. It often introduces artifacts and errors and is still vastly imperfect. I would rather not have to resort to it at all, but as technology advances, it will become harder and harder to avoid it.