AI art and the future of visual creativity
This New York Times article, "Opinion: The Starving Artist vs A.I Guess Who Is Winning?" is an insightful look at one of the most significant questions raised by the sudden emergence of generative AI: If visual artists are already starving, how are they going to make a living, and how might the future of visual art suffer and/or benefit? Personally, I've had mixed feelings about generative AI, both on the word side and the image side, from the beginning. I worry about the word side because Large Language Models can already write better than some of my college students could -- I'm not saying that LLM writing is good, only that it's not-badness is scary to a person who has made his living writing. (I prompted chatGPT to write and illustrate a novel about Descartes and the mystical roots of the enlightenment -- not very good, but again, scarily not-that-bad.
LLMs derive their power from the digital cultural heritage of humankind, including millions of books and articles without the permission of authors -- myself among them. I know that my work is part of the corpus that at least one model was trained on. One of the largest LLM companies, Anthropic, was sued by several authors...who won:
Bartz v. Anthropic is one of the major copyright lawsuits brought by authors against an AI company for using books without permission to train large language models. It was filed by nonfiction authors Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse) and Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief) and thriller author Andrea Bartz (We Were Never Here).
In June 2025, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled on summary judgment that using books without permission to train AI was fair use if they were acquired legally, but he denied Anthropic’s request for summary judgment related to piracy—finding that the piracy was not fair use. Judge Alsup scheduled a trial to determine Anthropic’s potential liability for piracy for December 1, 2025.
The lawsuit website includes a lookup service for authors: I found that Anthropic had used 4 of my books and several of my co-authored books. If you were to ask me if I feel ripped off, I would say that I am happy to contribute to culture. If you were to ask me if I would refuse to participate in the settlement on principle I would say "are you kidding me?"
Back to the topic of the New York Times article. I was once automated out of a graphic artist job. Before PowerPoint, people could make a living or a side gig out of preparing charts for presentations and meetings. We used x-acto knives, rubber cement, press-type and hand-drawn and colored illustrations. I remember once when the new publisher of Saturday Review proposed to split it into four magazines. We helped create the charts for the presentation to backers. The threat today is much broader: people who make a good living or a side gig by creating visual art commercially using analog or digital tools are already being displaced. This, the authors of the Times article propose, poses a real threat to the future of visual creativity.
Photography did not destroy drawing and painting, although those humans who made their living creating commercial drawings and paintings were encroached upon although hardly eliminated. I doubt whether many who share trepidation about AI art would dispute that Photoshop can be a creative tool in the hands of a skiled artist. And among the piles of AI slop is a not easily dismissed and growing portfolio of art created by humans in collaboration with generative AI. If my position seems ambiguous, it's because I'm ambivalent. Of one thing I am sure: generative AI in the realm of the word and the image is not going to go away. I remember how excited I was in 1984 when the Macintosh and Macpaint made it possible to maniupulate images at the level of pixels. In 1987, PhotoShop was created. I'm pretty certain we are in the Macpaint era of generative AI. If it isn't going away, how will we live with it?