Ai art is social art

AI Art is social art

I’m bewildered by the apparently good-faith criticism that entertains the framing that “AI Art” is somehow art made without or beyond humans. It is by every obvious measure one of the most socially-and-historically-entwined methods of producing an image ever devised.

At the time of writing, generating an image with a paid Midjourney account involves:

• sharing your contact and credit card details
• typing human language into a Discord in front of other people
• waiting for your prompt to be processed by a model written and trained by other people, using one of the largest sets of human-made images ever assembled
• receiving an image over the human-made internet

And if you share it, you’ll probably do so on one of the handful of mega-sites that dominate the web.

To say that a human is not involved in the production of art using this process means you are locating the “art” part of the process somewhere very specifically out of reach of these measures.

#done