Letter to the Editor: AI content is not art: a response to “Do Androids dream of fascist censorship” 

First allow us to make an important distinction: AI generated content is not art. Art is uniquely human, and even as Artificial Intelligence continues to become more advanced, it is still far from emulating the complexity and empathy needed for artistic works. For example, artists create work influenced by their experiences; AI interpolates based on the work it has been trained on. 

Of course this leads us to the next concern. The article states that the artist “is certainly unaccustomed to his paintbrush, (sic) flat out refusing to allow him to paint a particular subject.” The implication here is that AI is the paintbrush. However, this analogy misses another issue. If the AI is the paintbrush, it must also be the paint, the vision and the executor. Feeding a prompt to a generative AI is not creating art. It is, rather, akin to commissioning a work from an artist. If the AI is generating the content, is that content really yours? Or does it belong to the collective artists that, either knowingly or not, provided the data used to train the AI? 

This is the ethical question that we should consider around the issue of generative AI: is this generated content actually the AI’s? Further, if one were to claim that, yes, AI generated content is art and yes, it is original, they would have to contend with the fact that the AI in this case is not the paintbrush, but the artist. An artist can refuse a commission. An AI can refuse to answer a prompt. 

Understanding AI in this manner allows us to finally address the issue of “censorship” within AI. If an AI refuses to provide an answer to a question it sees as asking it for “the creation of harmful content,” then that is the choice of the private entity—for ChatGPT, that would be OpenAI—that controls its use. If you believe that a “critical examination” requires satire that the machine doesn’t understand, then that just shows the complexity of art and expression and shows the lack of AI’s ability to empathize or understand context. 

So, when you have an idea for an artwork, don’t just ask AI to create it. Create it yourself. Engage in the process of making something wholly new; not something derived or made for you. Then you know you are an artist and that your work is your own.