workflows to create high-quality art, even for those without much training

“People will be able to create deeply personal works with models trained on an artist’s photography, writing, or other creative inputs,” said Cansu Peker, founder of the Digital Arts Blog. An example: Sweden-based artist Lela Amparo merges her photographs with machine-imagined worlds. The otherworldly landscapes “feel both alien and intimately personal,” Peker said in an email.

This is because if you spend more than 45 seconds thinking about it, rather than allowing it to glitch past at 2x speed on a business podcast, it becomes so patently ridiculous that it is almost offensive. I know it is offensive to many artists, especially since it’s deployed in service of achieving *precisely the opposite aim* that it purports to. AI will not democratize creativity, it will let corporations squeeze creative labor, capitalize on the works that creatives have already made, and send any profits upstream, to Silicon Valley tech companies where power and influence will concentrate in an ever-smaller number of hands. The artists, of course, get 0 opportunities for meaningful consent or input into any of the above events. Please tell me with a straight face how this can be described as a democratic process.

The other thing that really irks artists and creatives is that making art is already a fundamentally democratic process. Anyone can do it! (Hence the pick up a pencil meme.) It just takes time, effort, training, dedication, a development of craft. AI advocates have tried to argue that AI helps disabled people create art—but the already plenty vibrant disabled artist community shut that down extremely quickly. No, it’s making a living practicing art that is the tricky part, the already deeply precarious part—and it’s that part to which the AI companies are taking a battering ram.

It’s true that, as Murati points out, not everyone has the right industry contacts, but how does AI change the equation there? Besides, that is, making matters worse? With AI giving rise to a flood of samey-looking AI output, if anything, industry connections only matter more; the science fiction magazine Clarkesworld had to close its submissions, as its editors no longer had time to wade through reams of mediocre ChatGPT output, and turned to working only with writers they recognized or already had relationships with. As far as I’ve seen, no one who’s arguing that AI is a harbinger for a new democratized paradigm of creativity has offered an explanation of how the current gatekeepers might be done away with, what that might mean for a society with a functioning creative economy, or how the industries that creatives rely on to pay rent will in any way be made more equitable by its arrival.

Of course they haven’t. To the big AI companies, none of that enters into the equation. The democratization pitch is aimed not at aspiring artists, but at tech enthusiasts who may or may not feel that largely abstracted gatekeepers have been unkind to them or derided their cultural contributions, who feel satisfaction at seeing slick-looking images produced from their prompting and eagerly share and promote the results, and industries who read the ‘democratize’ lingo as code for ‘cheap’, and would like to automate the production of images, text, or video.