FEBRUARY 2023
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Sketchy or priceless? Artists reflect on implications, impacts of AI-generated art By Savan Bollu
While an artist uses a lifetime of experience and carefully honed technical skill to create their art, Artificial Intelligence (AI) art programs like DALL·E 2 and Dream can generate artwork in mere seconds based on short text prompts from users. In response, artists have expressed both excitement and concern. Junior Agna Soneji, an AP Art and Design student, carefully crafts the composition and color in her art to convey emotion, she said. AI doesn’t put the same emotion and background in its art, she said. “I don’t think it has the authenticity of art,” Soneji said. “It doesn’t have the meaningfulness we find in art.” Artists and hand-made artwork may become undervalued because people can now generate art using the internet, Soneji said. Copyright issues are another concern because AI art is generated from existing human artwork that may have been used without artists’ permission, she said. “I think they’ve ripped off artists and have just cut-and-pasted pieces, and that should (violate) copyright because you’re using other people’s art to make something out of a computer,” Soneji said. “Just like you can’t use ChatGPT
for an essay, that’s what you’re doing for art. It’s ripping it off and saying it’s your own.” Ceramics teacher Jeff Albrecht has spent the last decade selling artwork in galleries in Hawaii and around the world, he said. People buy his art because of the emotions he instills in it based on his experiences and the subsequent connection that people make with it, he said. “If I go into my studio and it takes me two nights to work on a piece, it’s really a culmination of all those years and all those projects that I’ve played around (with) and explored,” Albrecht said. “Really, paintings take me 50 years. The next year, they’ll take me 51 years. It’s a process, and it’s a journey.” Just like some of Albrecht’s clients prefer purchasing his original paintings instead of a print, there will always be people in the world who value a oneof-a-kind artwork touched by a human, Albrecht said. As a result, he is not concerned about AI replacing artists, he said. “There are billions of people on the planet,” Albrecht said. “I know that no matter what happens with AI, I’m never going to have one of my paintings in everyone’s house. … Since that market is never going to be oversaturated with my artwork, why am I concerned about
AI, which is a totally different vertical in the art world?” AI is a powerful tool that is already integrated into platforms like Photoshop, and Albrecht may even consider using it to make art in the future, he said. In a changing art world, Albrecht recommend that artists try different types of art instead of specializing in a single area that AI could easily take over, and to be cautious when posting pictures of artwork online to avoid unwanted additions to AI databases, he added. “Those are some of the challenges you’ve got to be aware of, and you can’t let them stop you (from making or selling art),” Albrecht said. “You adjust and you adapt.” Alternatively, AI can make art more accessible by encouraging people who aren’t as technically skilled to make art, drawing teacher Hyemin Jo said. “There are always going to be people who appreciate traditional art, so I don’t think it’s going to take away their (artists’) jobs,” Jo said. “But by making art a lot more approachable to a
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larger population, it actually opens the door for more people instead of closing (them).” Jo compared users who generate AI art to Marcel Duchamp, an artist who found a urinal and signed it with a made-up signature, creating a controversial yet revolutionary piece of art that museums still showcase today, she said. People debate whether his work was art because he did not make the urinal from scratch, Jo said. However, she views his work as art, she said. “I think just coming up with a creative idea and showing it visually itself is already an art,” Jo said.
Savan Bollu | THE UNION
Courtesy of West Park Gallery The painting “Forever Flying” by Albrecht.
AI art generated on Dream with the prompt “An acrylic painting of a flying American flag in extreme colors,” with art style set to “Expressionism” and allowance of “Minor influence” from Albrecht’s “Forever Flying” painting.
Computer scientists consider benefits, drawbacks of ChatGPT By Sidhant Burela
Courtesy of ChatGPT Student inputs a prompt about cheating on ChatGPT and it generates a continuous response until the user requests it to stop.
Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT have sparked concerns over the future of the education system. For some people, these developments just create an easy opportunity to cheat, but for others, they represent an integral technological advancement in society. ChatGPT is a program that is causing controversy over the issue of cheating in the classroom. Designed by OpenAI, the software can respond to anything the user asks quickly and effectively. The program is able to process and create answers that can have the authenticity of a human by pulling information from all over the internet. This creates problems in the classroom environment as students are able to give ChatGPT an essay prompt and the program is able to reply with a full essay on the prompt in seconds, allowing students to easily copy and paste. While this software is the perfect breeding ground for cheating in schools, ChatGPT represents much bigger real world developments, AP Computer Science teacher Charles Castleman said. “I think the advancement of technology and AI is reality,” Castleman said. “It’s not like we can decide that we don’t want to advance in things that could potentially help us solve our problems as a society and solve engineering problems just because it creates issues in schools.” However, the way ChatGPT obtains information causes problems as to whether or not all the information ChatGPT replies with is true, according to “AI experts on whether you should be ‘terrified’ of ChatGPT”. “It (ChatGPT) wasn’t taught to understand what is fact, what is fiction, or anything like that,” AI researcher Timnit Gebru said. “It’ll just sort of parrot back what was on the internet.” This program is not perfect, Castleman said. For example, when asked whether the root of four is rational or irrational, the program replied by giving proof as to why the root of four is ir-
rational, he said. However, after giving the program the same prompt a week later, ChatGPT was able to correctly say that the number is rational, he explained. Rather than spelling disaster for the education system, AI could assist it in some cases, junior and five-year coder Arnav Khinvasara said. “I think as we progress more towards AI, the classroom environment will be different,” Khinvasara said. “We will have different things teaching us, maybe not just teachers or platforms that we have right now.” Cheating is nothing new as there have always been resources available to students that encourage it, Castleman said. “There are other ways (to cheat) even before there was ChatGPT,” Castleman said. “Quizlet, things like that with students being able to look up answers.” In addition, blocking ChatGPT in the school environment and creating necessary programs to detect whether or not ChatGPT was used would curb the amount of cheating, Khinvasara said. “As we are using AI more, and as we progress, we will learn more about how to stop AI in some situations where we don’t want AI to be useful … in cheating, for example,” Khinvasara said. Castleman explained that a way to reduce the ChatGPT use is to form a curriculum based more on understanding and developing, he said. “I think while ChatGPT can give you answers to certain questions, it doesn’t tell you what questions to ask,” Castleman said. “You still have to know the basics. Just because we have calculators doesn’t mean we stop teaching first and second graders basic math. Because if you don’t know the basics, you won’t be able to learn stuff later,” he said. While developments in AI will affect the education system, that doesn’t mean that there is anything inherently wrong with ChatGPT, only the way it is used, Castleman said. “I don’t think there is anything wrong with building tools to help us think,” Castleman said. “The problem is when they begin to think for us.”