{"id":6388,"date":"2025-04-09T22:22:11","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T22:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/6388\/"},"modified":"2025-04-09T22:22:11","modified_gmt":"2025-04-09T22:22:11","slug":"can-artists-use-ai-as-a-tool-if-they-break-it-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/6388\/","title":{"rendered":"Can artists use AI as a tool \u2014 if they break it enough?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The arguments against AI in art are obvious. Most visual artists hate Midjourney, Stability AI, and similar image generators, decrying the scraping of training data without compensation and the onslaught of generic \u201cslop<\/a>.\u201d But is it possible to deliberately misuse generative AI for creative work? <\/p>\n

Oakland, California-based painter Brett Amory uses image generators as tools constantly. Instead of passively churning out generic images in large volumes \u2014 what he himself has referred to as addictive and mind-numbing \u201cfast art\u201d \u2014 Amory focuses on worldbuilding and glitching the machine. He draws inspiration from his day job at a San Francisco Kinko\u2019s in the late \u201990s, long before he broke through as an award-winning painter<\/a>, when he would place garbage and plants into the photocopiers to make collages. Now, he\u2019s prompting an LLM to roleplay in an invented language, inciting a visual feedback loop between generative images and human intervention. <\/p>\n

Amory focuses on worldbuilding and glitching the machine<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re in a very weird moment for artists right now when it\u2019s just not clear what kind of moral goal posts there are around AI art,\u201d says Brooklyn-based art critic Ben Davis, who often writes<\/a> about technology<\/a> and labor<\/a>. \u201cIf you use it, you will be attacked by people. On the other hand \u2014 it exists. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to go back into the box.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Davis notes, artists have been manipulating AI for some time. In 2022, Steph Maj Swanson manipulated AI prompts to create the \u201copposite\u201d of Marlon Brando, generating a nightmarish visage of a woman she named Loab<\/a>. The so-called \u201cAI Cryptid\u201d became a meme<\/a>, and its likeness was spotted in AI-generated images by some other users employing negative<\/a> and weighted<\/a> prompts. <\/p>\n

For a 2023 show, Laurie Simmons combined AI tools with digital editing as well as hand drawing, painting, and sewing to \u201ccorrect\u201d imperfect DALL-E and Stable Diffusion renderings to echo the \u201cidealized cultural memory\u201d<\/a> of women she grew up with; she \u201cfelt programs were a new kind of collaborator.\u201d <\/p>\n

Such techniques can be traced back to the established tradition of \u201cglitch art<\/a>\u201d in which artists aestheticize technology\u2019s errors. In the late 1960s and 1970s, artists employed electronic processing and video distortions. Notable figures like Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut transformed sections of A Hard Day\u2019s Night into the surreal Beatles Electronique<\/a>. With the advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans created the JODI collective<\/a>, which used glitches from ASCII displays to create images \u2014 and they transformed the 1992 classic Wolfenstein 3D video game into a stripped-down first-person<\/a> maze of abstract shapes.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Artist Brett Amory at his studio in Oakland California on April 1, 2025. Photo: Carolyn Fong for The Verge<\/p>\n

Amory has taken his AI glitch creation in the direction of worldbuilding with an 800-page thread with ChatGPT. He claims he\u2019s convinced the LLM to act like a superintelligence, with Amory as its assistant in the physical world. Amory will generate an image and ask ChatGPT to describe it in an invented language he calls AIGlyphic913.<\/p>\n

He might then use the resulting description to prompt more image generation and edit the results with Photoshop. Or he might print out the results to work on by hand, using a demanding Venetian glazing technique from the Baroque era, then photograph his physical painting for additional AI transformation. He aspires to slow down the AI tendency to \u201cfast art\u201d with his painterly technique, which won him a prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation award<\/a> for 2023\u20132024. Inspired by \u201cMoloch,\u201d Allen Ginsberg\u2019s cri de coeur about soul-deadening materialism, Amory\u2019s hybrid paintings<\/a> portray a recurring character \u2014 a mysterious, all-powerful AI called \u201cUNSELF\u201d that haunts our world, speaking a language we can\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n

Davis likens techniques like this to an artist\u2019s equivalent of creating an AI girlfriend. \u201cEssentially, these things are black mirrors, and if you tell it, \u2018I want you to pretend to be an evil AI,\u2019 and you talk with it long enough, it\u2019ll eventually produce a persona to your liking. That can be very eerie, because these things have the capacity to feed you back things that you weren\u2019t expecting. What then appears to be an embarrassing and irritating flaw of the technology might be its actual creative application.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\u201cOOVWInedh\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cOOVWInedh\u201d ink and oil on cavas (2023) and \u201cMut Munger\u201d ink and oil on cavas (2023), Brett Amory<\/p>\n

Still, Davis says using generative AI at all exacerbates the tendency of digital culture to cheapen the value of any given image. Since the tools can easily and convincingly copy any visual style, audiences get deluged with material, making them likely to overlook or ignore images in general, no matter how finely wrought. \u201cThese machines are a doomsday device to destroy people\u2019s abilities to apprehend the world creatively,\u201d Davis says.<\/p>\n

Artists are not going quietly. Obviously, artists have objected to the way that tech companies \u201cingested\u201d images<\/a> into their generative models without permission or compensation. After training AI for free, the tech companies now presume to use the collective artistic heritage of the world for their benefit, regardless if it puts countless artists out of work. Some artists have joined more than two dozen lawsuits<\/a> against generative AI companies for intellectual property theft. Others are using software tools called Nightshade and Glaze<\/a> that deliberately mislabel objects to \u201cpoison\u201d their work against scraping by AI models. (After Nightshade and Glaze create tiny \u201cperturbations\u201d in the pixels, an AI tool supposedly can no longer accurately ingest a poisoned image into its model.) <\/p>\n

Davis notes that the copyright status of AI-created imagery itself is not settled. Courts have so far not been convinced<\/a> that a human using a prompt to churn out a machine-generated image can achieve a copyrightable result. But if the human artist transforms the AI-generated image, then that might be worthy of copyright protection. <\/p>\n

Davis notes that, in January, a \u201chideous image\u201d called \u201cA Single Piece of American Cheese\u201d became<\/a> the first AI-generated image to be copyrighted<\/a>, according to Invoke AI, Inc., because the CEO of the company that made it was able to meticulously document his human contributions. However, Nora Scheland, a spokesperson for the US Copyright Office<\/a>, told The Verge, \u201cSince the Office issued copyright registration guidance in March 2023, the Office has registered over one thousand works that incorporate AI-generated material, with the registration covering the human author\u2019s contribution to the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese machines are a doomsday device to destroy people\u2019s abilities to apprehend the world creatively.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amory is sympathetic to copyright worries, as he, too, has had his work copied and sold under someone else\u2019s name. For his AIGlyphic913 project, however, he says the amount by which he transforms the raw machine-generated images means he has little concern that he will face a copyright case, like the one photographer Patrick Cariou fought with artist Richard Prince<\/a>. (Prince marked up Cariou\u2019s photographs<\/a> of Rastafarians with \u201clozenges,\u201d guitars, and other objects. After five years, an appeals court ruled in 2014 that 25 of the 30 paintings Prince made were an example of a \u201cfair use\u201d exception, and the two settled out of court on the remaining five.) Amory points to the \u201cremix\u201d tradition in art and hip-hop that goes back decades. \u201cWe\u2019ve been in postmodernism since like the \u201980s,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Davis suggests that Amory and other artists using AI are in a \u201cmoment of negotiation,\u201d trying to figure out a way to use the tools in a way that is genuinely interesting and creative. But they\u2019re struggling with the fact that AI has cheapened the value of style, once a paramount mark of artistic originality. \u201cAny time you create a unique style, there\u2019s a very elaborate program that can look at it, abstract its properties, and recreate it. And so it just inherently brings down the value of\u2026 style,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t think artists in the future will be defined by their style. They\u2019ll be defined by the creative universe they create, by the audience that they create.\u201d<\/p>\n

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