The Old-Fashioned Way

The Old-Fashioned Way by Iris Carden

I saw a post on Twitter the other day. Someone was boasting they wrote, illustrated and published a book all in one weekend.

How did they achieve that? They used artificial intelligence. One AI program wrote the book and another illustrated it. All the “author” provided was an idea.

In a sense I’m envious. I still do things the old-fashioned way, with my brain and my fingers to type my stories and draw (admittedly, often terrible) illustrations.

In another way, I’m pretty annoyed. You see AI doesn’t invent new illustrations or stories. It steals them. It takes the work of authors or artists, and uses that as a base to present something “new”.

Then the people using AI to “create” something claim it’s their own work.

That means people purchasing this work don’t know if it was written/drawn by the person who claims to be the author/artist.

For me, this raises multiple ethical issues:

• Is the customer getting what they think they are buying?
• Is it truly the author/artist’s work if it’s taken from samples of other people’s work?
• Why isn’t there acknowledgement/payments to the artists/authors whose work is used as a base for the product?

I expect that ai-generated arts will become more and more a part of the arts marketplace, but I suspect that’s not going to be a good thing either for the arts or for the people still using their own brains.

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