Just Fake! Why Generative AI Art is a Myth

"The Portrait of Edmond de Belamy seems to be a paradigmatic example of generative AI art. Generative AI art has to be distinguished from AI-assisted art. The latter involves AI just as a tool that supports human art creation, comparable to a brush or a typewriter. In generative AI art, in contrast, the artistic achievement supposedly lies solely with the AI, while humans play no or only a minimal role in the creative process."

"The Portrait was produced by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), a deep learning architecture in which two neural networks compete with each other to generate new data. Humans are only involved in providing the training data, programming the system, and curating the results. They play no role in the creation of the images themselves."

"Nowadays, the capacity of AI to generate images, music, poetry, and even movies, is far more advanced. The perfection of its products, which can no longer be distinguished from human creations, raises the question all the more vehemently of whether AI has surpassed humans in yet another domain that was once considered genuinely human: artistic creativity."

In 2018, Christie's sold Portrait of Edmond de Belamy for $432,500, marking a pivotal moment in AI art recognition. Created by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), the work featured an algorithm signature instead of an artist's name. Generative AI art differs from AI-assisted art; while the latter uses AI as a tool supporting human creativity, generative AI art attributes artistic achievement solely to the AI system. Modern AI capabilities now produce images, music, poetry, and films indistinguishable from human creations. This advancement intensifies debate about whether AI has surpassed humans in artistic creativity, a domain traditionally considered uniquely human.

Read at Apaonline