The Ethics of A.I.

The Ethics of A.I.

by | Mar 13, 2025 | Technology

A friend once asked me for my opinions on the use of artificial intelligence.  I’ve been a big fan of A.I. for most of my life, and it’s been a popular theme in science fiction.  But now, we actually have credible A.I. in our social and commercial environment, and it’s time to address the elephant in the room.

Artificial intelligence is a tool, nothing more. One does not condemn a table saw because it can present more teeth to the plywood panel faster than a human could. Such assertions that it is somehow inherently evil are misguided and disingenuous at best.

Generative AI does depend on having been trained by observing the works of artists, and a great many of them. This, however, is also true of human artists, and we do not consider this theft or misappropriation. Those who present this notion as viable apply a double standard. The same is true of the written word. Generative AI learns by observing the work of others. It’s not a copy-paste machine. It does not now, and never has, worked that way, and those who imply that it is somehow “stealing the works of others” clearly do not understand how either artificial intelligence nor human creativity work well enough to make an intelligent comparison.

The areas where generative AI shines are the technical ones, writing code that runs, diagnosing complex networking issues, constructing database applications that perform specific tasks. It can also do miraculous things, like protein folding, and speeding the discovery of new, previously unknown materials.

That said, one does not just lay the wood on the table and press the button, hoping for a replica Louix XIV divan to come out the other side. It’s just a tool. It requires a human being to make the decisions as to where to cut, and why. Artificial intelligence is mostly useless when it comes to creative acts, for it cannot create, except under the express direction of a human being.

Those who rely on generative AI for their writing simply by typing a quick command and pressing a button have removed themselves from the equation, and presenting the output of generative AI as their own without any material guidance, in my view, are charlatans and cheaters. The same is true of those who use pushbutton AI to make images, and then presenting that image as their own work. There is a role for AI in image generation, but deceptively passing it off as one’s own creative work is an unworthy occupation.

The U.S. Copyright Office has clarified its stand on the use of A.I. in creative works. They have said that if A.I. is used as a tool to create elements used in the finished composition, that one may copyright such a work. But if the finished piece was created without the guidance of a human hand, it cannot be copyrighted, for machines may not author anything directly.

I use artificial intelligence when creating graphics, but almost never to create entire images. Instead, I do things like remove people or objects from images, or add missing features. I also use A.I. when coding, because frankly, most of what I have to do is grunt work, and my guidance to the A.I. comes in very precisely defining the task so that I get exactly what I want. It’s like talking to a very literal minded child.
I also use it in my writing, but never to create whole works, only to analyze and to help me organize what I have already written. I have tried, a few times, to have it write things for me, but the results are always mud-dumb, lackluster or outright wrong. And, A.I., no matter how hard you try to set up meta rules to combat this, tends to tell you whatever the hell it thinks you want to hear. This is not useful behavior in a creative, critical environment.

As I see it, the primary ethical concern with ChatGPT and its ilk is the abuse of the service from the standpoint of people trying to take shortcuts with it, or claiming its output as their own. This can range, therefore, from merely being sloppy and lacking in thoroughness to being outright unethical.

Tools, in essence, are tools. There is nothing inherently good or evil about them. It is in no one’s interest to anthropomorphize it and assign it moral or ethical behavior on its own. It is what we make of it, nothing more.

So, take what you want from this view, but remember that you can’t just declare something to be true in defiance of fact or objective proof otherwise.  See the situation for what it is, and plan and react accordingly.  No other approach makes sense.

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Did I make the header image for this article by pushbutton A.I.? I wanted something decent, and there had to be an image there, but I didn’t care much what. So yes. But I’m not claiming this as my artwork. It’s just generative graphics.

AI Art is Here to Stay. Better Get Used To It.

AI Art is Here to Stay. Better Get Used To It.

by | Dec 20, 2022 | Art

AI Art, or generated art, is a problem, yes, but not for the reasons people think. It’s a problem because nobody was prepared for how rapidly it would impact our world of creatives. Nobody was ready for how hard it would shake the box.

The Argument

The No to AI Generated Images logo, designed by Alexander Nanitchkov
People claim that it steals artwork from the original artists (it doesn’t, only making generalizations made from the observance of the artwork of humans, just as a human artist would do) or that it takes jobs away from humans (TOR Books is in some hot water over a book cover they commissioned that used stock library art that turned out later to have been AI generated). If I paint in the style of Van Gogh (warm saturated earthy colors, impasto, impressionistic, with emphasis on the arcs and swirls that flow between in the negative spaces), am I stealing from his work? No reasonable person would claim this. Now, what If I use an AI Art generator like Midjourney to do the same thing? It’s a shortcut, yes, but stealing, or cheating somehow? To me, it just appears to be a really sophisticated tool, and one in its rocky infancy. It is, however, a new process whose potential as an art tool is understood by very few, and whose operation is understood by even fewer. It is my observation that the alarum being raised is similar to that raised about the rise in popularity of synthesizers as early as the mid-1950’s. Everyone was sure that the synthesizer would put a lot of professional musicians out of work. Of course, that did not happen. It’s true that synthesizers were used in place of an ensemble of real musicians, but in a lot of those situations there just wouldn’t have been money to pay humans.  Instead, music became possible where the alternative would have been silence, canned music taken from something else, or somebody trying to make do with a single guitar or a piano and a set of bongo drums. Synthesizers simply became one more tool in the toolbox.  AI Art is just one more step past CGI, and nobody these days is claiming that isn’t art. A healthy debate is already in full swing. Already facing some backlash from artists, Artstation is allowing artists to opt out of having the artwork they submit to the Artstation web site used to feed AI art generators, and there is an on-going protest there among artists who think Artstation shouldn’t be allowing people to sell AI-generated images there. The site was awash with anti-AI posts protesting the original policy, with the illustrator Alexander Nanitchkov, creator of the No AI logo, proclaiming AI generated work to be “soulless stealing”. The counter-argument to this is, of course, if a human looks at a body of work and says, “Yeah, I think I can paint in that style”, and then does it, is that stealing? Few would argue that studying and replicating somebody else’s art style is theft, because original artwork isn’t being simply copied. Yet, when a machine does it instead of a human, somehow it’s supposed to be different.

How It Works in Very Basic Terms

Superfrog, in the comicbook style of Van Gogh. Midjourney had never seen a Van Gogh comicbook, so it took its cues from Van Gogh paintings and comicbook art it had analyzed. Even so, the elements look just sort of mashed together, and don’t form a cohesive artistic whole. Of course Van Gogh never did comics; the point here is to show that the AI is mashing up concepts, not just copying things.

AI-generated art doesn’t just copy bits and paste them together. Instead, the artificial intelligence is taught about art by looking at a huge number of images, adding noise to each one until it becomes unrecognizeable for what it was, and then taking notes on exactly what made that image recognizable as being a certain thing. The process is repeated on a very large number of similar subjects so that the AI can tell, in general, what makes that subject look like what it is. This may include photographs, or the work of human artists, but always in great quantity, usually tens of thousands or more. To generate a new image, the process is reversed. It begins with a noise field, and then everything that doesn’t look like the requested subject is slowly repaired. It’s further skewed by another instruction layer that adds other elements to the scene as described, to create a new and unique image. The resulting image may contain varying percentages of a given individual’s artwork, but it’s never a straight up copy.

It Needs What It’ll Never Have On Its Own: A Little Heart

Synthesized art suffers the same problem that synthesized music does: it lacks heart. A performance in either medium created solely by algorithm lacks the human touch, the emotional connection that makes that creative product worth consuming. Without it, it’s just an attractive but ultimately soulless effort. It can save time producing creative content, but without the guidance of an actual artist it will produce only the facade of meaning without ever actually touching it. As a result, AI created art is actually pretty easy to spot when you see it. I predict that there will be a great deal of arguing back and forth about AI art, but in the end, people will pause long enough to realize that AI art can’t reasonably compare to the creativity of a skilled human artist, and we’ll all get on with our lives. There is precedent; this is pretty much how the arguments against synthesizers went.  After a while people realized that the synthesizer was just another tool, and in the wrong hands it could produce flavorless pap just like any other tool in any other medium—or in the other direction, allow the art form to be taken to new places previously inaccessible. AI-generated art is like a chainsaw: it can do a lot of damage very fast, and it seems dangerous to be around. Without its human guiding what it does, though, it’s just another tool to be tamed. And, after a while, we’ll get used to the idea that there are such things as chainsaws in the world that do useful things.
Superfrog, in the style of Jack Kirby, third iteration of the prompt, created in MidJourney.

Superfrog in the style of Jack Kirby. Has Jack Kirby ever drawn a superhero frog? Not that I know of. The heavy bombastic ink and color style reminiscent of Kirby is here in these images, but nobody would mistake one of these for a Kirby original.
These are a good jumping off point (pardon the pun), and may be most useful as a tool for ideation, but repeatability is still very dodgy. 
The frog with the spitcurl is just a goofy take on Superman. Artificial intelligence alone will only carry you so far. The rest requires an actual artist to make some creative decisions and use the elements to create actual art.
Oh, and don’t look too closely at the hands. That’s some real nightmare fuel.

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Reprinted from [SCIFI.radio]