AI - Is it Art or Plagiarism?

 

    Artificial intelligence has been a big topic in the art world lately. Some people have won awards for AI-generated content, others use it as nothing more than a filter on their Tik Tok pages, and still, others use it to write entire books. The question is, when does this fun little device become plagiarism? Where is the line that indicates what belongs to the robot and what belongs to the human? 

    You may say, robots and AI don't have rites. No, I suppose they don't because they are not living breathing creatures. However, that brings up a discussion on what gives a creature rites? Is it breathing? Or is it having the ability to think? We are still a while away from needing to have this discussion, though we get closer every day as inventors try to create realistic-looking AIs (aka, androids). Avoiding the Star Wars conundrum of whether droids should have rites, there are things we need to be considering as artists. 

    Here's the deal...the world is constantly changing. New technology is being invented around every corner. When I was a kid in the 90s and early 00s we used to play games with AIs. Not Cyberpunk AIs or Portal AIs, where the games warned us about how bad artificial intelligence could be for the human race. We actually would communicate with them in a game where we'd think of a character from a book, TV show, or movie and the AI would use 20 Questions to figure out who we were thinking of. We thought nothing of this. If anything, we thought it was pretty cool and tried our hardest to stump the AI, which was basically an impossible task. 

    Yesterday, while on Snap Chat, I received a message from my 11-year-old sister saying, "Have you gotten your AI yet?" I was confused, our other sister said she wanted nothing to do with My AI, and the youngest thought it was the coolest thing ever. A virtual friend and assistance. It's like Siri but has chat conversations with you. I'll admit I messed around with mine, testing out what it would say and customizing its appearance and name. I named my Kali. She's okay but I don't know how much I'll use her. The 11-year-old hasn't stopped talking to her AI.

    My 25-year-old brother, who plays games like Cyber Punk, Fallout, and Portal, says no one should use AI. He thinks we could eventually end up with a Terminator situation. 

    Right now we don't have to worry about Terminators, though. What we do need to worry about is the definition of "art". 

    A couple months ago I read an article about artists winning awards for AI-generated art. An uproar started. Some people argued that these artists shouldn't have won anything because they ultimately didn't create their submissions. The artists argued that the original idea was theirs and that they had to tell the AI what kind of picture they were looking for using keywords. 

    As many of you know, I am a journalist, an editor, and an author. This subject started in visual arts like painting and photography but has since entered the world of writing. I've been watching conversations between people debating on the morality behind AI-written books. And, yes, there are books being written by AIs. You, as a reader, basically have no way of telling if an author actually wrote out the words to their stories if they typed in a couple of sentences into a generator and let a robot do it. The question is...is this right? 

    Artists of all kinds universally agree that the process of art is as much an art form as the actual outcome of their mediums. What makes a writer an artist is the character creation, word building, and sentence stringing that they do. Because of this, there is a group of people who strongly believe that AI has no place in writing and that books that are written using it should be treated as plagiarized works. 

    I will admit I share this opinion...when it comes to fiction. Nonfiction is a whole other story, which I'll break down for you shortly.

    I write both nonfiction and fiction. I would never consider using AI for my fictional works. Not even for my covers. I purchase my covers from graphic designers or create them myself using Canva. I write every single word in my manuscripts. I wouldn't trust my stories to a robot. I don't care how good they are. Here's the thing though, my books are always above 10K words. That's a lot of pages. Especially since I hit the 100Ks on some of them. Fiction writing is all about creativity. There isn't a single aspect of it that doesn't involve a creative process.

    Nonfiction writing is different. For nonfiction you gather facts, put them together, and publish. You don't embellish, you don't get fancy with your adjectives, you just state things as they are. Now, not talking about biographies or textbooks, but in this instance, AI could be applicable. 

    I've been talking a lot with another journalist about the applications of AI specifically in the newspaper world. As a journalist, your writing process is different and the AI being discussed doesn't create articles from nothing. This AI, takes the sentences you input and arranges them in a comprehensive way. This could save time and make a journalist more productive. 

    When a journalist writes a story the first thing they do is get a lead, then they investigate that lead to see if it would be of public interest. Next, theY get a contact and set up an interview. The interview is usually between 10-30 minutes, where the journalist voice records the conversation in order to have correct spellings and quotes. 

    After gathering the facts, the journalist then types up a story with pictures and cutlines, proofreads it, sends it through others to proofread, does a final proofread, and has it published. The AI being talked about to use in journalism would decrease the amount of time spent writing. It would take the journalist's information and craft a story out of it. The journalist would then still have to proof and edit the piece. It cuts the entire process down by maybe two hours. This type of AI, I'd be okay with because you're not cutting out a massive part of the process. 

    In fiction, I will never use AI. in nonfiction...it is applicable. In my opinion. My question for you all is, what are your feelings about AI?