AI takes over the world, one step at a time. And what could be a better target than art- something worth a thousand words?

That’s right. AI overlords are here to take over comics, masterpieces, paintings, and more. AI art generators have been in existence for a decently long time, but only recently have they taken off in popularity and entered the mainstream. 

The benefits of AI art programs are that they can produce pieces in mere seconds that a human artist might take hours or days to complete. However, because AI can’t organically learn the techniques and strategies in art, they must turn to other means. 

AI and AI developers take artists’ images found online, such as artwork-posting sites of the world like DeviantArt and Instagram, that are pulled from the deepest pits of the interwebs and internet and add it to their database in an action called “scraping.” The controversy behind it is that AI programmers don’t tell artists their work is being scrapped. This brings up a whole host of copyright and ethical issues that have yet to be resolved.

While AI art programs are innovative and represent what science and technology can create, they collect their data by scraping- a majority of the time without the original artist’s permission- artworks already completed by humans and generate new artworks.

Art is defined as, “… the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination…” As it stands now, because AI runs solely on algorithms and collected data, it cannot replicate the creative process that is inherently human.