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Does AI have a place in artist’s studios, or on display in galleries or museums? Should viewers be told when AI was used to make art — and some would argue, is it even art at that point?
A Peninsula gallery is exploring these potentially polarizing questions, seeking to help the local creative community forge a way forward as the role of generative AI in art sparks debate.
San Carlos-based collective Art Bias announced earlier this spring that it was forming an AI task force, made up of artists from the 61-member collective and community leaders.
Art Bias member Shari Bryant, an illustrator and designer, was inspired to form the group after noticing the issues AI raised in her tech job, where works in information security and privacy.
“I was seeing how it was starting to particularly affect creative fields, which is my after-hours gig,” she said.
Bryant gave a talk at Redwood City’s Chan Zuckerberg Community Space earlier this year called “Practicing Art in the Age of AI” that touched on many of the topics the task force is now exploring.
Initially, the group aimed to establish some guidelines for Art Bias, based on conversations with its artists. But seeking a wider range of input, the task force grew to include other community members, including a representative from San Mateo County Office of Arts and Culture.
“We have a range of perspectives from folks who’ve worked teaching AI, from folks who are more traditional artists. There are a few others who are on the committee who are in tech, people who work with customers, clients. We want to get a whole range of perspectives,” Bryant said.
“The general purpose is to provide some sort of a framework for Art Bias, but then also maybe for other organizations on how they want to engage with AI,” she said.
Bryant noted a couple examples she’s observed where having such a framework would help curtail confusion, such as galleries that put out calls for artists specifying that AI cannot be used but then don’t have an AI policy posted on their websites, or exhibitions in which traditional artists are surprised to find their work showing alongside that of artists who have used AI in their pieces.
The task force has posted an online Art and AI community survey, seeking feedback from Bay Area artists, people who work in art-related fields as well as those who enjoy art. The survey closes on June 10.
Addressing an overall lack of information and guidelines in the arts community is part of what initially drew the county’s participation in the group, said Mara Grimes, an administrative manager with San Mateo County Office of Arts and Culture.
“Our mission is to advocate and promote arts and culture in San Mateo County. We’ve worked pretty closely with Art Bias and other artists, and so when this opportunity came to us, it had been on our list to explore: ‘What are the rules? When can you use (AI)? When can you not use it?’ I started reaching out to some of my contacts to find out that everybody’s really curious about it, but nobody has any real steadfast guidelines,” Grimes said.
She also reached out to many arts educators to find out how AI policies are handled at their schools or organizations, but those rules were largely focused on literary, rather than visual or performing arts.
“So we wanted to dig a little bit deeper. Art Bias is creating their own policy, and we’re hoping to be able to spin policy, or at least guidelines, off of that, that the county can support, and then also offer some sort of template to our arts and culture organizations so that they, too, would have some guidelines. Because writing those kind of guidelines is not easy,” she said.
Art Bias member Liz Broekhuyse, a graphic designer and artist, is also a member of the task force. She created her own AI policy for her freelance graphic design business, a field where she noted people will sometimes use AI for shortcuts, but with not necessarily good results.
In the FAQs on her policy page, she writes that she will not use AI tools to create visuals or text for clients because, “While they have me beat on volume, I still have an edge when it comes to quality.”
She has worked with the tools to gain a better understanding of their capabilities and does use some limited AI products, but not those that, as she writes in her policy, “I have the expertise to do myself.”
“Part of crafting the policy has been trying out these tools and seeing whether they have a place in my work. And part of it is understanding which tools were trained on scraped data, and coming to the conclusion that there are certain tools which don’t really add that much value and are ethically dubious, so I’m deciding not to use them. That mostly applies to image generators and text generators,” she said.
Meanwhile in her work as an artist, she realized she was more frequently encountering AI-generated images on sites like Pinterest.
“I make surreal paintings, which requires looking at a lot of reference photos and learning how to paint things realistically. For a while, I was put off from creating paintings like that because AI could make a similar kind of photo-realism style work. But I’ve recently come back to creating these sort of paintings because I realized, ‘No, this is still fun. Just because there’s another way to do it doesn’t mean that I have to employ AI to create things,'” she said.
The growing ubiquity of AI-generated images also means it’s important to find ways to be transparent with viewers.
“For people who create intensely detailed and realistic looking work, people will start to ask, ‘Oh, did you use AI to help you with this?’ And the answer isn’t necessarily obvious, so I think a piece of what we are hoping to do with the task force is to think about what are the kind of relevant standards of transparency if we are allowing AI into galleries,” Broekhuyse said.
According to a press release announcing the task force, ethics, transparency and fairness are guiding principles for the group in developing an AI policy, —principles inspired by a framework that Bryant uses to deal with AI at her tech job.
Ethics comes down to what Bryant describes as AI’s “original sin”: “It was built on training data that was scraped from the internet, and that was basically all the art that was on the internet up until 2022. People didn’t have the right to opt in or opt out, or give their consent. So a lot of people refer to it as ‘stolen.’ I hear that over and over again. I know a lot of times when I’ve been having conversations with folks, particularly who are very pro-AI, they kind of breeze over that part. But I think that’s a huge piece for people who have problems with AI in creative fields,” she said.
Also, what AI tools have scraped from the internet reflects years of human-generated content and interactions, including from the darkest corners of the online world.
“With regards to fairness, (we’re) really talking about it with regards to bias. AI was built on scraped data and there’s a lot of bias on the internet. So if you train your models off of it, it may inadvertently reflect some of those biases that are in our real world. I think we have to keep that in mind, because we’ve already seen instances where different models have been adjusted to espouse things that are bigoted or or just whole points of view which are not necessarily rooted in fact,” Bryant said.
Due to its source materials, the perks and the pitfalls of AI come from humans, and so it seems that finding ways to address the debates around its use will have to be human-led as well.
“I think, for me, the biggest part is understanding what people believe AI is, and determining ways it can be used, and ways it should not be used. I don’t have the answers to that. I think all of us are pretty open to (thinking about) ‘what does that mean?'” Grimes said of the task force’s work.
With the group, Bryant said, “What we’re looking to do is to start conversations that I think are probably a little overdue.”
Given the speed at which AI is developing and improving and appearing in different aspects of life, it’s going to take more focused effort to figure out how to engage with it,” she noted.
“There’s a saying: if you don’t define a process, that process usually defines itself. We want to flip it so we’re not letting AI define the engagement. We want to make sure we’re able to define it ourselves.”
Art Bias is located at 1700 Industrial Road, San Carlos, and offers classes and open studios on the first Sunday of each month. For more information about the collective, or to take the AI task force’s survey, visit artbias.org.
