The internet is infatuated to a new subject after many people flocked away from the sketchiness of cryptocurrency, to AI generation. This new fad will most likely die within a few months. AI art started to take form in the 1960’s, merely starting as simple projects that were mere squiggles on a screen. Past the 60’s, it was only used for possible student and scientific studies, but as of late has regained interest in the public eye due to public programs such as DALL-E becoming popular within the news, noted as a total shift on what is counted as “art.” Simply type in a prompt and magically you have some… questionable results.

AI art works off a fairly simple premise. It takes the prompt you input, then uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) that’s been specially trained to interpret these words and create a brand new image. However, these images aren’t as new as they may seem. In fact, the new images created are really preexisting images morphed and spliced together to form something new, fitting your prompt.

 The main issue of this generated art can be summarized with one simple fact: they have been credited with stealing countless previous artworks to make their networks, and due to it being a budding technology, doesn’t entirely work how you would expect.

This controversy has caused many scandals, including one generator called Stability stealing the entirety of many watermarked photo libraries, such as GettyImages. For something that is new emerging technology, many artists think that they may be out of a career. In reality they’re obviously not, especially due to the many legal issues AI art has been causing and its many imperfections. It will never replace real art and seems like it is just the “buzz word” of the year for the news to cover, not something to worry about. AI will not take over art made from scratch, but it has long since been used as an assistant for digital artists for years with auto selecting tools and other additions. All in all, pure AI generation is something that may just come and go, however its impact will go on as methods to make art easier for existing artists.