A Human's Guide To Detecting AI Generated Content

The quintessential AI-art protest

I can go on and on, but you get the point—the look of the artwork, what we actually see, is only a part of its artistic impact. When we're looking at a pretty image, we can admire its beauty, the colors, the composition—but we can also admire the choices of the artist, their creativity and skill. We know there's an infinite number of ways to make an artwork look bad, so it's almost unbelievable when an artist manages to avoid most of them.

AI art doesn't have any of that. Yes, it's quite amazing what these programs can do, how they can learn to understand concepts and then use that knowledge to produce something new and beautiful. But it can't be compared to human skills. A human who can run 40km/h is more impressive than a car that reaches a speed over 200km/h—because humans have to work within the limitations that machines are not restricted by.

Yes, I am aware that a lot of "prompt engineers" take a lot of time to tinker with the settings and new iterations to finally get the image they envisioned. The concept itself can also be pretty amazing. But the end result is more like a photo than a drawing/painting/3D sculpture. Why? Because the beauty of all the subjects in your image wasn't created by you, just like the sunset is not created by the photographer. In the end, I believe AI art should have its own category, just like photography is separated from "manual art"—so that people can admire it without feeling cheated.

Argument #2: It's Not Stealing, Humans Also Learn From Each Other!

"AI doesn't copy parts of someone's art to create its own art. It simply learns from artists, and then it creates something new from that knowledge—just like artists do. If I can go to a museum and use all these artworks as an inspiration to create my art, then how is that different from AI doing the same?"

A lot of artists feel uncomfortable with the thought that AI used their art to learn. But why? Isn't it the same as what humans do? Not exactly.

First, learning from other humans without their explicit consent is actually unavoidable. Even if we agreed it's bad, it's just physically impossible to regulate it, so we have to tolerate it. This isn't true for AI—AI has to be explicitly told what to learn from. Limiting its training to a specific set of copyright-free artworks is not a problem at all.

Second, there's a problem with scale. I'm going to be blunt here, but this seems to be an accurate comparison—allowing birds to defecate on your lawn doesn't mean you consent to anyone dumping their feces there. Yes, it's technically the same thing, but the consequences are different, and that affects your consent. Similarly, consenting to other artists learning from you doesn't have nearly the same consequences as allowing AI to do the same. So the consent to the former shouldn't imply the consent to the latter.

Third, humans are limited. Our time is limited, our strength is limited. No artist is capable of learning from all the others to do the same as they do, and forever produce better art faster than all of them combined. Even the best artist ever will die one day, leaving space for new ones. So allowing another artist to learn from me is not that risky, all things considered. Can the same be said about AI?

Fourth, it's actually pretty absurd to claim that if it's ok for a human to do something, then there's nothing wrong with a machine doing the same thing. If a machine killed a human in self defense, there would be an outrage—and yet it's ok for a human to do so. Putting it simply, humans have rights, machines don't, and ignoring this fact is actually pretty offensive to humans.

Argument #3: It's Not Copyright Violation, Because the Artworks Are not Actually Copied

"You only think that it's stealing, because you don't really know how AI art generators work. The artworks are not really copied (otherwise the AI database would have to be much, much larger, and it's not!). AI simply trains on them and then leaves them alone."