GenAI: Painters v Photographers Analogy

I recently attended an event that featured a talk about how creatives can use AI. I’ve recently shared my thoughts on AI. I hoped the talk would cover tools like podcastle.ai which uses AI to add features like removing noise from audio, rather than going down the “we don’t need artists” route.

Unfortunately, the talk focused on how “you can make an ad in 2 mins". The talk featured a live demo of Invideo.io, which was prompted to create an ad for the event space we were in.

One shot featured a gunman running in and scaring off all the customers. Seriously. What was also not mentioned in the presentation was that the footage wasn’t “new” even by GenAI-standards, it was stock footage.

During the Q&A afterwards, someone asked if AI tools are going to put us creatives out of a job. The speaker mentioned that when photography was invented, artists would attack painters, because they felt their work was being stolen.

This analogy obviously falls flat. Imagine if photographers were only able to capture existing paintings and sell prints of those: That would be theft, painters would rightly be angry, and no one would claim the photos were new art.

That is the accurate analogy for AI. The idea that AI is doing what a creative does, only faster/better/cheaper, simply isn’t true. As I have written previously:

AI that had been trained on Shutterstock data was asked to create a tree. It produced a tree with a fragment of the Shutterstock watermark on it.

I’m sure newer models will use smaller pieces. But they remain pieces of existing material. There’s no getting around that.