AI promotes plagiarism rather than boosting creativity

By Debparna Mitra

Poets have often described creative inspiration as an everlasting hearth that gives rise to transitory brightness at the blow of some inconstant wind. The image is that of a spontaneous force of inspiration that strikes the creator in a moment of epiphany, that which she/he meditates upon in pensive solitude to create art. It is a journey of exploring the “self” via various mediums and laying bare the psyche for others to view. Art does not simply constitute the finished product but rather involves the unseen arduous process of its creation, each laborious action connected in a thread to weave a glorious wreath. Some in the past, have believed that art is divine, and artists were ordained to give shape to their divine inspiration like an oracle reciting prophecies. Art has long been considered to be uniquely human but with the advancement of generative AI, machines can now mimic human behavioural patterns and produce convincingly authentic images, audios or text from language prompts. This has raised the question as to whether it can surpass and altogether replace the need for human creativity.
The major problem with generative AI lies in the procedure by which they are trained. These programs are provided with a prompt and shown multiple examples of whatever the user wants to recreate. Over several iterations, the AI is taught to perfect its craft by implementing the desirable aspects of the fed data and discarding the undesirable ones.
Unfortunately the images or texts that are used to train the AI are usually unscrupulously sourced from existing works uploaded on the internet, often without the creators’ permission, which in itself is a form of plagiarism.
In the field of visual arts, what generative AI creates is simply a collage of pixels based on probabilities and can never exceed the limits of what it was trained on.
Similarly in the case of written works, it can never truly compose, only sort through a pile of existing creative endeavours to fuse and remodel the most relevant bits into a coherent piece. While it is true that no art is born in a vacuum and the greatest artists have profusely studied reference works in order to perfect their works, there is enough innovation, emotional tangibility and expression artistic inspiration that sets it apart from the machine-manufactured mindless mimicry of the labour of creators, that ultimately fail to point at any personal profundity.
Generative art conjured by machine is bereft of the human element and is a mere shadow of what it claims to reproduce.
Questions raised on the ethical viability of AI “art” cannot be understated since it poses a serious threat to the safety of intellectual property and the livelihood of artists. When a machinery is capable of churning out a plethora of artistic works, almost instantaneously and at a meagre cost, there remains little need for employing artists and writers to do the same job. This rampant misuse or rather “overuse” of AI in replacing human labour, skill and intellect has resulted in widespread discontent, a popular manifestation of which has been the writers’ protests of 2023 which demanded the limiting of AI usage in the writing process of films and media.
One of the characteristic qualities of art is that it engages the higher faculties of our mind that make life meaningful. It is the most profound expression of a liberated spirit since it is created for self-fulfilment – it is labour without the expectation of utility. AI can be a brilliant tool in aiding human creativity. However it can never truly be capable of harbouring or harnessing it in any form.

(The writer is an artist)