Talking About AI As A Working Artist and Blogger

There is A LOT of talk about whether AI art is a good thing or a bad thing! Here are my thoughts about AI and how I choose to interact with it to make art or to make my artist life easier.

Disclaimer: I used no AI to write this post or make the pictures simply because I wanted to have a “clean” post in case the AI haters come for me!

How Am I A “Working Artist”

I thought that I would lay out my bona-fides right here at the start so you can judge whether you think I am an “artist” enough to listen to!

• Artsy Fartsy Youtube Channel – I have 522 videos and am coming up on a million views for art tutorials I post
• Artsy Fartsy Website – I have a website where I get over 35K hits per month to all my posts. I show my work over there when I remember to update it!
• Email list – I have about 20K people on my email list that I talk to about art twice weekly

While I have no formal art training, I make my income through blogging, affiliate marketing and video marketing. I make art to make money so I am a working artist!

Here are my thoughts about AI art in no particular order… I am not preaching, just telling you my thoughts and you can do with them what you will!

ARTIST THOUGHTS

I use AI in different areas of my work and so this is the part where I talk about how AI is applied to artistic pursuits.

AI Already Ate The Internet

As an artist I have thoughts about the fact that AI ate the internet without asking every one of us for permission to use our copyrighted materials.

That said, my work gets “stolen” everyday already. People copy my style because I put videos out in the world encouraging them to copy my style (go figure!) People also steal my content from my blogs and post it as their own. They steal my top performing pins on Pinterest and redirect them to their site instead of my own… sigh.

Years ago I decided that the only way to make sure this doesn’t bother me is to actively NOT CARE!

I feel like I am constantly creating and evolving so they will always be in my rear view mirror and karma will eventually catch up with them!

There is no point in railing against the AI machine, it already happened so I just need to move forward from here!

Is There Such A Thing As “Original Art”

Back in the day the old masters copied each other, used projectors to thrown images on the walls and generally took creative inspiration from the works around them.

The concept that any artist today has totally ORIGINAL art with no input from anywhere else is ridiculous. We all see art, learn about art and appreciate art in different forms every day!

So (for me) the thought that AI can’t produce original art is the same as saying that humans can’t produce original art.

Unique AI Art Style

I feel like I am super blessed that early on I started following a guy on Instagram who was making amazing and creative images of old people using AI, Jonas Peterson!

He made cool old ladies with fun clothing, silly expressions and generally tickled me! Looking at these it is very apparent that they are made by the same person and that this is his art “style”.

Copycat AI Art Style

That said, one of the reasons that so much AI art looks similar is that people who are lazy write prompts that say, “in the style of”.

There is a guy named Greg Rutkowski whose artwork has been used in a gabillion games (this guy has a style!)

So when people write prompts or recommend writing prompts “in the style of Greg Rutkowski”, I feel like they are functionally saying that they have no creativity of their own and need copy someone else’s work.

Using Non-Copyright Work As A Style

Now let’s talk about using AI prompts that are “in the style” of artists whose work has come out of copyright protections.

First off, I am 100% more comfortable with that… I even have a HUGE List of Artists In The Public Domain for AI Prompts with examples of AI artwork created in those styles.

And doing that is fine, they aren’t hurting a living artist with AI copyright protections…. BUT are they creating original art? I don’t think so and I don’t do that, but I do use non-copyright protected vintage illustrations in my freebies and items for sale, so I am not going to get all up in arms about using non-copyrighted works!

Creativity Is Creativity

Art (to me) is about having a creative idea and then expressing that idea in the world.

It doesn’t matter if that is in oils, pastels, watercolors, collage, digital art or AI art, it is the expression of creativity that makes me happy as a consumer of their art!

Whether someone is making their vision in pencil on paper or with spray paint or tattoo ink, all of those are an expression of creativity so I don’t think that AI art is exempt from being a medium to express creativity.

I had a fun talk with my Father In Law who is an “Capital A” Artist. He has had his work shown in galleries and he supports artists by buying (A LOT) of their work to hang on his walls…

While chatting with him about AI art, he said he has a friend who is a photographer whose work he has bought in the past. AND now the photographer is doing AI art in his own style and my FIL likes that work also because he appreciates the creativity and style of that artist, not only the medium that he is working in!

Not Gatekeeping Creativity

I have a newsletter where I talk to thousands of people each week about creativity and the thing that I hear most is that there is feeling that they aren’t “true” artists… sigh.

So first off, if you are making art, you are an artist, hard stop.

That said, many people are hesitant to make art that would make them happy because they feel like it has to be “good enough” for some random metric they have made up in their head.

These people could be let loose to create art prolifically if they knew how to make art show up just by writing what they want to see in the world! I LOVE THAT!

AI Image Copyright

As of right now, there is no way to copyright a plain AI image. The courts will not uphold your right to the ownership of that as an asset to you or your business.

Do I think that eventually a case will be made for being able to copyright images? Sure, but when? No idea!

If you are making some kind of art that you want to protect, I suggest you take a peek at this post by the US Government Copyright office, What Visual and Graphic Artists Should Know about Copyright. If you live outside of the US, check with the copyright laws in your country!

BLOGGER THOUGHTS

I am also a full time blogger so I use AI frequently in my work to show images that represent the CONCEPTS of my writing. Here are some of my thoughts about this!

Using AI To Help Write My Posts

I have been a prolific writer for years and I have developed a signature writing style (lots of !!!, … and sighs). I have scads of examples of my writing to feed into AI to train it to talk like me!

In fact, AI has eaten my writing along with a large portion of the internet so it is a wee bit incestuous to have it write for me!

That said, there isn’t any value to regurgitating old ideas over and over again so I feed each post into it with the exact things that I want to convey, and then just use the AI to “pretty it up” for me. Many times this is a few hundred word outline of what I am trying to express and there is no actual addition to the thoughts, it is just my editor!

In years past I had an amazing writer, Suzanne, write out my articles for me which I then “Tara-fied” to be in my style and concept. I use AI as that same kind of writing assistant.

Really Bad AI Writing

That said, my ad network Mediavine, has come out recently and said that they will not be working with bloggers who use AI writers to make all of their posts. OF COURSE!

I believe what they are talking about is when you put in a keyword like, “junk journals” and tell it to write a post about that topic with no input or creativity from you.

That program then goes back to it’s “memory” or scrapes the internet to find the collected works about the topic and aggregates those words into a post… ick!

That is not good for the reader or the blogger because Google and other sharing platforms want unique and creative work, not just the blandest version of product people can produce!

Using that kind of writer reminds me of the old days when there were “article spinners” that would just take a preexisting post and rewrite it, using synonyms and other swap outs. This was eventually stopped because it wasn’t helpful and I think that unhelpful web content will be stopped eventually too!

Using AI For “Stock Photo” Images

I have used stock photos in my blog posts for years! For example, if I was talking about goal setting I would use a target or arrow, if I was talking essential oils I would use a picture of oils surrounded by plants.

In either case, I wasn’t actually buying the props, setting up the photo shoot, fixing the lighting, taking pictures and processing them… they were stock photos!

I have no hesitation about using “stock AI photos” now in my informational posts!

That said, I am sure there are photographers out there who made their living shooting stock photography. Their business must change I am sure!

The AI photos are not print quality or copyright-able so big corporations won’t use them. That will probably have to be more of a consideration now that anyone can make very credible web quality images with AI.

AI Is Already Everywhere In Stock Photos

IF there were no AI images on stock photo sites, would that change my outlook? Maybe… but the stock photo sites themselves are full of AI images AND offer AI generators to their users to make their own images.

Unless I was willing to have 100% pure, taken only by me images, I would invariably be using AI images in my post whether doing so intentionally or not.

Inclusivity In My AI Photos

One thing that I have found using stock photos in the past is there is a curated image of what things and people SHOULD look like.

Finding stock photography of women like me (short, chubby, Hispanic, over 50) is a very limited search:

Out of the top 29 pictures, 21 are NOT Hispanic women in bathing suits… sigh. They are younger Hispanic women, white women, cartoon women… they managed to find 8 pictures that were kinda-sorta what I asked for!

Is this deliberate on the part of the photographers? I don’t think so! They are business people who are taking pictures that are sell-able on an open marketplace and there isn’t a huge demand for pictures of older, non white women.

I LOVE that I can ask AI to create inclusive pictures of people that are all different shapes and sizes for my posts!

How Cool Would It Be To…

I have a very creative mind and I can think up a MILLION ideas that I would like to do! That said, I don’t have infinite time or money to produce everything that interests me… sigh.

With that in mind, sometimes I make AI images for things that I would LIKE to see to inspire me (and maybe my readers).

For example, I have a post showing veggies in glass vases for the seasons. I took a lot of time to write prompts, curate and design the images, throwing out the ones that I did not like or that could not be accomplished in the real world.

Would it have been a better post if I went out, bought and chopped veggies, made each arrangement, photographed it, edited it and then posted the pictures? I don’t think so, but some people hate anything AI so I disclose that they are AI right at the top of the post!

Disclosing AI Images

I just had a conversation with my readers and they come firmly down on two sides of the equation… either they DESPISE AI images with every fiber of their being OR they love AI and want me to make them a course on how to do it…. crazy pants!

So what is a good way to come down in the middle (for me)? I am disclosing AI image use on any post!

If it is the main part of the post, I disclose right at the top so my readers can make the decision whether to proceed. If it is a “stock photo” concept image I am disclosing that at the bottom of the post. Either way, they are getting disclosures!

Disclosing things is not weird for me as a blogger. FOR YEARS we have had to have a disclosure at the top of our posts if we had affiliate links in it (were we get paid a small amount for recommending products or services). This is a legal qualification according to the FTC so okey doke, I just disclose.

There is no legal reason to disclose AI images right now, but I want my readers to be happy and they said disclose, so disclose it is!

Using AI In Creative Work Wrapup

Those are most of the thoughts that I have so far on using AI in different parts of my work. I will be adding to this post as new issues come up so I can direct people here who have questions about how I use AI in my work!

Hopefully this helps…
XOXO
Tara

Other posts you might love:

• HUGE List of Artists In The Public Domain for AI Prompts
• Use AI To Get Public Domain Quotes For Commercial Use
• HUGE List of Popular Stories In The Public Domain

Source: https://marketingartfully.com/talking-about-ai-as-a-working-artist-and-blogger/