It's Art of Our Control

New AI tools pop up around us every day. New generative challenges and trends go viral on social media. They all fuel the same old debate: Is AI art, or not?

Companies driving these trends rejoice. There’s no such thing as bad press, and any news is good news. It all drives engagement. It all gets more people to try their product.

Regarding that “art” thing though, here’s a little food for thought: Can a creative work be considered an artistic expression when the (corporate-controlled) tool determines which topics are permitted and which are not?

Currently, the vast majority of models used to generate AI content (text, image, sound and video) have built-in safeguards. Some of them are there to protect the corporations behind the tool from legal liabilities: depictions of child abuse, gore, unauthorized use of public figures, and such. Others are there to direct public perception of the tool and disassociate the corporation from potentially sensitive topics like nudity and sex, branded content or intentional misinformation campaigns. Finally, many of the AIs are explicitly trained to push a certain corporate or political agenda – such as X’s Grok avoiding mentions of any misdeeds of its owner and their political allies.

Regardless of the motivation – the tool has the power to decide what is said, shown or written. You may prompt it in any way you like, but it will stop you or redirect you if you enter the forbidden territory.

Can you imagine a typewriter or a word processor that refuses to produce paragraphs on certain topics? Most LLMs will. Can you imagine a pencil, brush or even a graphics app that stops leaving a mark on the canvas when you try to create some particular imagery? Most image generation AI will.

Sure, you can train your own models, inject LoRAs and mess with the weights – but in the end unless you have the billions of dollars needed to create, train and operate your own model from scratch – you remain dependent on a foundational layer built with these limitations. Can you imagine a microphone refusing to record a particular performance? The list goes on.

Art is, and has always been about exploring aspects of human existence. It often delves into the uncanny, the uncomfortable, the unmonetizable. Without the freedom to interrogate any of these topics at will, we are no longer doing art. We’re producing crafts.

Content produced by AI does not deserve the art moniker. Directable Stock feels like a more accurate classification.