UC Merced Magazine | Volume XX, Issue VI

By Jody Murray “Making art” once was commonly agreed to be a brush on canvas, charcoal on paper or a hand holding a chisel or even a digital tablet. Today, it also means opening a webpage and typing into a text box: Polar bear in a green double-breasted business suit sucking on a lollipop. Medium: Oil. Style: Bauhaus. AI Art? Color It ‘A Gray Area’

jaw-droppingly powerful text Q&A tools such as ChatGPT. Alongside these word-based programs came a huge palette of art generators — Dall-E, Midjourney, DreamStudio, Micr oso Image Creator, Imagen, Wombo Dream, Adobe F iyr.e.. “It’s new territory, you know?” said Grace Garnica, manager of UC Merced’sLa Galería.“It’s changing a lot of things in our social landscape, as well as with artists and business and marketing.” It is also, as Garnica puts it succinctly, “a weird gray area.” Because AI art is rendered without much huma noert, is it equal to what an artist paints, draws or sculpts? Does it democratize the fun of making something cool at the expense of artistic expertise and training? How has its allure been intensi ed by Instagram, TikTok and other social media? More pointedly, what about ownership rights for the art on which these tools are trained? Copyright regulators and lawmakers are playing catch-up with technology that seems to pump out upgrades every month. “For an artist, there’s a lot of trial and error, along with years of practice,” said UC Merced student Faryn Eastman, a painter and writer. “So for an AI system to produce something that people can consider comparable to artists’ work, that’s soul-crushing. “I believe art is something that requires emotion and soul,” said Eastman, who is on track to graduate next spring with a management and business economics degree. “A robot that can create an image in a few seconds can’t come close to that.” ‘An Extension of the Computer’ UC Merced Executive Director for Arts Collin Lewis compares this gap to calculators. ey provide answers to simple and complex math problems. But you can’t become a mathematician simply by knowing how to use one. “I wish there was some sort of barrier in the a retld that worked the same way,” said Lewis, who, in addition to managing the university’s arts programming, is a classically trained clarinetist. “You can now create super-compelling, incredibly detailed art with hardly an yoert, which leapfrogs what once might have required years and years of training.” Meanwhile, the gaping maw of social media, with its domination of marketing, discourse and eyeballs, has an insatiable demand for attention-grabbing art. Someone needs an Instagram post or meme, and they need it yesterday.

Click. ose words called for a smidgen of human imagination, but the image (above) that popped up in ve seconds required no organic thought. e bear was rendered with generative arti cial intelligence trained on hundreds of millions of images paired with their text descriptions. AI-generated art dates back to the 1960s, when scientists typed rules about lines, shapes and color into programs that turned out autonomous drawings — crude and abstract at rst, then more sophisticated as data was added and re ned. en, here in the third decade of the 21st century, AI exploded into our lives with the debut of publicly available and

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