In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, the lines between human creativity and machine-generated art are becoming increasingly blurred. The use of AI image generators, such as Midjourney and Stability AI, has sparked controversy among visual artists, with some hailing them as innovative tools and others decrying them as soulless imitators. Amidst the debate, a new generation of artists is emerging, combining traditional methods with AI-generated imagery to create something entirely new.

Oakland-based painter Brett Amory is one such artist, using AI image generators as a tool to explore the possibilities of worldbuilding and glitching the machine. By prompting an LLM (large language model) to roleplay in an invented language, Amory creates a visual feedback loop between generative images and human intervention. This hybrid approach has earned him a prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation award for 2023-2024.

Art critic Ben Davis notes that the use of AI in art raises important questions about the moral goalposts of creative work. "If you use it, you will be attacked by people. On the other hand – it exists. I don't think it's going to go back into the box," he says. Davis points out that artists have been manipulating AI for some time, citing examples such as Steph Maj Swanson's "AI Cryptid" and Laurie Simmons' use of AI tools to "correct" imperfect renderings.

The techniques employed by Amory and others can be traced back to the established tradition of "glitch art," which aestheticizes technology's errors. This movement has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, when artists used electronic processing and video distortions to create surreal and abstract works. With the advent of the World Wide Web, artists like Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans created the JODI collective, using glitches from ASCII displays to create images.

However, the use of AI-generated imagery also raises concerns about the value of human creativity. Davis argues that these machines have the capacity to cheapen the value of any given image, making it likely that audiences will overlook or ignore images in general, no matter how finely wrought. "These machines are a doomsday device to destroy people's abilities to apprehend the world creatively," he warns.

Artists are fighting back, with some joining lawsuits against generative AI companies for intellectual property theft. Others are using software tools like Nightshade and Glaze to deliberately mislabel objects and "poison" their work against scraping by AI models. The copyright status of AI-created imagery itself remains unsettled, with courts yet to be convinced that a human using a prompt to churn out a machine-generated image can achieve a copyrightable result.

Despite these challenges, Amory remains optimistic about the potential of AI-generated art. He points to the "remix" tradition in art and hip-hop, which has been around for decades. "We've been in postmodernism since like the '80s," he says. Davis suggests that Amory and other artists using AI are in a "moment of negotiation," trying to figure out a way to use the tools in a way that is genuinely interesting and creative.

As the debate around AI-generated art continues to evolve, one thing is clear: the boundaries between human creativity and machine-generated imagery are becoming increasingly blurred. Whether this marks a new era of artistic innovation or a threat to the value of human creativity remains to be seen.