Tabernacles, Poisoning, & AI "art"
How should Christians, especially parents, think about the use of AI in the arts?
This is the final installment of my four-part series on AI. The first provides an overview of what parents need to know about AI. The second addresses the problems posed by AI in K-12 education. Both articles include AI terminology & definitions I think you’ll find helpful. The third examines some of the more dangerous ways AI is being used against kids & teens.
“Then all the artisans who were doing all the work for the sanctuary came one by one from the work they were doing and said to Moses, ‘The people are bringing more than is needed for the construction of the work the Lord commanded to be done.’ … So the people stopped. The materials were sufficient for them to do all the work. There was more than enough.” Exodus 36:4-5, 6b-7
A Dot Is A Lot
I’m not an artist myself, but have had a handful of friends over the years who are quite gifted in their craft. From watercolors meant to bring glory to the Creator of the universe, to hand lettering that amplifies the Word made flesh, to photography that’s meant to capture the joy of those made in the image of our God, my friends are talented and I love displaying their created works in my own home. As humans, we were created to create, by a creative God; a god who delights in beauty and order and purpose.
Thousands of years ago, the Israelites were wondering around the desert, having successfully escaped Egypt. One of their first tasks was a challenging creative project, the building of a mobile Tabernacle. (I’m going to connect the Israelites to AI. Just hang with me.) From the description Moses recorded for us, the Tabernacle was beautiful. It was filled with gold and gems, intricate wood working, and hand sewn linen curtains. There were (besides God), two main architects of the Tabernacle, Bezalel and Oholiab. Bezalel was “filled with God’s Spirit, with wisdom, understanding and ability in every kind of craft to design artistic works in gold, silver, and bronze." (Exodus 35:31) Oholiah, too, was filled with “wisdom and understanding to know how to do all the work of constructing the sanctuary.” (Exodus 36:1) In addition to their skill as craftsman, Bezalel and Oholiab had “the ability to teach others.” (Exodus 35:34) So, right there, in the middle of the desert, they built a community of artists.
Everything they needed for building the Tabernacle was donated as a goodwill offering by the Israelites. At some point, Bezalel and Oholiab communicated that they had more than enough supplies and the Israelites could stop making donations. The artisans understood the value of the materials they were working with. It appears that they weren’t prone to waste or excess, they were content and purposeful. If you’ve ever done finger painting with a toddler, you know that waste and lack of purpose is the name of the game. Before everything is said and done, you’re going to need a hose, scrub brush, and laundry detergent. When my kids were younger, their art teacher would remind them, “A dot is a lot.” The message was clear: start with a small amount of paint. You can always add more, but it’s hard to remove extra paint from a canvas. Use what you need and don’t overdo it. Skilled artistians know this.
An Artist’s Perspective
An artist will tell you there’s a lot of intentionality behind their work. They see and create pieces of a whole in ways that my brain doesn’t quite understand. Sometimes, maybe the finished piece wasn’t quite what was intended, but that’s okay. The learning happens during the creative process, not from the finished work.
I read an article somewhere on Substack, written by an artist parent who was trying to draw a particular type of duck for a small child. The duck variety was something obscure, not your normal Mallard. The artist worked, reworked, researched and pontificated on all of the different aspects of this particular species of duck. (If you are reading this and know the article, please send it my way so I can link to the piece!) It was painstaking and, at various points, not going well. The artist kept at it, trying to capture the duck both above and below water as it dove beneath the surface to capture its prey. The final piece was quite lovely, much to the delight of the child.
At the end of it all, there was an admission that most of the effort could be viewed as a waste of time. AI could have created the final piece in a fraction of the time, after all. But then the artist’s child asked, “How did you do that?” And the story of creativity began once again as the artist explained the trials and errors, mistakes and success to the young child. A child who now knows something more about hard work and perseverance. And joy.
Mini-Creators & Poisoning Art
Thanks to AI programs, we can now all be “artists.” A few prompts and out comes an AI image. I’ve even used some in a post I wrote a few months back. I wish I hadn’t.
Recently, I interviewed a young artist, Claudia. She is a high school student and hopes to make a career out of her artwork one day. Like so many artist before her, Claudia began as a young child with finger paints and playdough before graduating to charcoal and colored pencils, her preferred media. She draws people, specifically realistic looking people. Her works aren’t silly or cartoonish. She’s trying to create, on a small scale, the beauty that God created when he made humans. She likes to call herself a “mini-creator.”
As she walked me through her process of creating art, we quickly turned to the topic of AI generated art. I asked how I, a non-artist, could tell the difference between AI generated art and the “real thing” made by human hands. She taught me to look at hands and eyes, textures and shading. She taught me that AI art can be saturated with color, but still have a dull quality. There are computer programs that will detect AI art, much like those that will detect AI term papers. Ultimately, Claudia taught me that experience is the best way to determine if a piece of art is AI generated or not. Tell me more, I prompted her. “AI doesn’t create new art, it doesn’t make anything new. It Frankensteins art.” (“Huh?,” I thought.) She went on to describe to me, how in the same way that generative AI platforms like ChatGPT use word vectors to “write” papers, AI art generators piece together parts of images that have been taken from other sources. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to “write” an essay on plants at a 10th grade level and you can ask art generators to “draw” a boy next to a lake in the style of Monet. Neither have been truly created on a blank canvas or piece of notebook paper. They have both taken information from the web and regurgitated it.
Computers work in numbers. Humans work in words. Computers work in numbers. Humans work in images. This is why sometimes AI art works and sometimes it’s just a mess. At this point, Claudia is becoming more animated as I ask more questions such as, “How do you keep AI art programs from copying/stealing YOUR work?” She tells me about AI poisoning films. One such program, Nightshade, was created by Ben Zhao at the University of Chicago. Essentially, it is like a cloak or film overlaid on top of the digital artwork that distorts the image such that a computer doesn’t “read” it properly. Dogs become cats, cats become cows, and so on. Another program Claudia told me about is Glaze. According to its website, Glaze is “a system designed to protect human artists by disrupting style mimicry. At a high level, Glaze works by understanding the AI models that are training on human art, and using machine learning algorithms, computing a set of minimal changes to artworks, such that it appears unchanged to human eyes, but appears to AI models like a dramatically different art style.”
This information was opening up a whole world I didn’t know anything about! Artists are often the victims of having their artwork stolen by AI programs and then recycled into images the artist never wanted to create. For Claudia, who draws realistic images of people, she worries that an AI program could steal her art and create an image promoting something she disagrees with or that is against her morals or ethics. Could this one day turn into her being falsely accused of contributing to a cause she abhors? A cause that’s illegal or immoral? If the AI art mimics her style, damage could be done to her reputation before she has a chance to clear her name.
As you can begin to see, the ethical implications of AI generated art are vast. They are certainly far larger and more dangerous than I had considered months back when I used an AI art generator! Ultimately, Claudia hopes that with enough education and even top down regulation, companies and people who use AI generated art will be encouraged to stop. If we change the narrative about AI generated art, artists like Claudia will be able to protect not only their personal image, but also the images they are creating.
Eventually, will artist stop posting their work online as AI learns to hack programs like Glaze? Maybe so. Claudia says if that comes to be, she thinks AI generated art will “self destruct.” Meaning that AI platforms will run out of modifications and everything will become a dull, monotonous image.
Dear Christian Parent, it may seem silly and harmless to let your kids play around with AI generated art. Maybe you’ve even thought it was developing some sort of technological skill. But, just like using AI to generate a school essay is cheating, using AI to create art is cheating. It’s also lazy. The purpose of art is to create, to be a mini-creator, as Claudia likes to say. Creating is one way we bear the image of our Lord.
I Wonder Why…
A few weeks back on a trip to NYC, I spent half a day roaming The Met Museum. One painting caught my attention more than any of the others. It was a piece by Thomas Cole, an American artist in the early 1800’s. At over four feet tall and six feet wide, the painting immediately drew me in. An elderly couple was perched on the bench in front of the painting discussing the work of art. As I gazed and they talked, I heard the woman say, “I wonder why...”
I’ve forgotten how she finished her sentence, but I’ve continued to wonder why. Why did Cole paint himself into the picture? Why did he choose to paint this particular portion of the Connecticut River Valley? Why did he paint a portion of the sky as a thunderstorm and another portion as a sunlit day? Why is he looking, not at the landscape he is painting, but instead at the person who is viewing his art? Why we are using AI programs to generate art when we are created by a Creator?
Thomas Cole, Claudia, Bezael, and Oholiab are mini-creators, bearing the image of our Lord. It is good, for those of us who bear His image, to mimic his design. There is beauty, work, and worship when humans create. Don’t let your kids outsource their imagination to a computer platform. A little bit of creativity, paint, and a blank canvas can go a long way. We don’t need to steal from millions of images on the internet to create good art. We can use the resources we have at our fingertips. Like Bezael and Oholiab, we must recognize when we have too much. A dot is a lot, after all. Millions and millions of pixelated images is an excess we should say no to. Our sons and daughters were created to do more than steal. In this digital age, we must teach children what it means to be human, what it means to bear the image of our Creator.