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| Street Artist Jesse Zuefle at his creation at 795 Elmwood Ave. |
By Emmanuel Rogers
Artificial Intelligence generation has taken the world by storm with its recent technology of creating any thought or image based on a few sentences or phrases. Specifically, one use of AI that has caused different opinions and controversy is AI art or image creators.
Websites that provide free access to the tools of image generation, such as Midjourney, Firefly Adobe, and Night Café, have given people the ability to make anything imaginable.
A case that occurred in 2020, brought up in a New York Times article, involves a man named James M. Allen, who entered the Colorado State Fair art competition and won a blue ribbon and a $300 prize for entering an AI image created on Midjourney.
Local street artist Jesse Zuefle, also known as Banksy Hates Me, says he can look on both sides of the concerns of AI usage. He understands the frustration of hard-working artists losing their credibility and the advantages of using AI as a reference. He is mostly comfortable with using AI for your personal creative gain.
“I think that artists will always be more important than AI. Are some people going to lose their jobs to an advertisement or marketing development where art is needed? For sure,” Zuefle says.
Zuefle says when photography was introduced the world took this as a dangerous new form of imagery and eventually became a huge success in art. He says using this new form of imagery can be good for new upcoming artists that need references.
“Artists need to figure out ways to take advantage of it and use it and to not let it use them,” Zuefle says.
Zuefle’s work consist of different styles that are mainly used by stencils and spray paint. He has used AI image generation to get inspiration for his pieces by manipulating them into his style.
Zuefle says he made a piece in New Orleans called “AI Made Me an Artist,” where he stenciled a man holding a sign that originally said, “I am an artist.” By spray painting over some letters, it would then read the quote.
Two local artists had a negative view on AI imagery and how it could potentially give artists difficulty adjusting to the new technology.
Esther Neisen, owner of Lumpy Buttons shop located on 717 Elmwood Ave., believes that AI makes it hard for artists to keep their credibility.
“It's taking without permission from other artists, feeding into it, and making it a way for people to not pay artists to create imagery,” Neisen says.
With AI having the possibility of reaching the level of being displayed and viewed in professional art galleries, Neisen says that this may cause some difficulty in the art community.
“AI is a huge competition for people who are actually doing their own work. AI is taking something from a resource and claiming that you made it,“ Neisen says.
Carl Lee, a media artist who specializes in video film and installation, says AI takes away the original form of an art piece and causes issue with telling what is artificially made and what is not.
“I think it’s problematic because it’s mining the work that people have created, and I think that’s an issue,” Lee says.
