Corinne Whitacker

"The year was 1994. My talk was called, “Look Ma. No paintbrush!” It was the first lecture ever given at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Digital imaging.
The year is now 2024. The title now would be “Look Ma. No paintbush! No Chisel!”. After 30 years, another revolution in art history is upon us.
These radical moments demand a new way of thinking about art and force us to reconsider who we are and what we are doing.
The introduction of the personal computer, and with it a binary language, was one such moment. It was a radical departure from Renaissance perspective, and necessitated a new visual iconography which is still only slowly permeating the understanding of others,
I think of art as making a mark, in some fashion, to reflect what it means to be human and to be alive at any particular moment. The tool is ancillary: the mind, passion, and craftsmanship primary.
AI has opened up a vast new world to artists. If multiple universes exist, if a metaverse is possible, AI is one key to enter those magical realms. We know that ChatGPT was initially trained on about 300 billion words. It is therefore logically improbable to think that any one artist could identify her/his own work in an AI product. Is copyright valid any longer?
Another issue facing us is ownership. Once you put anything in/on an internet world, all privacy is moot. There simply is none. As Buddhism reminds us, we are loath to enter into an unknown world. That new world is there for all who have the courage to enter it, although each of us will experience it in different ways.
It may also be that AI is the Rosetta Stone of contemporary society. If we blow ourselves into smithereens, at least there will be a record of who we were. If we manage to co-exist in harmony, we will have breached borders and differences to present one exhaustive overview of our world.

Asking artists not to use AI is like asking the sun not to shine."