A few weeks ago, there was a huge uproar here at Hackaday. A writer published a piece using AI-generated headline art. Honestly, it was pretty good, but also subject to all the horrors that occur along the way. If you’ve ever tried any of our image generators, you’re familiar with the eerie style of AI art. At first glance it looks good enough, but upon closer inspection you realize that the limbs are in the wrong place. The editor noticed and immediately replaced it.
The story was that a writer couldn’t find a nice visual to go with a blog post, so he encoded the data into a QR code and printed it for storage. Actually, this is a frequent problem here. For example, when creating a code hack, there is usually no good image to accompany it. Our writers need to be creative. In this case, he dumped it into a stable spread.
Some commenters worried that this meant we were outsourcing the work of our wonderful and very human art director, Joe Kim. His trademark style was seen in many of our long-form original articles. Of course not! He was a genius, and when I told him I needed art on a variety of subjects, from smelting cobalt to the Wimshurst machine that generated static electricity, he responded immediately. We’ve probably all wanted to turn one or more of his headline art pieces into a poster. Joe is a treasure.
But for daily blog posts showcasing your work, you usually just use photos of your projects. You can’t ask Joe to make 10 pieces of art a day, and he never does. AI-generated art is just as good as finding licensed clip art, at least as far as Hackaday is concerned, right?
Except it’s not. When it comes to the data used to train algorithms, there is a lot of uncertainty about whether the copyrights of original artists can and should be ethically or legally respected. Some even worry that all this will spell the end of art. (They were also concerned about this when they introduced the camera.) But there’s also the extra limbs and cliche style of AI-generated art. We worry that after we become saturated with them, they will become stale and boring.
So while we are not using AI-generated art as a policy at this point, that doesn’t mean we don’t see both the benefits and risks. After all, we’re not Luddites, but we’re also in favor of artists getting paid for their work and respecting the commons when people copyleft licenses to their images. We’re very interested in how this plays out in the future, but for now we’re sitting on the sidelines. Sorry if that means more headings with colorful code.
