AI art is plagiarism, and that’s great!
How AI Art exposes our capitalist understanding of human creativity
Have you heard that AI is killing art? No? Well, you should. The hashtag #AIArt has been all the rage on Twitter for days and some members of the popular artist platform Artstation obviously didn’t enjoy it very much.
By sharing an “Anti AI” logo on their social media channels they raised their voice against a technology that they fear is killing human creativity: AI artists were accused of stealing the art of others and thus plagiarizing. On closer inspection, this accusation turns out to be a true blessing. Here’s why:
What is plagiarism?
In the first century after a Jewish social reformer known as Jesus remixed popular Eastern belief systems, a Roman writer named Marcus Valerius Martialis accused his fellow poet Fidentinus of falsely passing off Martialis’ poems as his own. “Plagiarius!” he uttered, venting his anger in one of the sarcastic epigrams for which he became famous. For us, in the absence of slavery, this would mean something like “Kidnapper!” or “Hijacker!” (Martialis, in his figurative style, referred to his writings as slaves that he sets free, so that the one who steals them becomes a “slave robber” aka Plagiarius).
