A Tattoo Artists Take on Artificial Intelligence Part 3 - Cons
And now the moment you’ve been waiting for; my rant on generative AI. I was fortunate enough to graduate high school right before the rise of generative AI. Now students have access to chat GPT which allows them to submit assignments and essays without having to do any work. So let’s think about this for a second; let’s say there is a student studying psychology. The student is able to understand the basics of the industry but they use AI to write any assignments. Yes, they can read over those assignments but they are not understanding the content. This has the potential to create an uneducated work force which can cause serious issues with society in the future. Furthermore generative AI has the capability to create what’s called “hallucinations” or completely untrue facts that spread misinformation. When Gemini was first being added to google, you could search “how many rocks should I eat in a day?” and you would get an answer “according to UC Berkley geologists, people should eat at least one small rock per day” which is INSANE. This answer came from an article from “the onion” which is a well-known satirical news site.
As an artist my primary concern is generative AI art. There are a few issues with AI art. The systems used for this use machine learning which consists of feeding the program already created art. So real art is stolen to make these programs work. In 2023 an artist by the name of Kelly McKernan, who is a well-known painter, joined a class action lawsuit against Midjourney, stable Diffusion and Dream Up. These companies are public platforms where users can have images generated based on prompts, however they use a database of publicly available art from over 5 billion images across the internet. Now even though the images are publicly available that does not mean that it is ethical to steal these images. Within the tattoo world it is generally frowned upon to steel designs. I had a client who wanted a floral jelly fish tattoo on her thigh and while researching reference images I was able to find multiple examples where the same design was used. So think about it, if you paid a painter to make you a piece of art and you found out that they had actually stolen that from another artist, how would you feel? The same thing goes for tattoo, if you are paying an artist to create a custom design, it shouldn’t be stolen art or copied. AI art can also create high expectations for tattoo artists. You can be an extremely talented artist and still not be able to make a tattoo that looks like an AI generated image. I am sent images by clients that are clearly AI and I will have to explain that the tattoo will not look like that. There is also the threat of fake artists. Fake artists can take advantage of tattoo clients by creating a fake portfolio online and accepting deposits for tattoo appointments just to steal money from tattoo collectors and ghost them.
This is why it is so important to be smart about what you see on the internet. It becomes really easy to believe that you should be eating pebbles when the first google result says you should. But use your common sense. Take a second look at the image you see and think “why does that person have an extremely deformed hand?” or “is that sandwich too shiny?”.
All I’m saying is you should just use critical thinking, not just within the art and tattoo space but in every aspect of your life. Misinformation is a serious issue right now and it seems that everyone forgot the phrase “don’t believe everything you read on the internet”. So with my rant out of the way I want to ensure my current and future clients that I do not use or support the use of AI in my tattoo practices. Thank you so much for reading!
Ps: this is all my own opinion based off of research I have done.
