No. 25 No, ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence don't make you an artist. (English version)

Season 3, episode 4 – It’s okay not to know how to draw, it’s a little bit more serious to steal and infringe the copyright of people who have taken the time to learn how.

While I was writing this newsletter, I was listening to…

I’m pissed off. It’s as simple as that.

You’ve probably heard about it or seen it go by: ChatGPT’s latest update includes the ability to generate images, and since then it’s been an artist-stealing fest! What people are talking about most – and rightly so – are all of the images generated in the style of Ghibli productions (for the best-known studio). Individuals and even politicians (the French president and some others) have tried their hand at it, and everyone has joined in. It’s so much fun, the landscapes are so cute and oh, have you seen what I’d look like if I were in a Miyazaki film? But this isn’t the first time, since around 2021/2022 when DALL-E and Midjourney began and took off, we’ve been talking about all the issues surrounding the subject.

But since last week, Instagram and all of the other social medias have been flooded with them again. And I’m contemplating it. I sigh, I clench my fists and I rant in my kitchen in the morning, still in my pyjamas, telling my boyfriend for the umpteenth time ‘but I don’t understand, how can people not understand, it doesn’t make any sense!’ while he tries as hard as he can to reason with me when he sees that I’m heading for a whole morning of being angry at the whole world, as I usually like to do in the morning when I’ve been scrolling a bit too early in the day. And because it’s all going nowhere, my dog Newton looks at me with his second favourite toy in his mouth – a big strawberry, his first favourite toy being a big red ball – waiting for me to finish so he can move on to something more fun which I understand.

I feel hurt inside because the subject is too close to me and, at the same time, it should be close to everyone.

When you’re writing an essay, you’re often told not to write about a subject that’s too close to you so as not to be biased. But I’m not writing a memoir, I’m writing a newsletter, so I don’t care and I think that if we write about subjects that are close to us, that’s where we write best.

I’m an illustrator, and it’ll be 10 years next year that I’ve made Art the source of my income and that it’s become – without any scale of value, the two activities respond to and feed each other – something extra alongside when I draw, paint and create for myself and my own pleasure, in my spare time, without any notion of making money. I don’t have enough self-confidence to say that I’m an artist, but according to Wikipedia’s definition1, I am one. And I find it disgusting to see my activity, the hours and hours spent creating, crushed by the simple fact of typing a prompt, pressing the Enter key and seeing something appear that only exists because artists have created it before.

I’ve always been drawing. When I was a child, then a teenager, then a young adult. I drew. I stopped for 3 years bcause I couldn’t stand drawing any more because of my studies, but then I started up again and haven’t stopped since. I’m not talented, I’m not born with it, I’ve just always drawn and it’s the hours and hours I’ve spent that have taught me what colours to use, what lines to draw, how perspective works… in other words, I’ve learnt. Just as you learn to play tennis, to sew, to knit, to manipulate numbers… And because I’ve learned, I know that it takes time. You know that learning takes time. Nobody goes from not knowing how to do something to knowing how to do it perfectly from one day to the next. And if that’s the case, it’s because other skills have helped to bridge the gap: when I took up oil painting, even though I’d never done it before, all my prior learning about colour and drawing meant that I wasn’t starting from scratch and already knew how to do it in a certain way.

Of course it’s not just that, it’s not just time that counts, otherwise it would be too cold and mathematical: spending hours and hours doing something isn’t enough to know how to do it, to that you have to add an element that is perhaps a little more a matter of chance: passion.

It’s passion that gives the extra something to what we do and why we like spending so much time doing it, and it’s the absence of soul, of humanity and passion that makes the images generated by IA cold and empty because there’s nothing behind them.

I’m better than last year and worse than next year — if you can really quantify skills, that’s another debate I suppose — and all my life I’ll keep learning because there’s something magical about learning: it’s never finished.

It’s not talent that makes you incredibly good at something: it’s passion. The joy you get from practising something, that special spark you feel when — in my case, illustration — the accumulation of strokes forms what you had in mind, the mixture of colours gives you a very special colour, exactly the one you were looking for, that precise feeling in your gut that makes you feel the colours, that you know when you see a painting how much blue, yellow and red it took to get that slightly brown, slightly faded green.

We know this because all our years of learning have given us a deep understanding of how colours work. It’s not magic, it’s knowledge and it has a worth.

There’s a magical side to learning too: it adds an emotional aspect, a feeling of life, to the very cold side of skills.

If I wanted to be simplistic, I’d say that anyone can draw and that art is accessible to everyone.

At first sight you might think that this is true. After all, anyone can use the Internet if there’s no museum nearby. In reality, however, it’s not quite as simple as that, for economic, social and cultural reasons.

And if everyone were able to inform themselves, fake news would be debunked by everyone as soon as they appeared, but that’s another subject. Art is classist and shouldn’t be. Not everyone lives in a big city with museums or cultural facilities or has the opportunity and the time to go there, whether as a child (the best age to start and make it fun!) or as an adult, and once you’re an adult, it’s already more complicated. And that’s why I think there’s so much misunderstanding about the fact that AI and Art have nothing to do with each other. Appreciating art and understanding it takes time, but it also takes resources that not everyone has access to. Nobody is born understanding why Contemporary Art is not as ridiculous as you might think and why that particular blue is more than just a silly blue.

And I think this is the heart of the problem of why people don’t understand the extent to which the use of AI makes us angry when it gets to the very heart of our lives. And to be honest I’m sick of them thinking we don’t understand anything. It’s David versus Golitath, the emotional is diminished and made laughable when it’s the very emotional that allows image generators to exist and pillage through billions of images.

Last year was a disaster in professional terms for me. It had been complicated for months, I couldn’t find any new contracts, I was underpaid, I often cried in the morning in front of my computer while I was working, and yet when I spoke to my therapist, who suggested that I should maybe try to find a job with no strings attached, I flatly refused. It’s a huge privilege, I know. I had the possibility of not having to go out and look for a regular job (not an art related job I mean), but I told her it was unthinkable. I didn’t want to give up, I couldn’t.

Not doing my job would be a bit like dying inside. I know that may sound excessive, but that just goes to show the extent to which this is my whole life. I’m incapable of doing anything else: not just in terms of my skills, but in terms of my life. It’s what I get up for, what drives me, what gives value to everything. Art is visceral for me and I can’t imagine doing anything else for a single minute.

Art is conceptual, intangible, it cannot be quantified, it cannot be evaluated in terms of skills or boxes to tick.

Even when Art can be touched, when it materialises in the form of a canvas, a piece of pottery or a bronze sculpture, you might think that Art has to be understood to be fully appreciated… and at the same time, not really. Anyone can feel something in front of a painting: whether you’ve spent years studying Art History or it’s your very first time standing in front of a Classical painting, the emotions you feel will be very real, and one will be no more valuable than another.

On one hand, you will feel the weight of history, the choice of placement of the figures, the angles, the light, the dog painted in the corner of the canvas and its symbolism. On the other, what cannot be named can still exist: the emotion of the light, of the expressions on the faces.

Why does this tiny painting left in the corner of a museum affect us so much and no one else? We don’t know exactly why, but we feel it, there’s something there. But it’s this emotion that has a double edge.

We’ve been taught to stop taking the time to appreciate, insidiously and without even giving our consent, we’ve learned too quickly to have everything, right away. We no longer have the time to wait, to look, to listen, to understand. We only have time to consume.

In 2017, The Guardian wrote an article about Netflix and what they considered to be their biggest competitor: our sleep2. That this sleep time has a monetary value and that their aim is to get us hooked, to make us watch one more episode, then one more, and then one more and not sleep instead, to bingewatch, to devour entire series without ever stopping. New series have recently reverted to the old model (Severance I’m talking about you), where you wait every week for a new episode, enjoy what you’re watching and don’t consume.

And I love it. It feels good to be taking it slow.

8 years later, it’s not just our sleep that is the biggest competitor for all the platforms available, whether streaming platforms or social networks in general, it’s our brain time: our attention and our capacity for reflection that are the crucial issues for them. We — and I include myself in this, I’m no better than anyone else — have got used to having almost immediate access to everything, and breaking free of this is a real mental exercise as well as being a real effort. In my opinion, this almost instantaneous speed is a nonsense. Taking your time makes you appreciate what you have in front of you.

Consumption makes us see the world as a vast fast food restaurant. Food that you can hold in your hand and eat in less than 5 minutes so that you can get on with your life and consume something else. A series, a film, a music album and then repeat it over and over and over again. There are too many images, too much of everything. The shelves in bookshops need to be constantly replenished, new titles put aside, books that don’t sell enough are destroyed. You have to have something to consume, but not something that takes too much time.

And then there’s artificial intelligence. And I don’t get it.

I really don’t understand why we’re giving so much attention to this new tool without at the same time taking into account its impact and all the issues associated with it. To throw ourselves into it headfirst and maybe, in a few years’ time, realise that we should have been more careful and done better. To spit in the faces of all the people who dedicate their lives to art. Who spend hours and hours making art and without whom AI could not even exist.

And I wonder why people want so much to be called artists. If this word has that much value, why taking the very same value out of the art in itself by making it throwable, fast and soulless and making it a product to be consumed?

There is no such thing as ethical AI. These are used arguments that don’t work. The very essence of AI is not ethical: to exist it has to steal. Simple as that. And what it does use are monstrous energy resources (studies are still in their early stages and the carbon footprint of these tools still lacks much transparency to be able to assess their impact) and astronomical quantities of data taken from the Internet without obtaining any consent from the people from whom it is drawn. One is no more important than the other, but the angle I’ve chosen to talk about it from, as you’d expect, concerns the human ethical aspect and what concerns me.

This is an insult to the very principle of copyright: everything you create is automatically protected. No one can take it away from you, no one can change it and what is yours is yours and only a contract can allow you to give or obtain permission to use it according to precise terms. Terms of duration, platform and territory. 3 years, on television, in France. 5 years, on web media, in Europe. 15 years, on print media, worldwide. These are all terms that you choose and that have a value. Once the term has expired, a contract must be renewed or the work can no longer be used. The problem with AI is that it doesn’t ask for authorisation, that it goes beyond intellectual property and the copyright branch.

So how can we talk about ethics when the tool can only exist through theft? This notion of theft is subtle because you can’t tell when you see an image created using such a tool that someone has been robbed.

After all, don’t artists continually inspire themselves? What’s the difference between theft and inspiration? Why shouldn’t using AI to create an image also be considered inspiration?

I’ve had enough of this argument. Sometimes I think we have the right to refuse to debate and waste our time with fallacious arguments. Because it’s this hypocritical rhetoric that shifts the subject, blames the artists, makes us look like people incapable of thinking, driven solely by emotion. It’s this rhetoric that cuts off debate and prevents everyone from questioning what is questionable. And while we are debating the difference between theft and inspiration, we are not addressing the very heart of the problem and are allowing these tools to keep on stealing without authorisation. AI cannot and will never be ethical because its very existence is based on the exploitation of others. If you go to someone’s house and grab an object then take it home without asking permission or having the agreement of the person who owns the object, that’s theft. If children can understand this concept, why is it so difficult to admit? It really doesn’t have to be made complicated, and yet it seems it is.

One of the arguments I see most frequently is the one about the emergence of photography. In my view, this is a lazy argument that gives the person using it the impression that they are educated, that they know what they are talking about and that they have thought enough about the subject to be entitled to give their opinion.

But let me state the facts: we don’t always have to give our opinion. It’s okay not knowing and keeping our mouths shut.

So, back to this argument I was talking about. It is simple: AI is the same thing as when photography arrived. It’s the same thing as when printing presses arrived, when we were able to start drawing by computer, when we created cars to replace carriages.

Except that none of this is true. Photography may have been frightening when it first appeared, because it allowed us to reproduce exactly what the human eye could see, but it has not replaced painting, because just as oil paint is different from pastel, photography is a creative tool that does not use painting to exist. Both can exist independently. Whereas AI, at its very core, only exists because we have created before. I still can draw if I don’t have access to a computer or the internet. If you’re using GenAI, well I’m sorry but… you can’t and most importantly you won’t know how. Whether it’s generative AI to create images, or ChatGPT’s database when you ask it a question, or even just Google, these tools can only work because they can access a gigantic database to give you what they consider to be what you’ve asked of them.

And these requests require resources. Data, human resources, but also environmental resources. AIs are trained by exploited people. What we call data workers who are exploited and obviously not properly paid (what a surprise!). Until 2022, OpenAI used an external service provider, Sama, a firm based in San Francisco that exploited Kenyan, Ugandan and Indian workers, notably to train ChatGPT3 to recognise and detect toxic and violent language and remove it from their platform. For around $1.50 USD, tens of thousands of people found themselves dealing with situations described very graphically and explicitly, including murder, rape, incest, suicide and violent pornographic content.

For AI to exist, it must use humans. And these resources have to be large, they have to work fast and they have to cost as little as possible to maximise the profits generated. All this at the cost of ethics and human respect, which are just resources. In Finland, the start-up Metroc4 has decided to turn to a prison: for €1.54 an hour, prisoners train Chatbots to answer their users’ questions.

So can we really continue to naively defend the possibility that AI might one day become ethical when its very foundation is not, and is based on the exploitation of underpaid workers or the theft of data? It would be like expecting a house to stand when its foundations are made of rotten wood and damp cardboard. It would be ignoring the fact that what counts for GAFAM and the companies at the head of these tools is not how well things are done but how to do them as quickly as possible, with the least amount of cash possible and with the aim of generating as much profit as possible without any redistribution to the workers. Funny, it reminds me of capitalism.

Finally, I often read that AI makes art accessible to as many people as possible. That they make it possible for people with disabilities to create art.

It’s the same argument used by people against inclusive writing who suddenly remember that dyslexic people exist and use it to set themselves up against it when the rest of the time, living conditions and respect for people with disabilities has not the slightest place in their thoughts.

Art has always been accessible to as many people as possible; you don’t need to know how to paint the ceiling of a chapel or sculpt marble to have access to it, a simple pencil is all you need to start. While I was in high school I was obsessed with drawing with a blue ballpoint pen, the most simple tool that could exist and yet, it was fun and I enjoyed it so much. It’s because we see art as something incredible and inaccessible that we want to produce it more quickly and automatically.

But it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how. It’s OK to draw badly, to struggle, to take a long time to draw a house, a portrait, a tree. Everyone starts out as a beginner, and that’s what makes creating so magical. And even when we know how to draw we still make bad things sometimes. What matters is not whether you can draw a house, a portrait or a tree but how much fun (well maybe not a first I know) you had doing it.

On the other hand, it’s a serious offence to steal someone else’s work, to rob them of all the time they’ve spent, the years they’ve spent learning how to do it, and to think that what’s been generated is your own creation. Would you find it ethical to go and steal an athlete’s medal and then claim it as your own without ever having learnt how to do the sport? Now, imagine you’re the athlete and someone is coming to steal your own medal, the one you’ve trained for your whole life, for which you pour your passion and efforts into it. Then this person is telling that they won it and that they belong to them. How does it feel?

I don’t want to draw more quickly, I don’t want to achieve the desired result in less time, what matters to me is not just the result but all the time spent and the joyful experienced in slowly putting together an illustration, whether it’s done digitally or traditionally. I want to continue to be frustrated when I can’t draw for several days or when everything I do is ugly. Because I’m simply a human. I want to continue to learn for myself, to make sure that what I create is mine alone, is personal to me and comes from my own life. I want to continue to support other artists, to understand how this person whose work I adore can continue to make my practice better, to continue to be inspired – not to copy – to look around me and to take inspiration from everything that makes up my daily life so that I can create.

It’s this deep joy, this particular thing I feel that I can’t describe, almost visceral, that makes my whole life revolve around art. The rush I get to sleep at night when I suddenly have an idea in my head and can’t wait to put it into shape, the joy I feel when I see an illustration come to life little by little, the excitement I feel every morning when I get up to continue working on a project for a client, a client who pays me to do what I prefer to do in the world: draw.

We’re not just happy fools who believe we can live on the food of love and refuse to accept what others think is a revolution in the art world. We firmly believe in the need to protect what makes us human. To protect rights, to protect our ethics and to preserve the very principle of the creative process that ensures that everything we create has a soul and a meaning and is not completely emptied of meaning by the simple act of typing a prompt that will draw on someone else’s work to exist. I don’t want to see a world where art isn’t made by human beings.

If the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world, it’s not just for its looks but for its history, for the mystery surrounding the identity of this woman with her hands crossed, for its use of sfumato, the very special painting technique used by Leonardo da Vinci that gives paintings using this method that soft, vaporous impression. If this painting is famous, it’s for everything that lies behind it, not just the result.

We’re getting screwed by encouraging tools that push us to do things that give our lives essence faster, while living conditions in the world are still not improving and the richest continue to get richer via these same tools. Wouldn’t the opposite be to work less so that we have more time to create, to spend time outdoors, to look after our garden and the community around us? To simply slow down? I thought that was the whole point.

You might think that this newsletter is there to make Art sacred, to make is special, something that we can’t discuss or criticise. But there’s nothing sacred about art, and there’s nothing sacred about creation either. It’s just art. We don’t care if you draw well or badly, if you’re famous or not, it’s not about that, it’s about finding joy in what you do. Whether you’re drawing on a corner of a table or on a big canvas, you’re not saving lives, you’re just doing things with your hands because you think it’s cool and fun and because you like it. Yet every individual deserves respect and, by extension, what we create. In my office on the wall I’m facing when I work I have this small framed card that I bought a few years ago from the shop of Marloes De Vries (this card doesn’t seem to be still available unfortunately), an illustrator whose I love the work. It reminds me daily that it’s just art. That it’s not really serious and most importantly when I’m feeling particularly stressed about a work in progress, that it’s not a big deal and everything will be fine. But it’s also what I enjoy doing most on a daily basis and it’s the passion I feel for creating that will keep me defending it so much.

So keep on doing what we love the most, to support each other. We buy things from artists because we know they put love in it and that we know it has value, not because of how fast they made a sculpture, a painting or how fast they’ve written a novel. I know it can seem a little bit utopian because nothing these days encourages us to keep on respecting each other and we’re going through an era that’s pushing us to divide ourselves but if we give up, what’s the point really?

Even if I may seem to be a fool, I don’t care, at least I know how to draw hands.

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While writing, I also listened to…

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