1

Photography of Everyday Life:

Reflection

Krystal Pham

CMN601: Visual Communication

Ryerson University

Professor Z. Zurba

October 29th, 2022

 2

Reflection
I chose to explore the controversies surrounding art that is generated by artificial

intelligence: AI art. The concept has recently taken the internet by storm, occupying an

unprecedented presence in the realm of both digital and traditional art. This project will analyze

the socio-political consequences of the subject through the context of Walter Benjamin’s ideas

about art, and its intersections with technology, which demands the questions of art and ethics.

AI art being digitally curated renders it, in many people’s eyes, not art at all due to its

lack of humanity. It is the mass collection and combination of various different images across the

internet, compiled into a single image to illustrate a representation of abstract ideas that people

have contributed to cyberspace. Thus, while the art pieces created by AI are in their own

original, it is blatantly the accumulation of other artworks making many question “originality”.

Benjamin’s statement, “Replicas were made [. . . ] by third parties in the pursuit of gain” (Walter

& Arendt, 1969) rings true, especially the in the case of the third parties. Once AI software gains

access to images from anywhere on the internet, they have access to the art of others in order to

exploit it for its own pursuits. I included AI works in my gallery that were directly designed to

echo the styles of famous artists to illustrate this exploitation.

While Walter's views on reproduction were specific to rendering copies of a single work.

Here, the replication is done to artworks to create something similar. Moreover, pre-existing art

should maintain its authority, however once used by AI, it becomes a controversy of copyright

and stolen style (“Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a

forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis a vis technical reproduction” (Walter &

Arendt, 1969)). Though many artists and audiences enjoy the AIartworks and believe that art

should be appreciated regardless of its origins, many in the art society consider the rise of AI art

to be the downfall of human art, and consequently, the art of humanity.

 3

References

Walter, B., & Arendt, H. (1969). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (pp. 217–251). essay, Schocken Books.