For a school that’s dedicated to teaching art, many find it unacceptable for FIT to promote AI generated art. Companies and industries have been known to not care for artists as much as they should have. They treat us with disrespect and question our worth. Now with artificial intelligence, it’s incredibly easy for any management team to use AI as a cheap replacement of artists. This in itself is disgusting, and FIT, which is an institute founded to teach upcoming artists how to find jobs in their industries, should not be endorsing AI art at all. 

The purpose of this petition is to limit FIT’s support of AI as it’s an unethical procedure of obtaining art, and completely destroys the concept of being “unconventional”.

Recently, FIT had a symposium about the use of AI in the field of fashion design. If AI can design clothing all by itself, then what’s the point of giving students education on it? Why support a technology that might replace graduates in their future job markets? There was even an email sent out by Student Success in which one of the images attached was AI generated. It’s truly sad to already see artists get disregarded before they even finish school. I am unsure if they have used AI generated content again, but if they have done it once, there’s no certainty that they won’t use it again.

We want FIT to seize any use of AI generated art in their emails, advertisements, programming, social media, as well as not supporting its use in classes, symposiums, markets, and more. AI is an ever-developing technology and many understand its benefits in the field of art, however, we believe FIT’s use of it has been unethical. This AI technology should not be used for the conception of work. If students aren’t allowed to use ChatGPT for assignments, then neither should FIT be able to use AI generated art. All art in emails should be created by human artists and should be credited accordingly. To achieve this, the college can commission students for illustrations as necessary. This way, students can build up their portfolios and gain professional experience while FIT can post ethically created art.

There are some who defend AI art by saying it’s the same as a human artist. This argument is invalid for several reasons:

First of all, supporting artists provides them with job opportunities. The “starving artist” trope wouldn’t become a reality if companies and institutions weren’t constantly trying to cut corners to avoid expenses. Paying AI art generators results in supporting a database that steals real artists’ work without permission. Midjourney, which is such a site, was proven to be copying the works of over 16,000 artists without their knowledge or consent.

AI takes bits and pieces from others artworks to generate its “own” pieces. The process of this completely differs from that of a person taking inspiration from their fellow artists. Humans study the color, composition, shape language, etc. in artwork to learn from them. Inspiration can also be gained from photos, everyday life, memories and abstract thoughts. The products of AI are a gross amalgamation of all the pieces it steals from. This results in pieces that essentially switch up the pixels of already existing artworks.

Most notably, it’s lazy. AI art is objectively not real art. It lacks personality, individuality, skill, time, and so many more things that are involved in the creation of art. The way they end up looking proves this; in the email sent by Student Success which was mentioned earlier, the cat has four toes on one side and five on the other. Truly a lazy work of “art”.