It seems that, like a virus, the idea has been spreading that the use of generative AI is unethical or inappropriate, as if this made any real sense. There are people who have gone from indifference —or even from looking favorably upon the arrival of this set of new technologies— to seeing them as something malevolent or immoral, adopting the anti-AI slogan as a pseudo-religious mantra that, they believe, places them on a higher moral plane, as if they were fighting against some form of injustice. Of course, this is not the case, but a small number of people fall into the web of lies spun by those interested in not losing their business.

It is therefore vital to tear down that lie about the theft of artists’ intellectual property, because it reveals a lack of deep knowledge about art and the tradition of art that is intolerable in anyone who calls themselves an artist. Perhaps calling oneself an artist is part of the problem, but we will go deeper later into the relationship between the artist’s ego and the ominous lack of humility shown by some of them, because the main problem that articulates this virus of hatred toward so-called AI art —I do not believe that what an AI generates can be called art— has nothing to do, at least initially, with intellectual property, but with money, as I stated at the beginning.

The main issue here is that there are individuals who, taking advantage of a widespread need, have trained certain skills in order to monetize them. Put that way, this is no different from any other job or occupation, such as working as a translator. In this way, these people, with that skill, sell their services to others, thereby establishing their business model. But they lose sight of something fundamental: they are no longer in the realm of art, but in the marketplace: the law of supply and demand. These people sell artistic products, and are therefore subject to competition, and those competitors may lower the cost of their services, make use of technologies that make them more productive, or copy their products to some extent.

Burger King and McDonald’s have been doing this for six or seven decades; and it is not a useless comparison, because just as they do not produce food but food products —it is not about nourishing people, it is about getting them to buy and eat by appealing to gluttony— artists who sell their art make artistic products. Those who create their works without the intention of monetizing them, however, can indeed be said to be making art, because art is created out of passion, necessity, to calm the mind or heal the soul; it is a pleasure, not a business. The moment you charge for what you do, you turn it into a product, especially if we consider that this execution does not arise from one’s own will, nor from desire, nor from inspiration: an artist who works on commission is a mercenary, like someone who makes a custom cake, renovates a home, or tunes a car. And all of them —like the translator— use their trained skill in order to monetize it, with the risk that their competitors may do it better or cheaper, or that one day they may be replaced by machines or artificial intelligences capable of translating texts without human intervention: this is called progress.

The fact that humans no longer need to study languages in order to understand messages in other tongues, or to watch YouTube videos that were previously inaccessible to them, is an advantage. Is it not also an advantage that each person can create their own illustrations? It is not an advantage for those who charge for it, because it affects their modus vivendi, but for the rest of humanity, for those who want or need images, it is highly positive. A true artist will continue creating their art and enjoying it forever. That is a value no one can take away from them. However, what can indeed be taken away is what they use to obtain money, as with any other job: you can lose it at any moment, or it may stop being as profitable if market circumstances change.

And so, these people, annoyed because their business model is collapsing, suddenly spread this false idea of intellectual property theft. A few fall prey to this spell and repeat these slogans endlessly, as if they were a divine mantra, or a truth written on the tablets of the law. They fall prey to their ignorance —and perhaps to their ego— and dedicate themselves to feeding hatred toward users of generative AI, to promoting brigades aimed at changing subreddit rules, harassing people on networks like Facebook or the former Twitter, even, sadly, falsely accusing artists of using generative AI when they have not done so, because their perfect detection radar simply failed.

But do you know what? It turns out that a generative AI does the same thing we humans have been doing for at least some five thousand years: recycling everything that came before.

This is where the concept of the tradition of art comes fully into play. Octavio Paz said that trying to escape tradition is useless, but that it is a phenomenon that always happens as part of tradition. Let us demolish this with one definitive and simple blow: what would H. R. Giger have done if he had been born 1,000 years ago? Can you imagine Tolkien living before the entire cultural heritage of medieval Europe? Before Chrétien de Troyes? Do you think The Lord of the Rings would exist? And without that work, do you think Dungeons & Dragons would exist?

No artist could have done anything if all the creators who preceded them had not existed, creators from whom they stole —consciously and unconsciously, and this is important— everything they know today and everything that, through a great deal of practice —training— they managed to consolidate in a particular way. In the Middle Ages, in poetry and painting, masters were always copied, because that was the only way to learn.

But it is not only a matter of making conscious copies of previous material, or of the effort required to master the hand so that it does what you want it to do. We ignore the fact that, from the moment we are born, we are being exposed to reality, and therefore to countless works of art, each one of them gathering countless centuries of cultural heritage. But beyond that, there is another crucial fact: before an artist or writer has the conscious thought or impulse to create something, this very exposure to hundreds or thousands of works has been impacting and, in some way, educating their brain, redirecting it in a particular direction. So, in addition to that passive, unconscious learning, we must emphasize a fundamental point: having consumed certain works is perhaps what has motivated you to do what you do.

Perhaps Lovecraft would never have written anything if he had not read Poe, Bierce, Chambers, Dunsany, Machen, Shelley, and others, because those works would not have nourished him and awakened his interest in creating.

And it is at this point that ignorance is intensified by a lack of humility, a broken ego, and the need to stand out or be recognized. To be an artist, regardless of your art, is to become a living homage to tradition. It is an honor to be able to integrate all those influences into new works that exist only because of the works from which they were nourished. Learning from others or copying their works is a privilege to be grateful for, because nothing you do as an artist truly belongs to you —only an insignificant minimal fraction related to your personality, tastes, or style. The rest belongs to all the millions of your predecessors from every corner of the world, as well as to the increasingly close dialogue among arts that feed back into one another: literature, cinema, painting, photography, comics, and so on.

So artists train and learn from their tradition —or from other artistic traditions they consume— reusing and retreading previous works, and that is fine; but when generative AI does it, it is wrong? It is somewhat absurd, incoherent, or, what is most likely: malicious. We would return to economic interest as the true focus of this momentary fever against AI, and the circle would close.

But perhaps it would be sensible to propose that every artist pay royalties to every other artist from whom they learned —stole, copied, were inspired by— something, just to be fair. But of course, the training dataset of an AI is somewhere and can be verified, whereas there is still no technology capable of scrutinizing and mapping the human brain in order to show how works of art leave an imprint, an inspiration, a lesson, a burst of creativity that pushes you to create something, and what exactly you are copying. Who knows, perhaps one day it will be possible and we will be in for a great surprise. But if we add to this impossibility of knowing the specific source, or the fundamental influence of those works on our own, an enormous lack of perspective and humility, and probably an unhealthy ego…

The irony is that the anti-AI crusade is doomed to fail. There have been reactionary movements against many technologies in the past. Today we do not question factory machines, the printing press, or computers, just as people will not question AI a few years from now. Photographers became intense about computer photo editing; portraitists rebelled against photography —they even spread the idea that photographic cameras captured the human soul. The printing press and the typewriter were received as assaults on the art of handwriting, and Plato criticized writing, saying that it was bad for memory and the mind. In some of these cases, people said: “No, this time it is different.”

And yet here we are, creating without end.