Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
product based on the patterns it observes in those images. 12 Now, this does, perhaps predictably, present potential legal issues that will be discussed later in the paper, but for the moment, however, let us resolve this argument. How is this process, in which an artificial intelligence analyzes other artworks to generate its own, significantly different from how professionally trained traditional artists learn the craft? Artificial intelligence, as previously outlined, does not copy/paste the work of an artist but takes inspiration, if you want to call it that, from what it observes. 13 Are art students not instructed by use of the artworks of other traditional artists? Are we to look past the obvious inspiration that traditional artists find in the works of each other? Take, for example, Andy Warhol’s The Last Supper , which was directly inspired by Leonardo di Vinci’s own art. 14 Is Warhol’s impressive work somehow cheapened by the fact that it takes its inspiration from another work? Some would probably argue in the affirmative. Yet others, many of whom are artists themselves, say no, proclaiming it a valuable piece in art history.
Figure 1. Di Vinci, “The Last Supper” (left). Figure 2. Warhola, “The Last Supper” (right).
Interestingly, in art, there is a term called appropriation , and it sounds eerily similar to how artificial intelligence generates art. Appropriation is the concept that imagery from another work is taken and recontextualized, creating an altogether
12 “Generative Models.” 13 “Generative Models.”
14 “Andy Warhol: The Last Supper | The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation,” The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, n.d., https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/andy-warhol-the-last- supper.
Volume VII (2024) 7
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