AI Art Generation In The Veldt By Ray Bradbury

The Twentieth Century saw the birth of a new era of technical innovation which particularly proliferated automated machinery. A trend primarily focused on aiding and entertaining in the everyday lives of the people. This spike in new technologies led to many benefits and detriments, examples of which are seen in both the Ray Bradbury short story “The Veldt” and in modern AI Art generators.

The Veldt focuses on a wealthy family in an imagined future who have accommodated their home with a robotic system called the Happylife Home. As well as a “Nursery;” a room which can transport the senses to anywhere the user can imagine. Despite the technology of the Happylife home being fictionalized by Ray Bradbury for the point of its damages; there are

AI Art Generation is the process of Automated intelligence scanning a massive dataset of online images to create a new image responding to a prompt (Vargas). This Technology has already been used in high-profile album and magazine covers such as Lil Yachty’s Let’s Start Here, and a June 2022 issue of cosmopolitan (Vargas). Even though it may seem contrary to first inferences, many artists such as Don Allen III, see AI-Generated Art as an aid to their own work (Vargas). Allen is a visual artist who uses AI to plan out patterns for shoes; which he modifies and brings to life by his own hand (Vargas). As is added by Melanie Ehrenkranz in an NBC news article; this creative safety can also serve to ensure and act as a new stepping-off point for new and struggling artists. It also seems as though it is unlikely that AI art will ever be able to overtake art created by humans (Vargas). The technology is recurrently unable to effectively replicate human faces and is bad at capturing emotions; two things that are not only unappealing to speculators but are also intrinsic to art as a medium (Vargas). A 2018 Pfeiffer Report study shows that only 37% of artists were worried about AI art threatening their work – the other 63% remaining unthreatened

To refer back to the dataset method of reference accumulation that AI uses; there is a risk the AI will be able to steal the style of a certain artist if their name is used in the prompt (Vargas). Since AI uses such a massive online image pool to accrue its dataset, it becomes impossible to track its sources. And if a prompt directed that a generated image be in the style of a specific artist, then the technology may produce work very close to that artist's creations, in a way that can’t be easily prevented. Furthermore, AI has been shown to exhibit bias in its creations (Ehrenkranz). Because of its online-centric data pool – the bias exhibited in different online spaces tends to appear in generations. It’s been shown that if AI is prompted to exhibit criminal behavior it is much more likely to portray black people; where academic spaces are more likely to be generated showing White people (Vargas). Some AIs have even been shown to equate the word Muslim with Terrorist (Ehrenkranz). Thankfully alot of this behavior has been corrected in larger AI art machines such as DALL-E (Ehrenkranz). Finally, there is a risk that AI art could be used to threaten people's identities by creating what are essentially deep fakes (Ehrenkranz). By the same token, there is a risk that prompts be used to portray people in threatening or disrespectful contexts. Like with racial biases, this has been prohibited in most major AIs but since the