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AI Art Flyer Brings Controversy to Oakland First Fridays

Organizers of Oakland First Fridays made a flyer using AI, and are facing backlash for not using a human artist.
Scott Simon, NPR

Art showing a busy street corner, bustling with people in front of a building adorned with an OAKLAND sign and pink flowers.
The AI-produced flyer used by Oakland’s First Fridays. (Oakland First Fridays)

The spring flyer for Oakland’s First Fridays street fair shows people strolling on an urban avenue past a building festooned with bright, pink flowers.

But that advertisement for an event celebrating creativity wasn’t created by an artist. It was generated by AI.

“Shame on you,” an Instagram user commented. “You exist because of artists and yet you insist on stealing from and subjugating them…”

Oakland First Fridays was begun by local art galleries in 2006 as a kind of Friday night, art gallery crawl. Organizers say it now draws about 30,000 people each month.

This week the organizers defended their use of an AI image to promote the festival as being all they could afford as a local nonprofit running a free event.

“(W)e do our best to balance creativity with the resources we have available,” they posted on Instagram. “Unfortunately, we don’t currently have the budget to hire artists to create designs for us… it wasn’t a purely AI-generated design,” they added. “(W)e made significant edits and adjustments…”

I think the Oakland First Fridays flyer looks… fine. But knowing it was produced by artificial intelligence doesn’t make you consider what an artist saw with their eyes and hoped to express.

AI is poised to change the world and alter the fields of medicine, manufacturing, accounting, coding, and yes, writing and even broadcasting.

But people make art to spark imagination and feeling, in the artist and the audience.

Riva Lehrer, the artist and writer who also teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, told us: “We in the arts have to understand the machinery of our imaginations in order to become deeper artists. AI is like letting our minds be kidnapped and distorted. It is a vampire mirror, capturing your soul and putting it in a cage.”

Pablo Picasso, by the way, made paintings and lithographs to promote art fairs. Maybe the folks at Oakland First Fridays could have taken one of those and just made a few “significant adjustments.”

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