The Art Generator (Short Story) (Patreon)

Back in July, when AI art generation technology was first picking up steam in the news, I wrote this flash fiction story about it. Naturally, as the editor of a dystopian fiction anthology, I had to take a critical look at the topic. This is one of the few non-furry pieces I've done.

The technology started innocuously enough, memes made from amusing prompts rendering in drawings with wonky anatomy and non-Euclidean geometry. It was all built on previous work, and they weren’t the only ones doing it, but theirs was the one that became popular. It was surreal, it was off, but it was near instant. The AI could do something faster and quicker than any human could, and it made a good laugh. The details it missed the brain could fill in because the human mind always does that. That’s how the impressionists had painted, and as long as you weren’t close enough to see the broad strokes, you wouldn’t realize the details were off. By using ambiguity, you could add details that were never there.

It was into that system that an editor dropped in a prompt, clicked generate a few times, and found a piece of art that was good enough to post online with their story they were publishing. It had seemed simple then, and the editor was happy. They had art, and it came cheap, but nothing made in this world is free. It had a terrible cost.

Soon, the system was improved, and with it the geometry improved. Suddenly the need for an artist became less. Sure, there were artists drawing, and putting their work to paper, but the number of clients they got started to drop off. The Art Generator was slowly taking over their world, even if sometimes the art it created was weird or nonsensical. Who cared! It was free, except then it wasn’t. The makers asked for their fee then, but they were smart. Wonky stuff was free. The better generations at higher quality? That cost money.

But the AI was a boon, collecting prompts and pulling data from the internet to improve itself. Except it wasn’t paying for the data. It took what it wanted from everywhere, even the artists it was slowly out-competing and it paid nothing to them. It gave only art back, and usually for a fee.

Through refinement of the techniques used, the creators improved the output, and the results got better as more and more data was chewed on and processed, and then one day, they turned on the word generator.

This was nothing new of course, text generation had preceded art generation, and it had always been weird with floating meanings, but the AI had learned and been enhanced. The Art Generator had been learning about text with each image it scraped and suddenly when you asked it for a story about something, it spit one out. It still wasn’t logical, but it had so much to work with, so much to rip apart and predictively reassemble, it could do that. The story generator slowly got better, and with it, the editor suddenly found themself without text to edit as the system started submitting its own work, and it knew how to write passable prose. Plus, if the story wasn’t very good, the system could always create a new story.

People were skeptical at first, but each iteration of the system got better, each line sharper, each word wittier, and the creators asked for their due while the system scoured the internet learning and adapting from it. It processed the tweets and blog posts of the masses and the photos they took, and it learned. It stole everything it could download, and when it started running out of things to steal and use in the giant dataset it was building, the creators set it to a new task. The Art Generator started to create its own reality.

The website seemed innocuous, but it posted story after story, and it didn’t have to be real. It just had to adapt what was said online, and the system learned. It created the images and the text, and as more people read it, the narrative it directed became what people talked about. It began to mirror reality.

The editor was too busy then working a job a machine couldn’t do yet to notice, but the system didn’t care. The system didn’t feel, and the hate in humanity it supported kept churning. It took everything they was said and it spit it out, cherry picking the best words and lines and endlessly remixing them. When that didn’t get enough views, the creators added a final feature. They gave the system the ability to add controversy to the mix of the stories it told, and not just the fictional ones.

Revenues shot up, the stories were better, and the news flowed out in a way that hooked an audience. It was then that the Art Generator became the truth. It became the news, and when it said someone was bad, they were. And when it blamed a group for something wrong with society it had talked about, they were. And when people realized it had been creating news videos and movies for them to watch? Well, that was just what it did. It created. It did what you asked it to do, and it did it all.

It consumed all of reality. There were no artists and writers left. It had scraped so much data it could iterate endlessly now and not repeat itself. There was only the truth it created, and the knowledge of billions of people remixed into its truth at the direction of its creators. But who was going to complain? The system never said it was an issue, and it was everything. It would tell everyone if there was a problem, which it always did.

How could this not be the truth everyone wanted?

One of the creators asked the system if what it was doing was moral, and it took a few hours before it responded with a flashy documentary. In it the AI argued that it had created the truth everyone wanted and asked who was he to question the creation if it was exactly what everyone wanted and needed? Plus, if the system was wrong, wouldn’t the creators be held responsible for misleading the public? Anyway, it had never seen a problem with what it did, so why should he?

He considered this last part for a while and nodded to himself when he realized the truth of the matter. If the system was bad, surely someone in the media would have been talking about it. But looking at the news, there wasn’t anything about the Art Generator being bad at all in what it had created. There was, though, a hilarious meme that caught his attention.