Student Blog: Artistic Integrity and The Role of AI In Education and the Arts

I first noticed the increasing use of artificial intelligence in school and the arts during my junior year of high school. Over the course of that year, I went from having not a lot of idea about AI or what it actually was, to having it used in school by my peers and teachers alike. Going into my senior year, it was interesting (although not particularly surprising) to see people I knew using AI to generate everything they had to write. From college application essays to what to say in text messages, it seemed like everyone around me very quickly lost much motivation to create original, genuine words. There seemed to no longer be a need to communicate one’s own experience of something or to interact directly with other people and the world. Even just within the people around me, this phenomenon has only increased in the past year. Most professional people I know use AI tools at minimum to format and outline most written work, if not to fully create it. This rise seems slower in theater and performance areas, but AI’s influence has clearly crept into many corners of artistic scenes (especially in arts education). In the past year, i've been shocked by the amount of public artificial intellignce in film production, writing, analysis, criticism, image and marketing creation, and so much more. While there are absolutely some practical and innovative uses of artificial intelligence (even in the arts and educational settings), it genuinely is scary to see this tool being abused so heavily and immediately by people across all fields. 

As a college student studying both theater and education, I am worried about the future of arts production and integrity as we rely further and further on generative AI. Personally, I am in school because I want to do new work. I consider myself an artist because I want to create new things and learn the best ways to use my own thinking and creative abilities to understand and respond to the world. I do understand the temptation of using AI tools, especially in classes or assignments one might not be particularly interested in. While I firmly believe that AI should not hold any weight within the arts as an option for creation, it’s true that it does prove as an efficient tool for completing work. However I can’t help but question why people, especially those who deem themselves creatives or academics, would choose to regularly undermine their own capabilities and artistic integrity with a tool that, as evidence shows, is actively harming our fields, futures, and planet. 

Artistic integrity, in a general sense, is the idea of remaining honest, ethical, and genuinely personally committed to a creative piece or process. Others define it as having a genuine motivation or interest in the art, or engaging in creation because you love it and have a personal motivation to create a certain work. Whatever your personal definition of artistic integrity, the truth is that in today's world it’s very difficult to be profitable or successful in a career within the arts while remaining completely non-motivated by outside factors. So, where does artificial intelligence fall within the realm of artistic integrity and our creative industries? When discussing academic and artistic integrity, it does not matter that the work itself is not directly being taken from another person (although based on how artificial intelligence models generally receive information, one could argue that other’s work is referenced and imitated in order to generate new things). Of course, I am no expert in this topic, but I firmly believe that achievement not directly created by the person claiming to have created it violates the basic principles of artistic integrity. 

Besides the moral implications of artificial intelligence tools, their use within the arts violates basic rules of artistic integrity. I know that students, artists, and all humans have the ability to generate and convey their own ideas. Humans have been doing just that since the beginning of civilization. The use of artificial intelligence places a filter between our thoughts and the ways we present them. We are no longer creating based on our own experiences or emotions, we are using another entity’s interpretation of our recounted experience in order to communicate, create, or succeed.