Provincetown's annual Carnival parade last month included floats decorated with images made by generative AI, like Chat GPT.
That's according to Jack Styler of the Provincetown Independent.
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke to Jack to learn more about what it means for AI art to be showing up this way in a town known as a haven for artists.
Gilda Geist You were at the Carnival parade this year. How much AI art did you notice while you were there? And for folks who aren't familiar, can you describe that specific kind of look that art made by generative AI tends to have?
Jack Styler At Carnival this year we did see what appeared to be more and more AI-generated art. And I say "what appeared to be" because it's really getting harder and harder to tell when a piece of art is made by a chatbot. Some of the leading models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are moving so quickly and progressing so rapidly at this point that the images that they're able to pump out are becoming more and more realistic. A researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab said that there are still some distinctive elements to AI-generated art. The images that ChatGPT or Claude make tend to have depictions of humans that have very few or no blemishes on their skin, [and] sort of a glossiness to the image that can mean that people look almost too perfect, or that their backgrounds look almost too perfect. But that researcher also said she thinks the way that the models are progressing, those sort of tells that you can see now—and that made a lot of people suspect that t-shirts, posters and other materials at this year's Carnival parade were AI-generated—are going to be harder and harder to discern in the future.
GG You spoke with some local creatives and business owners about how they view and use generative AI. So, let's start with the people who told you they do use it. What did they have to say about AI art?
JS Well, it fell all over the spectrum, really. There were owners like the CEO of the shirt store [Seaplane Shirts] in Provincetown, who said that he has really been an early adopter of AI. And this guy whose name is Schuyler Brown said that he thinks AI is a gift that has allowed him to work faster, make hundreds of new designs and imagine the possibility of actually running a store without employees. Now, there's also some people who are a little bit more experimental with their use of AI. The owner of Art's Dune Tours, for example, Rob Costa, told me that he made an image in February for the 80th anniversary of the Art's Dune Tours, and he used ChatGPT to make that image. At the same time, he said that he's not really comfortable with the whole AI thing and that he probably will be relying on local artists, friends [and] family to create his art for graphic design purposes in the future.
GG And the Art's Dune Tours generated image was one of the ones you saw at the Carnival parade, correct?
JS Yes, that is correct. It does show some of the kind of hallmark traits of an AI-generated photo. It appears a little bit sleek [and] cartoonish. Rob Costa said very straightforwardly that he did make this image with ChatGPT and that it was something that he was trying out and that he liked this image, but that doesn't mean that he's totally comfortable using these bot-generated images in the future.
GG Then what about Provincetown folks who you spoke to who were against using generative AI for art? What did they tell you?
JS Well, of course, because Provincetown has such a robust artistic community, there's a lot of people who don't want these AI models to have any sort of connection to their artwork. I talked to a different owner of another t-shirt shop, Joey Holman, who owns a shop called the Old Baby in the West End. He said that he thinks that AI is this cheap and easy technology that he really objects to because it is, he says, stealing the intellectual property of all artists basically ever and using their work to create images that are using resources like water and other energy that he thinks could lead to really rapid environmental degradation. And as a graphic designer and artist himself, he said that he's trying to run his business without using AI at all. And he's not alone. Several other artists and business owners I spoke to said that they are really worried about what AI could pose for one of the country's oldest artist colonies. Because AI images are so easy to produce, it can be tempting for a small business to make a flyer or make a poster really quickly. But a lot of the artists I spoke to said that that would, in their view, be against kind of the ethos of Provincetown.
Read Jack Styler's full story in the Provincetown Independent.
