So I've run into an AI art bro who had a specific and...we'll call it 'interesting' take on why using AI to help one write is fine and normal and what artists across time would have done. I'm not going to link or screenshot it here, because I want to focus on one specific assertion: that Michelangelo used assistants to help him create his artwork. Therefore, Michelangelo would have used AI in his art had he access to it.
I find a number of flaws with this argument (modern "AI" would be impossible to create without work like Michelangelo's to train off of) but the actual point about the assistants proves, I think, the exact opposite of what this AI bro intended. So let's talk about that (big long essay below):
To start, is this assertion even true? I'm not an art history buff. I welcome those with expertise on the subject to chime in, but it sounds like the question of if Michelangelo has assistants helping him with his art is actually the subject of some debate, historically. There are sources I have found who say he hired assistants for at least the first year of work on the Sistine Chapel, for example. Others, including a history by Giorgio Vasari written a few decades after the Chapel was painted, claim otherwise. The way Vasari writes it, Michelangelo had hired assistants specifically to paint the fresco, but alleges that he realized the assistants' work was "very far from what he desired". Quote: "He resolved one morning to throw to the ground everything they had done...[and]...made arrangements to paint the whole work by himself, carried it well on the way to completion with the utmost solitude, labor, and study."
Now, Vasari is not entirely trusted as a source by historians? He reports a lots of fact which can be verified, but there have been plenty of errors found in his work. And I think that, as a person who would be alive when people were still calling Michelangelo "The Divine One~" for his artistic capabilities. The hype was real, and it's entirely possible that Vasari is unconsciously filtering Michelangelo's life through this genius narrative, the "great man" theory. Of course his assistants didn't do anything important. Michelangelo's the important one, the auteur, his art springs from him and him alone. I personally have some skepticism about this idea, but logically there are only two possibilities in play: 1) Vasari is correct and Michelangelo did the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling all by himself, and 2) Vasari is exaggerating a bit and the assistants did contribute to the art itself.
I shouldn't need to explain that option 1 is really bad for the AI art bros, right? The whole thing is a specific kind of argument to authority--if *Michelangelo*, one of the greatest sculptor/painters of all time, used tools like the assistance of other artists to create his greatest masterpieces, it must be okay for "AI artists" to do the same today. But if Vasari is right, that entire narrative is backwards. What actually happened is that Michelangelo considered using an artistic shortcut because he lacked a specific skill (he was primarily a sculptor, and had limited experience with frescoes in specific). But he realized that the shortcut could not replicate his vision for the art, so instead he worked hard to develop the skill he'd been lacking. The work of art we consider today to be a masterpiece is such *because* he chose not to use these types of artistic shortcuts. From this story I think we can conclude if Michelangelo had access to AI, he'd try it, decide it wasn't helping, and throw its work out completely. Not a win for team AI.
Now, I have mentioned I don't personally buy that the assistants did nothing on the Sistine Chapel. There is, as mentioned, some debate. I have found sources that argue the assistants were employed for at least the first year of the project. I've seen a claim (secondhand) that they may have done "less" important work like scalloping edges or some "decorative figures" in the background. A modern biographer, Dr. William Wallace says that (emphasis mine), "when [Michelangelo] says he painted it all by himself, that’s his way of celebrating the fact that really he did. He directed the entire operation and painted the most important figures." And that's an interesting way to phrase that, right? Because if he did paint "the most important figures", that does support the idea that other artists painted other figures. So he didn't really do it all by himself, did he? We just ignore those other contributions in favor of, well--Michelangelo the Divine.
Option 2 is definitely the more appealing one for the AI art bros, which is why the argument started with "Michelangelo used assistants, which is exactly the same as AI today". The argument this person thinks he's making is: "Michelangelo is considered to be one of the greatest artists of all time, and he also outsourced boring artistic work like repetitive flourishes and background characters to external tools (people). Therefore, if I outsource boring artistic work to AI, I am also qualified to be considered one of the greatest artists of all time."
That's not the argument I hear, though. What *I* hear, is this: "There are people who helped contribute artistically to what is considered one of the greatest pieces of art of all time, and we do not consider their names to be worth learning." Look, I understand why Michelangelo receives the bulk of the praise for the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. Even with all the debate, it is likely that Michelangelo did the majority of the painting, along with the high-level creative planning that made the whole thing possible. But surely the assistants merit some consideration? This is a very common and long-running issue in art--we like so much the idea of The Auteur, the single visionary who is solely responsible for the entire work, that we let the individuals applying their creative skills in less glamorous ways fall by the wayside. It happens in video games (which have a long history of failing to credit developers, artists, and more, and which still like to frame single "creators" as being responsible for an entire game), it happens in film (which highlights directors, though film does have an industry standard of meticulous credits for all the workers who made the final product possible), and it happens in fine art. We know Michelangelo so well we refer to him by first name only. I have to hunt to learn who his assistants even were.
Sources name his original four fresco assistants as Bastiano da Sangallo, Giuliano Bugiardini, Agnolo di Donnino, and Jacopo del Tedesco, all from Florence. I've also found attribution to Pietro Rosselli, a plasterer who prepared the ceiling for the new fresco and Pietro Urbano, another sculptor involved. I see a source saying that Bastiano, Giuliano, and Agnolo left the project at some point to be replaced by Giovanni Trignoli and Bernardino Zacchetti from Northern Italy. Their collective involvement is only mentioned in corrections of misconceptions of history. They're footnotes in the narrative of "the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted by Michelangelo".
And this point *is* something that ties very heavily into AI, and the question of its use in art--but not in the way the AI art bros want. Because AI is designed to do exactly this process, to erase the contributions of "lesser" artists in favor of a narrative where great men make great art ~all by themselves~. Other artists make art, which gets fed into the churn of AI training data, which provides no proper credits for which artists' work informed the feature weights which spat out the results of a given prompt. And the AI itself, of course, isn't going to get mad at you for not crediting it as a co-creator. Its job is *not to do that*. Its job is to tell *you* that you did all the work by yourself...even when, like Michelangelo, you didn't.
I wonder if I was being too snarky when I called the (human) people who assisted Michelangelo his "external tools [for art]", but literally that's the equivalence that was made by the AI bro at the start of this argument. Assistants whose names are almost lost to history are the same type of tool as an AI whose modus operandi is using the work of individual artists without compensation or citation. And not just artists--the entire industry of AI is built off of the exploitation of real human people worldwide in such large numbers they are effectively nameless. This exploitation is done both for resources (processing units require rare metals, which are often mined under abhorrent conditions and at great danger to the miners) and for mental labor (AI companies are right now paying desperate workers worldwide pittances to perform mentally and emotionally strenuous annotation work for their billions-large datasets). This problem is not new to "AI", it's been endemic in the tech field for a very long time. But I find it especially chilling the way companies elide the massive amounts of (human) labor behind their product to investors, stockholders, and their consumer audience. Their business model is removing recognition for the (human) people actually doing the work, in favor of a narrative where the tool is a neutral mechanical assisting force which allows the consumer to be an auteur who produces 100% of the product themself. It's selling a narrative, not a tool.
Using AI in your art does not make you Michelangelo. It makes you think you're Michelangelo. And not even real Michelangelo, the guy who actually taught himself how to fresco despite being a sculptor because he was annoyed that his vision wasn't coming out right. Michelangelo ~The Divine, the fictional man who produced the fresco entirely by himself on his back for four years, and teeeeeeeechnically he had a lot of help but not important help, not the kind of help that needs to be mentioned in history books--just the kind we bring up when we want to argue that our favorite art guy would have used AI if he'd had it. It's an illusion. You're being sold an illusion. And it's one that I personally, am sick of.