No matter how clever they are, no one likes a cheater

This is an observation that will tell your age in a flash. Should you be staring at this image and wondering who these two are, then you’ll probably be under stage age of 40 - or have a really good knowledge of pop trivia. If, like me, you know at once that this is the pop outfit Manilli Vanilli, then hello Gen Xer!

I bring these up as, even in an age that spawned a lot of corporate, manufactured music, these really were the ultimate, in that they won a grammy for what was a huge hit album, only to have it revealed that they had lip synced the whole thing and had not sung on it at all.

Of course, lip syncing in itself has a noble tradition made famous by Rupaul’s drag race, and it has become a valid and often moving vehicle for creativity and self expression - if you want to see what I mean, have a look at this frankly jaw dropping and nerve tingling performance by Drag Legend Sasha Velour -

Who takes lip sync to a whole new level and power, with deep, referential respect and a reinvention of a classic which is truly breathtaking.

But the thing is, we all know that Ms Velour is lip syncing, they’re proudly using a voice which is not their’s to speak about a pain and a triumph which is not uniquely there’s and universal, almost the way that an actor now speaks words written four hundred years ago, but which speak to us now - but the Vanilli boys were forced - apparently- to pretend that they weren’t.

Maybe we wouldn’t have cared so much if they hadn’t won a Grammy, maybe they might still have had a hit if we’d known, but when it was revealed, all hell broke loose. They are probably very glad that this was in pre-internet days, as the roasting and indeed threats they might have got through social media would have been quite a thing, people being what they are. The irony is, that they have actually gone on to have a music career with their own voices, but you can find find out what they think about it all here -

My point in writing this, is that AI art is kind of doing the same thing as the Manilli boys - and they can argue that they were naive, that they didn’t know, they were forced into it - but people who put out AI images as their own creation, don’t have that excuse.

In a twist of hysterical fate, this post appeared in a children’s book illustration group I am part of on Facebook, and you can probably tell that the illustrations are all AI generated. Among all the people pointing this out, there was a very obvious NFT scammer bot attempting to entrap the fake AI artist - which is a modern moment of the snake eating its own tail for sure.

Of course, there are plenty of people who say ‘oh, but artists copy all the time,’ bu they are so missing the point, they might as well be going up to Sasha Velour and ‘call them out’ for lip syncing. Of course artists copy art, they copy it, reference it, re-work it, reform it and make it into something new - but comparing that unfavourable to AI art, is like complaining that a Shakespearean actor today, is only copying what Shakespeare wrote.

To copy art, to use it as a reference, to build on it takes time, skill, failure, hard work, more skill, time and commitment, through which you learn and grow and become something different to where you started. And no, you can’t copy directly - that’s called forgery - and even when you use a huge amount of skill to create a copy, you will still look like a cheat at the end of the day - and nobody likes a cheater.

The photo on the right, taken by Jingna Zhang, was copied by the highly skilled oil painter Jeff Dieschburg (left), and he’s finally be called out as a plagiarist by the European courts - which is a dam good thing. There is an incredibly smug air to his justification, where he assumes his skill and status alone means he has the right to directly copy a young woman’s work simply because he can, and I feel it’s that mindset which tried to claim AI art is only doing what artists have done for years. Sure he could have a painted his copy and hung it on his wall as an exercise himself, but the problem comes when he tried to make money out of it and claim it’s all his own work.

If you’re a brand and you want to tell the world who you are, using AI generated art is telling the world that, fundamentally, you’re cheat, that you’re ok with stealing stuff to cut costs and for me, that would turn me right off. Comedian Dave Gorman once spoke about the weird sense of betrayal he felt when completely down to his own mistake, he discovered that Cafe Rouge was not a unique local restaurant, but part of a chain, which immediately tainted how he felt about it - and Cafe Rouge don’t in any way pretend to be anything but a chain. If brands put out AI generated art and don’t come clean about it, then they’re leaving themselves at risk of a Vanilli Manilli style exposure, and even if they are open about using it, I’m not sure it’s ever a good look.

You can see some very much not AI generated art at the Untitled Arts Fair July 12/13/14 at the Chelsea Town Hall London, with my latest collection that plays with ideas of icons, gender and sexuality, with a lot of fine line work, none of which was done by a computer.

And this weekend, if you can get to Peckham, you can visit an art installation at the Safe House galleries, and see some of my images haunt its beautifully spooky spaces, as part of the Secret Salon.