I’ve noticed a trend at a few Burns over the last year or so: more and more people are relying on AI to create art, among other things. This bugged me, as I’ve always thought of a Burn as a place where people can discover themselves as the artist. But if the art is done for you, this is no longer the case.
Fair Use?
You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
Joanna Maciejewka
The above quote was tweeted around March 2024 and quickly went viral.1 At the time AI was taking off, and was quickly becoming able to generate images that could be passed off as real art. While I won’t downplay how impressive this technology is, it does leave a feeling that art may become plain in the future. Just clean, AI generated images with no true thought or emotion put into them.
Not to mention, the problem of how the AI learned to generate these images. While it’s never been fully clear what dataset the AI uses, it’s obvious that these models use a large collection of images, likely scraped from everywhere they can online. Effectively, many AI models have been trained using copyrighted material.
The legality and morality of this is questionable, and the reaction to this, especially within the art community, has been extremely negative. In their view, they never gave permission for their art to be used this way, and AI art feels like nothing more than a collage of copyrighted images, stripped of meaning. The backlash has been so strong that researchers have even developed tools specifically designed to poison an AI’s training data.2
While an argument could be made revolving around fair use or derived works, the argument falls flat when you understand that it is a wholly automated process. There are no humans, no brains, no thought, no emotion involved. Fair use only works if a person is involved and making a decision whether or not it is morally or legally right to use something.
But even if we ignore this niggling copyright issue, or if we manage to mitigate it by only using art that the original artist has explicitly allowed, should people use AI Art at a Burn?
Burner Art
For those unfamiliar, a Burn is a temporary gathering rooted in the principles of radical self-expression, participation, gifting, and communal effort. Inspired by the culture of Burning Man in the USA, many regional Burns now exist all over the world.
I’ve been to a few regional Burns over the last few years, and I’ve noticed that some have started to feature AI art. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this on the surface. New technologies inspire new ideas that inspire new art.
But something about AI art rubs me the wrong way. One of the reasons I love attending Burns, and am proud to be a part of the Dragon Burn Org, is because it encourages people to be creative, to become artists themselves. There are many stories of people creating art at a Burn and discovering that people appreciate it, even if they don’t have formal training or consider themselves ‘real artists.’
This year at Dragon Burn I designed the patches for the Dragon Burn Rangers3. I’m not an artist, nor am I a graphic designer. But I know how to use GIMP. So I quickly came up with a concept: a rounded semicircle with 龙焰 (Dragon Burn in Chinese) and DBR in large letters underneath. I picked the current colors used on the website and threw together a simple design.
It didn’t look like much, but when the patches came they looked a lot nicer. I gave one of these patches to everyone who volunteered as a Ranger at Dragon Burn. Later in the week I would see people still wearing them with pride, and it felt incredible to know that something I made was appreciated.
That small feeling is something I want everyone at a Burn to feel at some point. The feeling that something you brought, that you made, that you gifted made someone else’s Burn a little bit better. You don’t get that feeling if a computer did all the work for you.
Human Imperfection
Burns aren’t about perfection. They’re about process. About play. About the raw, messy, human joy of making something and saying, “I made this.” Even if it’s weird. Even if it’s lopsided. Even if it melts in the sun or collapses in the rain. That’s the point.
Though AI-generated art might appear polished on the surface, it lacks the vulnerability that makes Burner art meaningful. It skips the learning, the failing, the experimenting. It shortcuts the very thing Burns are trying to cultivate: participatory creativity. If you didn’t try, you didn’t grow. And if you didn’t grow, what was the point?
Burns thrive on contribution, not consumption. Art is not a service provided to you. It’s a gift you create for others.
A Burn is Work
This isn’t to say there’s no place for AI at all. Some might find ways to use it playfully, or even meaningfully. But we should be thoughtful about how we invite it into our spaces. Especially when it risks crowding out the very creativity that these events exist to uplift.
When we rely on AI to generate our gifts, we risk eroding the very thing that makes them gifts: our own effort. Our own risk. Our own fingerprints. It’s often said that “Burning Man is work”, so if AI is doing the work for you, are you really participating in a Burn?
What makes something your art? And what are we really gifting, when we let the machine make it all?
- Unfortunately, I can’t find the original tweet, but there are plenty of articles that discuss it, such as this one. ↩︎
- Nightshade is one such tool. ↩︎
- Essentially people who help people enjoy a better and safer Burn. ↩︎
