Today's Blog Post won't be on the usual topics on how to make your Art Fair table stand out or a tutorial on screen printing, but rather something I felt like talking about as it is quite the hot topic at the moment.
You must have noticed everyone's new profile pic or Instagram carousels of AI-generated "artworks". It's been quite the year for AI art, with DALL-E and Stable Diffusion gaining popularity and grabbing people's attention. It might seem impressive but at the same time the ethics of how AI works are vague at best.
A certain app has been number 1 on the app store charts... Everyone is having fun and bombarding social media with newly generated avatars. Why should we be concerned? To put it very simply, the way AI "art" works is to be trained using real artists' works from all over the internet without their knowledge, or permission. Did you know that only a day after master Kim Jung Gi's death, all his work was fed to an AI to be trained to draw in his style? This was done, you guessed it, without his family's permission. This is being done to the works of many other artists, while they're even still around to see it but can't really do much about it. Not to sound too salty, but to me, this is blatant theft of intellectual property and years of work, but hey.
A painting of a tree house generated by DALL-E
To put more salt in the wound, that very popular app that uses unethical methods to produce its content, also costs money. And it's not cheap! But as it is a trend right now, everyone is using it, which is feeding money to its creator and images to the AI to train it further.
I am not saying there is only a downside to AI-generated art, many artists and myself included have used DALL-E or Midjourney to generate environments to use for inspiration and develop ideas. It could be a powerful tool in art in general, it all depends on whose hands it is in.
To summarize what the issue is:
The database of the AI generators doesn't ask for the author's permission for their works to be used for training, so the actual artists might not even be aware of this. Clearly, not every image on the internet is public domain, which brings a major ethical concern amongst artists. Many people don't realise that the works of millions of artists are available online for free for these programs to be used in training without consent.
Knowing that, let's make it worse. Some generators advertise that the users would have full ownership of all the images they have generated through the app, including commercial use rights. This essentially would mean that anybody who manages to enter a descriptive enough prompt would profit from actual artists' work without permission. Copyright laws still haven't caught up to that, of course, and we don't know if they would anytime soon anyway.
A few images generated through the Lensa app by @magisanvlog
Artificial intelligence could be a fantastic tool but this should come with certain regulations, making sure artists' works aren't benefited from without artists being compensated for it. Many artists right now are concerned they would be replaced by AI, maybe not now but at some point in the future, seeing how fast this technology is being developed. Which is quite ironic, knowing how it is done.
On the flip side, there is something else I feel I must mention. Even with its complex algorithms, AI is not sentient, there is no emotion to it. That is why generated art is easily recognised as such and rarely can be mistaken for work done by an actual human- it lacks emotion and the so-called "artistic flare". You would usually get a soulless-looking character staring at you through the screen. Its creativity is also questionable.
Examples of generated art, where the AI has left the mangled remains of the real artist's signature
The thing is- there are tons of immaculate works of art that are in the free domain and free for everyone, including AI to use for training. Classical works of art and paintings of great artists that could give us amazing results! Such an obvious option instead of harming contemporary and living artists by stealing their work.
As AI technology progresses, so does the very extensive list of drawbacks. The implementation of laws could be some sort of solution to the abuse of copyright infringement, I don't really think there is too much to be done. It is already done to a certain extent. It is up to the user to choose whether to use the technology in a productive way or turn it into the art world's tragedy of the century.
Yes, I am aware of how dramatic this sounds.
I'll leave it at that. I know that there is a chunk of my readers that weren't aware of how these fun apps work, so there it is. My main point is to inform those of you who didn't know what goes behind the generated art. That was the basics of it, if you are looking to delve into some more in-depth information, I would leave some links here:
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