An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
He did not make it. He essentially commissioned a machine to create an image for him using millions of pieces of art that were stolen from artists. It’s no different from commissioning an artist to draw something for you, except the artist turns out to be someone who traces bits of other people’s art, or copy and pastes it, and then you attempt to take credit for it instead by claiming that you made it. I predict that this lawsuit is not going anywhere as he does not have a proverbial leg to stand on.
What if he wrote the technology himself? Would that count?
What about games with “procedural generation” - does that count?
Last I checked, procedurally generated games all exclusively use their own internal assets. Apples and oranges.
Authors didn’t invent the alphabet. Painters didn’t invent colors. It’s rearranging pre existing work in a way that makes sense to the rules of a new system. Need a stronger definition to explain the difference.
I like it, it’s more interesting to me than most of the boring “original” paintings people try to sell at art shows and online, and almost all of the stuff I’ve seen on people’s walls in their homes. Not another triptych with 4 circles and a triangle, or a lone tree on a grassy hill, or a bowl of fruit and a wine bottle.
Most AI art haters only hate it after they’ve learned it’s made by AI. In reality it’s next to impossible to tell a well made AI art from human made digital art for example. Ofcourse everyone claims they can immediately tell the difference but even they know they’re kidding themselves. It’s gatekeeping, pure and simple.
There’s plenty of really good AI art and generating it is not as simple as they often make it to be.
Hate the artist, not the art. Hence, hate the AI, not the AI-generated art.
AI is not an artist any more than a paint brush is. Neither can generate anything on their own. They’re tools.
Oh I’d be careful, that undermines the “the AI is an artist in itself” - defense of companies against plagiarism charges. Because otherwise if we go with that, most material would not be allowed as sources for training. The vast majority in fact.
Better let the AI be an artist, that way it’s legal if it steals from others works, but that also means I can critique it as, well, being shit and just doing derivative works. 😛
AI doesn’t copy pre-existing art. It’s influenced by it. Human artists take influence from prior artwork just as well as AI does. Nobody is creating art in a vacuum.
Gatekeeping? Nah, it’s not as it’s quite easy for AI Bros to pick up a pencil. Nobody, except disabilities, stops them.
And yeah AI slop has become so well that rabid people are accusing actual artists that their art was made by AI. But why is that? Certainly not because their previous art was trained on…
Fuck AI. It is used to replace actual humans and human creativity.
Exactly. People already enjoy AI-assisted art in many other forms and they don’t even realize it. When they find out, will they stop enjoying it? They don’t seem to have stopped enjoying autotuned or computer-generated music, or CGI movies, or practically every artistic photograph made in the past 30 years. It’s an arbitrary line in the sand.
The problem isnt that the art is bad. It feeling like its made by AI doesnt ruin the art
The problem is that it is made by AI, that the art has a negligible amount of effort put into it
As a photographer I feel like the same thing could be said of it. Especially when talking about film or polaroid cameras, it doesn’t take much longer than a few seconds to take the picture. I can’t even write a prompt for gen-AI in that time.
Meh this looks very AI generated to me. Most of what’s going on in the picture makes no sense.
That could be said of much art from cave paintings to modern art, but the important part is that art is subjective. The main issue I have with the people complaining about AI generated art is, they only seem upset about it after they find out it’s AI generated. If you really have the ability to see the difference, maybe you should be judging these contests. The judges had absolutely no idea until it was pointed out to them. If that bothers people, they shouldn’t place any value in that competition.
People enjoy paintings with modern pigments and canvases and synthetic brushes as art, autotuned music (and other post-recording fixes) as art, photographs that use filters and image/color/artifact-correcting software as art, and I see no difference in prompt-tuned AI-generated art. It’s a technology that makes it easier for the artist to arrive at their desired result, and it has the ability to inspire emotions and thoughts in the viewers, in the same way.
I’m guessing there is art you enjoy that I might not, but I am happy you have that available to you. It’s funny to me that people are so strongly against something so innocuous. In that it inspires such strong emotions, it’s arguably more artistic than the hand-painted submissions the judges found lacking.
Perhaps it won merely because it has a lot of details, which is impressive when a human does it? What is happening in this picture? I’m interested in your interpretation.
It reminds me of surrealist paintings crossed with the darker stuff Fuseli and Goya painted. It gives me a feeling of nostalgia for things I really enjoyed but haven’t thought of for a long time, by reminding me of all of them at once even though whatever the prompt was, probably is not directly related to any of them.
Specifically, just looking at it the first time reminded me of a bunch of fantasy and science-fiction story arcs I like all mixed together, with world-building magic or tech, like the Cosmere universe of Sanderson, or the Discworld, or the Hainish Cycle, or Dune; all the portals to different worlds and ways to fold time or space, like the wardrobe to Narnia + the Subtle Knife rifts + The Ways & Telaranrhiod + the Dark Portal to Draenor + the machine in Primer + ansibles and NAFAL travel + spice. The 3 main figures remind me of the Dathomir witches, but also the 3 witches (at a time) in Discworld, the main Maiar in LotR, etc.
It makes me think about all those at once intertwined and how much I enjoyed getting lost in each story the first time through, but how it doesn’t conform to any of them individually, and then try to imagine what kind of different world-building series could come out of it without completely ripping off any one of them. Like, how Shelley and Polidori and Byron inspired each other and spawned both Frankenstein and every modern vampire saga, how Robert Jordan talked about being inspired by Tolkien, how Tolkien and Lewis ran their stories past each other as they wrote, how Sanderson was inspired by Jordan and even completed his WoT saga, how basically every school of young witches/wizards series and instant communication across space was inspired by Le Guin, and makes me look forward to discovering the next author who writes like any of them who I haven’t yet stumbled on, or the next game or movie or show that mimics that style well.
Wheneved I look at the abstract circles & triangle triptychs, I think of Abbot’s Flatland, so I like those ones a bit more than the still lifes, but not as much as something like this image. I do really enjoy Mondrian’s colorful straight lines and I can’t explain why, and tbh that might be the easiest style for AI to replicate. And I’m fine with that, bc a nice quality Mondrian print was obscenely expensive up until about a decade ago, due to moronic copyright laws that didn’t benefit him or even his children at all, since he didn’t have any. I would love for the programmers and prompt writer of this image to be able to make money off its creation/copyright while they’re alive, so they would be inspired to make more like it.
“put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
This is an Onion article, right? No one can be this deliberately and hilariously ironically. Fuck AI, and fuck these techbros.
This is stupid and I hope he gets his butt handed to him, but:
A federal judge agreed with the Office and contrasted AI images to photography, which also uses a processor to capture images, but it is the human that decides on the elements of the picture, unlike AI imagery where the computer decides on the picture elements.
Journey outside the world of API models (like Midjourney) and you can use imagegen tools where " the human that decides on the elements of the picture"
It can be anything from area prompting (kinda drawing bounding boxes where you want things to go) to controlnet/ipadapter models using some other image as reference, to the “creator” making a sketch and the AI “coloring it in” or fleshing it out, to an artist making a worthy standalone painting and letting the AI “touch it up” or change the style (for instance, to turn a digital painting or a pencil sketch to something resembling a physical painting, watercolor, whatever).
The later is already done in photoshop (just not as well) and is generally not placed into the AI bin.
In other words, this argument isn’t going to hold up, as the line is very blurry. Legislators and courts are going to have to come up with something more solid.
How old is that judge that they think digital photography is the only possibility to capture an image? 15?
The rule is already human expression in fixed form, of creative height. So you have to demonstrate that you the human made notable contributions to the final output.
I’m sure that an argument can be made that the final output can’t be generated without the human-created prompt. Generative AI doesn’t output images on its own without a seed/prompt, much like a canvas doesn’t paint itself and a camera doesn’t open the shutter on its own.
Human involvement isn’t the rule though. Again, that which ends up in fixed form has to carry expression by a human. Otherwise everything from dirt stains to footprints you accidentally create would be under copyright.
The prompts aren’t generally considered enough because there’s too little control over the final expression, the same prompt can create wildly different outputs.
The prompts aren’t generally considered enough because there’s too little control over the final expression, the same prompt can create wildly different outputs.
AI art isn’t made by just entering a prompt, picking an output image, and calling it a day. There’s actually a lot more involvement necessary to get the final output to be what you want. Some more advanced pieces of AI art take hours of tweaking the prompt and redoing certain sections, balancing positive and negative prompts and their weighting, not to mention training a model in the first place and touching up the final output in Photoshop.
There’s a very big industry behind AI art right now, and they’re not just using DALL-E prompts to do it. Whatever your thoughts about AI art may be, there’s no denying that a large amount of human labor is involved in the creation of any piece.
If you didn’t make it how the fuck can it be stolen from you?
Machine output cannot be copyrighted. Whether prompt tweaking and the other stuff involved in making AI art is enough for something to not be considered machine output is still to be decided by the courts.
He spent weeks on fine tuning tbf
It’s like photography: Photographers often spend weeks trying to get the perfect shot, should they be allowed to copyright it?
Weeks? That shit can be done in mere minutes.
“I have been exploring a special prompt that I will be publishing at a later date, I have created hundreds of images using it, and after many weeks of fine-tuning and curating my generations, I chose my top three and had them printed on canvas,” he writes.
He’s still not an artist.
If I order an art piece by someone, and reject thousands of finished pieces for it to not meet my standards, will i become an artist?
According to anyone in the Stable Diffusion communities, yes. And as a matter of fact, because I responded to you, I am now a novelist.
If I take lots of photos, print out and frame one of them but delete the others, will I become an artist?
If I order an photograph by someone, and reject thousands of finished pieces for it to not meet my standards, will i become a cameraman?
you see here the thing is “I Take” you did the thing,
What about “I Generate”?
your not doing the work, you are telling the computer to do the work based on words you typed in, at best you could argue you own the copyright to the prompt you typed in, but not to what the computer generated. You did not generate, the computer generated
“you’re not doing the work, you are telling the camera to do the work based on a setting you found / created, at best you could argue you own the copyright to the setting, but not to what the camera captured. You did not take a photo, the camera took it”
How is that meaningfully different from “the camera generated”? Both result in a full image from a single input.
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It absolutely takes training to familiarize yourself with the model and get the results you want.
Copyright or not doesnt change time and effort that can be spent on prompting. Theres no reason to have an objective stance against people that want to explore it.
No, it doesn’t.
Rejection of reality? Because you dont like ai?
So you could create a targeted result with prompts/iterations as well as someone who has practiced with midjourney since it came out?
Yes, photographers, who held their camera, who spent years honing their craft, learning the ins and out of the art of photography, who put their bodies in the field to capture real life, yes, they should be able to copyright their work.
Pull out your phone. Open the camera app. Click the button. You just did an art.
Pull out a pen. Scribble your stick men. You just did the last supper.
I didn’t say a good art. But a work sufficiently creative as to be covered by copyright at the least.
Another thought experiment: If I hire an artist and tell them exactly what they should draw, which style they should use, which colours they should use etc does 100% of the credit go to the artist or am I also partly responsible?
According to these people, YOU become the artist, and the AI is the artist.
Normally, if you’re commissioning a piece of art for commercial purposes, you would have some sort of contract with the artist that gives you the copyrights. Otherwise, the copyright belongs to the artist that produced the work, even if you buy the product.
But does the artist get 100% of the credit? Ignoring copyright for now, this is just a thought experiment, who’s getting how much credit?
Then there needs to be a copyright ownership agreement between the artist in the article and the artists’ whose work was used to train the AI…
While some just snap a photo. And both are equally copyrightable
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it’s the people that had their art used without their permission to train the AI.
This is the least coherent argument I keep seeing against AI art… Every art student in the world trains on the works of other artists. They explicitly study the works of great masters to learn their techniques. But when an “evil corporation™” does it it’s now theft.
It’s literally wanting the laws to reflect who is doing something rather than wanting them to be applied fairly.
Right, learning their techniques, not cutting out pieces of said master art and pasting it onto someone else’s work. There’s already predecent for this when that one monkey took a photo and the guy that provided the: camera, scene and direction was denied the copyright because he didn’t do the work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
Right, learning their techniques, not cutting out pieces of said master art and pasting it onto someone else’s work
Tell me you know nothing of art without telling me…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_Mona_Lisa
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/yasumasa-morimura-sen-cun-tai-chang-portrait-futago
And AI doesn’t just “copy paste”. Have you not seen anything created by AI? People act like it’s just re-creating existing works for some reason.
There is a difference between studying techniques, ideology, history, and mediums to be able to use a style created by another artist in your own creative works, and putting all the creative end products into the ideas blender and churning out a product with no creativity and no intentionality to the application of the process. What’s the end game? At what point does human creativity become redundant and AI starts eating its own slop? Do human artists need to keep creating depictions of meaning or value or whatever else they find important to endlessly feed into the machine so it can duplicate them, missing any of the metaphor, subtext, and soul present in the original? At what point is it obvious that workers are having their labor stolen by the tech bro Soylent Green idea machine to enrich them at the expense of whoever’s life work they seemed to be slop worthy of regurgitation.
AI can be an excellent shortcut or a great tool, and help us make our work easier and products better, but it is not a creator of original creative works, and cannot be validated at the same level as human artists. I, for one, would like to see a future where artists don’t just exist to feed into their machine betters.
AI can be an excellent shortcut or a great tool, and help us make our work easier and products better, but it is not a creator of original creative works
An AI image doesn’t just pop into the universe apropos of nothing. I don’t think you can say there is zero creativity in the process. A human sat down, conceived of an idea, and used a tool to create it. What is at the core of debate is whether the result is a creative work made by the human or not.
I agree that the AI is not the creator of the work. But I’m not so quick to say that the person wasn’t either… Cameras have a lot of stuff they do for the human. You can’t credibly say that you create any photo you take with your phone. The billions of transistors and image processing algorithms do that. You chose what to point it at and when. And maybe some technical parameters. And when you prompt an AI you have full creative control over what goes into it as well. Hell - you could probably even copyright the prompt if it’s sufficiently creative! But not the resulting artwork?
We may not value AI art as much as we do traditional arts. But I’m very hesitant to say that it is not art at all.
Photography has far more depth, complexity, and creativity as an artform and comparing it to AI both misunderstands the process and does it a huge disservice. Even before lining up the shot, the photographer must choose the right focus length, exposure, and a number of other technical settings, then must choose a subject, perhaps modify the composition, and have the right timing.
Photography can be as simple as pointing a phone camera for a well timed moment or snapping a once in a lifetime shot with an expensive lens. AI art takes orders of magnitude less creativity or training to do well, because it’s stealing the work of people that have already learned the composition techniques and have done the legwork, which is just being shoddily regurgitated by the plagiarism machine.
If anyone deserves copyright over a picture of something, it’s the people that made that thing that had their thing used without permission to be the subject of the photograph. Then, the people most deserving of the copyright are the engineers that developed the camera.
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I keep saying dude could have just painted it over by now. Is he just stupid. Just paint the picture you already have it.
I’m glad you posted this here, because there’s obviously a lot of controversy about this.
Fun idea: let him copyright his prompt, if he’s so particular about his “creativity.”
The philosophical depth of so many comment threads on this post kind of highlights the issue with AI and intellectual property rights.
By definition, AI leverages existing work, crucially in a way that usually does not credit or benefit the original creator.
If I took two images from random creators, cut one out, and pasted it onto the other: have I created a new work? Is it a copyrightable work? (I genuinely don’t know the answer to that).
its debatable who the artist is, however, because if you remove the ai from the picture he could never have made this, and if you remove the training data the results would also be different.
Realistically: everyone whose data this was trained on should be included as authors if its not just public domain
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It’s a bit more nuanced than that, because a human can still develop artistic skills by observing non-artistic creations beforehand.
For instance, the world’s very first artist probably didn’t have any paintings or sculptures to build off.
I’m not saying I necessarily agree that the person isn’t an artist because they rely on external training data, but generative AI models most certainly need to observe other works to ‘learn’ how to make art, whereas humans don’t necessarily have to. (Although if someone were to make a reinforcement learning model based on user feedback as a way to entirely generate better and better images starting from random variation, that would make the original training data point moot)
Human beings aren’t automatons.
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are you suggesting the ai itself owns the copyright?
everyone whose data this was trained on should be included as authors if its not just public domain
Weird how we make this rule only apply to computers.
I doubt any human artist would make the exact same works as they have if they were not influenced by the art that they were.
So you’re saying the AI should own the things it makes?
Broken analogies aside, The twin major problems are
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most the data is still intact that AI often recreates it. I think court cases about this are ongoing.
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It breaks authorship chains. humans often have to wade through ads or buy products to ‘add data’ to themselves. So if you buy a magazine, you often contribute back to the source artists. or even cite them. AI does not do this. Which is why licensing datasets is a proposed solution to prevent AI from being a death spiral for creativity.
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There were similar debates about photographs and copyright. It was decided photographs can be copyrighted even though the camera does most of the work.
Even when you have copyright on something you don’t have protection from fair use. Creativity and being transformative are the two biggest things that give a work greater copyright protection from fair use. They at are also what can give you the greatest protection when claiming fair use.
See the Obama hope poster vs the photograph it was based on. It’s to bad they came to an settlement on that one. I’d have loved to see the courts decision.
As far as training data that is clearly a question of fair use. There are a ton of lawsuits about this right now so we will start to see how the courts decide things in the coming years.
I think what is clear is some amount of training and the resulting models fall under fair use. There is also some level of training that probably exceeds fair use.
To determine fair use 4 things are considered. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/
1 Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
This is going to vary a lot from training model to training model.
Nature of the copyrighted work.
Creative works have more protection. So training on a data set of a broad set of photographs is more likely to be fair use than training on a collection of paintings. Factual information is completly protected.
-> Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
I think ai training is safe here. Once trained the ai data set usually doesn’t contain the copyrighted works or reproduce them.
Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Here is where ai training presumably has the weakest fair use argument.
Courts have to look at all 4 factors and decide on the balance between them. It’s going to take years for this to be decided.
Even without ai there are still lots of questions about what is and isn’t fair use.
Hmmm. This comment made me realize that these ai images have something in common with collages. If I make a collage, do I have to include all the magazine publishers I used as authors?
Not defending the AI art here. Imo, with image generating models the mechanisms of creation are so far removed from the “artist” prompter that I don’t see it any differently than somebody paying an actual artist to paint something with a particular description of what to paint. I guess that could still make them something like a director if they’re involved enough? Which is still an artist?
I dunno. I have my opinions on this in a “I know it when I see it” kind of way, but it frustrates me that there isn’t an airtight definition of art or artist. All of this is really subjective
It comes down to how transformative the work is. They look at things like how much of the existing work you used and how much creative changes were made.
So grabbing your 9 favorite paintings and putting them in 3x3 grid is not going to give you fair use.
Cutting out sections of faces from different works and stitching them together into a franken face could give you enough for fair use if you made it different enough.
I don’t know how collages work, but samplers do pay every single artist they are sampling for their use of the song.
if you make a magazine collage you’ve already paid all the magazine authors for their work by buying the magazine. I know its not perfect, but at least in a collage situation there is some form of monetary trail going back to the artists.
If the AI company were to license their training data this would be an almost perfect metaphor. But the problem is we’ve let them weasel in without monetary attribution.
No but you don’t get it, they wrote a couple words and also they know how to use the spot healing brush in photoshop, they’re a REAL artist!
To be somewhat fair this prompt probably took quite a bit of work. Still way less than even producing it digitally but not a couple words.
The problem is “intellectual property” and capitalism more generally. As technology makes art harder to define and control, the absurdity of violently controlling art will hopefully collapse along with capitalism in general.
Intellectual property as a concept is incompatible with the continued advancement of human knowledge. Before copyright and patenting, we still had trade secrets and sensitive information, and those things cost us insights into metalworking we are still slowly recovering to this day. We still can’t figure out how Roman’s stumbled upon some of their glass blowing breakthroughs, and we just recently figured out Roman concrete.
Capitalism didn’t invent greet, but it’s certainly allowed greed to flourish as a core precept of its design.
That douche punched a sentence into a computer and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become.
That douche punched a sentence into a computer
The jokes write themselves, folks.
Imagine thinking this is a salient point, lmfao. “oh, you criticise people writing text prompts on large learning model tools to generate art based on an amalgamation of everyone else’s stolen art, for claiming to be artists, AND YET, here you are writing text.”
it’s so fucking stupid. a work has to be actually creative and novel to be protected by copyright, most AI prompts would not meet the threshold of creativity and originality to benefit from protection.
Yeah, the joke is that someone thinks they can call themselves an artist by typing a sentence into a prompt on a computer. I get that you’re trying to call me out, but the failure in your joke is that I’m not claiming to be an artist. That douche is.
You’ve got nothing.
I mean, everyone knows writing isn’t art. It takes no skill to make something meaningful out of words.
Keep trying, you’ll get there one day.
You’ve got nothing.
That’s a matter of perspective.
Dude just pointed a camera, pressed click and thinks he’s an artist? My god what have we become. We could take that train of thought all the way to “if you’re not grinding up your own pigments and painting on cave walls you’re not really an artist”.
AI is a tool. I don’t have an issue with someone using AI and calling themselves an artist, as long as they’ve generated the AI model based on their own previous art. You teach a machine to mimic your brush strokes and color palette and then the machine spits out images as you taught it. I don’t see an issue there because you might as well have painted them yourself, it just saves time to have AI do most (if not all) of the work.
Problems arise when the AI is based on someone else’s work and you claim the output as yours. Could you have painted the image exactly the same way?
Ahh yes, the camera bullshit. Here we go…
Yes a photographer is an artist. They need to know light diffusion, locational effects, distance and magnification, aperture, shutter speed, and have a subject prepped and able to take direction . They also have to have an insane understanding of post editing.
They don’t type a sentence into a computer and get beautiful photographs.
A child can produce the exact same image by simply typing the exact same sentence into a computer.
A child cannot be given a camera and be found to produce the exact same quality photo of a professional photographer.
So stop with this bullshit comparison. It’s apples and oranges.
Did you read the rest of the comment or did you stop after the first sentence?
I didn’t need to. The moment photography was brought up as a comparison, that’s all I needed to know.
AI is not art. Period.
Let’s say I’ve been an artist for 10 years. I take all my work and stick it into an AI model. That model starts generating images based on the art I’ve created in the past 10 years. Have I stopped being an artist because I put down the brush and picked up a keyboard?
How would a child produce the exact same image if they don’t have my AI model?
That assumes you have a big enough data set to even make anything useful with just your art. And we know that that was not the case here
That’s not the case here and I think the artist in the article has no claim to that image. I’m against the general idea that using AI instantly disqualifies someone as an artist, which is what the other person believes.
You did not stop to be an artist, you just stopped to make art and every kid is able to recreate what you did, because all it have to do is type your name in prompts.
More than that, every kid drawing with a crayons on papers or on tablet is more creative than you this time.
How would a child produce the exact same image if they don’t have my AI model?
The moment your art was run through AI, it was no longer yours, and no longer art.
I’m done talking about this. I stated my point, my opinion, and I have no intention to change it. AI is garbage.
If you want to be the old man yelling how the world is changing for the worse, go ahead. You are entitled to your conservative opinion.
A child cannot be given a camera and be tasked to produce the exact same quality photo of a professional photographer- and succeed.
Um. A macaque did. And every photo a child takes with a smartphone is considered to be sufficiently creative as to be a copyrightable work. It doesn’t need to be “good” to be art.
“What is art” can be a difficult question. But “how difficult was it to create it” is not the answer.
If a skillless child can reproduce it with no training but a command of their language of origin, it’s not art. You can give a child a camera but they’re not gong to be Ansel Adams. Yet you can give a child a computer and voilà! You have Stable Diffusion.
I’m not arguing this with you any further.
If a skillless child can reproduce it with no training but a command of their language of origin, it’s not art.
The art is in the eye, not the device. People made the same or similar claims about photography. “It’s just reproduction not creation!” “It’s just operating a machine that does all the work!”
AI is a tool - the person is the creative.
You may not like the art - but that’s not to say it’s not art. Either way I think it’s a creative work and worthy of at least the option to be considered art.
In my eye, AI isn’t art and using AI doesn’t make one an artist. In fact I think it’s an insult to at and artists that talentless hacks are now claiming the title when it takes a lifetime to develop a craft to become an artist.
It’s shameful.
In my eye Jackson Pollock is a no-talent hack who created meaningless crap that looks like somebody left a 2yr old unsupervised in the arts and crafts room at school. And I think it’s an insult to other artists that his work is so heavily prized.
But we’re talking about the quality of the work here aren’t we? Not whether it is a work at all. You’re effectively saying that you don’t value the work because it was easy. Which is fine - that’s your value call. But to deny that it’s a creative work at all is an entirely different thing.
People absolutely did rag on people like Turner for using pre-mixed paints. People absolutely did rag on photography.
Only the names have changed.
I don’t have an issue with someone using AI and calling themselves an artist, as long as they’ve generated the AI model based on their own previous art.
That’s, uh, not what happened here. And I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. Anyone with the skill to draw the kinds of pictures they want would simply draw the kinds of pictures they want instead of putting in tons of effort to get an AI to do it worse
Prompting an AI is not making art
That’s, uh, not what happened here.
I agree. He shouldn’t own that image.
And I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. Anyone with the skill to draw the kinds of pictures they want would simply draw the kinds of pictures they want instead of putting in tons of effort to get an AI to do it worse
I think that’s a matter of time until it becomes the norm. There was a time we painted literally everything and then photography came along. You could make the same argument against photography because back then photography needed setting up, the images were black and white and you could arguably do a better job painting it instead. However photography took over because you could spend the next how many hours or days painting something or you could go click and have the photo that isn’t as “high quality” but is close enough.
I think in the future artists will use AI to quickly prototype through ideas and when they get roughly what they originally envisioned, they take the AI image as a canvas and touch it up a bit. Sure they could paint it themselves and spend the next week prototyping all sorts of ideas before creating the final image, but would you really do that when you could spend maybe a day prototyping with AI and then another day to fix up the image? Maybe the image doesn’t even need fixing up, maybe the AI generated exactly what you imagined?
I think the statement “then photography took over” is doing a lot of work here. It’s incredibly inaccurate to say that photography took over as the primary means of visual creativity.
Photography took over as the primary means of capturing a moment. Sure it’s used artistically sometimes, but primarily it’s used for subjective reality. I would argue that painting, and especially digital painting, is at an all-time high due to the ease and relatively low barrier to entry.
I think that most artists would still prefer to paint something that they can consider “their art”, over typing a sentence and getting back a result. Sure, it’s neat, but it will never be anything more than a novelty, or a shortcut to generic results. The process of creation is only really 50% the final result, and the process itself is an important aspect and not just a means to an end.
Using AI just feels like a weird commodification of art - like using only pre-made Unity assets for a game and nothing else, and then having someone else make it for pennies.
I’ve seen so many bizarre “AI artists” cropping up, especially online, who legitimately try to sell AI art online for hundreds of dollars. I think the reasons people buy art can usually be put into three buckets: they appreciate the process that went behind it, they like the style of the artists or that painting in particular, or they find some meaning in it. If you wanted to buy AI art why not just prompt it yourself. What process, or artistic style, or meaning is even in AI art?
It’s not even like AI can be trained on an artist’s own works. It takes millions of samples to train AI, which a singular artist would never be able to produce. So, at some point, that model will have had to have stolen the content of its results from something.
I think the statement “then photography took over” is doing a lot of work here. It’s incredibly inaccurate to say that photography took over as the primary means of visual creativity.
I think my context there was pretty obvious so it’s somewhat disingenuous to take it out of context. Photography has largely taken over portrait paintings. I think photography has also largely taken over scenic paintings. I never said it completely replaced painting, it became a tool in the hands of artists the same way AI art can become a tool.
I think that most artists would still prefer to paint something that they can consider “their art”, over typing a sentence and getting back a result. Sure, it’s neat, but it will never be anything more than a novelty, or a shortcut to generic results. The process of creation is only really 50% the final result, and the process itself is an important aspect and not just a means to an end.
And I think artist will use AI to come up ideas for their art and use the output as a canvas.
Using AI just feels like a weird commodification of art - like using only pre-made Unity assets for a game and nothing else, and then having someone else make it for pennies.
Because that’s the current use of AI. It doesn’t mean AI will stay this way.
I’ve seen so many bizarre “AI artists” cropping up, especially online, who legitimately try to sell AI art online for hundreds of dollars.
I’m not talking about those people and I’ve already mentioned elsewhere that their “work” can be considered questionable.
I think the reasons people buy art can usually be put into three buckets: they appreciate the process that went behind it, they like the style of the artists or that painting in particular, or they find some meaning in it. If you wanted to buy AI art why not just prompt it yourself. What process, or artistic style, or meaning is even in AI art?
Let’s say the artist trains an AI model solely on their own previous art and then releases some of those AI generated images. The person who likes the style or a particular painting, do they care it was made by AI? Doubt it, because it’s in the artists style. The person who appreciates the process that went behind it, is “I put my previous works into an AI model and the model generated this image based on what I imagined this image should be” really that much less impressive than “I imagined what this image should be and so I sat behind my drawing board and drew it”? As for meaning, the artist still chooses what to release. If they release something it must have a meaning. I think it would be extremely disrespectful towards an artist to claim the art they chose to release has no meaning.
It’s not even like AI can be trained on an artist’s own works. It takes millions of samples to train AI, which a singular artist would never be able to produce. So, at some point, that model will have had to have stolen the content of its results from something.
I thought we were talking about it from a philosophical point of view. I’m not about to predict the future and claim it could or couldn’t be done, but let’s say it could be done. Would that change your opinion?
You teach a machine to mimic your brush strokes and color palette and then the machine spits out images as you taught it. I don’t see an issue there because you might as well have painted them yourself
This artist didn’t “teach” the AI anything though. No more than I “teach” my computer something when I do file search using operands like “+” and “-”
oh look, someone who knows nothing about the topic spewing shite again!
I’ve covered this specific multiple times already. My point was more against the general idea that anything AI related is not art.
Firstly, I agree with most of what you’ve said. However…
Problems arise when the AI is based on someone else’s work and you claim the output as yours. Could you have painted the image exactly the same way?
Is there anything in the world that isn’t a derivative of something else? Can you claim to have a thought that isn’t influenced by something you’ve heard, read, seen? Feeding art to AI is no different than a student walking a gallery and learning the styles of the masters. Is the AI better at it? Sure. But it’s still doing the same thing. If someone with eidetic memory paints like Picasso, are they not an artist?
To really drive home the point, if I have a friend that is an artist, like, a really good artist, and I ask them to paint something for me, say, a field with wildflowers in the snow, and they come back with something that looks just like Landscape With Snow by Van Gogh, does that mean my friend isn’t an artist? If I ask AI for that, and they come back with something like what my friend painted, how is it any different? We call them “learning” models, but we refuse to believe that they “learn”. Instead we call it “theft”.
I didn’t say I’m completely against imitation. I more or less implied that’s where lines start to blur. If someone spends their entire life learning Picasso and can perfectly imitate Picasso then I don’t consider that to be not art. Similarly if someone did that and fed it into an AI model that then imitates them imitating Picasso I think that’s still fine.
But if you throw in all the famous artists and have the AI generate an image could you really imitate it? Not only would you have to imitate how all of them paint and what colors they use, you should also be able to tell the difference which part of the painting was influence by which artist so you could imitate it correctly. And if we factor in that AI can blend brush strokes it becomes even more harder to actually imitate. That’s so muddy water it’s easy to make arguments for and against.
Congratulations! You’re now a journalist for having typed that paragraph. Man, you’re really racking up the careers here!
(Do you see the point here? Using a tool that does all the work for you, doesn’t make you comparable to those that spent their lives doing it without cheating. Just like typing something out using auto-correct doesn’t make you a journalist).
Farmers aren’t really farmers, the machine does most of the work. People who work in manufacturing aren’t doing a real job, the assembly line does most of the work. Etc etc.
So far all you’ve proven is that you’re an asshole who takes things too far.
Man. If coming up with apples to oranges comparisons was a skill, somehow I have a feeling you’d have AI do it for you.
Do you honestly think a farmer’s knowledge of crops, seasonal growth rates, harvesting times and techniques, using the right tools to promote growth, nitrogen/PH content of soil, and how to properly avoid blight is somehow the same thing as some kid knuckling a few adjectives into a computer and creating a pretty picture?
Fuck man. You are ALL the way out of gas here.
However, I’ll add that having punched up that ridiculous response, you’re now a world class comedian. Congrats!
Oh, and if they work on an assembly line, then no, they’re not a manufacturer- they’re what’s called a “laborer”. That’s how shit works. The company in your scenario would be the manufacturer. They would have done the R&D, designed and financed the machinery and produced the product.
Man, your school sucked.
Do you honestly think a farmer’s knowledge of crops, seasonal growth rates, harvesting times and techniques, using the right tools to promote growth, nitrogen/PH content of soil, and how to properly avoid blight is somehow the same thing as some kid knuckling a few adjectives into a computer and creating a pretty picture?
That’s all knowledge you need to produce crops and not fuck it up. By saying you can’t “fuck up” AI art you’re saying that the years of art school learning about composition and all other stuff is worthless because a talentless pleb like me has the same aristic vision as someone who spent their life studying art. Way to take a huge shit on all the artists.
I’m not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that because AI can blend together the works of hundreds and create something unique, that it is bad?
I’m not saying it’s bad, I’m saying claiming it as your own original work becomes very questionable. If you want to claim AI art as your own work you have to use only your own artistic expressions in the AI model.
Is there anything in the world that isn’t a derivative of something else? Can you claim to have a thought that isn’t influenced by something you’ve heard, read, seen?
Yes, i have made something that wasnt influenced by anything else
I mean, I don’t believe you?
So, you’re now allowed to be called a novelist because of that reply. Congratulations! Enjoy your new career!
“artist”
He’s already made a greater impact on art than those who created images themselves.
So he’s an artist in the sense that a guy with a sledgehammer is a builder.
““my work””
Super interesting. The guy claims is wasn’t just ai, that he performed alterations as well. If that’s true but he still gets shot down it might pave the way for AI being much more shunned in the world out of IP concerns on the output side rather than the training data.
You can’t copyright that music, game, book, screenplay or video because AI made some contribution.
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Nah, that won’t work. As soon as corporations get involved they’ll carve out exemptions for themselves.
Corpos are involved.
