PHOTO: LARA JAMESON.
(Originally posted on Instagram on December 15, 2022, since edited, expanded, and uncensored.)
AI “ART” IS being touted as a huge technological leap forward. It seems like a bit of harmless fun and, admittedly, does have its uses.
I wouldn’t use any in an artwork (probably 🤥). But it would help brainstorm things such as composition and colours in pre-production, saving time and effort, and other valuable applications beyond art.
I would have much preferred it, though, if the images were sourced ethically. These apps scrape the internet for other people’s art to add to their data sets without the artist’s consent. They’re using the artworks as raw materials to generate AI images. You can even see some artists’ mangled signatures appearing in some of these abominations.
It’s Not All Bad.
Let me be clear on the point that I am not automatically against AI, until such time as it straight up murks us all. I’m not even against AI-generated images. It’s the idea of AI-generated “art” that I take offence to. It’s one thing to be able to generate an image for illustrative purposes but another thing entirely for a computer program to have a mid life crisis and decide that it wants to be an artist all of a sudden, at the expense of actual ones and then go ahead and bite their style while they’re at it.
It’s daylight robbery and threatens livelihoods. We’re getting jacked, plain and simple.
First, A.I. doesn’t even make “art.” It’s just a computer’s best attempt at counterfeiting it.
Metaphorically speaking, a collage maker fucked a photo filter while they were both rat-arsed on steroids and shrooms. Then, one day out pops a mutated little shit that just combs the web for fragments of pre-existing images it can slap together to create something resembling an original image (not unlike a collage) before slapping a visual effect on it (not unlike a filter), to make it look like a piece of art.
I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but who gives a shit? So, forgive me if I’m not sprouting a big, turgid one at this supposed “technological marvel,” like everyone else seems to be doing.
You might as well rip a Banksy off the wall, tape it to a Jeff Koons, then to a Rubens, and call it an “original work.” It appears I’ve been operating under the crackpot delusion that this was the whole point of drafting copyright laws in the first place.
People busted their arses for years to improve, get noticed, get work, pay for art school, art supplies, studio space, etc. Literal centuries’ worth of work and people’s entire lives reduced to a computer program that can regurgitate some malformed digital turd in seconds to serve as an amusing internet trend for fuckwits.
Talented people with a once appreciable skill that’s hard enough to monetise as it is, working their arses off for hours, days, or more on a piece only for some dipshit in the comments to ask:
“Broooo, what prompts did you use?🥴”
AI imagery, in one form or another, has always been an inevitability and does provide a valuable service, like when stock image sites don’t have the exact image you’re after if you’re a smaller content creator, for instance. Which is a pain in the arse, but it’s not as if it’s an urgent necessity.
If the developers couldn’t devise a way to develop their shit without pirating ours, then that’s their problem. Their app could have waited, and the world wouldn’t have given two shits if it did. Art generation is right up there as one of the lamest and least essential applications of AI technology, which is otherwise awesome, if I’m being honest.
Given the anti-competitive nature of using AI for such a purpose, they could have made a distinction from the outset between being able to generate images for editorial or entertainment purposes, and generating art.
Some Common Takes:
“Nothing is original; everyone takes inspiration from someone else. This is the same thing.”
Adopting a style, a colour scheme, an idea, or another such thing in a transformative work is inspiration. Directly copying another artist in a non-transformative work is plagiarism. Directly using another artist’s actual work as raw materials in image creation without permission is straight-up theft.
“It’s so vast, and there’s so much different art in the data set that it doesn’t use enough of one artist’s work in one image to be copyright infringement.”
Wouldn’t that depend on how much of an artist’s work a user wants to use in one image? Couldn’t they use as much of a specific artist’s work as they wish, even almost entirely replicate it by prompting the generator to do precisely that?
However small those increments of our work may be, AI image generators are still, technically, brokering the distribution of our intellectual property while leaving it to the discretion of the user just how much of it they want to use.
Napster and MegaUpload got nailed for basically the same thing. The developers of these apps could have come up with their own stylization options and left other people’s styles alone.
“It makes art more affordable for the people who can’t afford to commission an artist.”
Fuck them. By that rationale, if you ripped off a truck full of Blu-Ray players and sold them for cheap, I suppose you would be “making Blu-Ray players affordable for the people that can’t afford one.” But you would be glossing over the part where you ripped off a truck full of Blu-Ray players.
It isn’t a legitimate enterprise, and I doubt that news outlets would be running stories about “the geniuses who revolutionised the way people watch movies.”
“The images they produce don’t look as good as the real thing.”
Until they do. By copying us. Without our consent.
In conclusion, say no to this bullcrap. It’s for dickheads, anyway.
