It took Monet nearly three decades to complete his full collection of “Nymphéas” or “Water Lilies” paintings, yet images of the same Normandy water garden could be captured by a photographer in mere minutes – with arguably less effort.
You can imagine it now, as pointilism is replaced with point-and-shoot, 19th century landscape artists pose the question: Can cameras really be creative?
But, lo and behold, photography is still alive. Having earned it’s rightful place in the world of modern art, the pictures a camera captures are equally as revered as the oil-painted masterpieces of Monet and his contemporaries. Despite this however, history appears to be repeating itself.
Enter artificial intelligence (AI).
Although a lot has changed since Monet’s time, some things never do: people don’t like change, to be challenged or the unknown. AI is the embodiment and catalyst of all three.
What started with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a sunglasses-clad cyborg assassin, has now evolved into a full-blown era-defining culture war of man vs. machine, with many of the world’s artists heading up the frontline.
“AI is destroying fine art and undermining creativity,” say the artists.
“Computers fuel new levels of creativity,” says AI.
Amidst this battle, however, there is perhaps at least one thing that artists and AI can still agree on: Human hands are really hard to draw.
AI is approaching human level intelligence.
How do I know? It’s about as bad at drawing hands as humans are 🤮#AI #Singularity pic.twitter.com/fyNOGeMBk1
— Fedja Bosnic (@fedjabosnic) January 31, 2023
First, it came for the creatives
The fear of being replaced by machines is not a new narrative. Since the early days of automation we’ve known of the threat AI poses on various professions, with the blue collar workers first in line to be usurped, then the white collars, followed by the creatives right at the back of queue.
But the thing is, it’s actually gone in the exact opposite order.
As AI image generator platforms such as OpenAI’s DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have erupted, both traditional and digital artists have found themselves going head-to-head with computers.
Many traditionalist connoisseurs have begun questioning if the images generated by computers can actually constitute art, while others have labelled the trend as a fraudulent farce which infringes on copyright and undermines the craft they’ve spent many years perfecting.
Some artists have even begun adding a “Do not AI” label to their Twitter profiles in protest.
Despite this, however, AI-made artwork has made its way mainstream, and computers have begun swiping competition trophies out from underneath them.
This painting has caused a surprising amount of controversy.
Théâtre D’opéra Spatial by Jason M. Allen won the Colorado State Fair in the digital art category, but the fact that it is AI generated has sparked debate on what constitutes art. What do you think? pic.twitter.com/CEPtnsPq3f
— Avant Arte (@avant_arte) September 10, 2022
The AI art scene is booming
Deep Fake, NFT Paris, and Frieze are just some of the exhibitions that have shone a spotlight on AI generated artwork, while another AI artist reimagined women as different countries.
AI-Generated Art Personifies Countries as Different Women Across the Globehttps://t.co/AYNcxVR2v0 @mymodernmet#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #DataScience #100DaysOfCode #Python #MachineLearning #BigData #DeepLearning #NLP #Robots #IoT pic.twitter.com/EQlPoQ73fP
— Ravi Dugh (@ravidugh) February 21, 2023
PATRÓN have launched their own AI image generator for tequila fans to design the margarita of their dreams.
Craft a PATRÓN Dream Margarita with AI for #NationalMargaritaDay, share it with #PatronDreamMargarita & #PatronSweepstakes, and tag @Patron for a chance to see @iambeckyg! https://t.co/99kE2trggl NoPurNec. Open to US residents, 21+. Ends on 2/24/23. Rules: https://t.co/3KEGpGF6XS pic.twitter.com/D4e5JowTnA
— Patrón Tequila (@Patron) February 17, 2023
Architects are using AI art generators to design and visualise fantastical structures. Imagine futuristic curvy concrete facades, biomimetic floating stadiums, urban canopy gardens – you get the picture.
Designed by Ross Lovegrove, the “Cosmic Odyssey” is a series of AI- Generated projects featuring inflatable architecture for outdoor concerts and public events.
Tap the 🔗 link to read more about this project: https://t.co/P151lXqB4I#midjourney #midjourneyarchitecture pic.twitter.com/HiCxGkxAA1
— ParametricArchitecture (@parametricarch) February 15, 2023
Publishing and print industries are also embracing AI, with news outlets like The Economist and many authors now using automation to design cover images.
It is time to look at the promise and perils of the next big thing in machine intelligence. Join us on this new frontier https://t.co/jqVkAvpnAZ pic.twitter.com/1NkLZUI8dk
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) June 9, 2022
Even the fashion world is successfully navigating the space between neural networks and New York Fashion Week, with digital designers such as The Fabricant creating their own code-couture collections for people to purchase and wear virtually. Think — your very own personal designer “instagram” wardrobe — without the real-life clothes, but with the real-life price tag; virtual clothing is selling for as much as $9500 in some cases.
An AI model wearing @thefabricant ‘s “Iridescence” dress, the first digital fashion creation ever minted on blockchain, back in 2019 (on the left, the “original” promo with Johanna Jaskowska). pic.twitter.com/O6WN4XKicC
— rtx 👾 (@thatrtx) November 29, 2022
Salvador Dali vs. Salvador DALL-E
The ongoing debate all boils down to one particularly controversial question: Can computers ever replicate the distinct je-ne-sais-quoi of humanness that’s required for creativity?
It’s a distinctly intangible, difficult to quantify, and deeply personal quality – a far cry from the replication, repetition, automation and rigidity we associate with computers – and it therefore feels alien to imagine an inanimate machine being able to achieve it.
Where there’s no feeling, there’s no imagination, right?
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Marcus du Sautoy, Professor at Oxford University, mathematician and author of “The Creativity Code,” would argue that AI could help to inspire creativity and Yuval Noah Hurari, historian, philosopher and author of “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus,” says that humans are an “assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution.”
However, there is some debate around whether AI can fit in with the arts, or whether it possibly even undermines human artwork.
A discussion which touched on this matter was witnessed recently, when the Mauritshuis art museum in The Hague loaned Johannes Vermeer’s famous “Girl with a Pearl Earring” to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and reportedly sparked concerns by hanging “A Girl With Glowing Earrings” by Julian van Dieken – an AI piece made using Midjourney – in its place.
“A Girl With Glowing Earrings” is hanging in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague in the “Vermeer room” right now.
It’s exhibited with four other (non-AI) images at the same spot where you can usually see the original painting “A Girl with a Pearl Earring.” pic.twitter.com/wIzuenI8Wp— Kyle Hailey (@kylelf_) February 19, 2023
In Australia, an AI-made “photograph” of surfers on a beach fooled judges to win a photography competition, only to later have the title reallocated to a human-made piece once the panel found out the image was in fact computer-generated. The organisers did however go on to announce the establishment of a new contest which allows both human- and AI-made entries, to “settle the man vs machine, or photo vs image, debate, on a level playing field.”
Congrats to Jane Eykes, winner of our SUMMER Photo Contest!
This week’s contest is AT THE ZOO, enter at https://t.co/vUEUt0f5cn pic.twitter.com/hu0YBmTr1o— digiDirect Australia (@digiDirect_AU) February 1, 2023
It could be said that as a global society we may, understandably, dislike that which challenges the known status quo. But, Picasso and Braque’s abstract Cubism was initially regarded as absurd rather than admired, yet their revolutionary ideas caught on eventually.
Is it possible therefore, that the AI art wave we are currently riding is just the beginning of a new artistic movement, just as Impressionism or Cubism were in their own times respectively?
Regardless of the answer to this question, whether you support AI-made art or not and existential and cultural issues aside, there are a myriad of other legal and economic questions that also need to be addressed, namely:
Who owns the artwork made by AI? And does the creation of it, as well as the system’s training with rights reserved images, undermine artists and infringe on copyright?
Who owns AI-made art?
In order to generate an AI image, the model first needs to know what you’re looking for – the internet is a big place without any guidance parameters.
This is where prompts come in. These short strings of keywords are composed of unique combinations of ingredients such as style, colour, mood and even existing artists’ names to help define the nuances of the intended resultant image.
For example, the following images were created by inputing a prompt along the lines of “a futuristic version of Claude Monet’s ‘Bridge Over a Pond of Waterlilies'” into DALL-E:
Similarly, in his installation, “Memories of Passersby,” Mario Klingeman uses a neural network trained on a large database of existing classical-style portraits to generate unique and novel AI portraits in real-time.
Including the names of artists in prompts or training models on existing artwork in this way, is largely intended as a direction for the AI, to show it from where to draw inspiration.
The problem is, it also raises a whole host of consent and copyright issues, as anything from an individual’s unique brush stroke style can be replicated without authorisation from the artist themselves.
For example, Greg Rutkowski, a digital fantasy landscape artist who has created game artwork for the likes of Sony and Ubisoft, amongst others, is a more popular prompt ingredient than Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso or Leonardo da Vinci, according to MIT Technology Review – popularity which comes with a hefty price, as the internet is now flooded with faux Rutkowski renders.
At what point does inspiration become plagiarism?
Does the AI artist own the generated artwork?
There is a general consensus amongst both EU and US officials that the individual responsible for crafting AI-made artwork is also the holder of that image’s rights.
However, this week the US Copyright Office moved to retract the rights to images in a graphic novel, “Zarya of the Dawn,” which author Kristina Kashtanova created using Midjourney.
Though Kashtanova is permitted to hold the rights to other elements of the book, such as the story, the office deemed the book’s images as “not the product of human authorship,” and therefore cannot be copyrighted.
So if the AI artist doesn’t own the artwork…
Do the original artists who inspired the artwork own it?
When an AI model scrapes the internet and takes inspiration from existing artwork or copyrighted images, shouldn’t the artists or image banks who created or own the originals have the right to lay claim, at least in part, to the AI derivatives?
In this vein, Getty Images has announced it would be filing charges against Stability AI, Stable Diffusion’s parent company, for scraping Getty copyrighted images from the internet.
Some artists have also initiated class-action lawsuits against platforms like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney which they allege have used their work within AI datasets unauthorised. In some cases artists signatures have even been spotted within AI generated images, further fuelling the creative community’s concerns over consent.
As a result, many artists are now calling for their work to be removed from the training databases of AI research institutes and companies, requesting that prior authorisation must be given before they are included in the first place.
Infringing on copyright laws in this way is something that is also often seen within the NFT sphere, where many artists have their work ripped-off and resold as counterfeit NFTs without consent. But in the case of AI generative art, where the output is largely unique, many argue that neural networks are simply drawing inspiration from the artwork they observe, much like any artist would – computers are just much faster at it than we are.
In the traditional sense, artwork is borne from the accumulation of observations, experiences and memories that an individual collects throughout their life – kind of like a subconscious bookshelf – which ultimately culminates in inspiration and expression. Does artwork in the AI sense not work the same?
We perhaps therefore need to ask another question: Who owns inspiration?
In attempting to define who owns what, at the level of what a computer has “seen” or taken insight from, aren’t we effectively putting a price-tag on intangibles such as nuance or style, which cannot really be objectively owned?
A lot of questions, for which there are not many concrete answers at present unfortunately, so we’ll have to decide for ourselves. But if the both the artist creating the AI-made artwork as well as the artists whose work inspired it don’t own the generated content, dare we ask…
Does AI itself own the artwork it produces?
Given that the entire world still seems fairly split on the question of whether AI possesses creativity even at this point, it’s probably a stretch to conclude that it will be granted rights to its own artwork in the near future.
Besides, we can probably all agree (or at least hope) that AI doesn’t possess the level of autonomy required to own things… or does it?
AI can already do so much; write essays, articles and poetry, answer the world’s biggest questions, compose music, give legal advice, diagnose illness and even help with national security, but as OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati warns in the company’s video on human alignment:
“Very quickly we can end up in a place where machines are far more capable than us.”
“As AI systems get more capable, they don’t automatically become better at doing what humans want,” says OpenAI’s Human Alignment team lead, Jan Leike, “In fact, sometimes they become less inclined to follow intentions.”
For this reason, it’s of critical importance that, in parallel with pushing the human-like advancement of AI systems, we must also ensure their development is aligned with human values, lest we risk a rapid loss of control.
“Solving this problem is of critical importance if we want life on Earth to go well,” says Murati.
AI creates brand new forms of expression
Yes, this is true, but AI also possibly perpetuates age-old systemic forms of bias.
The algorithms which AI image generation platforms run on are trained on billions of existing images tagged with keywords which attempt to describe them. However, given the stereotypes entrenched within the infrastructures of society, when making connections between these descriptions and their visual representation, AI is not immune to bias – in fact, as it learns, some say it potentially perpetuates the issue exponentially.
As Tracey Spicer, author of “Man-Made,” a new book about “how the bias of the past is being built into the future,” said in her article for the Guardian, “These baby biases become troublesome teenagers through machine learning. The bots are increasingly bigoted, like white supremacists neck-deep in conspiracy theory websites.”
However, with the help of important initiatives such as OpenAI’s Human Alignment project, we can hopefully ensure AI develops safely, sustainably, and in a way that brings benefit to humanity in its entirety – as is in fact OpenAI’s mission.
In the same way that we prompt AI to create images, perhaps it can prompt us to discover new levels of creativity in return.
Rather than replace anyone, perhaps AI can be considered as a tool that provides an alternative angle from which to observe and create, exponentially increasing self-expression in new and exciting ways as part of a movement of machine-augmented creativity.
Kind of like the latest hi-tech model of paintbrush?
— Weird Ai Generations (@weirddalle) January 22, 2023
— —
Correction: This article has been updated since publication to clarify the following points: The organisers of the competition that reallocated the prize to a human-made entry rather than the AI-made entry depicting of surfers on a beach, did in fact go on to establish a new competition that allows both human- and AI-made entries.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of Impakter.com — In the Featured Photo: Person holding a sparkler. Featured Photo Credit: Stephanie McCabe/Unsplash
