With the release of ChatGPT, everything from education, coding, medicine, art and more was disrupted while all the tech players are fighting for number one.
In this fight, one should ask who bears the collateral damages.
While adopting AI has many benefits, we need to consider its effect on not only low-skilled jobs, but also high-skilled industries.
This rapid transformation is facing resistance from artists as they devote everything to their craft, and now AI can not only do it in seconds, but it can do it because it is trained on their work and without any copyrights.
Inspiration or theft?
When a machine starts taking ideas from humans, it feels different and is stirring legal controversies surrounding copyright laws.
Most AI image generators get their training data from a large-scale artificial intelligence open network, which consists of over five billion indexed images, including the works of many unsuspecting artists and copyrighted images.
Some critics point out that these AI systems are not truly creative but rely on existing data to produce derivatives.
With these POVs in conflict, it is good to ask ourselves: What is creativity in the first place? Is it simply the human mind remembering past inputs and mashing them in a new way? Don’t humans borrow from each other all the time?
Despite the controversies, AI art has been featured in various exhibitions, competitions, magazines, and social media platforms.
An AI generated portrait of “Edmund de Bellamy” featured on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, created by Obvious, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), won first prize in an art competition in France, beating out human-made artworks and was even auctioned and sold at ten times its original value.
In light of all this, artists are left devastated, making art creation easy, accessible, and devalued in price. It is even more frustrating for some artists when they realize that their art is being used in AI’s training.
Kelly McKernan, a rising star in the art world, is known for her distinctive style combining fantasy and sci-fi elements. On Discord’s Mid-Journey platform, her name appeared in over 12,000 public requests, resulting in images that resembled McKernan’s work.
Some might call this a style transfer, but for McKernan, the use of her name crossed a line.
Getty Images also accused Stable Diffusion of selling and licensing AI-generated images derived from their collection without attribution because the AI image produced even copied the watermarks.
McKernan and Getty Images filed lawsuits for infringing on their artistic identities and copyrights.
Orignality vs. creativity
The standards for determining originality and creativity differ between different jurisdictions. In Chinese courts, the rulings grant copyrights to AI-generated art depending on how much human involvement there was.
Even in Europe, copyright protection for AI art is still up for debate and differs between countries. From a legal perspective, there’s no clear consensus or law on AI-generated works.
When Photoshop became a popular tool in 1990, it was initially met with resistance, fearing it would undermine the integrity and authenticity of their work.
As with anything AI, there’s both immense opportunities and challenges. For artists and society, maybe it’s time to rethink our assumptions about art.
What is art? Can the power of AI-generated content affect you personally? Are you for or against copyright protection for AI artwork? Will we have an entity that can develop standards and provide legal support on AI art and copyright protection?
The journey of the digital world is ever evolving, and we are still at the start of the AI revolution, so let’s wear our seatbelts and enjoy the ride.
By Khouloud Sraj, Regional Business Director, iMetric by LeadGen Group
