Inspiration or remix: Are you stealing if you use AI?
“Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief,” Bono sang way back in 1991 on U2’s album Achtung, Baby. As art – and design – continue to evolve in this modern day, the suggestion of thievery still rings true. Where, exactly, is the line when it comes to generative AI??
Is AI-generated art stolen? This question is only beginning to be addressed by the justice system as authors and artists continue to sue AI providers over copyright infringement.?
Multiple illustrators, cartoonists, and other visual artist have filed cases against Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DeviantArt’s DreamUp generator. So has stock photo supplier Getty Images, whose case alleges that Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed 12 million of Getty’s images. Authors Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey have also filed suit, alleging that Open AI’s Chat GPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on “illegally-acquired datasets containing their (the authors’) works.”
“I felt violated,” artist Kelly McKernan told the BBC in a recent interview. She discovered that over 50 pieces of her artwork had been uploaded to LAION, a data set which feeds AI image generators. “If someone can type my name [into an AI tool] to make a book cover and not hire me, that affects my career.”
This begs the question of stealing vs. inspiration. If someone had seen Ms. McKernan’s art in a gallery and was inspired by her color palette or use of light or subject matter, and then went home and made their own art that was influenced by hers, is that person a thief? Or were they simply inspired by the original art? What’s the difference between inspiration in a human brain and new data in an AI “brain”??
To copy is to learn
At this point in the arc of human civilization, isn’t everything essentially a remix anyway? We take something old, we make something new out of it. All the words have been written, all the songs have been sung…
This video by Kirby Ferguson is an interesting take on the stealing vs. inspiration debate by positing that copying is at the core of creativity, and that remixing allows us to be more creative, to “create bigger and more complex ideas out of smaller and simpler ideas” and create “new ideas by building on top of old ideas.”?
Remixing, he says, also removes the barriers of needing expensive tools or, you know, actual skills. You can make music now without knowing how to play a musical instrument or carry a tune. You can also (as of August 30th) generate typography without knowing what kerning is. Is this a good thing?
It’s definitely an anxiety-inducing thing for a lot of artists out there.?
“Machines have breached a sacred realm we thought was solely the domain of people. The first battleground of the age of AI is art,” Ferguson says in his video.?
A question of consent
The issue is not just that art keeps getting cheaper and easier and faster for almost anyone to make (a reality, as Ferguson points out, that has been ongoing since the invention of the printing press). The issue artists are grappling with (and arguing about and suing over)? is how those machines are making art.
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An AI generator is trained on existing images (a training set), often (usually) without the permission of the creator of the original art. Then the AI emulates the style of the art it has been trained on to create its own versions. (It’s more complicated than that, of course, and if you jump to 53:34 in Ferguson’s remix video, he zooms in on the process and lays it out pretty clearly.)
The sticky part is the part where artists’ work is used to train AI without consent. It would be different if the training sets used in this process were art that is already in the public domain. Although media/tech pundit Benedict Evans makes the point that AI “doesn’t need your book or website in particular and doesn’t care what you in particular wrote about, but it does need ‘all’ the books and ‘all’ the websites… <data> is only valuable in the aggregate of billions, and your novel or song or article is just one grain of dust in the Great Pyramid.”
There is also the broader philosophical question of how artists see their own art. If everything is indeed a remix, as Ferguson claims, then all art is an amalgamation. It belongs to everyone. Of course, many (most?) artists feel differently, believing (quite strongly) that the art they create belongs to them.
It’s time to have an opinion
As of now, there is no one right answer. It’s a touchy subject that is hotly debated wherever it comes up. So where do you come down on the fair use debate??
Is AI generated art ethical? Is every artist a thief anyway, so it doesn’t matter? Or are there direct and inviolable lines of ownership tying a creator to their work??
If you don’t have an opinion yet, now is a great time to educate yourself. Get informed and develop an opinion, because the US Copyright Office wants to hear what you think about AI.?
That’s right, the government is asking for opinions on three questions:
The Copyright Office also wants to hear your thoughts about AI possibly violating publicity rights. So, it’s time to think about what you think. Engage in this fundamental shift in our industry. This is a massive opportunity for designers to have a voice and have an impact and actually help shape government policy that will directly affect the way we work.
The public commenting period is now open, so go here to share your opinion. Written comments are due by October 18, 2023.
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This post was written LaDonna Witmer .