CAN YOU HEAR THE ARTIST’S SING? CREATIVES REVOLT AGAINST AI ART

The barricades are springing up across the internet, emblazoned with the unequivocal message “NO TO AI GENERATED IMAGES." The “les miserables” of the arts space are marching en masse on ArtStation, DeviantArt, and other curation sites, demanding revolution. ArtStation, owned by Epic Games, is a popular platform that curates and displays video game, film, cgi, and Web3 artists' work, allowing them to connect and share their portfolios with the internet. Controversy erupted when ArtStation featured AI art alongside existing artists' works on their main “Explore” feed.

To the salty artists, the platform had crossed a big pixelated red line. The display of generated AI art alongside their own was a threat to their careers and trivialized their skills, which in most instances had taken years of hard work, practice, experience, and thousands of dollars spent on education and degrees to hone. They argue that AI-driven tools are trained on the fruits of their human-made efforts and styles, simply scraping their art, remixing it, and regurgitating it on command by the generative platforms without attribution or due moral hazard as to the artist’s income, creative rights, or feelings.

Tensions between platforms and artists really boiled over when the Lensa app blew up in popularity last year. The app allowed people to combine their selfies with AI-generated art styles to create a new image emulating the brush strokes, toning, and color scheme of any famous artist. It appeared to many artists that the app had copied and then replicated their styles in a very obvious way - to the point where, in some images posted, discernible remnants of a logo or signature were still visible.

-anonymous artist.

It’s already so hard to carve out your own niche in the arts industry. Lensa just robs you of your potential income, while exploiting your work and stealing your style. The public love the results, and think we are all snowflakes for complaining. It’s heartbreaking, and meanwhile Lensa is making all the bank. My art is used hundreds of times a day, without even asking me once for permission!

In frustration, artists have started protesting and boycotting companies that launch AI image generators, or allow AI art to be featured on their platforms. Adobe has come in for sustained criticism for allowing AI-generated images to be sold as stock images.

Prisma Labs, who created the Lensa app, recently responded on Twitter to the controversy by tweeting: “To sum up, AI produces unique images based on the principles derived from data, but it can't ideate and imagine things on its own. As cinema didn't kill theater and accounting software hasn't eradicated the profession, AI won't replace artists but can become a great assisting tool. We also believe that the growing accessibility of AI-powered tools would only make man-made art in its creative excellence more valued and appreciated, since any industrialization brings more value to handcrafted works.”

While artists are up-in-arms, the legal profession is taking a longer, more cautious approach to the febrile subject of creatives vs. machines.

Senior law lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, Kylie Pappalardo, says, “Sometimes it’s best to wait and see.”

"I know that's not very reassuring to artists right now, but we don't know how disruptive this is yet, and until we know that the law is not going to be very well placed to respond,"

"How do you define creativity in a quantitative way so that you can place some sort of value on it? And then how do you protect that and make sure it's sustainable for human beings while being an exciting landscape where AI can grow as well?"

Many of the same arguments were rehearsed by artists in their attitudes towards non-fungible tokens (NFTs), claiming that NFTs devalued their work and shouldn’t be considered "art," but dismissed as "jpeg" collectibles without any true worth.

The debate has been lively on both sides, with advocates of AI art pointing out how the technology is set to decentralize and democratize art for the masses in much the same way that Web3, crypto, and NFTs do already.

The artists, by contrast, have been dismissive and even fearful of these arguments. They won’t accept any future that diminishes their clout in the arts or challenges their belief that only proven human effort counts as "real" creativity.

At best, they compare AI art generation to a slot machine, where you press a button and a few minutes later the application spits out a prompt guided, but mostly unpredictable, pattern of pixels, totally artificial and therefore worthless in the eyes of human art purists. This type of elitist argument has been around since photographers claimed that digital cameras were technological toys, just a passing fad, and that only images produced by film, processed in a dark room, held any true validity.

Many of these central ideas of artistic privilege stem, with some justification, from the years of very expensive education and subsequent internships and grind required to achieve degrees for entry into an arts career. In arts education, there is a central mythology of human exceptionalism - almost divinity - palpable in art, music, film, and literature. We revere great artists and talk of works of art as revealing deeper meanings to their subjects. A beautiful painting shows us the soul of the subject and the personality of the artist. We look for the ASMR effect in music and find an uplifting effect on our spirits. All of this is valid. It is also an example of a class divide between artists and the rest of us. Those who conspire to set themselves apart to judge what real art is and denigrate everything that doesn’t meet their standards.

Artists have been marginalized and devalued for their career choices in society, and in the workplace, nowhere more so than in the film industry, where they are overworked, underpaid, and barely credited for their efforts. In animation and video games, the situation is very similar, with many artists experiencing early burnout and lasting depression.

So artists do have real concerns worth discussing, but they only harm their own cause by tilting lances and charging in with misplaced and ill-judged rants against the suspected and imagined windmills of Midjourney, Dall E 2, and Stable Diffusion. Imagine how effective the same artists' voices could be if engaged in informed debate with AI developers and platforms, rather than in open hostility and calls for boycotts. If these seasoned veterans stood in common cause with the whole community for the democratization of AI art and proper legal standards for all, and if instead of opprobrium and outrage against AI, Web3, and NFTs, they helped to create new jobs and opportunities in these spaces instead? What if their solidarity with exploited peers extended beyond AI art to change attitudes and perceptions of artists across industries, especially the modern workhouses of visual effects, animation, and video games?

Getty Images claims Stability AI

"unlawfully" scraped millions of images from its site. It’s a significant escalation in the developing legal battles between generative AI firms and content creators.

The news comes as a class action lawsuit is launched in California against DeviantArt, Stability.ai, and Midjourney.

It is reported in the media that plaintiffs, including artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz, and “a class of other artists and stakeholders,” accuse the platforms of “direct copyright infringement” and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects media, including visual art, from online theft. Stable Diffusion, they argue, is trained on “billions of copyrighted images” from a dataset known as LAION-5B, which were “downloaded and used without compensation or consent from the artists.”

More lawsuits can be anticipated as artists’ concerns grow. AI art is still in the early stages, but it is advancing quickly as AI models become increasingly sophisticated. AI art involves using algorithms and machine learning to create artworks that are generated through computer programs. These programs are designed to imitate the creative work of artists, allowing AI to create works of art with minimal human intervention. AI art is creating a new type of art that is interactive and ever-evolving. It is anticipated that soon the AI art software will be a viable alternative, replacing artists in various careers within the arts industries.