AI Art Generators, or Intellectual Property Laundering Machines?

[grayestofghosts]

I keep reading doomsday declarations about what AI art will do to actual artists and their possibility of getting paid and at this point I’m convinced that everyone writing about this is missing the point. Artists have not been paid what they’re worth for a long time, either by exploitation or outright theft of their work. The homogenized, regurgitated slopification of art — no, I’m sorry, content — has been going on forever in the form of Save The Cat making all Hollywood movies the same, the MCU taking over cinema, the Penguin Random House/Simon and Schuster merger (including a hearing where they admitted they have no idea how books get popular), the insane scheduling requirements on Instagram to get any attention whatsoever, “crunch time” ruining game creators lives, all the way down to T-shirt bots trawling Twitter. If you read Little Women, Jo gets paid about the same amount in dollars for her short story during the Civil freaking War as a writer today would get upon winning a similar contest. I’m not saying it can’t get worse, but the idea that AI will change the fact that companies and unscrupulous individuals will do anything to avoid paying artists for their work, up to and including outright theft, by convincing them and everyone else that all “art” is essentially interchangeable, is nothing new, to the point that I wonder where the fuck anyone making these statements about AI art has been for the last ten years at least.

 

Art or “Art” is not the point here. The term "AI art generators" obfuscates what these programs are actually doing, and that's laundering intellectual property.

 

For AI to do anything it needs to be trained on a large data set. So, for an AI to make “art”, it needs to be trained with a large data set of “art”, which through “learning” it can then remix trends into the images it spits out. So, the biggest, most obvious question, then, is where is this “art” it is being trained on coming from? By the image sets DALL-E generates online, it's very obvious that the art it has used in its sample is not free, based on the fact that what it is best at creating is obviously someone else's intellectual property. It can generate very reliably images including "Pikachu" or "in the style of Frank Miller", meaning that the program must have analyzed tons of images of Pikachu and by Frank Miller, and not one article I've seen talking about art generators actually notes that to use these images, the user would have to actually pay whoever owned these images and properties to use them commercially, even if the final piece being used was generated by one of these AI programs.

 

DALL-E is able to exist and pull from these images probably because it's assuming that the use of copyrighted images and properties would be protected under fair use, with the argument that it's not for commercial use and the demonstration with these commercial properties is a part of the educational or scientific value of the generated pieces. However, I could imagine a large company like Disney deciding that it did not like users creating images of Mickey Mouse at strip clubs and send a cease and desist request that all Disney properties be taken out of the learning set, which would leave users suddenly unable to make images of Darth Vader making the first pitch in Dodger Stadium or courtroom sketches of Sora being tried for manslaughter.

 

But Disney is Disney. What about everyone else? I am not a lawyer, but I think this gets both easier and harder. As long as we're discussing fair use of images, Mickey Mouse at a strip club could be argued to be a parody or criticism somehow, while, say, if a drawing I made of a flower I found in my backyard was added to the data set, it would be really hard to argue anything made with it would be parody or criticism of the original work because I'm a nobody. There would be nothing specific in that image to parody or criticize because I am not known enough to parody or criticize. The use of my artwork in the dataset would strictly be used in a straightforward, instrumental fashion, and there would be no reason for them to not use any other picture of a flower. An AI using my random artistic renderings would very likely be a violation of fair use, but because of the way AI generate their images, it may be very hard to prove that my image was used unless the AI hiccupped and left my watermark in the generated image -- thus the intellectual property laundering potential of these programs.

 

The legal issues in using an AI art generator to make commercial art would have to be argued in court. Is an image created by an AI art generator transformative or derivative? This would likely have to be argued on a case by case basis. The real meat here would be, would the individual responsible for compiling the data set for the AI also be responsible for getting permissions from artists when their art is added to the generator, because the art generated may not be sufficiently transformative? Must Disney allow Mickey Mouse to be used in the generator because of the likelihood of the generated work being parody, or can it disallow Mickey's addition to these data sets outright? What are the implications of this for other artists? Etc.

 

Honestly I think the misunderstanding of the actual problems with these AI art generators is not because people don't understand how AI works (even though they don't), but because they don't understand how copyright and intellectual property work. While the DMCA has changed this slightly, it's still very rare for randos on the internet to get smacked for misusing or stealing art they find online while the legal system has been coping with integrating new technology doing copyright infringement since copyright has existed. The people freaking out definitely seem like they have never had to deal with purchasing a stock image or getting permission for music sampling.

 

The idea that there's no humans involved with creating AI art beyond the user typing input is just demonstrably false. If I type in Frank Miller into a generator and it creates something Frank Miller-esque, then Frank Miller was involved with the creation of it. If these generators have not already paid the artists for the data they've trained their AI on, then it's extremely likely we have another Napster on our hands. I don't think comparing AI generated art to music streaming is actually a bad comparison -- it could be very bad for artists in the end, but in a totally different way than the initial doomsayers claimed. It's easy to imagine people who were already stealing art putting the art through an AI to tweak it to make it more difficult for artists to find and send them a DMCA takedown. It's easy to imagine AI generated art replacing stock images in many cases, and the artists that produce stock getting a smaller and smaller cut because, while their images are being used, they're only being used "in part" so the companies facilitating this decide they deserve less money for it. I can even imagine a far future where the final product of art is so untouched by human hands because all human-made art goes into the art-slush and what is wanted by the consumer is pulled out as needed, but the original human-made art was still necessary. It's hard for me to imagine AI generated art replacing huge swaths of the art market with "free" art where it wasn't before, because the US government has prevented that from happening repeatedly -- from photocopiers, to VCRs, to Napster, ad nauseum. The toes being stepped on by these generators are too big to ignore.

Comments

[brin_bellway]

>>The people freaking out definitely seem like they have never had to deal with purchasing a stock image or getting permission for music sampling.

I think it's important to note that individual purchases usually aren't how the-people-freaking-out *sell* their work, either. The people I've seen freaking out are artists who operate through Patreons and tip jars, with few or no paywalls.

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>>Artists have not been paid what they’re worth for a long time, either by exploitation or outright theft of their work.

It's interesting that you don't have a flinch response to the phrase "artists should be paid what they're worth". I associate that phrase with people yelling at me for being unwilling to pay $100 for a painting I value at $10.

I do not value visual art very highly, and somehow this is "demeaning the artist" rather than "reasonable mental variation". I don't *steal* paintings; I don't say to artists' faces that it was wasteful of them to spend $100 of labour making a $10 object (I assume they are trying to cater to some very different kind of mind that *is* willing to pay $100); just *not buying* artworks raises an awful lot of people's ire.

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>>It's hard for me to imagine AI generated art replacing huge swaths of the art market with "free" art where it wasn't before, because the US government has prevented that from happening repeatedly -- from photocopiers, to VCRs, to Napster, ad nauseum.

I was very confused by this statement at first. I guess by "prevented from happening" you mean "drove underground"? I suppose driving artbots underground *would* stifle them quite a bit, probably far more so than driving music piracy underground since the usual goal regarding an artbot's end result is to be shared rather than kept in a personal collection (so it would be far easier to catch).

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>>The term "AI art generators" obfuscates what these programs are actually doing, and that's *laundering intellectual property*.

This does not seem essential to what artbots are doing. It's *easier* to build an artbot if you compile its dataset without regard for intellectual property, which is probably why the first ones to come out have done so, but I see no reason why it would be *mandatory*. We have Wikipedia, which has overwhelmed closed-data encyclopedias pretty much entirely; perhaps more telling, we have OpenStreetMap, which is overall inferior to Google Maps but still usable, and organisations looking to pay money in exchange for maps will in many cases do this by *paying surveyors to contribute to OpenStreetMap* rather than by paying Google.

I suspect next-gen artbots will get ordinary individuals' drawings of flowers from their backyards by *donation*, rather than by theft.

[grayestofghosts]

We are talking about entirely different populations of artists, and from here the economy of those artists looks quite different and is dependent a lot on style and internet presence -- not that I'm not sure they're trying to figure out a way to generate this with AI, but that's very different from what you get out of an art generator.

I do not flinch at saying "pay artists what they're worth" and I think the undervaluing of visual and all other art has to do with a corporate-cultural push to do so. It is very easy to see the value of art has gone down and continues to go down, for both easily-reproducible works of art and one-of-a-kind handmade works of art. The reason why you perceive a piece of art as a $10 object is because of rampant deflation of the value of art and that perception has occurred due to various ideological reasons that exist in our culture. It is same as the devaluation of "menial" labor or care work, it is rampantly devalued because the powers that be want it to be of low value.

But none of this is really talking about individuals who purchase commissions from others on Twitter or Tumblr. I'm talking about shirt-bot theft, other clothing companies stealing prints, etc. I've even seen an artist's work blown up and painted on a wall in a commercial center without their permission. Watch the LuLaRoe documentary and one of the artists there talks about how she was encouraged to take works online, change them slightly so they probably wouldn't get sued, and then output them as prints because of the absurd quantity requirements of the company, cheating both the original artist and the artist who was outputting huge quantities of art at constant crunch.

An artist supporting themselves solely through online commissions is a pipe dream unless they're maybe making smut, and the puritanicalism of the new web makes me think that has little danger of drying up anytime soon because of generators, anyway.

"Drove underground" is one way to say what happened to Napster, I suppose. Yes, people are still P2P sharing music. However I think what Napster did indirectly is more important here, in that it exposed a niche for legitimate copyright holders to fill and changed the structure of how most people consume music which eventually led to constant streaming rather than downloads.

This is from a comment I saw looking at a newspaper editorial online, of people deciding a very ugly image attached to it was probably generated by an AI (I do not remember the actual credit). It seemed like a misunderstanding of where images that populate these kinds of pages normally come from, and that very few are directly bought by the paper from individual artists. Most of them are stock, and to a paper, typing in a search to a stock archive vs. typing in a generation value to an AI that's hooked up to a stock archive will not be that different.

Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap are fundamentally different from individual pieces of art as educational/scientific utilitarian projects. While lots of people are posting their art online, seeing visual art created for CC is still uncommon, much, much less common than art just being grabbed. It would be interesting to see an art generator created with images that are no longer in copyright but it's hard to imagine those being of more than niche interest.

[brin_bellway]

I wrote a reply to this, but you know what? "Finding out about a psychological wound in your conversational partner and responding by shoving your fingers in it" is simply not acceptable behaviour, *especially* not when debating ethics but really ever.

Do not contact me again.