The movements visibility has led to heated controversy within the artistic community, some claiming it has created a black hole , in ethics and copyright, given the fact that AIs are trained on databases of actual art, namely, the hand-drawn, the hand painted & the digitally created works produced by humans. It is been interesting to the casual user, and fun for tech enthusiasts, I admit, I mess with Midjourney & DD, it’s fun and the results are amazing. But it has created an ethical and copyright black hole, with everyone from artists to lawyers to engineers having very strong opinions about what it all means, both for their jobs, and the very essence of art itself. This is not idle speculation; debates over algorithmic art infringement has become hotly debated within the art community. Given my interest here, I spoke to several professional artists for this article, all working in video games, movies, and TV, many were concerned for the future of art jobs in the entertainment industry.
Whether AI art is the occasional prank made for Twitter, or paintings that appear as though they were made by real humans, the power of artificial intelligence to make art has burst onto the scene over the past couple months, and while it is been big news for the tech posters and enthusiasts, it has also raised a number of major questions and concerns. AI has even been used to help artists looking to imagine new artworks in the style of well-known artists from years past. There are a number of tools that artists can utilize to allow them to produce AI art. AI-generated art is already being used in the commercial realm. Websites such as The Atlantic (to name 1 of thousands) have already been noted using AI-generated art above articles, a space typically reserved for photographs (shot by humans and paid for) or art (created by humans and paid for).
The Swedish artist Simon Stalenhags style was recently used to generate images in a text-to-image Midjourney AI image by scholar Andres Guadamuz, an apparent effort to highlight legal issues surrounding AI-generated art. The result.. it’s a “Copyright Nightmare”. But it’s here & spreading like a wild fire. I guess AI is going to be a different way of creating. However in my humble opinion Intellectual Property is going to be worthless to smaller authors, since you wont be able to do advertising on art work made with artificial intelligence, saying “human authorship is the pre-requisite to protect the copyright”.
In my opinion there are too many copyright issues involved, which makes me wonder whether it is actually any good for the art being used. Simply put, like we see all too often with technologies advancing faster than the laws can keep up, there is not a clear, binding position to take on copyright issues that are central to machines crunching up human art and then spewing artificial interpretations of what it has learned. To be fair, this is much more interesting than going with conventional two-dimensional concept art. While we may disagree on every facet of artificial intelligence being integrated into our everyday lives we are perfectly well within our rights to voice concerns over the potential negative impacts. The human-ness of art is what makes it wonderful, and increased access to new technologies does not necessarily imply absolute obsolescence of man made Art. However from a Copyright standpoint it does create quite the cluster fuck.

Featured Image generated via text command prompts in MidJourney AI

The above article is by Danny Gordon and does not claim to reflect the opinions of all NWDA artists