There are debates raging all over the internet about AI artwork. And with good reason. It’s unarguably contentious. Not in and of itself perhaps but the ethos and the process whereby the imagery is created, source material and how it gets promoted.
AI does indeed produce “art”. That’s not the point for me and it goes way beyond consent.
Points have been made about the AI intent and that is a rabbit hole in and of itself if one considers the potentiality of self awareness.
The difference between a human artist using reference sources, photos, extant artworks etc in their own interpretive creations and the bots creating an AI image, is that in the former instance, the artist is still doing the “work”.
The artist is conceptualising, blocking it out, and ultimately producing the artwork and in most cases, providing an ingenious narrative as to how the end product came about whereas AI produced imagery is the product of a few keystrokes by someone (who admittedly had a graphical idea but who has no control over the direction this will take) and then the bots take over and do the rest. The typist then decides which image they like best and in many cases will try and pass this off as something else.
Now I have no issue with any of this and it’s not about copyright for me either (although anyone who produced an original work of imagery in some way, should be compensated for their creations or at least permission should be gained by the keystrokist to have that work used in the creation of the AI imagery). In other words, the imagery in the datasets should be there by permission. But I know that’s an unrealistic expectation as it’s never going to happen, in the same way that so much other imagery is poached without permission these days - it’s just the way it is. But that doesn’t make it right. Not by any stretch.
The most insidious thing of all in the AI art world isn’t so much the amazing imagery that’s being created - it’s the attempt to hoodwink others into thinking some human actually did the hard yards or that the photo realistic image is something that exists in nature.
There should be a disclaimer associated with any AI art that is displayed publicly at the very least proclaiming first of all that it is an AI generated image and also what source references and artists were used in the creation of the image. The keystroke prompts are the only things that truly belong to the purveyor of the piece.
But this is only my opinion, of course.
PS - I poached the AI graphic that accompanies this piece. In no way would I ever try and pass it off as a real bird or photograph or indeed as my own work but it is a freely available image taken from the internet from this website (Pixabay) and thus was used with permission and no artist’s children were deprived of food or shelter in the process….