It’s August 2022, and by now you’ve no doubt read (or more likely seen) something about AI art by now. Whether it’s random jokes made for Twitter or paintings that look like they were made by actual human beings, artificial intelligence’s ability to create art has exploded onto the scene over the last few months, and while this has been great news for shitposts and fans of tech, it has also raised a number of important questions and concerns.
Read or seen anything about the subject, AI art — or at least as it exists in the state we know it today — is, as Ahmed Elgammal writing in American Scientist so neatly puts it, made when “artists write algorithms not to follow a set of rules, but to ‘learn’ a specific aesthetic by analysing thousands of images. The algorithm then tries to generate new images in adherence to the aesthetics it has learned.”
From a user’s perspective, this is most often done by entering a text prompt, so you can type something like “wizard standing on a hillside under a rainbow”, and an AI will attempt to give you a fairly decent approximation of that in image form. You could also type “Spongebob grieving for Batman’s parents” and you’ll get something just as close to what you’re thinking.
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Basically, we now live in a world where machines have been fed millions upon millions of pieces of human endeavour, and are now using it to create their own works. This has been fun for casual users and interesting for tech enthusiasts, sure, but it has also created an ethical and copyright black hole, where everyone from artists to lawyers to engineers has very strong opinions on what this all means, for their jobs and for the nature of art itself.
I’ve spoken with a number of professional artists for this piece, all of them working in video games, films and television, and many are concerned for the future of art jobs in the entertainment business. “Artists skills were already undervalued before this technology; I fear this will compound that even more”, Jeanette (not their actual name), a concept artist who has worked at several major AAA publishers, tells me.
Bruce (again, not their real name), an artist who has worked on a bunch of award-winning indie hits, says “The endgame of a potential employer is not to make my job easier, it’s to replace me, or to reduce all my years spent honing my craft into a boring-arse machine learning pilot, where I’m trained to vaguely direct an equivalent software in hundreds of different directions until by chance it spits out an asset we could feasibly use in a game”.
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“I don’t think this tech will hurt any established, ‘big deal’ concept artists and illustrators as much as the low level ones”, says RJ Palmer, who has worked for Ubisoft and also on the film
. “I could easily envision a scenario where using AI a single artist or art director could take the place of 5-10 entry level artists. The tech is fairly basic (but still impressive) right now but it’s advancing so fast. The unfortunate reality of this industry is that speed is favoured over quality so often that a cleaned up, ‘good enough’ AI-generated image could suffice for a lot of needs.”
“I have seen a lot of self-published authors and such say how great it will be that they don’t have to hire an artist”, Palmer says. “Doing that kind of work for small creators is how a lot of us got our start as professional artists. So as an artist seeing this attitude grow gives me concern for the next generation of artists being able to find consistent entry level work.”
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The worries over young, upcoming and part-time artists is one shared by Karla Ortiz, who has worked for Ubisoft, Marvel and HBO. “The technology is not quite there yet in terms of a finalised product”, she tells
. “No matter how good it looks initially, it still requires professionals to fix the errors the AI generates. It also seems to be legally murky territory, enough to scare many major companies.”
“However, it does yield results that will be ‘good enough’ for some, especially those less careful companies who offer lower wages for creative work. Because the end result is ‘good enough’, I think we could see a lot of loss of entry level and less visible jobs. This would affect not just illustrators, but photographers, graphic designers, models, or pretty much any job that requires visuals. That could all potentially be outsourced to AI.”
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Travis Wright, a veteran entertainment industry artist, tells me “There’ll always be a need for someone who can give an art director exactly what they want, particularly character design, but with how quickly these algorithms have improved in just six months, it’s scary and I can totally see indie horror games, card games and Tabletop Role-Playing Games are going to benefit from using AI over paying an artist.”
Jon Juárez, an artist who has worked with Square Enix and Microsoft, agrees that some companies and clients will only be too happy to make use of AI art. “Many authors see this as a great advantage, because this harvesting process offers the possibility of manipulating falsely copyright-free solutions immediately, otherwise they would take days to arrive at the same place, or simply would never arrive”, he says . “If a large company sees an image or an idea that can be useful to them, they just have to enter it into the system and obtain mimetic results in seconds, they will not need to pay the artist for that image. These platforms are washing machines of intellectual property.”
Movie, but Disney will be able to use your work for their movie. If AI ends up being an Aleph of narratives, the Aleph is going to be privatised and shielded by patents.”
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Which brings us to our next point of contention. Calling them a “washing machine of intellectual property” is definitely one way of putting the legal concerns surrounding these art generators. Simply put, as we often see with technology that has advanced faster than the law can keep up, there is no definitive, binding stance on the copyright issues at the heart of machines chewing up human art then spitting out artificial compilations of what they’ve learned.
In February, the US Copyright Office “refused to grant a copyright” for a piece of art made by AI, saying that “human authorship is a prerequisite to copyright protection”. That case is now being appealed to a federal court, however, because the AI’s creator thinks that, having programmed the machine, he should be able to claim copyright over the works it produces. Even when a decision is ultimately reached in this case, it will take a lot more time and cases for a firmer legal consensus to form around the subject.
But what is that work the AI’s creator is claiming, if not simply a casserole made from art created by actual human artists, who are not being paid or even credited for their contributions? Juárez says one of the major platforms “has used one of my images, subject to copyright, without my consent. It’s already inside the system, the program can use it to mimic my style and the damage is irreparable”.
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“In many of the results there have been traces of watermarks and signatures, these programs are explicitly designed with the function of removing such marks that can circumvent intellectual property”, Juárez adds. He’s referencing examples of AI-generated artworks appearing to have signatures in their corners, suggesting that while drawing from pieces they have been fed they’ve simply copied the signature — albeit imperfectly — as well.
Not everyone I spoke with is as downbeat on the copyright implications of these machines, however. Frank (not their real name), an artist who has worked on several blockbuster AAA console titles, tells me “People steal our art all the time. I don’t know how many client meetings I’ve been in where they show me some artists I knows work and say ‘Make it like that’”.
“It’s the highly unfortunate result of doing what we do. When you do it on a high level, people try to find ways to rip it off and duplicate it. AI is just another way that’s going to inevitably happen. I do question the ethics of it for sure, but currently it does a piss poor job of actually pulling off what I do, and shit if it does figure it out that’s going to save me so much time [laughs]. Go ahead AI, learn how to paint like me really well so I can just adjust it a bit and turn that in and then go take a nap because the world stinks and every day is hell.”
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The image sets these AI are trained on need to be public facing and opt in only. The onus needs to be on the AI devs to ethically source the images they train them with, not on the artists to keep
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