“My work was copied by AI more than Picasso’s.”
AI (artificial intelligence) is changing life as we know it, but for digital artist Greg Rutkowski it’s causing big problems.
He said his name had been used more than 400,000 times as a prompt in AI tools that generate art since September 2022, but without his consent.
Prompts are the commands sent to the artificial intelligence system so that it generates the desired response.
When he checked it, it says that his name had been used as a prompt more times than the names of artists Pablo Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci.
Born in Poland, Greg has had his works used in games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, but he is concerned that his newfound popularity in the world of artificial intelligence will affect future work.
Sites like Midjourney, Dall.E, NightCafe and Stable Diffusion are known as generative artificial intelligence platforms. They are able to create artificially generated works of art in seconds from the prompts users type.
Tools have learned to do this by collecting billions of images from the internet. Artists are complaining that this is done without their consent.
“In the very first month I found out, I realized that it would clearly affect my career, and I wouldn’t be able to recognize and find my own work on the internet,” says Greg.
“The results will be associated with my name, but it won’t be my image. It won’t be created by me. So it will confuse people who are discovering my work.”
“Everything we’ve worked on for so many years has been taken away from us very easily by artificial intelligence,” he added.
“It’s pretty hard to say if this is going to change the whole industry to the point where human artists become obsolete. I think my work and future is under a big question mark.”
‘Real art has personality’
While the problems are clear, there are some ways AI tools can be used to benefit artists, according to animator Harry Hambley, who is the creative force behind the Internet sensation Ketnipz.
“I think for me the main thing generative art can solve is boredom,” he says. “But it can be scary, and the internet is already a wild place, and you mix AI with that… will, give.”
“Do I think my job is going to be sacrificed to AI or that AI is going to do better than me? I don’t know. I hope not.”
Harry believes that there is more to art than its appearance.
“At the end of the day, I think there’s a bigger reason why people got involved with Ketnipz, and I don’t think it’s just the mere aesthetic of it.”
“I think there’s a personality behind it that I don’t think someone imitating can really explore.”
‘Just keep making art’
Artist James Lewis posts videos of his painting technique to over 7 million followers on TikTok and Instagram.
He has yet to find out if his work was used by the tools, but he said that because artificial intelligence has learned from billions of artworks, it would be difficult to track which artist’s work was used in which image.
“If there was a way to go back and find out who inspired this style of image that was generated, I think it would only be fair for that artist to receive some sort of compensation,” he says.
In the meantime, he believes artists should continue to be creative.
“I am hopeful that no matter how much the art of AI develops and improves, it will never be able to capture the true human essence, the true creativity that we have as people”, he evaluates.
“You’re still going to need your own creative ideas, your own initiative.”
For artist and human rights researcher Caroline Sinders, it’s up to AI companies to solve the problem.
“Part of the argument we hear from companies is, ‘We have so much data, it would be impossible for us to tell, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’
“I’d like to say, Alright, this is ‘your’ problem, not ‘mine’ problem,” she adds. “I own copyright to the images and intend to exercise my copyright if my images are used without my consent.”
She stated that she was also concerned about the bias these tools created – and how that meant the AI art wasn’t reflecting the real world.
“Say we ask an AI imaging system to generate a doctor serving a family,” she says.
“The doctor is most likely to be fathered male and likely white, and the parent is likely to be fathered female.”
“And this is not an example that I’m randomly making up. Tests have been done with this kind of generic question without the gender being in the prompt, and quite often it’s reflecting those stereotypes.”
This extends to racial prejudice as well as ableism, says Irene Fubara-Manuel, who teaches at the University of Sussex in the UK.
Although he is enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by generative art, in his opinion, issues such as racial and gender biases in some created images are difficult to overcome.
“I was trying to dye my hair in the summer, and I was just looking for ‘people of color, blonde hair,'” he recalls.
“What I got in response was this fetishized image of black people. You know how? With the chiseled jaw lines, with the glowing skin.”
“There are black people who are that beautiful, but the images that you see commonly in a lot of AI are very, very fetishized representations of people. You wouldn’t see ‘plus-size’ people or people with visible disabilities, for example,” he adds.
Artists are now calling on regulators in the UK and around the world to take more steps to protect artists and the industry.
Irene explains that artists are not against artificial intelligence – “the argument is against exploitation”.
“However, I am hopeful that it will contribute to human creativity in general, just as the creation of computers has contributed to creativity. I am excited about its contribution”, he points out.
Caroline argues, in turn, that more regulation for the emerging AI industry in the UK would not “stifle” innovation.
“It makes things safer, which is why we have certain laws,” she says.
“That’s why we now have seatbelts and airbags in cars, and lots of rules around that. When they were invented, we didn’t have any of those. So it’s nothing else to ask for, or create, safeguards and protections.”
Additional reporting by Lola Mayor.
This text was published here.
