The feelings behind this potential revelation are being highly debated online: some feel shocked at the idea, others cheated with the belief it might cheapen the value of something they hold so dear.

Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic at the moment in the creative communities and the changes being made due to AI are not all good ones. AI bots like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Fotor — to name a few — are becoming more and more popular in social media circles, making people curious as to what this new technology can do, what limits it has. Many don’t even know the background behind the AI companies and how the bot is built in the first place. 

For example, websites like Midjourney are most commonly used to make images using word prompts from a user. The way this sort of bot is trained is by using images from the internet that are generated by the prompt words. This bot will then combine them together to create the image that the user wants. Not all of the images used are under the fair use section of the Copyright act 1988. As a result the owners of these images, who are not operating under fair use, are not getting proper credit for their work nor have any knowledge of this process happening in the first place. 

Some websites are already implementing a ban on Generative AI on their platforms. Pillowfort – a website alternative to Tumblr that is a popular and well established home for artists on the internet – has just put a ban on the posting of Generative AI on their website on grounds of avoiding copyright infringement. Pillowfort is a user-sustained site, their new policy makes clear, they want to protect users from having their art stolen and used to train these bots only for it to be reposted on the same website without any credit. 

Now, typically, not getting credit for someone else using your work would be labelled plagiarism or outright theft and the proper compensation (that being money or credit for the work) will be awarded. Nevertheless, the owners of these AI bots are getting away with using people’s work for the bot’s ‘training’ and omitting credit due to the proper owners. 

‘So how can the owners of the images not be credited, is that even legal?’ You may ask. Avijit Ghosh and Genoveva Fossas from Northeastern University put it best in their paper ‘Can There be Art Without an Artist?’ In which we are told that, “in the US, the use of published work to train AI is considered fair use, in the EU, the Directive of the Digital Single Market provides an exception for non-commercial entities to train models…”

In short, it becomes clear that there is no direct way for artists to protect their work across countries’ jurisdictions as different countries have different laws, leaving them woefully unprotected against the use of their work without consent. 

There is also the growing issue of AI’s tools being used instead of a human employee. For example, a company who needs a graphic designer for a poster promoting an upcoming product, they may find it cheaper to forgo paying extra for the work done by a contractor and instead opt for it to be made via AI. Admittedly the benefits to this are clear. The company shells out less towards additional costs in advertisement while still getting the job done well. Even though the benefits to this are obvious, it leaves less jobs for the real artists trained in this field who miss out on getting paid for the sake of cutting corners. 

Following on from this thought, it begs the question, is this the death of art? Is the easy access to AI cheapening the emotional value of art? It is my view that anything that inspires emotion or thought in us should be considered art, so my question to you, the readers, is the use of Artificial Intelligence lessening the value of art and artists to us as a society?

Moving forward into a world where AI is getting adapted to everyday life, it’s clear that there needs to be boundaries and laws put in place to help people like the artists of these works, to ensure that their effort is commemorated instead of abused. Essentially, there needs to be protocols in place to cover the blind spots created by new technology, much like Creative Commons, to ensure the safety of all parties involved. 

Stopping the advancement of AI is not the answer but creating room for it to grow alongside us very well may be.