Algorithms Capable of Imitating Signature Styles Have Artists Fuming
The concept of artificial intelligence taking over has been discussed in loads of science fiction stories over the years. In most cases, however, the ideas in those stories seemed pretty farfetched and very few thought they would become a reality. As time has passed, however, there have been technological advances that make people wonder if the science fiction stories they read were pieces of fiction or if they were foretelling the future.
Artificial intelligence has advanced a fair bit over the years and it has been quite handy for people in most cases. As effective as A.I has been recent, it has done a few things to upset certain people, which includes artists. For instance, Simon Stalenhag is a renowned artist from Sweden who is famous for his haunting paintings that combine natural landscapes with mysterious industrial alien creatures, industrial machines and giant robots.
Recently, the artist encountered a haunting dystopian dread in real life when he learned that some people were using A.I to replicate his style. The imitation act was performed by an individual named Andres Guadamuz. Andres was a student at the UK's prestigious University of Sussex where he studied legal issues regarding art generated by artificial intelligence. He created images that resembled Stalengag’s style with the help of a service known as Mid journey and uploaded them on Twitter.
Guadamuz stated that he made the images in order to highlight the various ethical and legal questions regarding algorithms generating art and mimicking various artists’ styles. Besides Mid journey, there are plenty of other artificial intelligence programs available that can churn out art, simply in response to different text prompts. These programs make use of machine learning algorithms capable of digesting millions, if not billions of labeled images from public data sets or the web.
Once these algorithms absorb the data, they can create almost any type of scene and object combination with ease. What’s more, they can mimic, recreate or replicate the style of a wide range of artists with incredible accuracy.
Guadamuz stated that he specifically selected Stalenhag for the experiment as he had been critical of art generated by AI for many years. However, the University of Sussex student did not intend to provoke a response from the artist. After the incident, Guadamuz made a blog post where he argued that there is a very low likelihood of copyright infringement lawsuits against AI-generated art succeeding. This is mainly because while copyright protects pieces of art, it does not protect artistic styles.
As you would expect, this was quite frustrating for Stalenhag, who stated that while taking inspiration from the work of other artists is common in artistic culture, AI-generated art that replicates the style of other artists is something else entirely. This is because it takes the heart, soul and essence of the style and merely mish-mashes things together.
Guadamuz made a public apology to Stalenhag, stating that he erased the images he tweeted earlier. He further stated that he received loads of angry messages and death threats from people who didn’t approve of the stunt. According to Guadamuz, his intention was never to incite an angry reaction from the artist or mobs on Twitter. Instead, he only wanted to conduct an experiment that makes people think about AI's potential and whether certain aspects of it should be controlled or restricted.
Stalenhag accepted Guadamuz’s apology and said that while he objected to the way the Twitter stunt was pulled he doesn’t really think that AI images copying his work are plagiarized. Instead, he believes that tools can be used for exploring new ideas rather than enriching tech companies that are already powerful, to begin with.
Artificial intelligence’s ability to take a lifetime’s worth of work and churn out something similar to it without the creator’s consent doesn’t set well with many creative individuals and they haven’t shied away from expressing their displeasure online recently.
While the use of algorithms for generating art has been around for decades, a brand new era of AI-generated art started in 2021. This is when OpenAI and Artificial Intelligence Development Company announced a program called DALL-E. This program used machine learning improvements made in the last few years to generate images by only using a string of text.
In 2022, DALL-E 2 was announced and this program is capable of generating paintings, illustrations and photos that look like human artists produced them. OpenAI made DALL-E available for public use recently, stating that people could use the images generated by the program for commercial purposes. This program restricts what people can do with it, using certain tools and keyword filters able to spot certain imagery that could be considered offensive.
With more people getting access to AI programs that can generate art, more artists have started to question their capability and legality of mimicking the hard work and style of human creators. An artist who goes by the name of RJ Palmer, the person behind the concept art of the Detective Pikachu movie stated that he tried DALL-E 2 simply out of curiosity.
When using the program, he was quite nervous and had reservations about what AI tools could mean for this line of work. David O Reilly is another digital artist who has voiced his critical opinions regarding DALL-E and other AI image generators, stating that tools like these steal the past work of hard-working artists for money just feels wrong.
Jonathan Low, who is the CEO of a stock image company from Denmark called Jumpstory, said that he didn’t understand how images generated by artificial intelligence could be used commercially. Hannah Wong, Open AIs spokesperson responded to this by saying that the image-making service of the company was utilized by numerous artists. The company also asked the artists to provide feedback when the tool was being developed.
She further mentioned that the copyright law underwent a few changes in the recent past to ensure the work of artists remains protected. While Guadamuz thinks that suing someone for their use of artificial intelligence to mimic their work can be quite challenging, there will still be loads of lawsuits. This is because infringing a brand’s logo, animations and other trademarks doesn’t go unnoticed and warrants legal action. Other experts are unsure what the legal repercussions of AI-generated art would be. Artists could claim that they didn’t give permission for training an algorithm on their art, but whether their case would be strong or not is an entirely different question.
