Creation Without Emotion: the Controversies of AI Art
AI-generated images has exploded on the internet, from TikTok to art platforms. Despite their popularity, the ethical and legal implications of their use have already caused controversies across the internet.
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If you’ve been online recently, it’s hard to miss the plethora of AI-made content that seems to be on the rise nowadays. In particular, AI art generators have become a futuristic new trend both in the creative and social online spheres. However, despite its seemingly innocent appearance, it has also sparked controversy and raised ethical concerns around its infringement on the creative industry and data protection of images, which are widely shared by creators, artists, and the general public.
Throughout the years, AI art has evolved from its need for miles of complicated codes into an easy text-to-image model that simply requires typing keywords to generate an art piece. Hence why it is now easier and more freely available to use online. The conversion of words into visualised images has clearly sparked a lot of interest in the public, with celebrities and ordinary people alike joining in on the trend of uploading their selfies to the AI art generator and seeing the “masterpiece” created by these computers.
However, as with most things on the internet, it has also been criticised and opposed by numerous groups, especially by digital artists. In one such controversy, at the last Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition, Jason M. Allen created “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” with Midjourney, an AI art generator from text prompts, which won first place in the digital category. Many artists argued that this particular example, and the generation of AI art overall, neglects the efforts of ‘real’ artists who craft their own digital pieces.
One of the largest online art communities, ArtStation, has had users protesting the use of AI because of its use of real artists’ work to train the AI’s themselves. The artists receive no credit or compensation for their work being used to train the very machine they must now compete against. They also disagree with AI art as a concept in general and believe that AI art takes away any emotions and feelings from the work, contradicting the very value of art itself. The movement quickly spread across the entire platform, with thousands of images with ‘No to AI Images’ dominating the platform’s trending page. Three artists are even taking the stand for “the rights of millions of artists” and suing several AI art generator companies for using billions of images from the internet to train their AI’s without the consent or compensation for the original image creators.
Some copyrighted resources are also used as elements to generate AI images. Recently, Getty Images, a supplier of stock images, discovered that their property rights images had been used for the text-to-image model Stability AI. Getty Images has now issued a legal statement stating they will also be suing the AI art company for copyright infringement.
Moreover, AI art brings to light the issue of data protection for personal images uploaded by users themselves. Tiktok has flooded its feed with posts featuring anime faces generated by its AI filter, which turns users’ selfies into digital avatars. Users have even shot their nudes with the AI filter to generate painted landscape pictures. This is a concerning new trend because it is likely that TikTok stores these users’ pictures on their database and owns the rights over those images. TikTok has already been under scrutiny for its data protection policy and users’ privacy may be jeopardised as data is collected and transferred to third parties.
It’s impossible to argue that these advances in technology don’t bring convenience and entertainment to our lives, but they are not without their own ethical issues. Some artists may see AI art as an opportunity to expand artistic opportunities, with the concept of what it means to ‘make art’ always stretching in definition. Nevertheless, these opportunities have to be shaped in a way in which agency and intention are not pushed away. Although it may seem like a harmless use of these technologies, we would be wise to proceed with caution as we continue in our ever-advancing world.