Artists fight AI programs that copy their styles

An AI-generated image inspired by Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Earring at the Mauritshuis Museum in the Netherlands. PHOTO: AFP

SAN FRANCISCO – Artists outraged by artificial intelligence (AI) that copies in seconds the styles they have sacrificed years to develop are waging battle online and in court.

Fury erupted in the art community last year with the release of generative AI programs that can convincingly carry out commands such as drawing a dog like cartoonist Sarah Andersen would, or a nymph in the style of illustrator Karla Ortiz.

Such style-swiping AI works are cranked out without the original artist’s consent, credit or compensation – the three Cs at the heart of a fight to change all that.

In January, artists including Andersen and Ortiz filed a class-action lawsuit against DreamUp, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, three image-generating AI models programmed with art found online.

Andersen told AFP she felt “violated” when she saw an AI drawing that copied the style of her Fangs comic-book work.

She fired off an indignant reaction on Twitter. It went viral and other incensed artists reached out to her with stories of their own.

Backers of the suit hope to establish legal precedent governing generative AI models that copy artists’ styles.

Artists want AI creators to be required to secure permission for works used in training software, with an option to remove it.

They also want suitable compensation. “There is room for a conversation about what that would look like,” said Ortiz.

Compensation could take the form of a licensing model, she suggested, and would need to be appropriate.

It would be wrong for artists to “get a couple of cents while the company gets millions” of dollars, added Ortiz, whose resume includes working for Marvel Studios.

Cheap and easy

On social networks, artists are sharing tales of jobs being lost to generative AI.

The suit notes that a video-game designer named Jason Allen last year won a Colorado State Fair competition with art created using Midjourney.

“Art is dead, dude. It’s over. AI won. Humans lost,” Allen was quoted as telling The New York Times.

The Mauritshuis Museum in the Netherlands sparked controversy by displaying an AI-generated image inspired by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s 1665 work Girl With A Pearl Earring.

The San Francisco Ballet, meanwhile, caused a stir by using Midjourney to generate illustrations used in promotional material for performances of The Nutcracker performances in December.

Andersen said: “It’s sort of a natural consequence of something being easy and cheap and accessible. Of course, they are going to use that option, even if it is unethical.”

AI companies named in the lawsuit did not respond to requests for comment.

Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque has portrayed generative software as a tool for “mundane image output” that can provide new ways “of ideating for artists”, which will enable more people to become artists.

Critics disagree. When a person prompts software to draw in the style of a master, they say, it does not make that person an artist.

Mr Mostaque has said that if people choose to use generative AI unethically or to break the law, “that’s their problem”.

Death of creativity?

Companies defending themselves from artists’ copyright claims are likely to claim “fair use”, an exception sometimes allowed when a new spin is put on a creation or when it is only briefly excerpted.

“The magic word used in the US court system is ‘transformative’,“ said lawyer and developer Matthew Butterick. “Is this a new use of the copyrighted work or does it replace the original in the marketplace?“

Meanwhile, artists are turning not just to the courts, but also to technology to defend themselves against generative AI.

A team at the University of Chicago has launched software, called Glaze, to help protect original works.

The program adds a layer of data over images that, while invisible to the human eye, “acts as a decoy” for AI, said Mr Shawn Shan, the doctoral student in charge of the project.

The onus is still on artists to adopt Glaze.

Mr Butterick predicts a “cat-and-mouse game” as AI makers figure out ways around such defences.

He also worries about the effect of AI on the human spirit. “When science fiction imagines the AI apocalypse, it’s something like robots coming over the hill with laser guns.

“I think the way AI defeats humanity is more where people just give up and don’t want to create new things, and (it) sucks the life out of humanity.” AFP

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