With generative AI tools creating artwork with just text prompts, the legal and ethical question remains- who owns the copyright to AI-generated art?
In some cases, if an individual or a company directly creates or controls the AI program that generates the art, they might claim copyright ownership. In other cases, the legal framework might consider the AI as the "creator," which could mean that the copyright is not owned by any human entity.
Under current U.S. copyright law, AI-generated artwork cannot be protected by a potential copyright owner. What does that mean for collaborations between humans and an AI-generated piece? Some of the most recent court decisions relating to collaborative work are a good place to look for an answer.
Getty Images is suing Stability in both the USA and the UK for allegedly using millions of pictures from Getty’s library to train Stable Diffusion. In the USA, Getty is reportedly claiming damages of $2 trillion!
One of my friends had this opinion-
" Realism lost much of its meaning and charm when cameras came. Avant-garde art was all about abstracting out the real. Then came digital cameras, and film development became a lost art. Almost everybody became an expert photographer. Now with AI, everybody is an expert artist. One way to look at it is technology democratizes art creation by reducing the need for skill, effort, cost, and training."
Is that democratization of art creation something to be feared? Or should we encourage AI-generated art as inspiration? Or even consider it a mere tool like a brush, pencil, or charcoal.
For example, I created these images using text prompts:
Inspiration for a jazz piano-themed cake design
Inspiration for a fairy garden
Inspiration for Madhubani Durga- which will serve as a starting point for something I want to create on canvas using acrylic colors
Honestly, I don’t think AI can ever replace true artists. At least, not shortly. For example, look at the proportion of the hand 🤚 in the last image; it is so off.
Even the AI-prompted write-ups don’t make sense without intensive human editing and can be extremely long-winded and repetitive. It will take years of training to reach professional-grade products. I may prompt the AI to generate ideas, but the final product still needs an artist to give it a cohesive look. This is like using Adobe Stock Photos to create banner elements. You still need a tagline that makes sense and is right for a conference's audience. And everything needs to be symphonic. Or else it will just be colorful clutter.
AI is still very nascent. It is making the jobs of graphic designers easier. For example, AI can make the menial time-consuming imagery in the background, while human artists can focus more on the objects in the foreground that are key to the illustration. This is precisely the outcome that major technology companies envisioned AI to achieve: alleviating the creative load that, from a relative standpoint, a creator might perceive as lacking true creativity.
And I say this as the director of some very talented graphic designers - AI can't replace my team of humans. Also, we will always need human minds for the correct prompt engineering. Future generations of AI systems will get more intuitive and adept at understanding natural language, reducing the need for meticulously engineered prompts. Still, someone will need to understand the problem in the real world and convey it to the AI to generate solutions. Also, it will always be humans who will eventually pick the variations based on the relevance/ context.
Who is an artist?
If you ask me, an artist is a person who creates visual, auditory, or performance-based works to express their creativity, emotions, and ideas. Artists work in various mediums, such as painting, sculpture, music, literature, dance, etc. Their creations often provoke thought, emotion, or appreciation from audiences.
In that regard, AI is creating art. And the "art" I create using text prompts encourages me to use my brush and canvas more. Of course, it is easy to say that because I am not generating any income by using AI art. for illustrations on my blog or social media or blatantly copying any copyrighted material to generate my images. What happens when there is more than a passing similarity between a pre-existing piece of work and AI-generated art? What happens to companies like Getty Images when tools like Stable Diffusion use their copyrighted images to train their AI?
In the US, “fair use” may be relevant to the Stability case, but this is less applicable in the UK. In the UK, the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 is unusual in tackling this issue as “computer-generated works”. It defines the owner (or author) as the person who makes the “arrangements necessary for the creation of the work”, but this will not always be so easy to determine, and it may be difficult to pick out where, and which, human has “made arrangements”.
However, who among us, who likes to dabble in art, has not tried to copy the great masters before we developed our own style? How was our training any different from what the AI is learning to do? The more we expose ourselves to art, the more we learn to appreciate it. Nurture it. Cherish it.
To keep art alive, you must expose yourself to more art. Both human and AI-generated. And expand your imagination beyond what you think is possible.
