The Dark Side of AI Art: 4 Potential Issues With the Growing Trend
Reading Time: 4 minutesGenerating AI reimaginings of yourself is fun, but is it ethical? Let’s discuss the dark side of AI art.
AI art generators seem like a lot of fun at first glance. Who wouldn’t want to input a few selfies and then see reimaginings of themselves as royalty, a Viking, or Victorian aristocrat?
But once you look past the surface, you’ll see it’s not all fun and games. Who’s behind the art the AI generator produces? Who owns the rights to it? Let’s take a deeper look into the dark side of AI art.
A Trend Is Born
Trends come and go quickly online, and one that stuck around and stirred the pot was AI-generated art. The concept seemed simple enough. You feed an AI generator images of yourself, and it crafts artful reimaginings of your likeness.
Social media was flooded with people participating in the trend. TikTok was ablaze, Instagram and Twitter, too. There were even dedicated YouTube videos trying out these services. But given that most AI art generators ask for payment and require you to feed it several images of yourself, did you consider copyright?
Are the ones behind the AI generator entitled to use the images the generator itself creates? What about the photos you fed to it? Do you relinquish your rights to these images when you agree to use the service?
Let’s discuss the potential issues with the AI art trend.
1. The Fine Print
It’s a commonly recognized joke that people don’t read terms and conditions but simply agree to them in haste. Well, when it comes to AI art generators, you really should take the time to read them.
Prisma Labs is among the most used AI art generators. It costs you $7.99 monthly or $29.99 yearly to use its premium features, and the terms and conditions are rather frightening.
In a nutshell, Prisma states that its users ‘retain all rights in and to your user content,’ which is a relief. But it also continues to declare that it has a ‘perpetual, revocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, transferable, sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, create derivative works’ with your images.
Don’t skip reading terms and conditions when dealing with AI art generators. Know what you’re giving up to receive an amusing image in return; your biometric data.
2. Copyright
Copyright is a huge issue when it comes to AI-generated art. To make it clear right off the bat, in the US, there are no copyright protections for works created by a machine; copyrightable works require human authorship.
That isn’t stopping people from trying to copyright AI-generated art. It also makes you wonder who deserves the copyright in the first place.
Is the person or entity who created the AI generator the one to hold the copyright to its creations? Is it the person who fed it their images and carefully selected the ‘right’ compositions from it? Or is it the one whose images have been fed to the algorithm behind the AI generator, whose work has been used to teach the AI how to create art in the first place?
That’s more than one person.
Copyright concerning AI-generated art is a highly debated topic, and it will likely continue to be one for years to come.
3. Is It Theft? The Ethicality of AI Art
It’s easy to use AI to create images of anything you can imagine, but AI generators cannot simply pull art out of thin air. Ready-made art or a text command gets fed into the generator, which it then uses to figure out what art is and how to make it. The bottom line is that these generators use other people’s art to learn how to make art.
It would be one thing if the people behind AI art generators sought out willing participants who consent to their art getting used to improve machine learning. But that’s not what happens. The AI generators pull art from everywhere on the internet that it’s freely available to view. But freely available to view is not the same as freely available to use.
Pinterest, Instagram, DeviantArt, and many other platforms host art shared by authors so people can get inspired and awed. Whether it’s a hobby or business is irrelevant—it’s their art and they did not consent to their work being used to teach a machine how to copy their styles. This is why many don’t consider AI art real art.
AI art can be fun and creative, but you can’t trace back how the AI generator came up with the design it crafted for you. Maybe it’s an amalgamation of millions of works by a ton of different artists. Or maybe it’s a spin-off of an artist’s work that was used as inspiration for what the generator created.
Morality often tends to get disregarded in favor of legality. At the time of writing, there are no laws prohibiting artists’ work from getting fed to AI generators. And until the courts make a decision, AI art versus artists will continue to exist as a debate online.
4. Bias and Harmful Stereotypes
The more art that AI generators come across and learn from, the better they become. But the content these generators learn from is made by humans, and humans are hardly infallible.
Usually, AI generators are programmed to filter out negative representations, like art that perpetuates harmful ethnic and gender stereotypes. However, despite the best efforts of the people behind the AI generators, you cannot possibly filter out everything. So, inevitably, you can end up with AI-generated art that’s offensive and harmful.
Don’t Overlook the Problems Because of the Fun Images
Of course, it’s fun to see a rendition of yourself as if Van Gogh painted you or as a superhero drawn in the style of the Batman comics. No one denies the fun aspect of AI-generated art.
But AI art bringing a smile to your face shouldn’t override all the negatives that artists who’ve had their works unknowingly ‘sampled’ by AI generators experience. AI art has a dark side, and we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.
Reference: https://www.makeuseof.com/dark-side-of-ai-art-potential-issues/
Ref: makeuseof
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