AI art pushes legal, artistic boundaries
AI art pushes legal, artistic boundaries
After the sudden popularity of AI art, artists are becoming increasingly concerned about the issues stemming from generative AI models and the companies behind them.
AI uses a neural network, a computer system that finds big repeating patterns in information given to it in text prompts, it scours the internet to scrape art from wherever it can find that aligns with what it was tasked.
Artists have been expressing their genuine concern. Many AI models train off of works made by human artists without their permission, to the point there’s even been instances of jumbled up watermarks in images generated by AI.
Artists who have had their art been consistently stolen from by AI are now told they’re using AI themselves, with some disregarding the proof provided that they made it. “Not only is this blatant plagiarism,” said a sophomore and artist in Maryland, “the common rendering style that AI uses is a style stolen by genuine artists which causes people with that art style to be accused of creating ai art.”
AI generated art lacks the humanity and creative expression seen in human artwork required to copyright it. In order to copyright something that was originally generated by AI, it’ll have to be reproduced by a human and have enough elements changed from the original generated image to be considered human-made.
In 2023, artist Kelly McKernan discovered she was having her paintings stolen and used by AI company Midjourney. A lawsuit was then filed against Midjourney and other AI companies by McKernan and two other artists — Sarah Andersen and Karla Ortiz — though the lawsuit was dismissed as neither McKernan nor Ortiz registered their artworks for copyright beforehand.
Artists have been taking preventative measures against their art being stolen by AI companies. Because AI models can’t “see” the artwork as a whole, some artists use an art poison on their work before posting it. For instance, Nightshade poisons the data present in the artwork and makes it unreadable to AI, causing it to create random images, while human artists can view it normally.
Not everyone using AI has the purest intentions. People using AI with malicious intent can generate images or even videos of a person doing whatever they want, just by typing a prompt into a generator. And while there were precautions that were set against this, President Trump has been rushing to remove the protections that ensure AI usage is safe across the US. Anyone who has bad intentions with access to an AI image generator could feed any images they find into a model.
“Will artists be able to grow culture through creativity?” said art teacher Maria Galati. “Or will AI art just be constantly recreating what has come before?”