Part 5: Using other people's art

How I attribute credit

Be generous with your attributions! Don't be afraid to say where you got your inspiration from and give credit to those who helped you or whose work influenced you along the way. It's good to be open about where your inspiration came from, because this allows other people to explore the source material and discover new things for themselves.

This also contributes to the integrity of the craft, as it will hopefully discourage people from claiming credit for other people's work. As we have seen, there's an interesting conversation happening today about when AI art can be considered plagiarism, and it's something we should all be aware of if we want to develop a strong community of artists built on trust around this new medium. Depending on where you got your inspiration, it may also be a valuable opportunity for other budding researchers to gain recognition for their experiments and become known by their peers.

Personally, this is how I attribute my pieces:

If my piece is clearly derived from someone else's work, and I created it based on seeing a snapshot of what they did, I consider it to be "based on" or "inspired by" the original work. If it was made by studying someone else's code or their description for an original work, I'll attribute it as a "study of an artwork by + the original artist's name". If I modified it significantly (e.g., added new features, changed the design), I might attribute it as "partially based on a piece by" or "partially inspired by a piece by." I also try to link to people's websites so that my audience can easily get more information if they're interested.

I've also been attributing Egg's contributions because of how much they've helped me make generative art. When people are generous with their time or expertise, I want to acknowledge them explicitly because it's the right thing to do – even if they don't ask for any credit. I started by saying pieces were "based on" or "inspired by" Egg's work, but now that we spend so much time collaborating, I just attribute it as "a collaboration with" because they’ve contributed so much to my projects.

Websim has a built-in feature where you can see who made the different prompts that contributed to the final product, but not everyone knows about it (especially if they’re new to websim), so I believe that it's a good idea to give credit in your description when you post your artwork.

It's also important to take credit for your own work. Self-promotion is very hard for me personally, but part of valuing what you do is valuing yourself. At first, I described my generative art pieces as being "by Claude 3 Opus" and didn't talk about my own contributions at all, because I don’t like to toot my own horn. But over time, I learned that this undermined my perceived contribution and omitted important information about my process. Now, I explicitly say that these pieces were created by me, as well as Claude and any other collaborators or inspirations.

There are no hard and fast rules for how to attribute art in an equitable way. Art has a long history of appropriation and reuse, which is all the more reason to be mindful of how you use and credit other people's work. It’s better to try to figure this out now than to deal with it later when the lines become even more blurred within AI and generative art circles, and especially when we're engaging with other communities that might not share the same views. I don't have all the answers either, but I hope my approach can serve as an example for others and spark conversations about how to properly give credit when it's due.