I heard about C2PA and I don’t believe for a second that it’s not going to be used for surveillance and all that other fun stuff. What’s worse is that they’re apparently trying to make it legally required. It also really annoys me when I see headlines along the lines of “Is AI the end of creativity?!1!” or “AI will help artists, not hurt them!1!!” or something to that effect. So, it got me thinking and I tried to come up with some answers that actually benefit artists and their audience rather that just you know who.
Unfortunately my train of thought keeps barreling out of control to things like, “AI should do the boring stuff, not the fun stuff” and “if people didn’t risk starvation in the first place…” So I thought I’d find out what other people think (search engines have become borderline useless haven’t they).
So what do you think would be the best way to satisfy everyone?
AI art is art, period. Just like with any method of creation, there will be good and bad AI art, and as with any method of making art, there is human input and intention behind it. Internet is chock full of same-looking fan drawings of popular characters—everyone can pick up a pencil, do a 15·minute sketch of Joker; or grab a camera, shoot a landscape, and upload it on Deviantart. Same for boring, uninspiring, mass-produced commercial art.
Fundamentally generative neural networks are no different from “oldschool” procedural generation tools like Mandelbulb3D or Terragen—with both of which I have tinkered a lot in the past. With AI you use a verbal prompt to generate; with “oldschool” generative processes you use a numerical input or different math formulas.
As for AI somehow “stealing” art, well, every artist who studies the works of other artists to learn how to make good art, is “stealing”, then. At the end of the day, a human brain is literally a neural network that can be trained using various inputs. No input; no output other than random noise. From my own past a decade ago tinkering with digital art—one of my renders with Mandelbulb that was well recieved on DA (ended up in some curated collection, even) was based on someone else’s input formula that I tweaked heavily and used different render parameters—and I’m sure someone else took my version of that formula and made their own version.
That’s the nature of art, nothing is created in vacuum; nothing is original. Every artist “steals”. Those who claim different, who believe art should never draw from other art, are either delusional or pretentious elitists. Or lawyers.