With all the fuzz about IA image “stealing” illustrator job, I am curious about how much photography changed the art world in the 19th century.
There was a time where getting a portrait done was a relatively big thing, requiring several days of work for a painter, while you had to stand still for a while so the painter knew what you looked like, and then with photography, all you had to do was to stand still for a few minutes, and you’ll get a picture of you printed on paper the next day.
How did it impact the average painter who was getting paid to paint people once in their lifetime.
Let’s explore this further. When we look at the work of a human we can often see their influences (and they can often acknowledge them or even cite specific works). In a way, they are able to credit those they were inspired by.
Would an “AI” be able to do the same? I’m guessing it probably can, but more as a statistical similarity to other works. I don’t know if it can cite its sources.
A human can say that they were influenced by XYZ but they might not be crediting all of the instructors they had, or all the art books they read, all the stepping stones that got them to the point of being able to produce a work that has an identifiable influence. Then consider the people who influenced the person they’re citing as an influence, and so on and so on. I don’t know that the AI can tell you where every flourish comes from, but the person using it as a tool certainly could tell you what tags they used, which often include "in the style of "
Instructors and art books literally give permission to use them as a “stepping stone” by definition. The entire point of them is to offer input to other artists.
Also the main difference is that a human has a human mind and is making creative decisions unique to that human. The problem is that a narrow AI algorithm cannot be anything BUT derivative. They don’t think, they don’t have a mind that filters the data through a unique perspective, they just process the data like a series of conveyer belts. If you never give a human any input from other artists they can still make art, that’s why we have cave paintings. But a narrow AI algorithm needs specific input via specific pieces of art or else it can’t create anything. With that in mind permission and consent is much more important to the artists whose specific pieces are being fed into the algorithm. It’s generally considered good form to credit inspiration in derivative work, but we understand that human nature means that humans may not always remember or realize what or who inspired them. AI doesn’t have that excuse. We are perfectly capable of only feeding images that we are given permission to use into AI, and we are perfectly capable of having the AI log and report what works it used data from.