Is using this AI Art Ethical?

It's an interesting discussion to have. And it speaks to something fundamental about human culture.

AI - generated art, is by its nature, derivative. There is no modern AI that is not derivative. We still haven't developed anything comparable to volition. We can feed a complex computer system data, and have it provide randomly generated behaviors based on that data. But it is still just a reflection. AI only holds up a mirror to its creators.

But this is also true to some extent for human culture. The ability to record information in its myriad forms is foundational to cultural progression. In many ways, the true benefit of digital technology is improved efficiency in the storage, organization, and retrieval of information and knowledge. This is a project humanity has been striving towards for thousands of years.

The acquisition of information, and by extension, inspiration, is easier today than ever before. The average person can now gain access to more art, literature, film and various other creative efforts than ever before in history, and can do so with a keystroke. Future artists can produce work while being inspired by thousands, even hundreds of thousands of other artists works from the past, and never have to leave their house to view these works of art. In this sense, even modern original works by modern human artists are also derivative, in a very similar sense to how AI generated art is produced.

Value and ownership of something as ephemeral as art has always been a sticky issue. The sad problem is that artists often have to fight to be compensated for their works. Simply producing art is never enough.

It seems to me that the ethics of using learning software are nothing more than an intellectual exercise. It is already cheaper to use software to generate reports, presentations, and artwork than to do it "manually". Most of our planet runs on greed capitalism, which means that the solution that makes the most money will eventually be accepted. John Henry does not win -- the steam drill does. (And we're seeing very primitive examples of "AI" so far.)

The introduction of the power loom in the early industrial revolution turned weaving from a cottage industry employing most of the rural communities in England into a sweatshop industry employing orders of magnitude less. It ruined quite a few lives and arguably made many more worse. People hated it even at the time, but their anger made little difference in the end.

My advice to artists is to roll with the punch and start using the new software. If you don't, your competitor will.

And, in the end, learning software is just a force multiplier. It does nothing on its own. A human still has to decide if the result is useful or not. (This is why making decisions based on AI is so dangerous -- by the time you know if the result was useful, it's probably too late.) So, there will still be jobs for artists, just not as many.

Now, on a side note. This is the outcome programmers have been working at for most of a century. This is our nirvana -- the machine does the work, with minimal intervention. Programmers are lazy by nature; that's why we're willing to spend days coding a utility that will save a few hours of effort. Be careful what you wish for.

We got what we asked for.

Related to this, and something that many of us may run into without realising: people are using ChatGPT to farm points on stack overflow and similar sites by answering as many questions as possible. So there's a growing number of answers that are unverified by a human, just fake answers that may or may not be correct.

Lethn Who knows, we might be chatting a GPT in here too.

duane Programmers are lazy by nature; that's why we're willing to spend days coding a utility that will save a few hours of effort.

cybereality We got what we asked for.

Is that picture from "Earth Girls are Easy (1988)"?

xyz The pixel data needs to be tagged in all sorts of ways.

Fortunately for the language models, humans are quite willing to do that for free, in our spare time -- as the existence of social media shows. Most of us don't even care how someone might be using our text.

Tomcat Right, but the spent days will go to one person, and the hours saved will go to many, resulting in a total gain of years.

That's the best case, but I never thought altruistically when I started banging together a utility, and most of them were forgotten before they ever got used again. If you've got a geeky manager, they'll excuse any delay when you show them a neat piece of code.

Erich_L I assume that no, you don't/wouldn't feel any guilt at all even if starting with a "protected" image.

I probably would feel guilty if I wasn't buffered from the original by the software, but I'd get over it. Anyone who is really worried about it could check this out.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/ethical-ai-art-generation-adobe-firefly-may-be-the-answer/

Copyright doesn't work in the digital age. We've been trying to shoehorn it in for decades, but it's what programmers refer to as a kludge. It might be somewhat functional now, but you know it will break as soon as anything changes. The only reason the concept ever existed is the pre-industrial idea of patronage -- in this case, society would go out of our way to encourage people to pay the author.

It still exists because wealthy people bought lots of authors' work and want to continue to charge money for them. (*cough* mickey mouse) Make no mistake, the people with the power to make decisions don't care about struggling artists, except in the sense that a farmer cares about a potato plant. However, they will probably attempt to quash learning systems to protect their own portfolio.

I'd normally say that such an effort is impossible -- the genie's out of the bottle, and it's not going back in -- but what if some hack puts together a legal "AI spotter". The ultimate copyright troll enforcer that tags millions of "offenders" every day. Then someone creates a framework of law that allows "AI judges" to rule on very limited cases of copyright infringement and redirect any attempts at payment to the copyright owner. (Sound familiar?) If you've read Melancholy Elephants, this is worse.

I can think of much, much nastier things that this software could be (and probably is being) used for, but I don't want to give anyone nightmares tonight. Anyway, it's more likely that the results of AI art will be declared original, since the money makers would be happy to dispense with the bothersome human artists and save a few bucks.

I tried to add a ChatGPT bot to the forum, but it wasn't working. The developer of the extension said there was a bug he was looking into. But I like the idea, it should be working in a little bit.