Title:
Unravelling the Future Intersection of AI and Artistic Integrity
Author:
Euan Xoan Downie McCutcheonPublication Year/Date: May 2024
Document Version: Fine Art Hons dissertation
License: CC-BY-NC-ND
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/
DOI: https://doi.org/10.20933/100001303
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 – Digital Arts history
CHAPTER 2 – Artist who Co-exist with AI
CHAPTER 3 – ISSUES REGARDING AI IN ART
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Introduction
The first recorded conception of AI was known as ‘Automaton’, used to describe a mechanical device imitating a human being. Humans later used the term Cybernetics which comes from the Greek word kybernetikos to explore the development of artificial intelligence. Andrew Marie Ampere, a French Physicist during the 19th century, is responsible for inventing the term cybernetics, which governs the science of control. Norbert Wiener, a central figure in the development of AI, born in 1894 in Columbia, Missouri, released a book titled ‘cybernetics’ in 1945, which is regarded as the birth of cybernetics. Wiener stated in his book “The Science of Control and Communications in the Animal and Machine.” which relates to the automatic control theory. Wiener’s book and efforts to investigate artificial intelligence laid a foundation for machine learning algorithms. The intent of cybernetics was to be able to make artificial limbs that the brain could control. Cybernetics experienced a lot of technological development during the Second World War.
After the Second World War in 1950, Alan Turing challenged the ability to make an intelligent machine. Turing created the ‘Turing test’, a way to gauge a machine's ability to mimic human conversation, setting the bar high for machine intelligence. Sixty-Four years later, after the first test to prove machine intelligence, a chatbot passed called Eugene Goostman. In 2013, the ‘Turing test’ was replaced by a program called The Painting Fool; the program was created by Simon Colton, a professor of computational creativity in London, who proposed that instead of AI having to converse in human manners, it should act skilfully and imaginatively. Colton programmed realism into the software by adding an artistic temperament where the program could refuse to paint.
With AI's rapid advancement, I want to investigate AI in the field of art and both the positive and detrimental effects AI could have on future artists. The term AI(artificial intelligence) was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy. Since the 1950s, the advancement of AI has had a monumental influence on the art sector, putting the ideology of human agency under scrutiny. My dissertation intends to investigate whether AI provides an outlet to surpass human agency, allowing us to expand our creative imagination beyond our imagination and limitations, or whether the collaboration and fusion of AI in art takes over the role of the artist diminishing our relevance in art.
Generative art, coined in 1965 by German philosopher Max Bense, describes artwork made with a mathematical formula or algorithmic code that was made partially or entirely using an autonomous system. Generative art tends to have moments of randomness embedded in the algorithm and can take different forms, including music and computer visuals; Bense described his ambition with generative art as "the artificial production of probabilities of innovation or deviation from the norm.".(Avantarte, 2023) The process is an early example of AI collaborating with artists. The generative system embodied the original artistic concept because it is a non-human entity that the artist defines. In 1968, Generative art received a lot of praise because of an exhibition titled "Cybernetic Serendipity" at ICA London, where other pioneers in AI art, including Vera Molnar and Frieder Nake, displayed works in the form of plotter graphics and painting machines. Frieder Nake is a pioneer of computer arts alongside Vera Molnir, who used Max Bense's theoretical framework to contribute to creating the first generative computer art piece, which was showcased in three exhibitions in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the term generative art started to phase to describe geometric abstract art parts of the artwork has been transformed or repeated to make a greater variation in complexity of forms. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago created a department in the 1970s called Generative Systems that focused on practices of new technologies. In 1998, artists from all fields that made generative art held their first meeting regarding generative art at the inaugural International Generative Art conference at Milano University, Italy. The generative art community has continued to host Conferences in Milan since then.
In 2009, generative art changed because Ernest Edmonds, a British pioneer for computer and generative arts, alongside Margaret Boden, a trailblazer in the fields of artificial intelligence, agreed that generative art no longer needs to be restrained to only using computers by developing a technical vocabulary that differentiates the generative arts for example G-art (generative art), CG-art (computer-based generative art) and R-art (robotic art). The Generative art style after the 20th century fading from obscurity but the process has been revitalized through its connection with NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens); NFTs are digital artwork through the same process generative art is made via an autonomous system that generates art randomly from the artists aesthetic traits such as patterns, colours and themes. The innovation for NFTs was that the code and algorithms used could not be altered, and once finalized, they are put on the blockchain permanently, and only when the artwork is sold will the artwork be generated with the randomness result that mimics the aesthetics defined by the artist. NFTs allow creators to bypass relying on galleries or record labels to promote their creations and be able to reach a global audience while hardly being taxed on the revenue generated from sales. Snowfro, Pak and Tyler Hobbs are high-profile artists in the NFT world. In 2020, Erick Calderon, famously known as 'Snowfro', created an art blocks platform that combined generative art with the blockchain, resulting in artwork created as NFTs on Ethereum. For the last 50 years, digital art has struggled to find a market to sell on because there was no system to agree on. There have been markets such as Bitforms Gallery, which has been distributing digital art for decades, but NFTs have rejuvenated the generative art market. there is speculation around the longevity of NFTs because the NFT artworks rely on crypto prices, which is a highly volatile market; for example, "June 2022, there was an 88% drop in the number of addresses transacting on NFT marketplaces."(Masterworks (2023) and in addition the "the average price of an NFT sale dropped by 90% in May 2022, falling from $3,894 to $293." (Masterworks (2023) these figures highlight just how to volatile the market truly is with artwork losing over 90% of their value in a matter of months.
Digital art Mike Winkelmann, more commonly known as 'Beeple', is one amongst the most well-known artists in history due to the introduction of NFTs. Christie's Auction stated, Winkelmann is "among the top three most valuable living artists" (BBC (2021) because In 2021, Christie's Held the first digital-only Auction, which Winkelmann raked in over £50 million with his NFT artwork. Winkelmann's submission was a collection of digital art he had done daily; Winkelmann was selling the first 5,000 days of his work, translating into 13 years of his artwork. The artwork was purchased by Vignesh Sundaresan or, better known as 'Metakovan' who is a blockchain technologist, Sundaresan revealed why he bought the NFT, stating, "The point was to show Indians and people of color that they, too, could be patrons, that crypto was an
equalizing power between the West and the Rest, and that the global south was rising "(Daniel Phillips, A.H. (2022)
Net art or more commonly regarded to as Internet art talks about work made from the 1990’s through the early 2000’s that utilises the internet as a primary medium. During the 1990’s there was a huge buzz around web browsing which led to inspired artists starting to evade the traditional mediums and began to display their net art using developer codes, web browsers and scripts. In 1995 the term “net.art” was created by Pit Schultz for a title for an exhibition that took place in Germany showcasing Vuk Cosic and Alexei Shulgin’s work. The art made within a browser is dependant on the protocols and the structures of the browser they are using to function. There is a consensus that for the work to be regarded as net.art the art must exists within a browser to qualify. When the internet was young and taking the world by storm, the group net.art which emerged in 1994 used this medium because it became a place where literally anyone could publish to and at the time that was the first ever global communication system with unprecedented levels of speed and connectivity. Artists were taken by the idea of net.art because they were using this new subversive medium as a new way expression. Net.art was the first time artists were able to explore their artistic identity beyond the traditional art world.
The Belgium, Dutch net art group ‘JODI’ group is a highly revered circle of net.art artists, the work consisted of computer errors or more simply put hacker culture aesthetic. The group were a part of Net.Specifics first exhibition Communication Paths. Their art can be rather chaotic with complex layers of code to challenge the viewers navigation patterns on the web. Direct activists utilised Net.art causing various issues with hacking and copying. There is an Italian net art group, ‘0100101110101101.ORG’ this group has consistently stolen and copied work from ‘JODI’ in addition, the exhibition site ‘Hell.com’ protests against the notion of members only access.
In 1996 The group etoy were responsible for the ‘digital hijacks’(1996) where users searching for specific words, were then redirected to a different website by the name of Hijack.org. The group was also involved in an extensive battle with commercial company etoys incorporation for the rights and ownerships of the web addresses and names of etoy.com. The lawsuit caused the ‘TOYWAR.com’ in 1999, a website made to prevent the destruction of the etoy. ART-BRAND but more commonly recognised as an effective but old fashioned resistance system against corporate bully's who attempted to bulldoze their power to take over etoy.com art brand. Supporters of TOYWAR after seven weeks, forced eToys to step back and reconsider their attempt to take over. The event ‘TOYWARS’ is a powerful symbol of how the balance of power can be tilted in digital culture. Sadly Net.art is no longer being produced, the program ‘Flash’ which was being used to make Net.art is no longer supported from 2020 onwards.
Generative Adversarial Networks(GANS) are Artificial intelligence systems designed to create content such as art. GANs has seen a lot of recognition over the recent years particularly in the art field. GANs have been able to produce astounding results in the digital art that allow AI to produce music, literature, hyper realistic images and artwork and they have been capably applied to many sectors of art such as installations, animations and generative music. And will continue to impact different fields. The person responsible for the creation of GANs is Ian Goodfellow along with his team of researchers at the University of Montreal in 2014.
GANS are comprised of two main components: The Generator, which is tasked to create fake data by using feedback from the other main component the Discriminator. After receiving the feedback the generator then learns to make the discriminators output as real. The discriminators data comes from training and utilising two sources which are ‘Real data’ and ‘Fake data’. Real data for example uses real pictures of people as positive examples during its training and ‘Fake data’ uses instances created by the generator and the discriminator takes this data as negative examples during its training.
What sets GAN apart from its competitors in deep learning models such as Stable diffusion or DALL-E 2 is the output capacity. GAN models are very fast with outputs generated with times recorded as little as 0.13 seconds to generate whilst retaining intricate details and high detail-texture. DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion
average a minute to generate an image that produces overall a lower resolution image than what GAN provides. GAN AI models is the future of AI art generation because GAN models are becoming cheaper and more accessible for artists to use as they continue to improve the efficiency of the AI. There are two GAN AI art models that stand out from the rest which are GigaGAN and StyleGAN-T, both excelling in different area’s. GigaGAN has fantastic upscaling capabilities and is ideal for image restoration and enchancement but StyleGAN-T has amazing output quality because it can generate at ten frames a second in real-time with a very high resolution of 512 by 512.
AI-da is the worlds first realistic artist robot whom is a famous example of the usage of GANs in art created in February 2019 showcased at the University of Oxford, the AI artist had a solo exhibition with an early founder in AI art Vera monlar in Venice Biennale in 2022. The robot has the ability to replicate numerous different styles of art such as landscape painting and portrait drawing. The creator of AI-da is Aidan Meller during an interview was asked “now that robots can make art, do we humans really want them to?” (Davies, C. 2022) in response “We haven’t spent eye-watering amounts of time and money to make a very clever painter, This project is an ethical project.” Meller said. A primary consideration when talking about AI-da’s art is that does it hold any value? since art has always been created by a human for other humans but AI-da claims to create art because artists are longer held back and “restrained by the requirement of human agency alone” (AI-da 2019) quoted directly from AI-da. The ideology of human agency is that robotic artists like AI-da can reach greater heights than an individuals capacity regarding purposive consciousness, reflective and creative action which can give the viewers an enhanced creative insight when approaching art.
Chapter 2 Artist who Co-exist with AI
Vera Molnar, a founder of AI art, passed away on the 7th of December 2023 at the age of 99, born in Budapest, Hungary 1924. Molnar started crafting art at the age of 8. She studied at the Hungarian University of Arts and graduated in both Art History and Fine Art from 1956 to 1968. Molnar started to work on a method called 'machine imaginaire, ' a process where strict rules prohibited humans' creative artistic creation. The meaning of "Machine Imaginaire" is an imaginary computer because, until 1968, Molnar didn't have access to a computer. While at the Sorbonne research lab, Molnar used the lab computer. There she started to learn programming in the language Fortran, enabling her to experiment with countless algorithm variants to execute and print innumerable amount of abstract images and geometric shapes with a device called the plotter printer. Molnar's earliest artwork using the plotter printer was labelled 'Interruptions' in 1969; the work consisted of a drawing made with her program, which the plotter printed. The program always had apparent degrees of randomness, resulting in 'interruptions' of line-work in the piece.
Molnar was intent on exploring the possibility of fusion between art and computers as far back as 1974 with the invention of a computer with a screen, she was now able to identify errors in code and examine and modify her creations empowering her to break away from the traditional concept of art. Molnar had her first solo exhibition titled 'Transformations' in 1976, held in the gallery of London Polytechnic; the ideas behind her works are: order and disorder, formation and liberation. Between 1980 and 1990, Molnar was an associate professor at CREIAV (Expérimentale et Informatique des Arts Visuels at the Université) until 1995, when she showcased her works at Galerie Onions in Rennes 1995, which resulted in her work being represented by the gallery ever since.
Over Molnar's eight-decade-long career, her astonishing creative outlook on AI's possible fusion with art has redefined the relationship of art with digital inquiry and geometric abstractions. Over the years, her work has received many much-deserved credits, earning the first D.veloper digital Art Award in 2005 and winning the AWARE Prix d'Honneur in 2018 whilst being able to feature in both solo and group exhibitions at
prestigous venues such as Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2018) and omen in Abstraction at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021). Paris Centre Pompidou, in February 2024, will honour and celebrate a true pioneer in art with the intent to pay homage to her profound contributions to computer art.
Vera Molnar, Interruptions (19681969)
Harold Cohen was an artist from England who was heavily involved in AI art for nearly 50 years before its recent rise in popularity. Cohen excelled in using traditional mediums for his art practice, showcasing his painting skills in 1966 at the Venice Biennale. Still, similar to other pioneers in AI art, such as Vera Molnar, he saw the ingenuity computers provided in art. At a time when computers were becoming more accessible, Cohen departed from the traditional art world to engage more fully with this new medium. Cohen is the creator of a single program called 'Aaron'; AARON was an algorithm that taught a robot to create drawings made in 1973. Cohen released a statement to the press giving insight on the potential of AI early on, saying, "Many of the things we see computer programs doing today would have been regarded as impossible a couple of decades ago; AARON is surely one of them." (Gazelli Art House) This statement held true because AI has been continuously going beyond our minds' comprehension in its capabilities, and new feats thought impossible have been achieved each year in the art field. Cohen used neural networks and machine learning, called Deep learning. Deep learning is a learning technique AI uses that revolutionized the field of AI; deep learning involves using a complex multi-layered neural system to learn from copious amounts of data. The term Deep Learning was put forward by Rina Dechter Detcher in 1986, but Alexey Ivakhnenko and Lapa in 1967 constructed the first working Deep Learning algorithm. Deep Learning heavily impacted AI art when it was introduced because it enabled AI to learn and adapt depending on the substantial amounts of data it received. Deep Learning allows artists to create more complex and realistic artwork using AI. These advancements enabled Cohen to enhance his artwork regarding variation and realism. Cohen continued to use AARON to create artwork till his death in 2016. Aaron is considered "the first profound connection between art and computer technology." (Gazelli Art House) Cohen spent decades trying to fuse artistic and technological creativity using his program; he had had success in his efforts; one of the
Harold Cohen, AARON with Decorative Panel, 1992pieces made with his program is tilted 'AARON with Decorative Panel, 1992' a self-portrait that has all the technical art qualities that would be more than suffice to be called art.
Cohen's Inspiration grew from what he would recount as his need "to understand what art is" (Vass, K. (2022), an issue that every artist can relate to, but AI managed to be the creative outlet Cohen needed in his search to understand art. Just like the other pioneers who left the restraints of traditional art mediums in the late 1960s to delve into the exciting augmentation of technology and art as a means of greater understanding for creative understanding and to go further than our notions of human agency are capable of, artists like Harold Cohen and Marlon Vera and many other pioneers who helped lay the foundation for AI artists make it hard to conceive the idea of the advancement of AI hindering artists in the future.
" An algorithm is a step-by-step recipe for achieving a specific goal" (Cope, 2022)
David Cope, a composer and professor of music born in 1941, investigated the relationship of AI and music composition. Cope is responsible for an enhanced AI system called "Emmy". The purpose of Emmy was to analyse existing music compositions and make new pieces in a similar style. Cope wrote books covering his research and findings, but his most notable book was 'New Directions in Music', published in 1971, which gave insight into the feats AI could achieve at the time. Approximately 38 years later, in 2009, Cope and his college Emily Howell, rightfully received the media attention that was absent when the program was made in the 1990s regarding the AI program "Emmy". Cope was motivated to challenge the notion of "authentic" artistic expression just like Harold Cohen and Marlon Vera; he aimed to show everyone that it was possible for artificial intelligence to mimic human creativity and to make work that could be indistinguishable from work done by human composers to highlight the creative potential addition of AI in art could provide.
In addition to the notion of challenging the notion of "authentic" artistic expression is an American artist named ‘Rebecca Allen’, has had the limelight for the incorporation of AI into visual arts since the 1980s. Allen's work had a similar purpose to Harold Cohen's: to explore the fusion of technology, perception and artistic expression. Rebecca collaborated with computer scientists and mathematicians, such as (Still from) Swimmer, 1981, to create her work. By incorporating AI, Allen's objective was to challenge traditional art forms' boundaries and the viewer's perception of what was possible with what art can be.
In the 1970s, computer arts was a male dominated area, it was very rare to have a female artist working on the early fusion of computer arts and digital technology. Considered a pioneer, Allen's work spans over five decades and takes form in different ways, such as live simulations, large-scale performances and augmented reality art installations. Allen graduated with degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which allowed her to utilise her research from the lab to inform her art. Allen was among the first artists to make art involving human motion simulation and other generative techniques. Allen's work often addresses the future of gender, identity and what it is to be human as artificial intelligence redefines our sense of reality. By incorporating AI. Allen's objective was to challenge traditional art forms' boundaries and the viewer's perception of what was possible with what art can be.
Rebecca Allen, (Still from) Swimmer, 1981.Mario Klingemann is another artist who is a leading pioneer in the AI art movement. Klingemann is a German artist and AI researcher who is revered for his astonishing AI-generated artworks. Klingemann's work, starting in the 2000s, heavily focused on experimenting with deep learning and neural networks as an artistic tool. His work involved manipulating existing images to make impactful and provoking visual compositions.
Along with various other artists who were the first to utilise AI in their work, Klingemann had grown up in the transition phase between analogue and digital and stated that he was "among the first to have access to a computer at home" (Dean, M. (2019). The creative opportunities that the computer provided Klingemann truly grasped his fascination as an artist since Klingemann stated, " Drawing or painting was never my strength, as I never managed to get the same control over my hand muscles as when I write code." this statement is thought-provoking since it simply shows that he is stating that AI acted as a relationship for him and not as a replacement since he was fully aware of his artistic hindrances and AI offered a solution. Klingemann reinforces this idea by saying, "Instead of fighting against my body to produce the image I might have in my head, I preferred to learn how to instruct machines to do that"(Dean, M. (2019).
Memories of Passersby I (Companion Version), 2018
The machine is fully autonomous, using a very complex system of neural networks to produce a neverending stream of portraits of people that have never existed. The artwork is shown as an installation piece. A fascinating feature of this piece is that it does not collect data, which is what AI commonly does. Instead, it is an AI brain made and trained by Klingemann. To train such an intensive AI brain, Klingemann used thousands of portraits ranging from the 17th to 19th century.'Memories of Passerby' was exhibited in Madrid, Colección Solo, from January to June 2019 and had an estimated cost of 30,000-40,0000gbp. Klingemann's work showcases the interplay between human intent and machine algorithms. Like David Cope, much of Klingemann's work challenges traditional artistic processes and heavily encourages viewers to reflect on AI's latent potential for artists.
Anna Ridler is a London-based artist who is heavily involved with using GANs in her artwork, specifically Ridler's piece "Mosaic Virus"(2018). This artwork is an AI-generated video that brings together ideas around value, capitalism and the collapses of different points of history. 'Mosaic Virus' revolves around the fire tulip phenomena. A hysteria that occurred in Europe in the 17th century, in which the price of these tulips drastically rose and crashed. Ridler linked the Tulip hysteria with the Bitcoin phenomenon to strongly
parallel the ongoing speculations with cryptocurrencies. Ridler had AI process 10,000 photos of tulips she had gathered during tulip season by categorizing and feeding the photos into an algorithm. 'Mosaic Virus' was displayed in a three-screen video installation where each screen showed a single tulip; the tulips would change depending on the price of Bitcoin to show the market fluctuation for cryptocurrency visually. When asked about the usage of GANs in her work, Ridler stated, "I use GANs, not merely as a tool, but as another way of understanding the subject matter" (Ruby,2019),
Ridler's statement in response supports the notion that AI will be another creative tool that artists can utilise to gain a stronger sense of understanding in art instead of a hindrance that will diminish the art field in the foreseeable future. Evidently, the 'Mosiac Virus' couldn't have been constructed without the intervention of AI as a tool for these artists, showcasing the potential AI can have with artists' future projects and expanding the possibilities and creative process.
Anna Ridler, Mosiac Virus,2019While already covering artists who use GANs for their artwork, such as Klingemann and Ridler, other artists utilise GANs, including a Turkish media artist, Refik Anadol. Anadols first solo show was called "Living Paintings", presented at Jeffrey Deitch. The work 'Living Paintings' was made by training AI to gather environmental datasets from California national parks and visualize the data in otherworldly forms in a large-scale installation. Another fascinating piece Anadol has done is called 'For Unsupervised'. The piece ' For Unsupervised' interprets what a machine would dream about after training it on data from The Museum of Modern Art. Artist Anadol utilizes machine intelligence as a collaborator of the human consciousness. He taught a sophisticated machine-learning model to interpret and transform over 200 years of art at the Museum of Modern Art. The machine was trained with the algorithm StyleGAN; the idea behind this piece is for AI to imagine all the variations of what modern art could have been and the dreams that would have unfolded. The machine processed over 138,000 pieces of metadata from the Museum of Modern Art collection, which spans over 200 years of art and presents transformative hallucinogenic-like visuals in a large-scale installation.
Refik Anadol, ‘Unsupervision’, 2022
A household name in the photography community, Pratik Naik, well known for his high-end retouching and is the creator of 'Infinite Tools', a Photoshop Plugin made for photographers to ease the difficulty of variations in colour casts, mixed lighting and skin tone that appear distracting in an image is an artist that endorses the use of AI in art rather than it being an impending demise. During an interview with DIYP, Naik addressed his relationship with high-end retouching and photography by saying, "My relationship with retouching and photography began when I was in high school! I was always fascinated by how photos could be manipulated to create new images or improve the existing ones."(Baker, A. (2023) Naik proceeded to state "I am passionate about retouching because I believe that it is an art form. It is a way to transform images and create new realities. I love being able to use my skills to help photographers and clients achieve their vision."(Baker, A. (2023) This statement highlights a trend among artists who have left the traditional medium art world. These artists feel AI is a solution to bypass human agency and no longer be constrained in their artistic and creative aspirations. Naik claims his photography skills work in unity with AI retouching, saying, "I find that photography is a great source of inspiration for my retouching work."(Baker, A. (2023) and went on to further say "I am grateful for the opportunity to work as both a photographer and a retoucher. I believe that these two roles complement each other perfectly."(Baker, A. (2023) which solidifies the idea of AI working as a collaborator with an artist instead of taking over by proving a creative tool the artist can use to enhance his work or explore a deeper understanding.
CHAPTER 3. ISSUES REGARDING AI IN ART
AI intends to generate output data that is indistinguishable from the real inputs, which have been a catalyst for significant infringement of artists' style and work. Polish artist Greg Rutkowski, a well-known illustrator who has collaborated in Dungeons and Dragons and various other successful projects, is a prime example of the rampant infringement and copyright issues occurring for artists due to the development of AI. In 2022, Rutkowski's name "has been used as a prompt around 93,000 times"(Heikkil, M), according to a lexcia website, which tracks prompts used on StableDiffusion. StableDiffusion is a high-quality Image text prompt generator used to produce art of a similar nature and style that replicates Rutkowski's artwork.
International share of Etsy Inc.'s gross merchandise sales volume from 2012 to 2022
Art produced by AI-image generators such as StableDiffusion can be found on 'Etsy' , a marketplace where copyright issues regarding AI and art are transparent. Etsy is an online marketplace founded in 2005 where all fields of art can independently list and sell their work. Looking at Etsty's annual gross merchandise sales(GMS) from 2005 to 2022, it is easy to see the correlation between AI art and the immense increase in sales. The GMS in 2019 shows that merchandise sales were approximately five million, which was to be expected from the gradual increase from 2005 onwards. Still, within 3 years, sales went up to about 13,491 million. The monumental rise in the popularity of AI art can explain the vast increase in sales because of artists like Rutkowski, whose name generated over 93,000 artworks that were independently listed and sold as prints.
Three artists filed a lawsuit against Midjourney and Stability AI which are the creators of AI art generators Stable Diffusion and DevianArt. Artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz are Suing because their art work has been culled from the web and used as training for AI-image generators without any consent from the artists. Stability, Midjourney and Devian Art filed motions to dismiss the claims. Judge Orrick, who was overseeing this case, warned them that their copyright claims were unlikely to hold up in court, stating, "I don't think the claim regarding output images is plausible at the moment because there's no substantial similarity"(Mattei, S.E.D. (2023) between images created by the AI and the artists. The dismissal of the case, highlights the instability and insecurity artists feel about AI because there are no rules to protect human artistic identity against AI in the art sector. During a radio podcast broadcast of ‘This is Nashville’ there was a panel of professionals involved in AI, Kelly McKernan was on this panel and said this in response to being asked about her feelings on AI art “I could see my hand in this art that I didn’t actually make” (Wreath and Bows | Haylos & Blooms (2023)referring to her work being misused on art generators " Like its sometimes scraping my brain for things I haven't even made, so it became...violating. (Wreath and Bows| Haylos & Blooms (2023) these statements give a brief insight on how detrimental AI can be when using artists work as data.
An event occurred in 2022 that sparked concern about AI negatively impacting subsequent artists in the future, was the Colorado State Fair fine art competition winner in the Digital arts category Jason Allen. The submission Allen sent in was purely made with a text prompt image AI generator, specifically Midjourney. Allen's work titled "Theatre d'Opera Spatial" and was crafted in Discord. Midjourney is accessible through a
Discord server where users such as Sincarnate and Allens handle the server to show off their artwork and exchange information on generating better output prompts. The controversy sparked because two of the judges that were assigned had no context to the situation and had not been informed about the usage of Midjourney or what it actually was, which Allen addressed by saying, "Should I have explained what Midjourney was? If so, why?"(Vincent, J. (2022).
Josh allen, Theatre d'Opera Spatial,2022
A popular perception of the usage of AI in art is that it lacks human qualities and effort. Still, Allen claimed, "I made the prompt, I fine-tuned it for many weeks, curated all the images"(Vincent, J. (2022) and that he wanted to "to make a statement using artificial intelligence artwork"(Vincent, J. (2022) which sparked a debate online between the AI community and people in the field of art. Could an argument be made that a more substantial body of work went into the development of Allen's submission, made only possible with Midjourney that could merit him beating the other seven contestants who relied on their habitual artist techniques and creative process to curate their artwork instead of a machine? There is a consensus that AI, particularly Midjourney, is another digital art tool similar to Photoshop that artists will employ as a creative outlet. Still, it is difficult to understand because where can we differentiate the artist and the AI in the artwork? Where can we see the artist in work in programs like Midjourney unless the ingenuity can be shown in the text prompts then it is understandable for Allen's desired 'statement' to cause concern and uncertainty.
Before the now widespread appeal of AI art, there was a debate about whether art made with AI could hold any value at all. In 2018, the well-known auction house Christie's, founded in 1766, became the first auction house ever to make an offer for artwork made with AI. The artwork sold at Christie's for $432,000. This made an impressive statement because the expected price for the listing was "between $ 7,000 and $10,000"(Vincent, J. (2018). The sold artwork is called 'Portrait of Edmond Belamy'; a group of French students aged 24 to 25 called 'Obvious' used GAN to make the image. The datasets the trio used for the algorithm GAN to train with consisted of historical portraits; the intent was for their algorithm GAN to make its own historical portrait.
A strong response entailed the auction's success after an announcement from a fellow AI artist, 19-year-old Robbie Barrat. Barrat claimed 'Portrait of Edmond Belamy' was made with his code and he was not given any of the credit he felt he deserved; the group 'Obvious' responded by swiftly saying, "We would like to thank the A.I. community, especially to those who have been pioneering the use of this new technology, including Ian Goodfellow, the creator of the GAN algorithm, who inspired the name of the Famille de Belamy series, and artist Robbie Barrat, who has been a great influence for
(Portrait of Edmond Belamy)us."(Vincent, J. (2018b). After inspection, it was deemed the work borrowed from Barrat was substantial, and the code he shared was under an open-source license. The speculation of ownership and authenticity that transpired after the auction is just one example of the issues around what future artists could experience with ownership and the intellectual property debate of AI artwork.
A team called 'Nightshade' is battling an underlying fear a vast amount of artists are feeling: whether AI will replace future artists with tech companies using their artwork to train AI algorithms such as GANs. Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, is head of a team dubbed Nightshade that aims to support artists against the misuse of data training in AI art. To protect artists against AI companies, Nightshade developed a tool called 'Glaze'. Glaze is a tool that masks artists' images against AI art generators. Still, as Zhao stated in an interview regarding the practicality of the Tool, he stated "does what it says on the tin poisoning any model that uses images to train AI"(Barr, K. (2023) The usage of Glaze would ensure chaos to erupt by forcing developers having to hand-pick poisoned images or by having to reset the AI models training altogether entirely but with the size of the AI model it may require thousands of poisoned images to have any effect.
Infringement and copyright claims are problematic because it’s not unusual to witness the court ruling in the favour of the copier opposed to the copied, an example of this is was in 2013, artist Richard Prince assimilated Photos by Patrick Carious into his work, Carious then filed a lawsuit against Prince but the court case deemed Prince’s use of Carious’s work was legal under the ‘transformative use’ law. Artists such as But Butterick voiced their thoughts regarding the transformative use law and how A.I. generators wrongfully bypass the law saying “We’re not litigating image by image, we’re litigating the whole technique behind the system”(Chayka, K. (2023). Established websites such as Getty images have also voiced their outrage for the blatant misuse in the transformative use law by filing a lawsuit against AI-art generator StableDiffusion on grounds of “brazen infringement.. on a staggering scale” revolving around StableDiffusions misuse of Getty Stock Photography. Getty Stock photography accuses StableDiffusion AI copied over 12 million images from their site “without permission”.(Vincent, J. (2023). Copyright infringement is extremely complicated because even if there are blatant AI copyright apparent in a court case it is often disregarded under the Fair Use that allows the re-purposing of copyrighted work without need any authorisation or permission from the owner.
AI-image generators such as MidJourney only generate artwork through training off private databases or, in most cases, off the open web. The reason why AI-image generators such as MidJourney can retain remarkable levels of detail is that the algorithm takes established artworks from artists, which a lot of the time are copyright protected and uses their work as data in their training. Established AI-image generators' OpenAI', the creators of ChatGPT have been refusing to publish the data used to train their AI 'DALLE2' after the New York Times engaged in a lawsuit that alleges 'unlawful use' because they have been using artists' copyrighted work for their AI DALLE2's training. OpenAI came out with the statement saying, "it would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens." (Gray, J. (2024)The statement gives an intuition that AI-image generators disregard the law protecting artists against infringement. Open AI managed to avoid scrutiny by staying firm on not revealing the training data. A tool named 'Have I been Trained' has been developed by the artist collective Spawning to help artists against AI's blatant abuse in copyright infringement. Spawning.ai intends to commit to assisting artists in managing their intellectual property. Unfortunately, there isn't a way to remove an existing dataset, but the tool Have I been Trained grants users the ability to opt out of any future training AI programs.
Conclusion
In the late 1800s, French poet Baudelaire opposed the use of photography in art, famously declaring the use of a camera in art is "the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies.”, this notion shares a parallel with how the use of AI in art is perceived by the artists in this generation. Artist Pratik Naik is an example that defies this parallel. Technology has always had a comprehensive reaction when introduced. In reality, developing and adding new technology in the art field adds a creative outlet for artists to utilise. Like the camera, AI has provided the same ingenuity for artists, successfully acting as a collaborator; Naik reinforces the fusion of AI and photography by his statement, "I am grateful for the opportunity to work as both a photographer and a retoucher. I believe that these two roles complement each other perfectly.",
Pioneers who laid the foundation for AI art shared a similarity in their pursuit of the incorporation of AI into art, which was the urge to break free from human agency, to gain a greater sense of imagination and creativity than what an individual can conceive, AI interference has rejuvenated generative art, provided artists a tool to compliment their pursuit in different mediums and the ability to augment and any artwork recorded in history. The artwork produced by AI is valued by tethering itself to a human's vision; if history is any indication, then we will change our collective tastes in response to technological progression. AI will benefit artists in the future in the same sense that Marlon Vera and Harold Cohen benefited from the invention of the computer; the fusion of AI and art grants artists a higher level of creativity and a variety of mediums to explore. The laws governing AI art need to be re-assessed, particularly the Transformative Use Act, because, with these loopholes in place, the stipulation regarding the future of AI in art will remain negative. While generative AI art has caused equal amounts of hand-wringing and clapping but when reviewing young successful artists Refik Anadol and Anna Ridler, the ways they have implemented AI into their art in recent years it becomes evident the co-creativity between AI and artists will continue to be beneficial for artists in every field of art.
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