Real Talk
Here’s What Every Parent Needs to Know About AI Art
Social media has been blowing up against the development of AI Art. Here’s what every parent needs to know about it.
A lot of our kids aspire to be graphics designers and artists. Some of them even reveal their knack for it, and we are supportive of their passion! But with the rise of AI Art, many artists, including our children, have been voicing out their feelings. They feel discouraged from a society that has a subjective and volatile concept of beauty. Now with a technological advancement that can potentially take away their livelihood and destroy their passion, all the more they feel frustrated. Here’s what we know so far about AI Art.
What is AI and how does it work?
The concept of AI isn’t new. We’ve been using it on our mobile phones in the form of Siri or Google Home. AI is short for artificial intelligence which a team of programmers and developers create and train” They “train” (or teach) artificial intelligence (AI) by placing it in different situations, much like humans do—developing algorithms and responses to multiple possibilities. Programmers often described creating and teaching an AI akin to parenting a toddler. There are clear commands but at the same time, the programmer needs to visualize and create several situations to see what adjustments can be made to the code.
Now, how does this affect artists?
Artists on social media are not mad about the advancement but about how programmers and developers are “training” the AI artists. The trend has brought to light a big problem that’s been going around the art industry: big companies often commercialize an artist’s artwork without letting them know to avoid paying royalties. Some companies even change the colors a bit to dodge the potential lawsuit. But these companies are also confident that independent artists cannot chase them because of a variety of reasons:
- Not many lawyers here specialize in Intellectual Property laws
- They don’t have the money to afford it
- The existing belief that the slight change of colors and shades makes the art “different”
- The already existing volatile and subjective concept of beauty and art makes some members of society look down on artists
- There are little to no laws protecting the legal rights of artists and their artwork
But this time, instead of selling the artwork, they now have a program that can essentially clone the artwork which they can easily claim as their own since all they have to do now is put it in a program to reproduce. Many of these artists are then arguing how developers and programmers are robbing them of their livelihood especially since it’s so easy to download the image to train the AI to recreate the image WITHOUT the watermark and meta description (two of the things that mark an artist’s ownership of an artwork), ruining the novelty, uniqueness, and even ownership of their art pieces.
This issue is also not just about artists who draw but writers who dedicate years to understanding the art behind languages. Granted, we do laugh at AI-generated movie scripts but that humor isn’t going to last long.
How AI artists could have actually helped
One of the greatest frustrations of any artist is having a lot of deliverables in the pipeline. They’re often stressed, trying to mass produce something and figure out what the client wants in a short period of time. AI artists could have done the repetitive work for them, allowing the artist to complete other commissions and requests that take more time and effort. Unfortunately, the training method appears to have excluded artists from the equation as if disregarding the inspiration, technique, and dedication that still come from a living human being.
Unfortunately, AI Art has created a big, ethical and moral mess!
While we cannot stop the advancement of technology and disregard its benefits for our families’ lives, every advancement has its price. And right now, AI Art appears to be more damaging than helpful. Some have already declared AI Art as a “washing machine of intellectual property”, removing any form of ownership the original creator has. While it is part of the learning process of many artists to take techniques of the masters, there also should be moral and financial compensation for those whose artworks were responsible for training the AI.
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