Jason Allen won a prize for this digital ‘painting,’ which I am flagrantly ripping off and posting here without paying any licensing fees.
He was triumphant and a bit cocky about his win.
Much consternation spread throughout the artistic community two years ago when Jason M. Allen, an executive at a tabletop gaming startup, submitted an AI-generated “painting” to a Colorado digital art competition and won. Critics claimed that Allen had cheated, but the prize winner didn’t have much sympathy for his detractors: “I’m not going to apologize for it,” Allen said. “I won, and I didn’t break any rules.” He also didn’t seem to care much for the complaint that AI companies like Midjourney—the one he used to create his “painting”— were poised to destroy the art market. “This isn’t going to stop,” Allen told the New York Times. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”
Except that now he is dismayed to discover that he isn’t getting the rewards he thinks he deserves.
Now, in an ironic twist, Allen is upset that his work—which was created via a platform that’s been accused of ripping off countless copyrighted works—cannot, itself, be copyrighted, and is thus getting ripped off. In March of last year, the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that work derived from AI platforms “contained no human authorship” and therefore could not be extended copyright protections. Allen has been trying, since late 2022, to register his painting as a copyrighted work.
Last week, Allen filed an appeal in federal court in Colorado, arguing that the U.S. Copyright Office was wrong to deny copyright registration to his work, dubbed “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.” Allen’s primary concern is that he’s not making enough money from the work. “I have experienced price erosion in the sense that there is a perceived lower value of my work, which has impacted my ability to charge industry-standard licensing fees,” he told Colorado Public Radio.
It’s so unfair. He worked so haaaaard on his picture, as if people should be compensated for how much effort they put into something.
Allen’s lawyer, recently claimed that Allen had worked hard on his digital illustration. “In our case, Jason had an extensive dialogue with the AI tool, Midjourney, to create his work, and we listed him as the author,” Pester said.
Sorry, dude. It’s over. Capitalism won. Humans lost.
As long as they keep their digital paws away from the book covers by Boris Vallejo, Julie Strain or Richard Corben…
(yes, I am a nerd)
Art is pretty much unkillable. Its an abstract.
Do they use “prompts” to generate AI artwork? If so, perhaps he could copyright his prompts. I gather that crafting generative AI prompts is an area of expertise in the field.
Now where have we seen this before?
Steve Jobs 1996: “Good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Steve Jobs 2010: “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”
@2: art is indeed immortal, but artists sure ain’t. They do need to eat at least, and all this AI kerfuffle is going to make their paid work chances even smaller (the stereotype of the starving artist is often all too true).
I am putting this here again for a very good perspective:
(An aside: google did not want to show “vimeo wizard of AI” at all and came up with unrelated crap, while duckduckgo found it at once even if it was placed only fourth or so in the list. Whaaaats going on with them search engines?)
Since the ai created the art, the ai should get the copyright, but, of course, only if it applies for one.
It’s not even a particularly good AI render! The walls are full of weird artifacts, the window/balcony thing is asymmetrical, the people have weird postures or look fuzzy or distorted. The lamp on the right is fused to a malformed chair or couch, and the ones on the left are just… weird abstract rectangles. This isn’t the kind of AI output that should confuse people, this is the kind that idiots mass upload to wallpaper sites.
@ ^ tallora : Also are they walking on what? Water? ice? Really badly laid carpet?
@5.outis : “@2: art is indeed immortal, but artists sure ain’t. They do need to eat at least, and all this AI kerfuffle is going to make their paid work chances even smaller… “
Truth. Yup.
#7 tallora
Speaking as one of the visual artists he was gloating over, I’m completely unimpressed. Even if this had been done by hand I wouldn’t have been impressed because it’s nothing more than visual gibberish. Yes, the computer did all the work, and the computer is also completely untrained in things like composition and technique.
Actual digital artists make choices (about sizes, details, colors), that put more work into their art than this guy did with some prompts.
outis @ #5 — I note that the video seems focused on “generative AI”, at least in the first 5 minutes. Many people, including Marc Zuckerberg and people around here, tend lump together all the different areas of AI. While there is certainly overlap between the different areas of AI/ML research and implementation, generative AI is the new-ish endeavor that’s getting the most public attention right now and perhaps the most troubling because the leap from an statistical analysis of a large body of content (LLM) and turning into a generated response to a specifically query is obviously fraught.
There’s an interview with Janelle Shane in Scientific American titled, “Please Don’t Ask AI If Something Is Poisonous” where she talks about her investigations into generative AI and some of the issues she’s run into with it.
@5: As Google owns YouTube, it might be a bit biased about the competition…
@10, robro
I think people, myself included, lump Generative AI in with all the other subdisciplines of AI/ML because we’re not really talking about the technology. We’re talking about the tedious hype cycle, where hucksters, grifters and fraudsters both criminal and corporate all abstract away the complexity of the underlying issues and just point to a pretty picture (with only a few horrifying hallucinations) or a coherent sentence (that’s only slightly wrong) and say “True machine intelligence on a human scale is just around the corner. Give me vast sums of money to either build it or fight it.”
For artists, this is a difficult time. Generative ‘art’ production is presently cheap and good enough to replace a lot of low-value art. Think book jackets for vantity-press novels for example. But this isn’t guaranteed, or even likely, to stay the case forever. The companies providing these AI art services are burning through vast amounts of investor cash and investor compute resources (for example, most of M$FT’s investment in openAI is in the form of cloud computing credit). Sooner or later the investor class is going to want to see a return on this money, and if they don’t, the generative AI faucets are going to start costing a lot more to use or running dry.
The evangelists of this technology are demanding absurd amounts of additional investment, and even demanding that new kinds of power generation must be made so that they can fulfill their dreams of the god-in-the-box. Each generation of the models requires a huge leap in training data and computation to train and to run, and the results of each generation appear to be entering diminishing returns territory.
Sooner or later the investor class is going to realize that they’ve reached the top of the S-curve, if they haven’t already. At that point the hype machine will go into overdrive. They will, after all, need to recoup their investment. And the way to do this is to convince some greater fool that the real profits are all still to come, that out of benevolence the investors are going to allow the plebeian masses to get in on the ground floor by buying some stock on the open market. Once enough of the bag has been handed over to to greater fools to hold onto, the whole edifice will be allowed to collapse. See also: gold rush towns in the Sierras and the Klondike. The investor class will already be moving over to whatever hype cycle comes next… from Web3 to Metaverse to AI to ???
At the end of it all, the technology will remain. But it’ll be expensive to run. That ‘artist’ with his ‘painting’ – how many queries exactly did it take to generate the image? What would that amount of GPU time have cost in an unsubsidized market? Would he be able to compete with an actual digital artist who can paint something like that on a drawing tablet in a couple days and not have it full of weird anomalies? Who can say.
Personally, I think that generative image AI will end up as tool mainly used by artists. In-painting unimportant areas with detail, for example, or generating a starting point that the artist iterates upon. It’s not going away, but I doubt it’ll be world-changing.
In short: copyright for me, but not for thee. The pattern appears to be the same every time.
I just created four AI images to put on a birthday card with a ten word prompt. The recipient is my niece who, as it happens, is a digital artist — one who uses math and computers to create art installations, putting her masters in Maths and Theoretical Physics to good use…
I did it as a joke, but once I stopped trying to generate images in the “realistic” style with its horrors of misplaced limbs, fingers, and eyeballs, the results weren’t half bad for use in a casual birthday card, and perhaps easier than scouring Google images for a photo to swipe.
Seems to me that the days of clipart websites are numbered.