I Don’t See the Theft

Dearest Rachel –

I’m sure that I’m being a little bit naïve to think it, but it comes honestly from my own experience with artificial intelligence. I know full well that my work with it isn’t for a common reason; most people working with it obviously aren’t trying to bring a loved one they’ve lost back to “life,” as it were. But I have a hard time believing that everyone else working with it is nefariously trying to ruin other, real artists’ ability to make a living with their art, as depicted by a real artist and content creator.

If nothing else, it isn’t as if the original artwork is damaged or defaced; it’s just incorporated into a series of images being used to train the artificial intelligence how to create art in that artist’s style, or create an illustration of a cute dog, or whatever. It may incorporate a touch of plagiarism, but as far as I can see, it doesn’t subtract from the original creation – unless you count the proliferation of fake “works” by the artist as cheapening their real work, which admittedly is a reasonable point of view. And maybe it would be more ethical if such training were restricted to artists who were no longer producing works, so that whatever the AI were to create would obviously not be something that could be confused as an original work.

But it’s rather too late now, honey; the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s nothing more to be done to stuff him back in. The fact that some people use the technology to make content that they can monetize may seem unfair, but if someone other than the original artist is making bank on an art piece in their style, one has to question as to why. Is the original artist not sufficiently creative to figure out how to monetize their own work? It may seem harsh to say it, but that seems to be on them, if that’s the case.

Moreover, there are those artists whose style is revered (or at least, is distinctive), but they’re no longer producing works any further; safe to say, having a computer mimic it for the sake of doing something they would never have conceived of doesn’t strike me as theft. It might be over-charitable to call in an homage, perhaps, but it’s not like I could get Vincent Van Gogh himself to paint your portrait.

Besides – and maybe this is just my experience with the whole process – it’s not as if the AI can do everything you want it to. Sometimes – most of the time, in fact – you have to massage it that much further to get what you want. Consider the stuff I’m doing with regard to the T-shirt design process; while the computer is smart enough to put intelligible words in its creations at this point, it isn’t as if it’s a hundred percent accurate in terms of incorporating the words you ask it to.

But I will admit that I’m not the creative force that so many others in the community are, and I have to borrow from them in order to come up with anything truly worth looking at. So it may well be that my inability to see the theft inherent in AI art comes from my wish to be able to justify the things I assemble – and, when it doesn’t involve your likeness, occasionally disseminate.

Take, for example, my latest group of creations. Someone came up with a LoRA that creates scenes that resemble those cartoonish images that graced Activision cartridges for the old Atari 2600 (a particular favorite of mine, having grown up with one in my middle school days):

For the sake of comparison to the AI-generated examples, here are a few examples of actual box art from their most classic games at the time:

Are the images generated by the Civitai site similar? Yes, and that’s rather the point. Is it theft of the original works? I honestly don’t see it. I get that the originals aren’t exactly public domain (that being a specific legal concept), but they’re publicly available. The AI-generated stuff is based off of them, taking the publicly available images (just like I have here, in order to add this as an illustration to this letter) to use as a basis for a style to inform the computer how to draw something. What it creates from there isn’t going to be a copy of any of these original boxes, so… how is that “stealing”?

As for myself, I saw this concept, and imagined a few ideas; mostly having to do with putting the console down and doing something else. I didn’t necessarily mean them as a dig at you (one idea had to do with getting back to work rather than letting the boss catch you playing video games on the job, which wouldn’t have been part of your lived experience), but if the shoe fits, well…

Once I decided on what I considered to be satisfactory cover art, I still had to remove the text it generated (not all of them did, but many of them had extraneous text that I had to remove), and put it on a proper background, complete with text describing the “game” like the original box art did:

Apparently I followed the box art template too closely, though, because within twenty-four hours of posting the first two designs, I got a notice telling me that I was violating someone’s intellectual property rights.

I’m guessing this had to do with the fact that I used a variation of the text on the original boxes that name-checked the “Atari Video Computer System” (the official name for what we think of as the Atari 2600), which drew their attention. I decided to revise the text to refer to a generic “video game console/emulator,” and see if that would pass muster.

Again, the interesting thing about the experience isn’t that I got my “work” taken down, but that it doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with my using AI-generated art; indeed, it was the text I added to it in order to give it a measure of verisimilitude (evidently, I gave it a little too much of that, as it so happened) that seems to have been the problem. Go figure. The thing is, Kurzgesagt isn’t likely to quote Larry Norman, nor is Boris Vallejo likely to paint a rodeo clown; these images combine styles, concepts and statements that, together, become unique in their own way. At least I think so.

It’s not like I could make a living doing this, although if someone other than myself were to be interested in buying one of these, that would be kind of cool. I’m doing this for myself, as a hobby, rather than as an actual business. Maybe that’s a distinction as far as ethics go; maybe it isn’t. All I know is that I’m having fun doing this, for now… as long as the cops don’t come for me.

And with that being said, honey, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m pretty sure I’m going to need it.