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A14 PEOPLE & ARTS
Friday 20 January 2023
AI tools can create new images, but who is the real artist?

By MATT O’BRIEN and ARI- ton, who uses these tools for
JETA LAJKA research. “You could make
NEW YORK (AP) — Count- some guesses if you have
less artists have taken in- enough experience work-
spiration from “The Starry ing with these tools,” Shah
Night” since Vincent Van said. “But beyond that,
Gogh painted the swirling there is no easy or scientific
scene in 1889. way to really do this.”
Now artificial intelligence But for all the backlash,
systems are doing the there are many people
same, training themselves who embrace the new AI
on a vast collection of tools and the creativity they
digitized artworks to pro- unleash. Searches on Mid-
duce new images you can journey, for instance, show
conjure in seconds from a curious users are using the
smartphone app. tool as a hobby to create
The images generated by intricate landscapes, por-
tools such as DALL-E, Mi- traits and art.
djourney and Stable Dif- There’s plenty of room for
fusion can be weird and fear, but “what can else
otherworldly but also in- can we do with them?”
creasingly realistic and cus- asked the artist Refik An-
tomizable ask for a “pea- adol this week at the World
cock owl in the style of Van Visitors view artist Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Wednesday, Economic Forum in Davos,
Gogh” and they can churn Jan. 11, 2023, in New York. Associated Press Switzerland, where he dis-
out something that might played an exhibit of his AI-
look similar to what you the marketplace with the a similar picture?” Holz said. what’s fake, everything will generated work.
imagined. original images. Until now, “Obviously, it’s allowed for suddenly become fake At the Museum of Modern
But while Van Gogh and when a purchaser seeks a people and if it wasn’t, because you lose confi- Art in New York, Anadol
other long-dead master new image ‘in the style’ of then it would destroy the dence of anything and ev- designed “Unsupervised,”
painters aren’t complain- a given artist, they must pay whole professional art in- erything,” said Wael Abd- which draws from artworks
ing, some living artists and to commission or license an dustry, probably the non- Almageed, a professor of in the museum’s prestigious
photographers are starting original image from that professional industry too. electrical and computer collection including “The
to fight back against the AI artist.” Companies that To the extent that AIs are engineering at the Univer- Starry Night” and feeds
software companies cre- provide image-generating learning like people, it’s sort sity of Southern California. them into a massive digi-
ating images derived from services typically charge of the same thing and if the As a test, The Associated tal installation generating
their works. users a fee. After a free trial images come out different- Press submitted a text animations of mesmerizing
Two new lawsuits one this of Midjourney through the ly then it seems like it’s fine.” prompt on Stable Diffu- colors and shapes in the
week from the Seattle- chatting app Discord, for The copyright disputes sion featuring the key- museum lobby.
based photography giant instance, users must buy mark the beginning of a words “Ukraine war” and The installation is “constant-
Getty Images take aim at a subscription that starts backlash against a new “Getty Images.” The tool ly changing, evolving and
popular image-generating at $10 per month or up to generation of impressive created photo-like images dreaming 138,000 old art-
services for allegedly copy- $600 a year for corporate tools some of them intro- of soldiers in combat with works at MoMA’s Archive,”
ing and processing millions memberships. The startup duced just last year that warped faces and hands, Anadol said. “From Van
of copyright-protected im- OpenAI also charges for can generate new images, pointing and carrying guns. Gogh to Picasso to Kan-
ages without a license. use of its DALL-E image readable text and comput- Some of the images also dinsky, incredible, inspiring
Getty said it has begun le- generator, and StabilityAI er code on command. featured the Getty water- artists who defined and
gal proceedings in the High offers a paid service called They also raise broader mark, but with garbled text. pioneered different tech-
Court of Justice in London DreamStudio. concerns about the pro- AI can also get things niques exist in this artwork,
against Stability AI the Stability AI said in a state- pensity of AI tools to ampli- wrong, like feet and fingers in this AI dream world.”
maker of Stable Diffusion ment that “Anyone that fy misinformation or cause or details on ears that can For painters like Erin Han-

for infringing intellectual believes that this isn’t fair other harm. For AI image sometimes give away that son, whose impressionist
property rights to benefit use does not understand generators, that includes they’re not real, but there’s landscapes are so popular
the London-based startup’s the technology and misun- the creation of nonconsen- no set pattern to look out and easy to find online that
commercial interests. derstands the law.” sual sexual imagery. for. And those visual clues she has seen their influence
Another lawsuit filed Friday In a December interview Some systems produce can also be edited. On Mi- in AI-produced visuals, she
in a U.S. federal court in with The Associated Press, photorealistic images that djourney, for instance, users is not worried about her
San Francisco describes AI before the lawsuits were can be impossible to trace, often post on the Discord own prolific output, which
image-generators as “21st- filed, Midjourney CEO Da- making it difficult to tell chat asking for advice on makes $3 million a year.
century collage tools that vid Holz described his im- the difference between how to fix distorted faces She does, however, worry
violate the rights of mil- age-making subscription what’s real and what’s AI. and hands. about the art community
lions of artists.” The lawsuit, service as “kind of like a And while most have some With some generated im- as a whole.
filed by three working art- search engine” pulling in safeguards in place to ages traveling on social “The original artist needs
ists on behalf of others like a wide swath of images block offensive or harmful networks and potentially to be acknowledged in
them, also names Stability from across the internet. He content, experts say it’s not going viral, they can be some way or compensat-
AI as a defendant, along compared copyright con- enough and fear it’s only a challenging to debunk ed,” Hanson said. “That’s
with San Francisco-based cerns about the technolo- matter of time until people since they can’t be traced what copyright laws are all
image-generator startup gy with how such laws have utilize these tools to spread back to a specific tool or about. And if artists aren’t
Midjourney, and the online adapted to human cre- disinformation and further data source, according to acknowledged, then it’s
gallery DeviantArt. ativity. “Can a person look erode public trust. Chirag Shah, a professor at going to make it hard for
The lawsuit said AI-gener- at somebody else’s picture “Once we lose this capabil- the Information School at artists to make a living in
ated images “compete in and learn from it and make ity of telling what’s real and the University of Washing- the future.”q