Can AI Truly Liberate Creativity?
When I was 9 or 10 I told my mother I wanted to become an artist - a painter like Piccasso. She then laid out the following reasons why I shouldn’t:
1. Most works of art take years to complete, while doctors save multiple lives in a day
2. A lot of artists she knew were starving
3. I can’t draw
Anyway, I abandoned that dream after the conversation. I liked food too much. But now, with the availability of many AI powered tools that can generate images in a few simple clicks, I have been revisiting that dream and have recently created a “surrealist artwork that depicts Artificial Intelligence’ contribution to mankind by making art creation more accessible…”
The produced piece of work reminded me of my favourite artist Rene Magritte and or Homer Simpson. And then I wondered, is this art? Or copyright infringement?
Over the past several months, artists and writers are suing platforms over their own work. Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz sued AI art companies. They argue these platforms unlawfully scraped billions of copyrighted images from across the internet - including their own artworks - to train the AI models.
Copyright disputes are brewing around language models too. Authors like Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay allege books like theirs were used to train ChatGPT without permission. Even comedians like Sarah Silverman are suing AI firms like Meta and OpenAI for feeding their material into models.
The issue is whether using copyrighted works to train AI is considered fair use or if it violates intellectual property rights. The models don't copy art directly, but they gain the essence of human creativity by ingesting millions of examples. Does this qualify as transformative use that ultimately benefits society? Or is it simply digital piracy on an unprecedented scale?
Who really owns creativity and how should we value the digitisation of art? Have tech companies exploited loopholes to unfairly co-opt human ingenuity? Or are they vehicles of creativity that has made art creation more accessible?
For now, I believe one way forward must balance equitably rewarding artists and liberating the imagination.
References
1. https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/21/judge_ai_art/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/05/authors-file-a-lawsuit-against-openai-for-unlawfully-ingesting-their-books
2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66164228