What is art?
With all of these capabilities at users’ fingertips, you can imagine why artists and photographers are concerned. Several lawsuits have been filed, including a class action lawsuit filed by a group of artists against several AI companies for alleged Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations and a lawsuit filed by Getty Images against the company Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement. The artists’ lawsuit alleges that “When used to produce images from prompts by its users, Stable Diffusion uses the Training Images to produce seemingly new images through a mathematical software process. These ‘new’ images are based entirely on the Training Images and are derivative works of the particular images Stable Diffusion draws from when assembling a given output. Ultimately, it is merely a complex collage tool.” Yet others argue that “if trained properly, latent diffusion models always generate novel imagery and do not create collages or duplicate existing work—a technical reality that potentially undermines the plaintiffs’ argument of copyright infringement, though their arguments about ‘derivative works’ being created by the AI image generators is an open question without a clear legal precedent to our knowledge.” Copyright law was murky and complex before AI. The rapid rise in AI capabilities, and the technological complexity behind them, will only compound these issues.
Questions about how we define art and how we understand the creative processes that lead to art lay at the heart of these controversies. Even though humans have long used technologies to support the creation of art (paintbrushes, cameras, software, and yes, even AI), generative AI seems to further separate the human from the act of creation. At the same time, AI relies absolutely on humans to create the foundation of the process by creating the massive amount of original works required to train these models. Does writing a prompt for an image generator constitute an act of creation? Or does art require more than a prompt? It’s not a simple question and it grows more complex every day.
Technology, math, and art have been interwoven throughout history. Islamic geometric art is an early example of algorithmically-derived art that has strong parallels to today’s algorists and the mathematical foundations driving the art they create. Similar algorithms are at the heart of AI image generation. At the time of its invention, debates flared about whether photography could be considered art due to the technical, rather than human, aspect of the process. Charles Bauldelaire claimed that “[i]f photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally” (Révue Française, Paris, June 10-July 20, 1859). It would be interesting to get his opinion on modern issues around monkey selfies, whether photos of paintings are creative works, how to think through photography in virtual worlds, or the kind of image generation that’s now possible with AI. Whatever his opinion, it has become harder and harder to determine the creative act and to separate that act from the technology it’s entwined with.
Though there are no straightforward answers here, these discussions are worthwhile. We may decide, as New York Times’ Jason Farago suggested, to adopt a higher standard for human creativity, rather than reducing our expectations to what generative AI can produce. He writes, “Insofar as A.I. threatens culture, it’s not in the form of some cheesy HAL-meets-Robocop fantasy of out-of-control software and killer lasers. The threat is that we shrink ourselves to the scale of our machines’ limited capabilities; the threat is the sanding down of human thought and life to fit into ever more standardized data sets.”