Ethical AI art generation? Adobe Firefly may be the answer

Adobe trained new AI generator on Adobe Stock, licensed content, public domain.

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[fanartappreciator]

correct. Much like how I can commission an artist to draw an image of the pokemon Poochyena. They would use official art as reference, but not actually use the image for making the art.

I don't agree with your assessment of the similarity of human cognition and machine learning. However, this comment was so outrageous I made an account just to respond.

You do realize that this exact kind of fanart is illegal to sell, right? That major franchises nonetheless allow sales of fanart to exist at a low background level because it boosts sales of the franchise and thus doesn't compete (free advertising)? That Pokemon still has the right to smack for sale fanart into oblivion if it so desires, and that an artist can never sell that fanart at scale? That if a fanartist did try to expand their production and make a competing game using these copyrighted corporate assets it would get sued into oblivion, as often happens with fan games? Do you understand the stratospheric level of confidence in copyright protection that the Pokemon company has? Do you know how many YouTube videos got taken down in the last week because they used still images from the pokemon anime for personal commentary?

The only reason fanart exists is because there are very clear legal boundaries of copyright and the franchise holder has all the power to allow controlled transgressions or not-- and it has made the call to allow it. Fanart stops when the company says it stops. Why. ON EARTH. Would you want that power to stay only in the hands of major franchises and corporations and deny small independent artists the right to the same level of protection? Your attitude towards the law and legal protection is just catapulting the world into a dystopia of legal haves and have nots.

 

[fanartappreciator]

I was talking a while back to a marketing head at a uni. He was observing that the art & design students liked interning for him because he paid them. Most shops had a pool of interns that had to compete for projects. They designed some page layout / picture / etc and then the company paid for one of the pool.

I listened to an interview with the art director at Fantasy Flight Games during the LCG heyday. She observed that to generate hundreds of art pieces for a monthly or bi-monthly release required many artists. She had a website requesting specific art pieces with styles described and artists submitted pieces. She'd buy some of them and use them. The rest were left unused.

Back to the marketing head at the uni, I asked him what the average graduate made going out into the world with a credible deign degree. He observed that the average pay was around $35k per year in our region (lower cost of living), but compare that to the estimated baseline of $41k at the time for a family (all necessities and a few extras).

The point I'd make is that people talk about all the artists being put out of work. Are they though? I'm not an expert in the field, but from what I can tell, it's already a brutal field. Many of them seem to have day jobs and do art on the side because they want to. At best, this might reduce the likelihood of people running a side gig or alternatively, AI assisted art might make provably human generated art that much more valuable. It could boost the incomes of the mid-tier / top-tier artists.

Most artist I know have made sacrifices in terms of hours worked at job per week so that they can devote time to make progress on their art. In the hope of improving enough/building up enough followers to sell regularly. Commissions here and there help to make up the substantial penalty. It would be very hard for anyone not born wealthy to keep making art without that income. Fingers crossed that this makes human art more valuable.

It has nothing to do with philosophy. zunipus said there is no AI art "as per every dictionary ever written". It's semantics.

AI art exists, it is being actively discussed by millions of people, no one have any problems understanding what these words mean. No amount of sophistry can change these trivially observable facts.

New things that don't exist "as per every dictionary ever written" emerge all the time. There was no smartphone 30 years ago in dictionaries, then it was added. The same will happen with AI art.

"So in a technical sense, we can argue it is not art" - you could but why would you? No one claimed it was.

"It has to be an expression of creative skill or imagination" is completely arbitrary requirement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) - literally urinal, "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice".

In December 2004, Duchamp's Fountain was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 selected British art world professionals. The Independent noted in a February 2008 article that with this single work, Duchamp invented conceptual art and "severed forever the traditional link between the artist's labour and the merit of the work".

See, the link was severed. 106 years ago. Forever.

I think it's pretty ridiculous to pretend like this massively overstated claim that applies only to conceptual art somehow affects all artists. Duchamp does not speak for everyone, he just invented conceptual art. Also, conceptual art only exists because it's in dialogue with practices and institutions of art, so this really does not apply to a consumer based pay-per-art-laundering service. Duchamp is not someone the arbiter of all IP law, art school,s individual artists practices, museums, etc etc. He's a guy who posed some interesting ideas while all those things continued to exist.

You can have a concept but unless you're actually making decisions in the process of making the thing, it's not art. Not even performance art, which is much closer to what Duchamp's intervention was (the act of exhibiting a signed urinal). Don't forget the man could also paint and was partially commenting on his own ideas and practices.

 

[fanartappreciator]

Its a gray area. People do sell it. Its not illegal to produce though.

It is not a grey area. It is illegal to sell fanart and you can be sued by the owners of the source franchise and made to pay reparations. You can avoid this outcome if the owner chooses to not pursue a lawsuit, or if you ask for permission in advance.

The problems in this case are 1) directly copying copyrighted artwork, which the fanartist may or may not be doing but the AI would do in training and 2) reproducing a unique copyrighted character design. Many AI models available right now can actually do both of these things, and they are illegal for a human when done for profit. In fact I think these issues surrounding the example of a copyrighted fictional character like poochyena is a great example of why you do not want copyrighted material in your training databases. I hope this makes it very clear why Adobe Firefly's approach is great for anyone with some foresight about potential legal hot water.

To respond to your original point, it is an interesting fact that AI is worse at copying established characters than humans, which tells use quite a bit about how differently we perceive and make images.

The guy is convinced that art requires "expression of creative skill or imagination", I pointed out that it is just his opinion and nothing more. "Fountain" is a good example where this requirement doesn't work.

"unless you're actually making decisions in the process of making the thing, it's not art" - this is also just an opinion. Duchamp can't decide what art is and what is not, neither can you.

I think that "making decisions" is a pretty ridiculous requirement. Midjourney users invent a prompt, then decide which generated image they like and if they want to make variations of it. Stable Diffusion is much more flexible, plenty of decisions to make. So, is it art after all?

"a consumer based pay-per-art-laundering service" - what are you talking about? Laundering of what exactly? This article is about "ethical" AI art generator. All the ethical "problems" people were so concerned about are avoidable. All you need is a corporation with good lawyers and deep pockets. Very soon paying it for the privilege of using the laundering service will become mandatory for artists who don't want to touch unethical open source models.

"Don't forget the man could also paint" - what difference, at this point, does it make? I looked through his Wikipedia page and I think "the man could also paint" is a massive overstatement. "Fountain" seems to be his masterpiece. No wonder it's the most influential artwork of the 20th century.

I think there's some confusion here. Duchamp invented conceptual art, which is deliberately considered separate from visual art. He invented the idea of language about art as an art form. This is not visual art, which does requires your own ideas and execution. Can conceptual art comment on visual art? Yes. Does it replace it? No. Visual art requires effort-- it's not like we kneel at a statue of Duchamp whenever we enter a gallery -- and I don't think that conceptual art is considered the dominant model of art in society either. Nor do I think the didactic description of art that goes into generators falls into a parodic or reflective category, so I don't that works as conceptual art either. In any case, the generator is doing the work, and it can't have intention or creativity, so there's no art. Only synthesis.

There are many other deeply influential artists of the 20th century who were very focused on labor in art.

I'm not concerned with Firefly, primarily just with companies that didn't ask people permission before using their art for training. That seems illegal and unethical to me.

Also I don't think Duchamp got copyright over the urinal just for signing his name on it. It was the event of showing it in a museum that mattered.