So I think we may have a crux—are “independent experiences” necessary for work to be transformative enough to make the use of existing art OK? If so, do the experiences of the human user(s) of AI count?
Here, I suspect Toby contributed to the Bulby image in a meaningful way; this is not something the AI would have generated itself or on bland, generic instructions. To be sure, the AI did more to produce this masterpiece than a camera does to produce a photograph—but did Toby do significantly less than the minimum we would expect from a human photographer to classify the output as human art? (I don’t mean to imply we should treat Bulby as human art, only as art with a human element.)
That people can prompt an AI to generate art in a way that crosses the line of so-called “stylistic forgeries” doesn’t strike me as a good reason to condemn all AI art output. It doesn’t undermine the idea that an artist whose work is only a tiny, indirect influence on another artist’s work has not suffered a cognizable injury because that is inherent in how culture is transmitted and developed. Rather, I think the better argument there is that too much copying from a particular source makes the output not transformative enough.
You could argue that Toby’s contribution is more what the commissioner of an artwork does than what an artist does.
On the question of harm, a human artist can compete with another human artist, but that’s just one artist, with limited time and resources. An AI art model could conceivably be copied extensively and used en masse to put all or many artists out of work, which seems like a much greater level of harm possible.
So I think we may have a crux—are “independent experiences” necessary for work to be transformative enough to make the use of existing art OK? If so, do the experiences of the human user(s) of AI count?
Here, I suspect Toby contributed to the Bulby image in a meaningful way; this is not something the AI would have generated itself or on bland, generic instructions. To be sure, the AI did more to produce this masterpiece than a camera does to produce a photograph—but did Toby do significantly less than the minimum we would expect from a human photographer to classify the output as human art? (I don’t mean to imply we should treat Bulby as human art, only as art with a human element.)
That people can prompt an AI to generate art in a way that crosses the line of so-called “stylistic forgeries” doesn’t strike me as a good reason to condemn all AI art output. It doesn’t undermine the idea that an artist whose work is only a tiny, indirect influence on another artist’s work has not suffered a cognizable injury because that is inherent in how culture is transmitted and developed. Rather, I think the better argument there is that too much copying from a particular source makes the output not transformative enough.
You could argue that Toby’s contribution is more what the commissioner of an artwork does than what an artist does.
On the question of harm, a human artist can compete with another human artist, but that’s just one artist, with limited time and resources. An AI art model could conceivably be copied extensively and used en masse to put all or many artists out of work, which seems like a much greater level of harm possible.