Visual artists in Iowa are reacting to the advent of artificial intelligence and Meta’s recent update with apprehension and mixed feelings.
AI-generated art became widely commercially available in 2022 with OpenAI’s image generator DALL-E, which allows users to enter a prompt and nearly instantaneously receive a completely artificial image. Although results from DALL-E can vary widely, users have become increasingly skilled at generating impressively realistic images, or ones stylized to look like a particular artist’s work.
Systems like DALL-E have been trained through large samples of human-created images that already exist on the internet — however, the sourcing of these sample images is now causing ethical dilemmas. Although these samples were originally made up of public, free-to-use content, many AI systems are now turning to more private data.
Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — recently launched an update that allows all public posts uploaded to those platforms to be used for training generative AI. The update was only officially announced to European Union users, where internet privacy laws are stricter than in the U.S., and took effect on June 26.
According to Meta’s policy on “Responsible AI,” the company states that people who use their products “should have more transparency and control around how data about them is collected and used.” However, users in the U.S. are not able to opt out of the AI data collection program.
For some artists, this poses a threat to intellectual property and copyright precedent. For others, it’s just plain theft.
Iowa City mixed media artist Jade Aiuchi said there should be no crossover between AI and art at all. Mr. Aiuchi, like countless burgeoning artists, mainly uses public social media platforms to promote and sell his work.
“I think that AI can be useful for research and analysis and making human life easier, however, the art side of AI is awful. Taking other people’s art and training an AI to replicate and create something similar to said art is just theft,” Mr. Aiuchi said. “As far as I know, most of these companies or teams or individuals are not asking permission to use the art, thus the artists have no idea their art is being stolen.”
Some artists on Instagram have started to look for other platforms to post their work, where it won’t be used to train AI. One such platform is Cara, an app created by Singaporean photographer Jingna Zhang, which gained over 600,000 new users ahead of Meta’s June update.
However, leaving the main social media sites is not an option for many. Yuchen Liu is an Iowa City traditional illustrator who relies on pre-existing platforms, but noted feeling distrustful of Instagram and Facebook.
“I personally only use them to promote my business and share some photos of my artwork — not original copies of my artwork — or where I am going to have my art shows,” Ms. Liu wrote in an email. “I have seen these social media platforms have been reforming to generative AI. I never felt curious about clicking into it and I don’t want to contribute to the generating process by clicking or sharing content through it.”
Ms. Liu emphasized that social media platforms are critical for artists to become noticed and that she does not plan to leave any time soon.
“That’s is kind of the only effective and accessible method to promote, especially for local artists like me who are doing art on the side and need some level of recognition and publicity,” Ms. Liu wrote.
Artists have also found ways to protect their art from AI by digitally “poisoning” their images, making them unusable for AI models to train with. Examples include the Glaze and Nightshade filters, which can alter images so they appear unrecognizable to AI, but seem unchanged to the human eye.
Even with these tools, some local artists are wary of the future as AI continues to advance. Joshua Steele, a Des Moines-area landscape photographer, said generative AI can be great for tasks like writing SEO or naming and organizing large numbers of files quickly.
However, he also said AI is complicating the way the public perceives art as a whole, particularly when people assume that real artwork has been generated artificially.
“I think it puts a lot of creators a little bit on the defensive, if we do very good work, and we put a lot of work behind it,” Mr. Steele said. “There’s all the time developing, the entire creative process that we’re working through. We want to be recognized for that, you don’t want to be just immediately dismissed as ‘Oh, well, you just entered a couple of prompts into a program and it spit it out for you.’”
Pertaining to Meta’s recent update, Mr. Steele said it is a clear infringement of copyright.
“If a company was to take my work and use it for some type of money-making activity, I should be compensated for that. And that’s ultimately what’s happening,” Mr. Steele said. “They should not be doing it with social media content unless they have the rights from the original creator to do so.”
Lianne Westcot, a Cedar Rapids plein air painter with a background in graphic design, also expressed concerns about the copyright issues surrounding AI.
“What I do care about is the idea of creating [with AI], and this is a question for me: is that considered an original image? Who is responsible for it if there is copyright infringement, who can you even go to?” Ms. Westcot said.
Looking to the future, Mr. Steele ultimately said the biggest difference between AI-generated art and human-created art is the emotion behind it.
“With photography, what I’m trying to share when I’m out capturing images is what am I feeling in that moment. I’m trying to capture a certain feeling,” Mr. Steele said. “And even if you’re a painter, you’re trying to generate a certain emotion out of an image … And most of the AI work that I have seen, it’s pretty lifeless, it doesn’t have a lot of feelings. It feels really bland.”
Ms. Westcot echoed this sentiment, seeing AI as another step in technology that people will move past, and that it will not replace human-made art entirely.
“I think that things kind of go around and come around,” Ms. Westcot said. “So being able to write or create images and things like that through AI, I think that people will be like, ‘Oh, he just did that through AI.’ Eventually, they’ll value something that they know is a little more personal, a little bit more authentic.”
