In lecture we covered topics on content, copyright, AI, and ChatGPT which were all very intriguing but what caught my interest the most was the DALL-E examples provided by Suzanne. I’m familiar with ChatGPT as I’ve used it to understand AI in other classes but during lecture was when I had learnt that you can use DALL-E within ChatGPT itself. The prompts and ideas you can create in the text chat is insane to see what kind of content AI generates from text to image. I played around with DALL-E by writing simple but obscure prompts to see what the AI would create and it made me think, if people use AI art and if they claim it as theirs, would that be ethical, right, or fair? This inspired me to write about this topic for my essay but in a way that could better understand human artists versus AI-art.
Within the lecture there was an example of a court case (Anderson et al. v Stability AI Ltd., et al.) where an artists work for the most part was being copied and posted elsewhere thus the artist sued but was ultimately dismissed. Reasonings included that it was not proven that the artists work is theirs and hard to prove that AI copied the artists work specifically. Thus, brings in the question of how ethical is AI when you can alter and contort the AI-art into what you want it to be. A classmate did a great and informative presentation on midjourney, another generative AI program via Discord, where it takes steps further into hyper-realistic AI-art. They provided a cool AI generated image after typing to midjourney “The publication of self in the everyday life” by upscaling and making variations for the final creation. It was interesting to note how all four images that were created all depicted a single Caucasian male sitting on a chair surrounded by books in a open background. We then had small discussions about why did AI create a Caucasian man and why was it the same fellow for the rest of the images with no versatility in stance, ethnicity, and setting?
AI is fascinating without a doubt. But I’m concerned about how AI-art will proceed as more new and upcoming programs will continue to generate new forms of digitalized art. With the increase in use of DALL-E specifically through ChatGPT, I doubt that the art industry will falter but I know those artists will face many challenges in regards to copyright, as did Anderson. I wish all the best for print and digital artists because no one wants their art stolen or copied especially from a computer generated machine that could utilize different ethical data.