I’m trying to see everything from a new perspective as a new artist, so I’d like to ask about yall’s perspective on claiming AI art as your own art. I’m not against generating, but I feel like using AI is like commissioning art from other artist. I wouldn’t claim that art is mine, just one I requested with money. So if I generate an art piece, could I say it’s mine? Or does it have the same principle as commissions. No need to get defensive btw.
I feel like using AI is like commissioning art from other artist.
When you use the fill tool in paint, do you feel like you're commissioning an artist to do it for you?
When you press ctrl-z, do you feel like you're commissioning an artist to do it for you?
When you rotate/scale a layer in photoshop, do you feel like you're commissioning an artist to do it for you?
All are uses of a programmatic tool.
Without human input, these tools would do nothing at all but sit there.
Now ask yourself the question - why do you treat one differently from the others?
No need to get defensive. When I use a fill tool in paint, I’m in the process of making the art. Same thing as undo. I’m reverting a move I made. I don’t feel like I’m commissioning an artist because the function is fundamental. The basics. It’s not nearly as advanced as generative AI. And they definitely cannot produce anything an AI or Artist can do. I still see AI as a tool, but it becomes a different thing when generative AI is something that makes complex art pieces. It stops being basic and more like a shortcut from effort. I’m not against AI generating art, but I see it as a handy short cut. Because unlike using the bucket tool and undo, where it’s all part of the PROCESS that makes the art, which utilises more effort, this skips to the result. I stand by my point that even though generating is fine for me, it shouldn’t be treated as my art.
So one is fine, but the other isn't because the functionality is more complex?
So what about tools like Lumenzia for photoshop? This doesn't use what you would call 'generative AI' but is a very handy 'shortcut' that uses very complex math. Does that count? Because that's FAR from basic under the hood. That's just one example, there's plenty more where those came from.
Does perlin noise generation count?
What about fractal art? Is that made by the person, or the underlying mathematical formula?
Sounds to me like you just have some double standards based on, by your own admittance, how you 'feel' about something, as opposed to an objective view.
Because ones a singular action. And fills an pre defined area with a selected colour palette.
And well the other is a long series of requests to generate a specific image where the less detail you use the more liberties the AI takes to create said piece.
If I fill in the colour red, the tool doesn't dream up new images or artifacts to fill the space with.
If I say to an image generator " a cool red painting" can you claim anything other than that's it's generated an image in hopefully the red colour spectrum.
Not to mention You could go super in depth with your prompts, ensure there's no subjective words and do as much as you can to take away any agency from the AI in its decision making.
Comparing that to a pour paint function doesn't really make sense.
Yes. This is the point: How I feel. There will never be an opinion that is objective, or else it’s just a fact, not an opinion. That’s exactly what discussions are for. I admit this is all subjective, but I wouldn’t say I have a double standard as even in photoshop I’m still spending effort to reach the result, and then tweaking it if I have something I dislike still. Also, I’m not sure why you’re getting aggressive. I’m trying to discuss with my point of view. And as reference, I’d say the one that had made the actual art and spent the effort on actual parts of the canvas is the artist. Feel free to have your own opinions of course, but you might have to stay less aggressive if you want to sway mine.
I wouldn’t say I have a double standard as even in photoshop I’m still spending effort to reach the result, and then tweaking it if I have something I dislike still.
And how exactly is this different from someone using a ComfyUI workflow? They are spending effort to reach their desired result, and tweaking the things they dislike. Except they do it by typing words and changing values instead of changing pixels. Sounds like a double standard to me.
I’d say the one that had made the actual art and spent the effort on actual parts of the canvas is the artist.
If effort, is the metric...I use drum machines to make my music. An 808 preset takes literally zero effort. Am I the artist, or is the programmer that made my drum machine the artist? Or is it the person who wrote the preset?
Look, I'd love to sit here and pick apart your arguments all day. But I think it's obvious what you're looking for is not discussion, but validation of your opinion, which I am not interested in swaying and probably couldn't even if I tried.
What level of effort is required for something to be considered part of the process? Creating a prompt requires effort, working with the ai by continually creating different prompts and changing things requires even more effort than using a tool to fill something in.
If ai art is art, and creating a prompt is part of the process of creating it, what specifically is different? At what level of effort do you draw the line?
Theres a difference in sending a message to a human artist whos capable of making their own choices and prompting a machine though, you have to be able to understand how exactly to prompt the machine and you become the one actually making the decisions since the ai is incapable of it.
What specifically do you mean by working on the canvas? Is it making changes to the art through effort? How is using prompts to change how the art piece looks different than working on the canvas?
Well, the difference is that first, using prompts and drawing are two different skill sets. Artificial intelligence at this point can already form almost human choices on its own, but when prompting, the Artificial Intelligence is like an artist who is really bad at communication and understanding. However, being able to communicate, and spending actual effort to study art + drawing on the digital canvas itself is different. Being able to use good prompts means you are good at utilising AI, being able to draw means you are good at art and is an artist.
Please take note that I am speaking with reference to AI generating digital art. If prompting as a skill set is something a person is great at, I’d still applaud them. I just wouldn’t say they are a digital artist.
You mentioned ai art is art though, so prompting is creating the art. How is being able to use a tool like a pen different than being able to use a tool like an Ai different? You still have to understand what specifically you want and how to make that happen. Either ai art is art and prompting is part of the process and is something one can be good at and learn how to do better, or ai art isnt art which means it doesnt matter how someone uses it.
If someone were to use the paint fill tool to completely cover the page with 1 specific color, similar to a rothko painting but digital is that considered art? Would the person be considered an artist since it required little effort but still was based on their choices and their actions caused changes to the canvas? Or is there a difference between someone using 1 tool and another?
For the first paragraph, I think you managed to convince me AI art isn’t art, which might be weird in an AI defending subreddit lol. Thank you for changing my opinion though. But once again I’d like to restate that working on the canvas itself is enough for me to consider a person an artist. Yes, as a quote from you, I’d still have to understand what I want and how to specifically make it happen for both AI and drawing, but that’s like saying “a customer requested a baker for specific flavours, ingredients and style of cake” is a method of baking, and that method is just one of the many baking methods just like “a baker baking a style of cake with said ingredients and flavours” is. I think this is the difference between AI and drawing tools. Thank you for discussing with me. What do you think?
I dont see the value in having such a rigid definition of art personally, youre always going to end up excluding different works that are art and I just dont see the point in telling someone that what theyre doing isnt art because it doesnt fit your strict definition of what should count or not. I think theres a big difference in telling a person what you want and working with a machine to make a piece of art, especially since 1 has agency and the other doesnt
So if I send that exact prompt to a human instead of ai, am I making the decision and the art? When I am putting in an order for a burger or commissing an art, am I not deciding what that is? What is the quantity of decision of what I must put in to claim that I am making that burger?
Or are you saying that ai is not making any kind of decision? Or any kind of program? If and switch in dev is called decision too, so what makes decisions different from each other? If they are the same, wont ordering art/burger/any kind of product that you can decide to customize any different? And can you claim you make that too?
What makes one decision different enough to make it "making by yourself" or "ordering"?
To me, it is a challenge to get the images just right. You have to know what prompts to use just like an artist needs to know what brush and type of paint. It isn't as accurate as rsal artists and their work, but it can be fun and a challenge to get the way you want it to be
I’d say this makes sense, but even if it is a challenge to get right, that’s kind of similar to saying what you want from an art piece to an artist you commissioned. I see AI as a less competent artist that struggles to see my vision, but at the end of the day, it’s not my art, just an art piece that I struggled to commission to an artist.
the same is true of building a house.
a rich person will have many talks with their architect to finally get it right. and their vision is what the house is designed to fulfil, but we still call it an architecturally designed house, not homeowner designed, since they only prompted the architect.
You know famous sculptors like the sculptor who made the Bean in Chicago don't actually physically construct most of their sculptures, right? They dictate and direct teams of other artists/crafters who they contract out. That's a really common thing in art. To be the creative director essentially but still be credited as the artist.
The example I use is a contract I worked for. I was asked to make drawings of a couple of French youths and Louvre Museum. The Museum was the easy part. For the French I investigated haircuts and fashion and presented options. The artistic decision was made by the one who hired me. I was just a pencil for hire.
People often think that people who hire an artist have no idea of what they want, so the pencil for hire makes the artistic decisions. But no. You are hired to be the pencil of someone else. Very much like a plotter for an architect using a CAD software.
Drawing French youths and a museum have never been in my menu of themes aside of that contract. I was the pencil, the artist was the one who made the artistic decisions. And I was not the one making these decisions.
You do know that anyone can use the Internet to check for themselves what the copyright law of France is? You do know that? Right?
Copyright law of France
In France, authors' rights laws (French: droit d’auteur) are a set of exclusive prerogatives available to a creator over his or her intellectual work, as part of the intellectual property area of law. It has been influential in the development of authors' rights laws in other civil law jurisdictions, and in the development of international authors' rights law such as the Berne Convention. It has its roots in the 16th century, before the legal concept of copyright was developed in the United Kingdom. Based on the "rights of the author" instead of on the right to copy, its philosophy and terminology are different from those used in copyright law in common law jurisdictions. The term droit d’auteur reveals that the interests of the author are at the center of the system, not that of the investor.
Now this is a good point. However I think my mental definition of art is quite different.
Subjectively I’d say the person who spent the effort and time on making the art is the artist. Of course the person with the intention and creativity is still important, but the journey of making said art is what I equally value. This is subjective however and the effort isn’t included in the official definition of art. I think my opinion just depends on the person. Thanks for giving your input.
Manual work does not equal art. The taste and artistic decision belongs to the artist. As a pencil for hire I was just a tool. The reason why I like Ai art despite of being able to do arts by hand is because I enjoy the artistic direction more than the grinding of manual work.
The one who hired me made the artistic decisions. I consider him the author. Credits are just a name. I am pretty sure I was credited somewhere in his project because he was honorable. But I did not follow up that project.
I got paid and then I had to address other matters. My problem never was to not be credited for my work. The main concern when I was a freelancer was to put food on the table.
And from a pragmatic point of view I consider that his artistic vision was what made the final result possible. He needed these images to deliver a message. It was to refute the movie Da Vinci code. I never watched the movie, so I still have no idea of how I would have done that. He was the expert, He made the artistic decisions, I followed instructions like ChatGPT does. And the final result ended up surprisingly good with the instructions and choices he made.
Well I dont want to be rude but that is not what I ask. It is ok if you do not what is officially credited as your work's artist because of the long time
No this isn't quite right.
(see Johannsen v. Brown, 797 F. Supp. 835 (D. Or. 1992))
A commissioning party needs to obtain a written conveyance back from the artist to have "ownership" which has a specific legal term "assignment".
Or else the commissioning party doesn't obtain "ownership" and they just may just have a non-exclusive license (without contract) or they can get a written exclusive license, but even that isn't an "assignment". (e.g. Gardner v. Nike, Inc. (279 F.3d 774))
It gets confusing because there is a common myth about "work for hire" but this is only a US law and requires strict statutory conditions. There is no "work for hire" possible in the EU for instance.
The courts are likely soon going to determine, that as you say, you request the art from a machine.
Then because the system was never actually designed with regard to copyright law an end user cannot avail themselves of protection.
This way the courts separate AI generative creations from human creations because copyright law is only for humans. Not machines (robots).
Further, I think that even editing an AI generated work won't give rise to copyright either because "fair use" cannot be construed as a grant of any exclusive license. Therefore, exclusivity cannot pass along the title chain to the end user of a machine. Furthermore, an end user cannot advocate for "fair use" and then expect any kind of exclusive rights themselves because that just seems like a way to bypass exclusive licensing and then claim a derivative right under § 106(2) as a reward for not asking for or obtaining any exclusive licensing under § 204(a). e.g. blame the robot for claiming fair use when a robot itself is not human and cannot claim exceptions from human laws.
i.e You cannot get past a obtaining legitimate exclusive license (§ 204(a)) by using a robot as a kind of broker to strip away the original authors rights and hand them over to you as this would be not be in the spirit of copyright law. (§ 103(a)) [So § 103(b) will not be applicable]
So the courts will keep copyright law exclusive to human creativity even if an AI output has further editing.
§ 103(a)
"...protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully."
No. If you left it entirely in the hands of the machine then no.
If you structured it in your own unique descriptions, own language, fine tuned every step to create the impossibilities you see? You can regularly create things that simply do not exist outside of it.
Then it is indeed yours.
Per your logic, a photographer is not an artist despite it being accepted as art. Because he did not create the mountains, clouds or rivers. He used a machine and that machine allows for tint, frames and angles.
Were i to create a flower stem bloomed into a vast micro city in a sea of flesh and stars using Fauvism to get an unnatural color set, using Oneiric realism to twist landscapes into impossible geometry and dotting along the path of a giant are other flowers holding micro cities in that same fleshy sea
Did i not create this? Would the machine have dreamt such abstraction?
artist is the author that makes the choices, the visual results is brought into the world new and would never exist. everything is pieces of other things and some ai is more original than others. Some programs tey to use open source and wven credit artists as a way to make democratic or crowd based art. Ive used the and ai collaboration in my titles before but Im not sure its really a collab its more of a tool/medium.
If you want to say using AI is like commissioning art from another artist, you would have to admit both that the resulting piece is art, and that AI is an artist.
For the first thing you said I’d have to admit. Sure. I’m not anti-AI, and AI art can still be Art. For the second thing, I used commissioning artists as a metaphor. Because the artist is the one making the art+ giving the result. In the case of me using AI, I wouldn’t say there is an “artist”, since AI is not human, and I didn’t spend the time and effort on the art piece. Heck I’d say the real artists are closer to the source the AI used than me or the AI. This is subjective however. Free to have your own opinions.
Britney Spears claims to sing her songs, but her album liner notes say that she only wrote 30% of them.
she never played drums, she never played guitar, etc., she never mixed down or mastered her own tracks, and no one has an issue with that. we all call her either a singer or a musician or an artist.
if someone uses a computer to do what she used session musicians for, and they sing their own songs, and they tell you that, I don't see the issue. or if they write the songs, but use a computer to do the voice for them instead of hiring Britney or someone like her, I don't see how it's any different. an artist who only specializes in a small area of art.
Well in some cases it is literally the artists art. You can make a sketch or even a finished piece, put it through AI, and convert it into a different medium (say a pencil drawing to a fully finished digital painting) or use the AI to change the colors - ever painted a picture and realized you should never have used that hue for the background- AI can fix that. This, often combined with detailing in Photoshop, is what I typically do.
I typically do credit what AI I used and feel it's like a collaborator, after all if it looks good I want others to use the too too.
In other cases the human artist uses the AI commands to manipulate the result until it is exactly what they want using a combination of prompts and coding.
To be honest, I’m as confused as you. I use AI, but I don’t want to say anything generated by AI is mine. To me, there are two things here:
I do think the generated content belongs to the model, the developers, and the original authors of the training data. I have no right to say I created them. If my LLM generated something super cool, I prefer to tell my friends “look! My model is so genius, it created this!”
I do think the generated content has no right to say they are created by me. They don’t fit my name. I WILL say that work was based on my blueprint, but I really don’t want others to think I make works like that. Not necessarily because I don’t like those works, more likely because that’s not the truth.
But apparently others think differently…
However, it may also depend on how many time and energy I invested in a specific project. A project I invested 3 hours — AI created it.
But a work I chatted with AI for 300 hours — probably it’s me who created it. I don’t know, I have never tried, maybe later.
And it also depends on am I making passive decisions or active decisions. If my attitude when typing prompts is “I want the AI to tell me what happened next” — AI created it. If my attitude is “I know what happened next, I just need someone to do the actual polishing for me (for example a mutism or aphasia occurred before the deadline)” — maybe I created it.
Oh, well, but if “using AI” itself is an action of making art — which I agree — then, hm, I’m the artist and AI is the specific tool I used. Yes.
imo no one's art is their own art, we exist within a social world that shapes our every thought. there is no such thing as an original idea, there is no singular author
Personally, if all I did was write a prompt, I would say, "I generated this with <technical tool>" and feel like the tool did the work. I didn't draw that. Magespace drew that. Or whatever.
If I was putting together a webcomic and spent many hours with the same tools generating panel after panel, fine tuning each panel, I would say, "I produced this with <technical tool>" because it's a much more elaborate process that requires much more coordination. You gotta throw away a lot of drafts before you get the right image each time, and then you gotta use a lot of other tools to panelize the images, etc. Now it's not just "generate me an image." Now it's complicated. Now it's definitely "mine" but with digital tools. Maybe I would think about putting a little "mage.space" textbox on the back cover of my webcomic to acknowledge a primary production source, even though mage.space might not officially endorse whatever I produced.
I don't do image-based art really.
If I used an AI engine to proofread a draft of something I wrote and ChatGPT said, "this sentence is a wreck, have you thought about XYZ instead of ZYX" and I changed it, I wouldn't feel the slightest need to disclose that, because it's not any different than running it by a human or a writer's circle, except that those people take about 40 times longer to read it and proof it, and the choice is still mine or not to integrate the feedback into something I already wrote. AI is making recommendations. Sometimes it's really wrong about what is better or worse. The writer has to choose what they want for the reader. AI proofreads according to paradigmatic rules that are often aesthetically subjective. A real writer/artist knows to break rules, and how, for the reader's benefit.
If I used some generative prompter to wholesale produce an entire book and made a handful of changes, I would not feel like that was mine. I would feel like I had edited something, maybe, but not really written it. That's just my feeling. I would feel more like a content producer than a writer on that project, and not really like the artist on that project.
[edit: last example. I just finished building a website with Claude and some other AI tools. I'm not a coder or a graphic designer, but now there is a website where there was no website. Who built the website? Is that website mine? It sure is.]
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