Artists fight back against AI

The soul of art Tanya Combrinck speaks to five artists about the impact of AI image generators, and what can be done to stop them

- Tanya Combrinck

When AI image generators burst into our lives last summer, what initially looked to many like a promising creative tool soon revealed itself to be problematic. Artists were shocked to find that their names were being used as prompts to churn out pastiche works that closely mimic their distinctive styles, sometimes even carrying garbled versions of their own signatures.

Even when AI-generated images don’t closely resemble any one artist’s work, many also find it galling that their images have been used as training data without their consent to create a product that may threaten their livelihoods.

Illustrator Deb JJ Lee describes the moment they first encountered AI art in their style. "The experience of seeing someone toss my work into Stable Diffusion and make a model off it was nothing short of devastating," they say. "An artist's voice is a lifetime development that is an amalgam of their visual vocabulary, interpretations of influences, and even their beliefs. It's everything. To have work come out from a mindless machine learning model that looks just like mine, but without the struggle of developing that voice, is a slap in the face."

LEGAL ACTION

Deb isn't the only one to go through this experience, and some rights holders are fighting back. Three artists have launched a class-action lawsuit against Stable Diffusion (see stable diffusionlitigation.com) with a lawyer also litigating against GitHub CoPilot, an Al-powered programming tool trained on publicly available code from GitHub.