When art and image generation began to surface on the internet, many thought it was simply a way to get interesting abstracts with beautiful colors (see: early stages of WOMBO Dream) or to generate interesting but useless ideas mostly for meme purposes like the images that show up on the @weirddalle Twitter account.
However, when “smarter” machine-learning image generation tools started popping up earlier this year, namely Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, in addition to the amazing works created by skilled artists with the tools, art theft and plagiarism became a serious problem in the online art community.
A good example of a skilled artist using AI to enhance their amazing work is @NekroXIII on Twitter, who creates these beautifully complex art pieces using photobashing, a technique involving merging and blending images and even 3D assets into one final composition. A common practice in the concept art industry to streamline workflow and convey realistic textures better, Nekro embraces AI in an amazing fashion, generating their own assets to photobash their pieces together.
Regardless of the assistance provided by AI-generated assets, Nekro takes a lot of time and effort to combine the pieces together to make something as well-composed and coherent as the work that they produce. However, Nekro states in the previous tweet, “no names of artists, only objects, as always,” because of one of the main features that attracts issues to AI art, which is the ability to feed other artists’ existing work into the output, whether it be through their images directly or using their name in the word prompt feeder.
Stable Diffusion is currently under fire for stealing artwork, as the developers have revealed that it uses other artists’ work, copyrighted or not, to help their machine learn how to create images better without the original artists’ permission. In fact, they even advertise that you can replicate their styles when you try to create a piece.
In another instance of art theft using AI, artist AT @haruno_intro was live stream drawing Genshin Impact fan art on Twitch and one of the stream’s viewers took the unfinished work and finished it using AI, then posted it onto Twitter as a finished work as if it was theirs. What’s worse, when AT finally posted their original finished piece, the person demanded they get credited.
After the individual promptly got bullied off of Twitter by enraged onlookers, AT then received to get over 400,000 likes on the original finished piece.
While many claim that AI art may be the “future” of art, it seems like many policies and regulations need to be put in place to protect artists from getting their work stolen or ripped off, but it still seems to be a faraway call.
