“ink drawing of a swan wearing a crown of flowers, vintage, folk art, neutral color palette”
“photograph of a black swan on a lake, polaroid, black and white, vintage style
“a photograph of a pink swan wearing a crown of flowers, vintage looking, sepia, polaroid”
“portrait of an artist, angry that ai is taking her job, cartoon style”
A few days ago, an artist I follow on Instagram declared that she was releasing a limited edition of AI-generated art that she’d created by inputting her own art as the base image and then letting AI do its work. Oh, the furore that was unleashed in the comments! Most of the negative feedback centered around how AI is “trained” on the images of millions of artists worldwide without their consent, and the alleged copyright infringements this might imply. Some artists have already sued the AI platforms Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney, claiming that the text-to-image AI tools have infringed the rights of thousands of creatives.
Now, I’m no copyright expert, but I know that artistic STYLE cannot be copyrighted in the US or UK - please tell me if it’s different anywhere else in the world. And we don’t want it to be because then there would be gazillions of lawsuits flying around and no artist could make work, since we have all been “trained” on previous artists’ imagery. Gosh, the number of lookalike artists just on Instagram is astounding. So, sadly (or not) it’s perfectly okay for someone to type a prompt into an AI art generator that looks something like this:
“a painting of a swan in the style of Frida Kahlo”
To which AI will say, “Great prompt” and offer something like this:
Or, you could even use the name of a living artist:
“a painting of a swan in the style of David Hockney”
To which my cheap version of AI (I refuse to pay) offers this:
Just as in the “real” world, what you can’t produce and sell via AI is an EXACT copy of an existing work of art that is still under copyright, although creating it for personal use is okay (just as you can paint a copy of the Mona Lisa and pop it on your wall) and who’s going to know anyway? As I write, copyright on AI-generated images is being discussed all over the world and it will be interesting to see how that shakes out. On March 15, 2023, the U.S. Copyright Office announced that works created with AI may be copyrightable, provided the work involves sufficient human authorship. This is how most photographers are now getting around copyright law: manipulating their AI imagery in Photoshop. I suspect, with big players like Microsoft, Meta and Google in the game, and their desire to make money out of AI, other copyright laws will be assigned to generative art. What interesting times.
Remaining on the theme of copyright, I am intrigued by and following closely the lawsuit that artist Deborah Roberts brought against artist Lynthia Edwards and her dealer Richard Beavers in August 2022. What an art soap opera! If you haven’t heard, come closer and I’ll tell you what’s been reported…
Deborah Roberts is a super successful, Black woman artist based in Texas, who shot to fame with her large-scale, collage portraits of Black children. I’m sure you know her work, but just in case, here’s an image from Deborah’s website:
Beautiful and powerful, right? Her work is sold around the world and Deborah has great representation from prestigious galleries. All was good until Deborah spotted artist Lynthia Edwards creating and selling work that Deborah Roberts perceived as “substantially and confusingly similar” to her own. I cannot post any of Lynthia’s work here due to copyright issues, but if you click HERE you’ll be taken to the Artsy website where you can view her art. Understandably, since the case is still ongoing, imagery of both artists’ work is not abundant on the web right now.
There is undoubtedly a connection between the works of the two artists, but as the court papers state, Deborah Roberts “did not invent and does not own the concept of depicting Black figures through collage.” Artistic style cannot be copyrighted, so the prosecutor’s case has to depend on the actual content of the artworks being so similar that it constitutes a copyright infringement. It’s a fascinating case and with all the conversations in the AI realm around what can and can’t be copyrighted, this real-world scenario proves that copyright is a tricky beast regardless of whether the art is created by human hands or a machine algorithm. I’ll post links to the full story below.
All artists have made work that looks like another artist’s style. It’s how we learn. Most schools (if they have an art class) will ask students to create a portrait in the style of Picasso or flowers in the style of Van Gogh. At the beginning of 2020 when I decided to take myself on a painting journey, I spent three months painting in the style of artists whose work I love: David Hockney, Florence Hutchings, Tracey Emin, Alice Neel… That was how I started to learn what I enjoyed about painting and what I didn’t. But I never showed any of that work and I certainly would never have tried to sell it or even pass it off as MY work. The pieces were all art exercises, nothing more.
I don’t understand artists wanting to make art that deliberately looks like another artist’s, even though I understand it might be a shortcut to financial “success”, but then I’m on the “art as self-expression” bandwagon and not particularly interested in what’s required to get myself gallery representation or sales. The seething cauldron of emulation and appropriation that is Instagram has done artists no favours at all about encouraging the copying of art styles: It’s tempting to adopt the style of an artist who has 10,000 followers and wears the “influencer” badge. I’ve also found that if I look at too much art on Instagram then I can subconsciously pick up motifs or styles that then filter through to the canvas. I remember painting a cowboy hat on a self-portrait and thinking, where the heck did that come from? Looking at you Danny Fox! I suppose years ago we’d have called artists working in a similar style, an art movement - do art movements even exist anymore? I’m told we are in the age of “Contemporary Art” but can art do any more movements? What comes next? Post-Contemporary Art? Artificial Art? Isn’t everything art now?
My fear around AI is that we are going to drown under a tsunami of really mediocre art that says nothing other than the “creator” (if we can call the human prompter that) can write a decent prompt. Already, there are Etsy sellers hawking prompt guides, packages of proven prompts, posters of AI-generated images…urgh! How utterly boring and unoriginal. But then maybe originality is over-cherished. As British artist Grayson Perry says, “Originality is for people with short memories.” In the past, artistic originality has partly been driven by technological innovation - Abstract Expressionism wouldn’t exist without the invention of acrylic paint for example - and maybe AI is just another tool that will drive us forward into the next art movement. What I’m certain of is that it’s our job as artists, to manipulate, subvert, massage, and learn to control the tool in order to squeeze originality out of it, and I’m looking forward to viewing art that does exactly that.
Until next time.
JC
RESOURCES
Read about the recent changes to US copyright law with regard to AI-generated imagery HERE
THIS is a good article about the Deborah Roberts lawsuit
Click HERE to read a great article from The Art Newspaper: AI and art: how recent court cases are stretching copyright principles
If you want to see what leading artists in the AI field are creating, head to
Visit Scott Eaton’s website:
It’s the rapidity of this development that feels unnerving to me. I feel we are on a cliff edge, but feel the pendulum will finally start to swing the other way soon with the hand of the artist being cherished and treasured. I hope.
I saw a comment on an FB post... referring to someone who is a photographer but was posting AI artwork that looked very similar to his own style of photography but was not captured with his eye or hand (other than prompt words I guess). The comment was something to the effect of: Just because I go the McDonald's drive-through and order a Big Mac with tartar sauce doesn't make me chef.
That's exactly what it feels like: fast food art.