Amidst the news that FTXcrypto went under and took a lot of cyrptobros’ money with it there was an interesting development in the art realm recently. DeviantArt; the popular online repository of digital and scanned traditional art had introduced a new policy which meant that any art posted on the site would automatically be included in the machine learning process for AI generated art, unless the owner opted out each piece individually. This caused mass outrage as some people have hundreds if not thousands of pieces on the site and there are plenty of situations when that opt out simply cannot be enabled. DeviantArt responded with a change which meant you could opt out of the ‘feature’ at a higher level, but the default remains opt in. The result of this has been huge amounts of vitriol and it has thrust the growing concern over AI art into the light. For me, as an artist whose goal has been to put a piece on DeviantArt and get a single like, this controversy has now pretty much meant that I will now never use the platform. Let me explain why.
What is AI art
It’s important to set the context for all of this and explain what AI art actually is. Essentially this is an offshoot of machine learning in that existing art pieces are fed in at one end and at the other end you get a repository breaking down the art and assigning tags to it: for example, ‘anime face’, ‘blue hair’. Then when a person wants to create a piece of art using the AI program, they enter some key words, and the AI effectively generates an image based on the tags in its database. This is an exceptionally high-level view, but it gives a basic understanding of what we are dealing with. It’s important to stress this is not art which someone has created on a computer; it is an amalgamation of art feeding code to then produce an image.
This, for me and many, is massively problematic.
The problem
Well, there are a lot of problems but the single biggest one is that already there are vast amounts of art which has been stolen and fed into AI art applications. Earlier this year there was an app which gained brief popularity in the wargaming community as you could put in 40k related key words and get some quite impressive art out. In a short space of time though it was revealed that a lot of art had been stolen by the medium of right click and save as. This had then been fed into the program and the original artist had no method of getting it back. This is not new as the NFT market has seen repeated examples of stolen art being minted and the original author being shafted.
Now in DeviantArt’s defence they are not ‘stealing’ the art, but they are effectively taking the work of others and using it to create new pieces without compensating or crediting the original creator. This for me is in many ways worse than outright theft because it is effectively sticking two fingers up to the people using the site.
I said above there are lots of issues relating to AI art and I am not going to list all of them; but there is another thing to consider. Is the art any good? Well, that’s what I find curious. Personally, I find almost every piece of digital art I have ever seen to be somewhat soulless. It is almost too perfect in both shape, colour tone and definition. It isn’t bad but it is just not quite right. It reminds me of the animated Final Fantasy Spirits Within film in that something just feels off on it. Art is, for me, fundamentally flawed and some element of the creator’s soul is in each piece. Yet AI art is by its very nature imitative of the pieces fed into it and in the resulting mix and mashing it seems to somehow loose the soul that the original retained. I accept this is very subjective but for me I would never buy a perfect AI art print, but I would buy a print of a flawed digital piece.
What is the point of AI art
This is something that is hard to quantify but for me I suspect this trend is inevitably linked to the continued scourge of NFTs. Some digital artists have gone into the NFT market but creation of a piece of digital art takes time, effort and talent. If you can however churn out an AI piece in a few seconds, then you can mint hundreds if not thousands of unique pieces in a day and for the NFT lovers this is the dream. No palette swapped monkeys here and instead you can create unique pieces and continue the ponzi scheme that is the NFT market. I may be wrong, but I fail to see any practical application for AI art beyond NFT but that maybe me being old fashioned and valuing the creation process and time of an individual as much as the finished piece itself.
DeviantArt’s response
It has to be acknowledged that DeviantArt has at least responded to the criticism online, but I have to say that I find the response from them to be at best weak. The main issue I have is that there are plenty of people who will not be able to opt out of the AI feeding default; they could be deceased, have lost access to the email address controlling the account and as a result this will mean that their work can be used without them being credited or recompensed for their work. This, to me, just feels wrong.
Secondly if the default option being ‘opt-in’. This for me is the wrong way of doing things. If you are planning to use someone’s work then it should be for you, the person using the work, to do the work. It should be for you to persuade people to choose to allow their work to be used to feed the machine rather than for them to do the work to opt out. The current default makes it clear that the business model of DeviantArt is favouring the AI route and one would be forgiven for expecting future TOS changes in the future which punish those who opt out.
The final concern I have here is the rushed way the mass ‘opt out’ feature has been implemented. If this was not part of the original acceptance criteria then there is the risk that the code cannot be properly tested, source controlled and relied on. Furthermore, if the default is in and the opt out adds an exception then any code deployment could easily remove that exception and in the time before it is picked up then the art has been processed; and once the data is in there then it is almost impossible for it to be removed. Now DeviantArt may have massive confidence in its regression testing, deployment pipelines and QA resource but when the default setting would process all files unless exempt then that is a huge risk.
The future
Well for me I will not be posting or using DeviantArt in the future. I am not a remotely good enough artist to have my work used for anything, hell I would probably break the damned code if I fed my art in, I have also seen a number of artists online say they will be closing their DeviantArt accounts. It remains to be seen if this is a trend which spreads or not but as long as the NFT bubble exists then it is likely that the AI art idea will continue to exist.
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