An artist who infamously duped an art contest with an AI image is suing the U.S. Copyright Office over its refusal to register the image’s copyright.
In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
I like it, it’s more interesting to me than most of the boring “original” paintings people try to sell at art shows and online, and almost all of the stuff I’ve seen on people’s walls in their homes. Not another triptych with 4 circles and a triangle, or a lone tree on a grassy hill, or a bowl of fruit and a wine bottle.
Meh this looks very AI generated to me. Most of what’s going on in the picture makes no sense.
That could be said of much art from cave paintings to modern art, but the important part is that art is subjective. The main issue I have with the people complaining about AI generated art is, they only seem upset about it after they find out it’s AI generated. If you really have the ability to see the difference, maybe you should be judging these contests. The judges had absolutely no idea until it was pointed out to them. If that bothers people, they shouldn’t place any value in that competition.
People enjoy paintings with modern pigments and canvases and synthetic brushes as art, autotuned music (and other post-recording fixes) as art, photographs that use filters and image/color/artifact-correcting software as art, and I see no difference in prompt-tuned AI-generated art. It’s a technology that makes it easier for the artist to arrive at their desired result, and it has the ability to inspire emotions and thoughts in the viewers, in the same way.
I’m guessing there is art you enjoy that I might not, but I am happy you have that available to you. It’s funny to me that people are so strongly against something so innocuous. In that it inspires such strong emotions, it’s arguably more artistic than the hand-painted submissions the judges found lacking.
Perhaps it won merely because it has a lot of details, which is impressive when a human does it? What is happening in this picture? I’m interested in your interpretation.
It reminds me of surrealist paintings crossed with the darker stuff Fuseli and Goya painted. It gives me a feeling of nostalgia for things I really enjoyed but haven’t thought of for a long time, by reminding me of all of them at once even though whatever the prompt was, probably is not directly related to any of them.
Specifically, just looking at it the first time reminded me of a bunch of fantasy and science-fiction story arcs I like all mixed together, with world-building magic or tech, like the Cosmere universe of Sanderson, or the Discworld, or the Hainish Cycle, or Dune; all the portals to different worlds and ways to fold time or space, like the wardrobe to Narnia + the Subtle Knife rifts + The Ways & Telaranrhiod + the Dark Portal to Draenor + the machine in Primer + ansibles and NAFAL travel + spice. The 3 main figures remind me of the Dathomir witches, but also the 3 witches (at a time) in Discworld, the main Maiar in LotR, etc.
It makes me think about all those at once intertwined and how much I enjoyed getting lost in each story the first time through, but how it doesn’t conform to any of them individually, and then try to imagine what kind of different world-building series could come out of it without completely ripping off any one of them. Like, how Shelley and Polidori and Byron inspired each other and spawned both Frankenstein and every modern vampire saga, how Robert Jordan talked about being inspired by Tolkien, how Tolkien and Lewis ran their stories past each other as they wrote, how Sanderson was inspired by Jordan and even completed his WoT saga, how basically every school of young witches/wizards series and instant communication across space was inspired by Le Guin, and makes me look forward to discovering the next author who writes like any of them who I haven’t yet stumbled on, or the next game or movie or show that mimics that style well.
Wheneved I look at the abstract circles & triangle triptychs, I think of Abbot’s Flatland, so I like those ones a bit more than the still lifes, but not as much as something like this image. I do really enjoy Mondrian’s colorful straight lines and I can’t explain why, and tbh that might be the easiest style for AI to replicate. And I’m fine with that, bc a nice quality Mondrian print was obscenely expensive up until about a decade ago, due to moronic copyright laws that didn’t benefit him or even his children at all, since he didn’t have any. I would love for the programmers and prompt writer of this image to be able to make money off its creation/copyright while they’re alive, so they would be inspired to make more like it.
Most AI art haters only hate it after they’ve learned it’s made by AI. In reality it’s next to impossible to tell a well made AI art from human made digital art for example. Ofcourse everyone claims they can immediately tell the difference but even they know they’re kidding themselves. It’s gatekeeping, pure and simple.
There’s plenty of really good AI art and generating it is not as simple as they often make it to be.
Exactly. People already enjoy AI-assisted art in many other forms and they don’t even realize it. When they find out, will they stop enjoying it? They don’t seem to have stopped enjoying autotuned or computer-generated music, or CGI movies, or practically every artistic photograph made in the past 30 years. It’s an arbitrary line in the sand.
Hate the artist, not the art. Hence, hate the AI, not the AI-generated art.
AI is not an artist any more than a paint brush is. Neither can generate anything on their own. They’re tools.
Oh I’d be careful, that undermines the “the AI is an artist in itself” - defense of companies against plagiarism charges. Because otherwise if we go with that, most material would not be allowed as sources for training. The vast majority in fact.
Better let the AI be an artist, that way it’s legal if it steals from others works, but that also means I can critique it as, well, being shit and just doing derivative works. 😛
AI doesn’t copy pre-existing art. It’s influenced by it. Human artists take influence from prior artwork just as well as AI does. Nobody is creating art in a vacuum.
Gatekeeping? Nah, it’s not as it’s quite easy for AI Bros to pick up a pencil. Nobody, except disabilities, stops them.
And yeah AI slop has become so well that rabid people are accusing actual artists that their art was made by AI. But why is that? Certainly not because their previous art was trained on…
Fuck AI. It is used to replace actual humans and human creativity.
The problem isnt that the art is bad. It feeling like its made by AI doesnt ruin the art
The problem is that it is made by AI, that the art has a negligible amount of effort put into it
As a photographer I feel like the same thing could be said of it. Especially when talking about film or polaroid cameras, it doesn’t take much longer than a few seconds to take the picture. I can’t even write a prompt for gen-AI in that time.