Your social media feeds have probably been flooded of late with bizarre yet detailed images you can’t quite explain. Are you seeing an Astroboy-style manga moment featuring Spider-Man at Woodstock? An oil painting wherein Harry Potter plunders as a pirate despite a suspicious number of fingers? Characters from The Office in a Mad Max world?
Chances are, if you’ve suddenly started noting such feverish weirdness, you’re probably looking at a piece of artificially intelligent art, or AI art. And though the tech and its more widespread use are both relatively new, at least at such a level, the implications of such new possibilities are dizzying.
But so much of what is and will happen is still unknowable. AI art has reached ubiquity on the internet, in media and in advertising so quickly, in fact, that no one is quite sure what to make of it, how it will continue to affect arts and artistic types, what legal ramifications might present themselves or even who owns what. SFR spoke with a number of people working in the arts, as well as an attorney, to try and understand the human…
