When generative AI art burst into our lives last summer, what initially looked to many like a promising creative tool soon revealed itself to be problematic. Artists were shocked to find that their names were being used as prompts to churn out pastiche works that closely mimic their distinctive styles, sometimes even carrying garbled versions of their own signatures.
Even when AI-generated images don’t closely resemble any one artist’s work, many also find it galling that their images have been used as training data without their consent to create a product that may threaten their livelihoods (See our pick of the best AI art tutorials and our guide to how to use DALL-E 2 for more on text-to-image generators).
The outrage of artists work being scraped to train AI art generators such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney caused many digital artists to protest on ArtStation as that platform began host AI-generated art. While we still look on in amusement at the weirdest AI images, this technology is becoming no joking matter for many digital artists. Below I speak with a number of…