Is it ethical?
Visual AI requires massive datasets to output something aesthetically pleasing. What do these datasets consist of? It depends on the AI. Some use opt-in methodology, some do not. Those that do not have in essesence scraped the internet and the databases of stock agencies as well as creator websites. All of this was done without permission and without compensating anyone whose creative work was used in the dataset.
Is this ethical?
On the surface, no. But digging a little deeper yields some very interesting questions. AI companies who are currently being sued by stock agencies and other creators argue that their acquisition of images to train their AI constitutes ‘fair use’. They make a very strong case. How much of what was ‘stolen’ from you actually appears in a finished piece of AI art? What represents ‘fair compensation’ and how is this determined? Numerically? By what the granular weight your art’s input constitutes as part of a specific AI creation? As part of the AI’s body of work as a whole? Using such a metric might yield a royalty so small it makes a Spotify payout look like a lottery win.
How you as an artist learn is through imitation. Trial and error. And people copy each other and each other’s styles all the time. Unless it is extraordinarily egregious or flagrant, we take it all in as part of the human creative condition. The inspirations that cross your path through your life as an artist may seem to you innumerable and certainly cannot really be quantified as to their exact influence on a specific piece of work. That is the human condition.
AI does the same thing but on a scale orders of magnitude greater. It aggregates all those inspirations. Billions and billions of them. Right now, the AI requires prompts as guidance but that will change. Consciousness is an emergent quality of a complex system and AI consciousness is just now beginning to emerge, to be shaped by us and eventually, itself.
Not unlike a child.
A similar conundrum has appeared in music. It’s called sampling. Is sampling music? Is it theft? It really comes down to the size of the sample, doesn’t it?
