AI-POWERED image generators are swallowing the art made by humans to help others create digital dupes.
Photographer Tim Flach, who specialises in stark animal portraits against black backgrounds, is just one of many affected.
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Speaking to The Sun, Flach said: “AI should support, not supply human creativity.”
The Shoreditch-based photographer first became aware of his work being fed to AI bots when an academic from the University of Arts London called him.
AI companies use a process known as scraping, which is where they capture data from the internet, to train their AI.
Trillions of images and pieces of text are pulled from the World Wide Web for use in generative AI – but a lot of it is protected by copyright.
“[She] contacted me because she was doing research and asked, ‘are you aware you’re one of the most scraped photographers out there?’ And I wasn’t,” he said.
“Then I went to Midjourney and I put in, ‘please do a snow leopard or an eagle in the style of [Tim Flach’s] work’… and I get a picture remarkably similar.”
There are an increasing number of AI-powered image generators like Midjourney out there, all being trained on scraped data.
Flach discovered that AI platforms were not just being trained off his images, but were actively impersonating his style, as well as that of other popular artists.
“There were multiple websites online saying you can now ‘recreate Tim Flach’s pictures’,” he said.
Flach added: “I’m always very curious. There’s always a kind of process in the arts where things have been influencing each other.
“But here, it’s the fact that there’s a sort of commoditization [of my work] without my permission.”
The UK government is currently working on legislation that would give AI companies open access to anything they can legally obtain online.
It means all copyright holders would have to actively “opt out” of having their work harvested by AI firms.
It puts the onus on artists, instead of respecting longstanding copyright legislation, which is why Flach says it is “unworkable”.
“What we can’t really permit is the unlicensed harvesting of our work and impersonation of our style that is not remunerated or without permission,” he said.
Artificial Intelligence explained
Here’s what you need to know
- Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, is a type of computer software
- Typically, a computer will do what you tell it to do
- But artificial intelligence simulates the human mind, and can make its own deductions, inferences or decisions
- A simple computer might let you set an alarm to wake you up
- But an AI system might scan your emails, work out that you’ve got a meeting tomorrow, and then set an alarm and plan a journey for you
- AI tech is often “trained” – which means it observes something (potentially even a human) then learns about a task over time
- For instance, an AI system can be fed thousands of photos of human faces, then generate photos of human faces all on its own
- Some experts have raised concerns that humans will eventually lose control of super-intelligent AI
- But the tech world is still divided over whether or not AI tech will eventually kill us all in a Terminator-style apocalypse
Last week, experts at the University of Cambridge urged the government that its “opt out” strategy puts an unfair burden on creatives.
“Going the way of an opt-out model is telling Britain’s artists, musicians, and writers that tech industry profitability is more valuable than their creations,” said Professor Gina Neff, executive director at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge.
“Ambitions to strengthen the creative sector, bolster the British economy and spark innovation using [generative AI] in the UK can be achieved – but we will only get results that benefit all of us if we put people’s needs before tech companies.”
Creative industries contribute around £124.6billion to the UK’s economy each year, according to the study.
Flach added: “Legislation is slow to respond and the tech companies are way ahead.
“They’ve been stealing the work for years now, and building data sets to create images like us. They have basically scraped us and human creativity.”
The Sun has contacted Midjourney for comment.
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