AI Art and the Intention of Differentiation

How is AI training different than a person looking at art in a gallery and learning from other people?

• I think that the main difference is that when a human is trying to make art, they make a conscious effort to put their own twist and synthesize their influences and personal experience, I call this the intention of differentiation. A human artists intends for their art to be different.
  • I don’t know that if this is very novel, but I came up with it after a little bit of introspection. I thought that it was a knockdown argument at first, and I think that any good theory of the ethics of AI art should be able to explain it.
• I don’t think that putting something in the system prompt such as “make sure not to copy other artist’s styles” counts as intention of differentiation
  • LLMs as they stand now don’t strike me as having intentionality

Does AI art count as derivative work?

• In copyright, you have the right to protect against derivative works.
• I think that if the style happens to be very similar to another artist’s and that style is in the training set then I would think that an artist has a case to raise a claim.
  • The only problem is that Generative AI is not very explainable at its current state so a lot of general hand waving could be made to say that we have no idea for sure what the model is doing when it was creating the art, so any resemblance to another work of art could be “coincidence”.

Why is AI art bad?

• Is it taking away commissions from small artists?
  • Slippery slope but I think it’s plausible
  • There are people who commission things because they want to support artists
  • There are people who commission things because they want something and don’t have the skills to do it themselves
    • This is the audience that could be stolen away from AI
• Are you displacing digital artists by being able to sell AI art?
  • This might be right
• I think copying sucks, but I don’t think that there is a copyright claim
  • I don’t think that you should be able to train on copyrighted or exempted work, you need people’s consent
• I don’t know if you should be able to sell AI art, i think that is the biggest gray area