Who owns AI-generated art?

12

October

2023

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In an age where artificial intelligence is pushing the boundaries of creativity, the realm of AI-generated art has become a topic of fascination and debate. However, it brings with it a complex problem – copyright. The question of who owns and can profit from AI-generated artwork is a challenge that’s stirring discussions in the art world and legal circles (Mahari, Fjeld, & Epstein, 2023).

AI-generated art, often created by algorithms, neural networks, or generative models, challenges the traditional notion of authorship. It blurs the lines between human and machine creativity. So, who should hold the rights to AI-created pieces?

One argument is that the person or organization who owns the AI system should be the copyright holder. But this viewpoint raises questions about AI’s true creative potential. AI, after all, relies on massive datasets and human programming to produce art. Is it genuinely an independent creator, or is it merely a tool at the artist’s disposal?

Conversely, some argue that the human artist using the AI should be credited as the creator. They provide the creative direction, select algorithms, and make aesthetic choices. However, this stance faces criticism too, as it can undervalue the AI’s role in the creative process.

This AI-generated piece won the Colorado State Fair, causing large amounts of controversy. (via: Jason Allen/New York Times).

Lastly, generative AI models are trained using human-made images. These images are usually picked from the internet, without artists’ consents, and used to train the models. This, in theory, could also mean that AI-generated art is plagiarizing the art used to train it (Appel, Neelbauer, & Schweidel, 2023).

The legal system hasn’t fully caught up with the nuances of AI-generated art. Existing copyright laws were crafted with human authors in mind and struggle to accommodate the evolving landscape of AI creativity. Nevertheless, new developments are turning the tide against AI-generated content. Recently, an American court ruled that AI cannot hold copyright for pieces created without human input (Reuters, 2023).

As AI-generated art gains popularity, it’s vital to address the copyright issue proactively. A fair and comprehensive legal framework is needed to protect the rights of all parties involved – AI system creators, artists, and the public.

Bibliography

Appel, G., Neelbauer, J., & Schweidel, D. A. (2023, April 7). Generative AI has an intellectual property problem. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2023/04/generative-ai-has-an-intellectual-property-problem

Brittain, B. (2023, August 21). AI-generated art cannot receive copyrights, US Court says. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receive-copyrights-us-court-says-2023-08-21/

Mahari, R., Fjeld, J., & Epstein, Z. (2023, June 15). Generative AI is a minefield for copyright law. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/generative-ai-is-a-minefield-for-copyright-law-207473

Roose, K. (2022, September 2). An A.I.-generated picture won an art prize. Artists aren’t happy. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html

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Blockchain technology in the art industry

26

September

2021

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Started as a tool for provenance and authenticity evolved to a new approaches to collect, and even create, new art forms. The impact of blockchain technology within the art industry can’t be denied anymore. It is clear that this trend, which is still al little vague at the moment, will gain popularity the coming years. How is blockchain applied within the art industry? And what does this technology bring to the art industry?

Non fungible tokens (NFT’s)

The evolution of non-fungible tokens (NFT’s) allows artists to register their artworks through blockchain technology and translate these artworks into securable sellable assets. The digital art piece receives an unique serial number which entitles the original piece a form of provenance. As the popularity of an art piece increases, the more people are willing to pay for some rights to the original digital art piece. In contrast to physical art pieces, NFT art can be shared and used everywhere.
To demonstrate the growing popularity of NFT art; traditional and well-known auctioned Christie’s has opened has opened its first auction only focused on digital artworks by one single artist. This new-born platform is called Beeple.

Blockchain as fraud preventer

One of the biggest challenges of art markets is to verify the authenticity of the art works where the artist is not alive anymore. A report, published by the Fine Arts Expert Institute (FAEI) in 2014, stated that more than 50% of the artworks they investigated were falsified or not addressed to the right owner. The use of blockchain could change this. Blockchain is believed to be one of the most secure manners to transfer digital data at the moment. This reason lies in the fact that there is no centralized version of the information accessible and hackable for someone with bad intentions. Blockchain is able to track and verify authenticity via timestamps on transactions.

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The day AI and IoT visited Le Louvre

24

September

2019

5/5 (5) Since visiting museums became popular during the Renaissance (Findlen, 1989), the industry grown to 12.1 billion dollars (IBISWorld, 2019). Only in the last year, 10.2 million people visited Le Louvre in Paris, making it the most visited museum in the world (Louvre, 2019; Orme, 2019). Maybe due to tourism marketing, maybe due to real passion for the arts, or maybe due to the power of Beyonce’s clip with The Mona Lisa, museums remain a top cultural activity, as shown by a steady 2.3% yearly growth of the industry (IBISWorld, 2019). But in an age when Google Images can give you a better close up to a piece of art, how can museums make visitors have a unique experience while in their corridors?

 

The answer is to make increasingly sophisticated and personalized services, reinventing the entire museum experience. And this is something that can only be achieved through the use of technology.

 

In fact, there are several museums that have already started implementing technologies. For example, through a visitor system based on a Nintendo, Le Louvre is now able to track what areas of the museum are most visited, and what “art routes” are preferred by their visitors. Thanks to this, the museum can have an insight on the preferences of consumers (De Geus, 2018). Another example are the technology applications developed by the Spanish company Minsait for the Vatican Museums in Rome. Through the implementation of connected systems (IoT), Minsait has developed an app that not only tracks consumer visits, but gives real time recommendations on routes and collects data on real time reactions to the works of art (El Confidencial, 2019; Minsait, n.d.). Not only does this allow for improved security measures, but it allows for personal collection of reactions on each Frescoes of Michelangelo.

It is clear that big players in the Museum industry are already looking at ways in which to change the customer experience through the use of IoT and other technologies. But will these develop into a new business model? Some experts agree that increasingly personalized data gained through these technologies might lead Museums to new models. For example, de Geus (2019) proposes a “pay-per-view” model, in which museums would charge a pre-specified amount per art-piece viewed based on insights of the most popular pieces in the museum. His article argues that this model could be similar to the one proposed by Youtube and Spotify, in which artists gain royalty based on the visits. This sounds like a revolutionary business model, attractive to those visitors interested only in those highly popular pieces of art. But a small questions pops up; who will receive the royalties for Da Vinci, Velazquez or Picasso?

 

All in all, we can see that museums are jumping in the train of technology to maintain and grow value creation for their visitors. Benefits are not only growth in consumer insights, but improvements in security and art recommendations. Nevertheless, we cannot forget the core underlying values of museums; a place where to collect finest pieces of art, history, and culture, from which visitors can learn and and appreciate the art of others. If museums start building their expositions and art routes based on “historical” data (the art pieces currently known and popular), how will the public get to know the future Botticellis, Van Goghs, and Warhols?

 

Sources

 

de Geus, D. (2018). Here’s What a Smart Museum Could Look Like. [online] IoT For All. Available at: https://www.iotforall.com/smart-museums/ [Accessed 24 Sep. 2019].

El Confidencial. (2019). Bienvenido al museo del futuro. [online] Available at: https://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/2019-09-16/inteligencia-artificial-iot-museos-vaticanos-bra_2151975/ [Accessed 24 Sep. 2019].

Findlen, P. (1989). THE MUSEUM: ITS CLASSICAL ETYMOLOGY AND RENAISSANCE GENEALOGY. Journal of the History of Collections, 1(1), pp.59-78.

IBISWorld. (2019). Museums in the US Market Size 2003–2025. [online] Available at: https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/museums-united-states [Accessed 24 Sep. 2019].

Louvre. (2019). 10.2 million visitors to the Louvre in 2018 | Louvre. [online] Available at: https://presse.louvre.fr/10-2-million-visitors-to-the-louvre-in-2018/ [Accessed 24 Sep. 2019].

Minsait. (n.d.). [online] Available at: https://www.minsait.com/es [Accessed 24 Sep. 2019].

Orme, S. (2019). The 15 Most Visited Museums In The World. [online] Culture Trip. Available at: https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/the-15-most-visited-museums-in-the-world/ [Accessed 24 Sep. 2019].

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Thinking ahead in the art industry

13

September

2018

No ratings yet. After subscribing to Netflix for watching movies and to Spotify for listening to music, are people ready to subscribe for art in their living room? ArtMgt is an e-commerce startup that is reinventing the way we rent and buy original works of art from critically acclaimed artists.

ArtMgt offers the opportunity to enjoy exceptional artworks without the commitment of spending thousands of dollars. A subscription costs $50 per month and includes insurance and shipping costs. This makes art available to many people with lower incomes. On the other hand are most artists experiencing unpredictability in their monthly income, and ArtMgt seeks to provide a more steady source of income to them. What distinguishes ArtMgt compared to other art rental companies is the website where you can find a specially developed, user friendly art search engine, where you can enter criteria like price category, colors used, or media type and more. As a user, you can organize and save the works online that you are selecting for your home or business. If you want to share your new artwork on social media, you can instantly download it in PDF version. (ArtMgt)

Today’s economy is revealed in what society is consuming: valuing “access over ownership.” People increasingly think it’s more important to enjoy an experience rather than collect and own the products (Haddad, 2015). Millennials don’t seem to have the same collecting gene as previous generations. This doesn’t sound good for the art market, which relies on a cult of possessing (Gerlis, 2018). The art industry has to look for alternative ways to do business. ArtMgt is a great example of adaptation to these changes.

However, they also need to think ahead. The next step might be a version of the sharing economy, where people rent out their art on a platform like Airbnb. The question will be whether that is good for the art industry or not. While ArtMgt’s end goal is to eventually sell the art, a sharing platform for art might make art sales decrease even further and hurt the artist’s wallet. For consumers however, it will be an easy and affordable way to enrich their lives with art. How long will it take for us to start sharing our luxury products like this?

Sources:

ArtMgt: https://www.artmgt.com/

Haddad: http://www.create-hub.com/comment/art-and-the-sharing-economy/

Gerlis: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/can-the-art-market-thrive-in-a-sharing-economy

 

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Is Artificial Intelligence Making Art?!

5

October

2016

4.6/5 (5) So, you’ve decided to read a blog about artificial intelligence making art, one of the activities that is considered impossible for computers to do due to the necessity of certain human cognitive traits that we have yet to understand ourselves? Well, without discussing the definition of art too much, I would like to tell you about the rapidly succeeding developments in the world of AI and how its applications are surprising scientists as they are becoming less dependent on human input and doing unprecedented complex tasks.

funny-animals (1)

To understand how pictures like the above are created with AI, we need to understand how artificial neural networks work.

Artificial neural networks make use of ‘nodes’ and are based on biological neural networks like you and I have. It is a hierarchy of these nodes and each node completes a very specific simple task, i.e. recognizing patterns and ‘firing’ a signal to a node higher up in the hierarchy when it does. For example, one node is specialized in recognizing the slash ( / ), for example in the letter A ( /-\ ). Another node is specialized in recognizing the backslash ( \ ), and when a node higher up in the hierarchy receives a signal of the slash,  ( / ), backslash ( \ ), and dash ( – ) nodes, it recognizes the letter A. In the same way, other letters are recognized and a few levels up in the hierarchy the nodes “Apple” or “cAr” are activated, depending on the other signals. The higher in the hierarchy, the more abstract these nodes become as the combination of more complex patterns increase.

Neuron3

The above is called deep learning and is part of the family of machine learning methods. These neural networks start ‘empty’ and are fed with incredible amounts of data, for example the whole google images catalog of cat pictures. Without supervision of you or me the program learns itself to distinguish a cat from a picture with a cat and a dog in it. Recognizing if a cat is a cat and not a dog is an example of a task that is effortless for humans, but has been extremely difficult for a piece of software to do.

Artificial intelligence is getting smarter. Not only are they telling us which movie to watch or what music to listen, recently there were AI programs that compiled a song, made a movie trailer, wrote a book, defeated the world champion in the Chinese game GO and won the TV show Jeopardy (the last two need a story of their own).

This brings us to the art that AI has been creating since a year. Researchers at Google realized that, after letting a artificial neural network learn, they could reverse the process. So instead of giving the program an image and asking what was on the image, they gave the program so called ‘white noise’, i.e. no object, and asked the program to create a picture of what it saw. As a result, the program started to look for patterns and created images of objects it ‘thought’ it saw, ending in images like these (there is a link behind the image with more of these).

Iterative_Places205-GoogLeNet_3 Iterative_Places205-GoogLeNet_4 Iterative_Places205-GoogLeNet_18iterative-lowlevel-feature-layer

Some people took it further and programmed the program to zoom into the picture it made, resulting in an infinite source of new patterns and new objects to create.

Deep_Dreaming_into_noise_with_inceptionism

AI is getting smarter as not only computing power but also techniques are improving. Researchers are getting unexpected output like the animated gif above and are surprised by the effectiveness of neural networks.

Although I think this is art, there are discussions on whether AI will ever succeed in human tasks like creating art. What do you think? Share your thoughts!

 

Joep Beliën

 

 

 

Wikipedia. (2016). Artificial neural network. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network [Accessed 4 Oct. 2016].

Newsweek. (2016). Can an artificially intelligent computer make art?. [online] Available at: http://europe.newsweek.com/can-artificially-intelligent-computer-make-art-462847?rm=eu [Accessed 4 Oct. 2016].

 Casey, M. and Rockmore, D. (2016). Looking for art in artificial intelligence. [online] Phys.org. Available at: http://phys.org/news/2016-05-art-artificial-intelligence.html [Accessed 4 Oct. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Deep learning. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning#Deep_neural_network_architectures [Accessed 4 Oct. 2016].

Furness, D. (2016). Google’s newly launched Magenta Project aims to create art with artificial intelligence. [online] Digital Trends. Available at: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/ai-art-google-magenta-project/ [Accessed 4 Oct. 2016].

IFLScience. (2016). Google’s AI Can Dream, and Here’s What it Looks Like. [online] Available at: http://www.iflscience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence-dreams/ [Accessed 4 Oct. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Jeopardy!. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy! [Accessed 4 Oct. 2016].

Mordvintseev, A., Olah, C. and Tyka, M. (2015). Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks. [online] Research Blog. Available at: https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html [Accessed 4 Oct. 2016].

PBS Idea Channel, (2016). Can an Artificial Intelligence Create Art?. video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbd4NX95Ysc [Accessed 4 Oct. 2016].

 

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