An AI work from Ayaz Basray’s ‘Solar Punk Cities’ series
When AI-generated ‘avatars’ from Lensa AI populated our feeds over the past few weeks, many were pleasantly surprised by how attractive the app had made them look, enhancing their best side profiles , as well as set against the background of low-angle shots. Spaceship and Garden. Then the truth emerged, shared and re-shared by dozens of artists around the world: that some of these photographs were as close as carbon copies of copyrighted artworks from living artists. In some, there were even remnants of the original artist’s mutilated signature, so obvious was the art theft.
police art
What happens when art has been literally vandalized by AI without giving credit to the artist or obtaining their consent? According to Ayaz Basrai, an industrial designer and architect based in Goa, notions of authorship, ownership, plagiarism and inspiration already have very blurred lines and conflicted views long before the advent of AI. “I believe the output of the text-to-image system brought it into sharp focus,” says Basrai, who is experimenting on Midjourney. Some His popular works include ‘Solar Punk Cities’ Where he has painted scenes of Indian cities through a dystopian lens. “The structure of the Internet is a redundancy of copies of copies of copies. A replaceable [non-encrypted] A piece of digital art is probably the easiest to copy, replicate or clean up in a database.
Ayaz Basrai
He adds that monitoring the use of digital art is an extremely resource-intensive and fairly opaque process with limited success. And the companies responsible for the piracy certainly know this to be the case.
In the Indian context, our copyright law is structured on the lines of the Berne Convention (Protection of Works and the Rights of Artists). “According to this, if you are creating a derivative work from an artist, you need to take permission from the artist,” says Sandhya Surendran, a Bengaluru-based media and entertainment lawyer. “In the case of Lensa AI, they have taken artworks from different artists and fed them into the AI model. It becomes a derivative work and permission has to be taken from them. And not only in India, but also across Europe and the United States Because they are all signatories to the Berne Convention.” The only exception to the rule is fair use, where artworks may be reproduced for entertainment or news purposes.
Sandhya Surendran
While artists have a right to legal remedy, actual enforcement is difficult. Unlike in the West, where legal recourse is generally swift and prompt, this is not the case in this country. Artists will hesitate to file cases in India because of the operational constraints that come with it – waiting, navigating a congested legal system, and wastage of time and resources. “Artists often don’t have the bandwidth to do it all,” she adds.
There are a rare few companies navigating AI in an ethical way. “We have a Bengaluru-based Beethoven that pays artists to include their works in their AI models,” says Surendran. “This workflow needs to be followed.”
a reductive lens
Basarai believes that telling a story around the speculative fiction is the main event, not just the image. “As a disclaimer, I must state that I am not a digital artist. For me personally, as a dabbler in Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, it is an opportunity to interact with another intelligence – a symbiotic collaboration, and not necessarily as a threat,” he says. “I would love to see this [AI-based] Plagiarism forms the most recent step in a very old chain of plagiarism. Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis movement was copied from houses in Tiruvannamalai, and Picasso picked up the ideas surrounding Cubism from African indigenous masks. He believes that if we can collectively view culture as progressive or regressive, it can provide us with a richer lens. “Whose copy-from-lens lens is reductive and I don’t think it defines the human experience in any meaningful way.”
protect creativity
John Lamm
John Lamm, a Canada-based digital artist, moodboard storyteller and animator – who has worked with a variety of clients including Marvel miss marvel — says artists should seek remediation with their local politicians and find ways to protect their art from unethical use by AI. Lam was one of the first group of artists to publicly call out Lensa, and his opinion was later incorporated into the new York Times And Washington Postamong others.
“People say there are some quick fixes like typing robots.txt in your website domain to protect yourself, but these are band-aid solutions,” he says. “Now that the media has informed us all that AI will affect not only artists but also lawyers and politicians, there is a need to engage with all stakeholders before major companies start lobbying for their products. “
On a personal level, how does an artist who only shares their artwork on Instagram protect themselves? Lamm suggests placing “loud and obnoxious” watermarks on important areas of the artwork (such as hands or key elements). “You can always share a low resolution image of your artwork on social media and link your audience to your password-protected website, although some scraping will bypass your password as well. But need to be heard.
The author is a writer and editor based in Mumbai.