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AI is already so proficient at copying a particular artist’s work it won’t be long before filmmakers need to protect themselves from plagiarism.
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There could even be a need right now to copyright camera
moves, editing choices, color palettes, lighting schemes, or compositions
because there is nothing to prevent an AI from entirely generating a new
gangster movie in the style of Martin Scorsese or a sci-fi film that looks and
feels like it has come from Stanley Kubrick.
On the other hand, there will be some in Hollywood no doubt
calculating that if an AI could perfect a hit movie without having to pay for
the fuss, the time, all the micro-decision making and risk that human talent
brings it’s a price worth paying.
This is not idle speculation; the debate about artistic
infringement by algorithm has become a hot one in the art world.
Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag is among those sounding a
warning. “AI basically takes lifetimes of work by artists, without consent, and
uses that data as the core ingredient in a new type of pastry that it can sell
at a profit with the sole aim of enriching a bunch of yacht owners,” he
tells Wired’s Will Knight.
Stålenhag’s style was recently used to create images on the
text-to-image AI Midjourney by academic Andres Guadamuz in an apparent attempt
to draw attention to the legal issues surrounding AI-generated art.
Stålenhag was not amused. In a series of posts on
Twitter, he said that while borrowing from other artists is a “cornerstone of a
living, artistic culture,” he dislikes AI art because “it reveals that that
kind of derivative, generated goo is what our new tech lords are hoping to feed
us in their vision of the future.”
The dawn of a new era of AI art began in January 2021, when
OpenAI announced DALL-E, a program that used recent improvements in machine
learning to generate simple images from a string of text.
In April this year, the company announced DALL-E 2, which
can generate photos, illustrations, and paintings that look like they were
produced by human artists. This July, OpenAI announced that DALL-E
would be made available to anyone to use and said that images could be used for
commercial purposes.
“As access to AI art
generators begins to widen, more artists are raising questions about their capability
to mimic the work of human creators,” Knight says.
Digital artist David OReilly, for instance, tells
Knight that the idea of using AI tools that feed on past work to create new
works that make money feels wrong. “They don’t own any of the material they
reconstitute,” he says. “It would be like Google Images charging money.”
But it’s not clear if the legal framework is strong enough
to protect an artist’s work from AI-generated imitation.
In a blog post, Guadamuz argued that lawsuits claiming
infringement are unlikely to succeed, because while a piece of art may be
protected by copyright, an artistic style cannot.
Lawyer Bradford Newman tells Knight, “I could see
litigation arising from the artist who says ‘I didn’t give you permission to
train your algorithm on my art.’ It is a completely open question as to who
would win such a case.”
In a statement to Wired, OpenAI defended DALL-E 2,
saying that the company had sought feedback from artists during the tool’s
development.
“Copyright law has adapted to new technology in the past and
will need to do the same with AI-generated content,” the statement said. “We
continue to seek artists’ perspectives and look forward to working with them
and policymakers to help protect the rights of creators.”
Painted art, like motion pictures or literature, evolves and
builds upon everything and everyone that has gone before it. Imitation could be
homage or pastiche. Brian de Palma’s work, including Body Double and Dressed
to Kill, was heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock’s film Psycho has
been recreated shot-for-shot by Gus Van Sant, in color. The infamous shower
scene in Psycho is credited to Hitch, but may have been designed by
Saul Bass. There is no clear line between imitation as flattery and straight
out plagiarism.
As AI gets more and more sophisticated to produce
longer-form narrative video, including deep fake or CG actors, the dividing
lines will increasingly blur.
Short film The Crow shows just how far
text-to-video has come.
One worry for
Hollywood is that while AIs might make certain types of production cheaper to
churn out, the same technology could easily be in the hands of anyone. DALL-E 2
and Midjourney, for example, are simple enough to operate by just typing (or
saying) a series of simple words.
On the other hand, there is an argument that AI art
should not be given the same equivalence as art generated by a human. It
should matter, the argument goes, that a piece of content pertaining to mean
something has been created by people who have actually lived the experience.
If AI video is inevitable perhaps the AI owner, the AI prompters, and all of the AI’s data-set training wheels should be credited in the titles?
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