Artists Rights
On Getting Paid for your Work in an Age of AI
I have just written and posted this exact blog post you’re reading now. Writers like me want to see their work go viral, and we’re happy to have your audience. However, if soon after I published it, I saw it copied and transmitted around the world without reference to my authorship— I’d be upset.
Or if someone copied the words, changed my name to theirs and shared my blog as their own — I’d be sad. Even worse, if someone audaciously sued me after stealing my work and publishing it as their own — heck I’d counter-sue. By posting my work online I’m granted the copyright, and can decide to grant others the right to copy and reuse, or not.
So what should writers and other artists do about AI ? What about all the comic illustrators, cartoon animators, painters, and filmmakers of the world? Is it time to ban A.I. forever? Yeah, right! Should Jim in Cincinnati sue Big Tech for scanning his latest social media pictures? Debatable outcome. These datasets are huge. Plus it would be near impossible for Jim to prove if any images generated on Big Tech’s apps actually used his stuff when creating similar images (the “black box” effect of neural networks). Being along with a billion other images — the payout would be fractions of a cent per use anyways, based on current stock photo prices.
Aside: Is writing the hardest art form? Some have said playing musical instruments is the hardest artistry to master and create new works for the average person.
I did always wish I could draw better. I’d look at my favorite Marvel Masterpiece trading cards [1] and comics, and practice drawing the characters. My brother could even invent and draw his own original characters as a youngster, it was amazing to behold. I drew a few cool copies but when it came time to create my own super-hero — well lets just say “Dogman” looked better in my head than on paper.
Drawing freehand is hard! Painting is incredibly hard, and creating a new style is immensely challenging, despite what so many amateurs tend to joke about original artists like Jackson Pollock [2]. Da Vinci set standards, so did Picasso, the French impressionists, and even the paint-makers who invented new mediums and tools with which to create like oil paint, acrylic, spray, even the tube itself — inventors and technologists changing what’s possible in art forever after.
If you were in 1920 and a guy named Walt Disney came up and drew a friendly rabbit cartoon, I bet you’d think it looked cool, as I’m sure I would have. Of course, Walt’s first character was “Oswald” — a rabbit not a mouse. Vibes of Bugs Bunny.
Walt switched to a mouse after someone accused him of copying their bunny character drawing. Was Walt Disney a notorious thief, only able to copy other’s greatness in the field of cartoon animation? Certainly not! But we must all respect what comes before us, and copyright law ensures this.
People today accuse Disney of going too hard on copyright protection, keeping characters for themselves of our favorite childhood stories. Some say Web3 is going to change this practice but I’m not sure it would make television better. If there were X-rated Disney Princess movies available to your children, would that be “free speech” or a travesty? I don’t think there should exist offensive content made with Disney’s lovable characters.
There needs to be regulation in media, and the advent of AI doesn’t change that. Disney gets to protect their characters in mainstream media, and it seems to work — we all seem to benefit. We can each invent new fun characters, and we should each benefit from our own original creations.
On one hand
How about a fee for including works in a Machine Learning (ML) Model training dataset. It’s easy to track and check what data anyone put in to building an AI model.
Here’s a thought. It costs a lot to buy someone’s “masters” in the music industry, and masters mean that only you can profit. How about with AI datasets, we make it so someone can profit from including their data in the thousands of AI training datasets of the future? Think about the explosion of growth. It’s up to the artist and the model-trainer to decide which sets they want to be a part of, per some ideally collective contract, like label musicians deciding to be included in Spotify or Apple Music catalogs.
If one of these AI products makes it big, artists can stand to make a lot of money. The industry could experiment with business models for human-created artistic works, for example a one-time set fee, or a percentage? Business models abound in AI and Media.
Paying for each user-generation for the applicable data used in training is probably not the right model (due to the“black box” nature of Neural Network models). All I’m saying is, there are lawyers and business people (like Schuyler Moore) that have done this for decades and understand AI. I believe it will be figured out equitably. If every human artist went on strike due to AI I’d bet the AI model outputs would get stale real quick. No new human works of art as input to the AI training, using only synthetic data to mimic new works and train on them? The AI would become too robotic.
Cautiously, it could go the other way like AlphaZero learning from reward, and not from watching humans — a virgin AI Artist Bot could take art to a whole new level even. Perhaps then only the best human artists could step up to that raised level, and go beyond the AI. The “democratization” of art would return to the artist, as the pendulum swings. Artists drawing original characters like our Walt — the legend Walt Disney.
On the other hand
Books, books, books. I still buy paper books from Amazon and have them delivered. I like buying old used books. I’m not paying the author, but instead I pay the person who did. Seems fair. Great reads. I do love a good book.
One day, I’m going to write a book. Do I owe a cut of the profits to every author and their estate, for every book I’ve ever read? That would be crazy, and would take some sort of blockchain Solidity smart contract.
How does one think of new business models? Or are the models best developed organically through the market of paying users? It helps to step outside of this thinking to other ways artists like sculptures are paid.
The other day I walked by a beautiful statue in San Francisco. I bet the artist got a decent chunk of change — it’s a major city. Limited spaces reserved for public art. Now, could you imagine a future where everyone who walks by this statue had to pay a fee? Of course this is silly, and these artists are happy to publicly display their work.
But they probably didn’t get to this point from giving away ideas to other sculptors — they made a name and were selected for this honor in the twilight of their career perhaps. Or it was a grant from the city, but they were the one selected out of all the artists — which again takes a career to nurture and attract such an opportunity.
If the equivalent of a United Nations passed some worldwide law banning the inclusion of artist’s works in AI/ML datasets, it seems clear that this ruling would skew the quality of AI outputs for the worse. I think it would change the trajectory of humanity’s enjoyment of the arts to a local maximum (to borrow an industry term).
I hope we can figure out a middle ground. AI art can be great. Massive profits and upside for humans who are publishing new works of art (in any domain), and a raised quality bar due to the combination of human artist and AI tools. On and on, to infinity.
Some artists will opt out, make a living on the side and be happier for it. No one should have to watch their work be stolen before they can see any meaningful appreciation of value. There should be some right to remove your artwork from Big Tech’s clutches, keeping it private and off the Internet completely if desired.
As market forces operate, competing AI companies will develop thinner and leaner datasets, so they don’t need to pay people any fees for data they didn’t use (and can prove wasn’t used, technically and legally). The fee to use someone’s images in a dataset will ideally and eventually balance out at something fair where all parties are making a profit.
So in conclusion
Perhaps this brewing AI legal battle between technologists and professional creators will come to a head. Perhaps like a website opting out of Google search, people can hide from the coming wave of AI (see the NoIndex meta tag and Robots.txt). Will the world compromise on opt-in vs opt-out, with government regulation enabling fair regulation?
Some artists will use all of their resources to keep their work out of AI training sets, an ongoing battle with lawyers and authorities like the pirated movie battles from the earlier days of VHS tapes and Internet file-sharing.
Some may even be successful, with their art only visible to them and accessible where they choose, for their own selected audience and with no ability for artists to learn from their output as long as they can hold out.
I for one, am happy to include my Medium blog posts free to the world and readable by the robots of the future (humans too — smash Like and Subscribe) but if no one knew I shared these thoughts with the world — even after reading them — well I’d be upset too.
References:
See: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/21/tech/artists-ai-images/index.html
Cover image: eBay auction item image (Oct 31, 2022) Marvel Masterpiece “Scarlet Witch” trading card — 1992–1996
[1] Marvel Masterpiece (1992) collection cards:
Wolverine (1992 MM)
[2] Lots of people believe they can make art like a Pollock, observation:
https://www.jackson-pollock.org/images/paintings/convergence.jpg
Jackson Pollock — Convergence (1952)
How Machine Learning Works:
Afterword from Russell:
Machines Learning, and Humans Learning
Steven Spielberg clearly watched a bunch of movies growing up. Then, he made his own and wow — made a fortune. You can bet he paid for every movie he’s ever seen. Thats not the tax. Those filmmakers he enjoyed also got rich in Hollywood and deservedly so.
Machine Learning is like a human learning yet that will live forever, so they have time to watch every film ever made forever. They also have a perfect memory, and their Neural Network (sort of like — our brains) is permanent and never gets tired — it’s always running at 100% and lasts exponentially longer than our 100ish years of age. A computer built in the next 20 years, may live for over a Billion years. (I. Asimov 1950's)
If you take your 1 image out of the dataset of billions of works of art, it’s not going to have much of an impact on the AI and it’s output. If you take an artists catalog out, probably still no effect for 99.9% of artists (save Picasso, Spielberg, a scoped selection of top artists of Beethoven level artistry). But sure Greg you can remove your content from the worlds AI datasets mostly, and like Neil Young removing his discography from Spotify — so what. No one is better off for this I would argue, the artwork is hostage while Neil makes a point.
I believe including everyone’s public artistic data in the future will benefit both AI and Humanity, but yes of course — only if done intentionally with care for the artistry.
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