Artists Rights
On Getting Paid for your Work with AI
I just wrote this blog post you’re reading now. If I published it and saw it copied, transmitted around the world without reference to me— I’d be upset.
If someone copied the words, changed my name to theirs and shared my blog proudly — I’d be sad. If someone audaciously sued me, after stealing my work and publishing — claiming authorship — heck I’d counter-sue.
So what should artists and photographers do about AI lately? What about all the comic illustrators, cartoon animators, painters, and filmmakers? Is it time to ban A.I. forever? Yeah, right! Should Jim in Cincinnati sue Big Tech for scanning his latest social snap? Debatable outcome. These datasets are huge. Plus it would be near impossible for you to prove if any images generated actually used your stuff, and even if so — being along with a billion other images — the payout would be fractions of a cent per use.
Aside: Is writing the hardest art form? What do you think? Some have said playing musical instruments is the hardest artistry to master and create, for the average person. Definitely writing original music (and playing in concert) is up there in difficulty of skill.
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 invent and draw new characters, it was amazing. I drew a few cool drawings but when it came time to create my own super-hero — well lets just say he looked better in my head.
Drawing is super hard! Painting is incredibly hard, creating new styles is hard work despite what so many think about 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 (oil, acrylic, spray, even the paint tube itself) — 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 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 thief, only able to copy others 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 and “The Mouse” of going too hard on copyright protection, keeping characters for themselves of our favorite childhood movies. Some say web3 is going to change this practice but, I’m not sure it would make television better. If there was Disney princess X-rated movies available publicly to your children, would that be “free speech” or a travesty for us all? Ew — I don’t think there should exist offensive content made with lovable Disney 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 them to compliment the artistry.
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 someones “masters” in the music industry, but masters mean that only you can profit. How about this: with AI datasets, we make it so someone can profit from including their data in the MILLIONS of datasets of the future? Think about the explosion of growth. It’s up to the artist and the model-trainer to decide which they want to be a part of, per some (ideally grouped) 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. Try models of business for human-created artistic works but instead of a set fee, 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 “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 get figured out. If every human artist went on strike due to AI I’d bet the AI would get stale quick. No new human works of art as input? Too robotic.
Cautiously, it could go the other way too like an AlphaZero learning from reward and not watching humans — an AI could take art to a whole new level. Perhaps then only the best human artists could step up to that raised level. The “democratization” of art would return to the artist, as the pendulum swings. Artists like Walt — Walt Disney.
On the other hand
Books, books, books. I still buy paper books from Amazon and have them delivered. I like buying old cheap ones in hardcover or paperback. I’m not paying the author but instead, 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 with paying users? It helps to step outside of this thinking to other forms of art sales.
The other day I walked by a beautiful statue around 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 of all the artists — which again takes a career to nurture the opportunity.
Two images above made with OpenAI image generator “DALL-E” version 2. Image created by AI is completely new and original, as was generated using a prompt submitted by author (Russell P. ’22) using “statue” in prompt. These are not real statues but could be similarly built.
If the equivalent of a United Nations passed some worldwide law banning inclusion of an artists work in AI/ML datasets — it seems clear that would skew the quality of AI output for the worse. I think it would change the trajectory of humanities enjoyment of the arts to a local maximum (to use an appropriate 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 toolbox. On and on for 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 Techs clutches, keeping it super private and off the Internet completely.
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, technically and legally). The fee to use someone’s image catalog in a dataset, with your AI app runs on the model trained on said dataset — well it will start high. You wouldn’t have an app without that dataset — but 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. Maybe like a website opting out of Google search, people can hide from the coming wave of AI (see NoIndex meta tag and Robots.txt). Does 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 early days of VHS tapes and Internet file-sharing.
Some will even be successful, with art only visible to them and 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 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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