I realise I haven’t nearly been as active this year as I would have liked to be art-wise. There are many reasons for that and it’s one such reason that I’ll be talking about in this blog and also how it relates to me cutting all ties with one of my favourite bands; Within Temptation.
While there’s been a lot going on in my personal life over the past year which has contributed to my lack of art one of the main reasons is the rise of the machine; Generative AI.
If you’ve been paying attention to the world you’ll most likely be aware that for the past year or two we’ve seen a steady increase in artificial intelligence, whether that be in terms of customer service, writing or indeed art. At first it was a new-fangled thing that intrigued a lot of us. A machine creating its own images, writing its own words. It was a novelty a lot of us were eager to explore and experiment with, myself included.
Then the more insidious nature of AI revealed itself, and so caused an ethical and moral conundrum for those of us directly affected.
But most people probably don’t really have much idea of what AI is or what it can do or how bad it really is, except for what they’ve seen and read in old Sci-Fi movies and novels. Is it all Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey? Are we doomed to submit before our new robot overlords?
What is Generative AI and why is it a problem?
Generative AI models are fed datasets of images, text and other media in order for the model to “learn” and then regurgitate what it’s learnt based on text prompts to form something “new” but with similar characteristics of that which it has been trained on.
You’ll notice the quotation marks on “learn” and “new” – that’s because while AI can produce imagery and text, it can neither learn from its datasets nor create anything new because it isn’t sentient and has no awareness of its own. All it can do is take pixels of images from its datasets, shove them into a digital blender and reconfigure them into something that vaguely matches the words you’ve typed into the prompt box. This is why you see people with deformed 7-fingered hands, an eye that’s not quite an eye, and folds of fabric that seldom make any realistic sense.
The truth is all it can do is take little pieces from the images it’s been trained on and restructure them into a different composition – forming a “new” image.
And here in lies the problem.
The datasets on which GenAI has been trained on contains billions of images. Where did all these images come from? I’ll let David Holz (creator of Midjourney – a GenAI program) explain; “pretty much the internet.”
The internet, while it can be a great source for inspiration and research, is made up of billions of images which are copyrighted, meaning they’re legally owned by someone else. If you took an image of Mickey Mouse and printed it on a t-shirt then proceeded to sell those t-shirts you would be infringing on Disney’s copyright. You’d most likely be ordered to remove the product from sale, and in the most extreme circumstances you could be sued for damages.
This presents the first problem. Billions of images have been fed into these machines, without their creator’s knowledge. This means they were unable to give their consent, which in turn means they haven’t received compensation for the use of their image.
If you saw a cool illustration online and wanted to use it on your book cover you’d need to contact the artist and pay a licensing fee, this would grant you the right to use the image on your book cover, legally covering you and proving you have permission to use the image in this way.
This was the crucial step GenAI ignored. No licensing fee was paid to the owners of the billions of images fed to their machines. Therefore everything which it produces is built off an unethical and immoral practice.
The second problem which arises from GenAI produced imagery is, again, copyright. But this time from the opposite side. A US court recently found that any image created by AI is unable to be copyrighted because to enable copyright the work needs to be created by a human.
What does that actually mean? And why does it matter? Well, it matters a great deal when it comes to big IPs like Marvel and Disney, or any big name franchise. If Disney created an AI generated poster for one of their new films that poster would be ineligible for copyright protection, meaning you could print it on a t-shirt, print and sell the poster and there’d be nothing Disney could do to stop you.
Furthermore, if you’ve been following the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in the US you’ll know one of the main reasons for the strike is down to AI and it’s use in visual media. As you can see AI is touching every corner of creative industries, and soon it’ll progress into every other industry. if AI remains unregulated we’ll soon find ourselves in a real-life George Orwell novel.
As I mentioned at the start of this article, the dystopian rise of AI is one of the main reasons for my lack of art this year; being worn down by the constant stream of AI generated images that now passes for art. Also, the complete lack of respect artists have had to endure throughout this just shows how little the masses really value art, so why bother waste my time? Especially if the only value my art has now is to feed the AI machines that will inevitably replace me.
Is GenAI inherently bad?
Not quite. AI right now is bad. It’s been trained on laundered images from the internet and in doing so bypasses the copyright/licensing process which the whole creative industry functions on.
But there is hope for the future, though it would require the techbros who created this problem to fork out trillions in licensing fees to all the artists on the internet which isn’t going to happen.
The only other option is to purge all the datasets and rebuild from scratch using only royalty free/public domain images which wouldn’t be a very big dataset at all. They could license copyrighted works into their datasets, but again, this would mean them actually paying artists to use their images, something they’ve proven to be averse to doing up until now.
But what about artists using other artists’ work as inspiration? This is one of the weak arguments brought by the techbros and their bootlickers. Is there a difference between GenAI blending billions of images together to produce a single image as opposed to an artist taking inspiration from a van Gogh painting? Well yes, quite a big difference actually. If you ask five artists to create an image based on van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” you will get five different images, guaranteed.
Everyone interprets things different, everyone has their own unique voice and viewpoint. If you’re tasked with painstakingly recreating “The Starry Night” paint stroke by paint stroke this is plagiarism and would indeed infringe on copyright, but to use another artist’s work as inspiration is just part of how we humans process what we see and feeds how we expand our imagination and creativity. That is worlds apart from actually using another person’s image and claiming it as our own.
Twitter @ZedEdge
Is AI not just another tool like Photoshop, a paint brush, or a camera? Again, no. Those tools don’t automatically create an image for you. There’s a lot of work and skill you need to acquire before a paint brush will yield a finished painting. In an AI image generator such as Midjourney, a simple prompt gets you multiple images; there is virtually no effort required, these two things are not the same. It’s like buying clothes off a website and calling yourself a fashion designer.
Are artists just scared of evolution? Artists had the exact same reaction to photography in the 1800s and again with Digital Art in the early 1980s right up until the 2000s – surely this is the same thing? Again, this is something quite different because yes those things were new art forms, and of course some were worried that these would replace them. But we’ve gotten to a place now where all these art forms have their own place in the world, each is just as respected and they all serve a purpose. GenAI just steals all of that work and vomits it back to the user. How can this be evolution when literally every artist could be out of work because it would cost significantly less to let a computer create the artwork, movies, VFX, novels the mindless masses need to consume? It isn’t a natural evolution, it’s a genocide.
What if GenAI was trained on ethically sourced datasets? If we ever got to the stage were AI was regulated and the companies were transparent enough to show how their datasets are ethically sourced then yes, perhaps AI could become a new addition to the creative community. Until that time it’s a firm no.
So what has this got to do with Within Temptation?
As you all should be aware I was a huge fan of Within Temptation, I even worked with them on their 2020 single Entertain You, creating a poster and various other merch and web design for them. At the time it was a dream come true. Now I’m feeling slightly betrayed.
This year has seen the band continue the slow release of their new album, releasing 6 singles over the span of 3 years. While I hate that kind of release, I’d prefer to only hear one or two songs before an album release, it wasn’t this which caused me to withdraw my support for the band, it was (as if you couldn’t have guessed) their use of GenAI.
In May 2023 the band released their fifth single, Wireless. Accompanying this single was a music video created by AI. At the time they received a huge amount of backlash on social media for their use of AI. Rather than release a statement apologising for the ignorance they decided to just ignore the issue and not just bury their heads in the sand, but to draw battle lines and dig their heals in, releasing a further AI generated video for their sixth single, Bleed Out, in August 2023.
Again, nearly every comment on their social media accounts were to criticise the band for their use of AI, but still the band refused to budge or even acknowledge the discourse.
There was, of course, the usual bootlickers and mindless fans who tried in vain to argue with the artists genuinely expressing their concern that such a socially conscious band would be so ignorant to the issues surrounding the use of GenAI. As of the posting of this article Within Temptation still haven’t acknowledged the very loud and sustained criticism they’ve received over this issue.
They have, however, stated they’d never use AI in song writing, or music production. They’re fine not hiring real visual artists, but when it comes to their own employment they can obviously see the downside. Hypocritical no?
Excerpt taken from loudersound.com
It leaves me in a very precarious position…
Should I still support the band?
On social media throughout the WT discourse there have been fans very much against the use of AI but who have indicated they will still support the band but will only consume the non-AI content (so they’ll purchase the music and the merch, but won’t watch the AI generated videos). Do I agree with this stance or is a complete purge of Within Temptation the only option available to me?
How can I support something that flies in the face of everything I believe in? How can I justify supporting a band when they’re actively harming the art community; my community? In my eyes it would be such a huge betrayal to anyone seeking to make a career out of their artwork. Like scabbing during a strike, there’s a certain degree of loyalty and solidarity that is needed in our industry right now, especially when it comes to the fight against GenAI.
But it’s hard to breakup with a band. Especially one you’ve loved for years, one whose songs are so ingrained in your playlist and daily life that it would be a mammoth task to try and eradicate altogether. I will admit their music stayed on my playlists right up until very recently, and even now I still have a few songs lingering. But knowing how callous and heartless the band are being towards the art community really makes me hate listening to their songs every time they come on.
I don’t see how I could support a band, give money to a band, who have such little respect for me and my livelihood. Why should I reward them when they’ve shown no regard for me, my craft, and my industry as a whole? I don’t even think I could bring myself to pirate their music (the only viable option left to me now) because I can’t enjoy the music knowing what type of people are behind its creation.
Is it final or is there a way back?
For me I can’t see any way back to loving Within Temptation like I did before. Regardless of what they do going forward; whether they release an apology video, donate to an anti-AI fund, hire real artists to create their music videos (surprisingly they still hire artists for their album/single art and more surprisingly; there’s actually artists out there willing to scab against their community and work with them) I just don’t see how I could get past this. Perhaps if after the initial backlash in May 2023 they’d released some sort of statement apologising for the use of AI and claimed ignorance against its ethical issues then maybe I wouldn’t be so hard-line about it. But unfortunately too much time has passed now, there’s absolutely no way they are unaware of the major issues surrounding AI and its continued use. Their chance of redemption has come and gone, along with any integrity they once held.
For more information on the perils of GenAI you can find various resources at the link below:
You can also read some great articles by Lauren Panepinto on the topic here:
muddycolors.com/2022/08/robots-vs-lawyers/
muddycolors.com/2023/02/tech-vs-tech/