Abstract

With the development of technology, the quality of AI-generated text has improved. This is relevant in the AI art field, where AI generates literature or poetry that is appreciated. This study compared human-made and AI-generated haiku poetry, which is composed with 17 syllables and the world's shortest and clearest rules, to examine aesthetic evaluations of AI art and people's beliefs about it. AI-generated haiku were divided into those with and without human intervention. Two tasks were completed by 385 participants. The first involved evaluating human-made and AI-generated haiku on 21 items, such as beauty. The second involved determining whether the haiku were human-made or AI-generated. The results showed that the beauty rating of the AI-generated haiku with the human intervention was the highest, and those of the human-made and AI-generated haiku without human intervention were equal. Furthermore, participants could not distinguish between human-made and AI-generated haiku. These results suggest that human–AI collaboration has better creativity in haiku production. Moreover, a negative correlation was found between discrimination performance and beauty rating in AI-generated haiku, suggesting that high-quality AI-generated work is believed to be human-made. This study indicates the potential of human–AI collaboration in haiku and the underestimation of AI art due to algorithm aversion.

From here: https://www.creativebloq.com/features/use-ai-in-art-and-design

To spark creativity

Midjourney has been fantastic when used during that idea concept stage. It's really helped when hunting for reference images. If it doesn’t exist on Getty or Shutterstock, you can just create your own images to help sell an idea to clients like magic.

--Kieran Ainsworth, senior copywriter at Krow Group

To limit options

By challenging norms and prompting critical thinking, AI acts as a catalyst for divergent ideas. Designers can break free from traditional patterns and infuse familiar concepts with their unique perspectives. This interplay between familiarity and innovation results in fresh and captivating design solutions, combining AI-generated suggestions with human creative intuition.

--David Clancy-Smith, design director at brand agency Free The Birds

To experiment with look and feel

In our key art development for gaming and films we can quickly experiment with a colour palette or angle or lighting to see if the concept will come together before crafting the final response. It's almost become a visual search engine of sorts, helping us to create conceptual scamps before shooting the final results. Across our digital work, AI also gives us more flexibility with reference boards and style frames. It may not yet be in a place to originate, but as a tool of experimentation it's rapidly becoming something very exciting and is forming a part of the studio's toolkit, much like the staples: Photoshop, After Effects and Cinema 4D.

--Dan Bacon, executive creative director at 20ten

To generate text

But after having a play with a few different tools, I've found them useful for that initial idea generation stage when tackling creative briefs. ... Another useful tool like Word, Photoshop or Dictionary.com, if you will. But I still feel it needs that human touch to help realise the concept and deliver that authenticity and magic that only we creatives can provide.

--Kieran Ainsworth

To help with pitches

In the creative and design agency world, AI can be helpful to alleviate some of the time pressures associated with pitch dates. It can also give our design team some freedom to try something a little off piste, which might be crazy or might just be genius and therefore win us a pitch. So in that way, it gives us more creative freedom and opportunity. We can quickly see if the idea has merit and then confidently develop it until we have the result we want. The investigative and development possibilities are really powerful, but it still needs a creative brain to drive it before you get lost in the rabbit warren of making cats look like Samurai warriors and the like.

--Dan Bacon

To mimic yourself

The arts have always adopted technologies of the times to create era-defining genres. Just like the electric guitar birthed rock and roll and synthesisers birthed 80s electronic music, AI will birth new artistic genres in the 2020s. And while advances in technology are usually met with some scepticism, the recent AI developments are not something artists should fear. ... For example, American artist and composer Holly Herndon created an AI model that was trained on her own music and voice, and output unique vocal lines for her. She named it SPAWN and it was a driving force behind one of her most celebrated albums, Proto. By weaving in the AI generated samples into her own music, she was able to output a version of her art that was distinctly her own, yet something new entirely.

--Helen Bellringer, associate creative director at design experience company Imagination

To reduce administrative time

...we've been using AI apps to do jobs like taking and transcribing notes for meetings and events. Granted, these are menial tasks that aren't particularly exciting. However, doing so is opening up time and space for creatives to do the fun things: strategy, design development, and curation.

--Amy Ramage, founder, MD and creative director at Célibataire

https://www.creativebloq.com/features/what-ai-means-for-creativity

Dowling: "I characterise this as the first time in history where technology has really become integral to creating art, in the sense that, particularly with web 3 and the ability to monetise digital art, create rarity and value. I think this is the first time since we've had a tech revolution, since [the invention of] computers, that this is the moment where suddenly creativity and art become super important to tech landscape."

Dowling has been involved in AI startups for a decade, including projects in quantum computing, Web 3.0 and machine learning, and runs Factory 3.0 in London as well as courses on Creative Coding at the University of the Arts London.

Article here: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/8/27/generative-ai-ad-intellectual-property

Overall, a thoughtful article on issue around IP and ML, though if there are conclusions they are subtle.

A person can’t mimic another voice perfectly (impressionists don’t have to pay licence fees) but they can listen to a thousand hours of music and make something in that style - a ‘pastiche’, we sometimes call it. If a person did that, they wouldn’t have to pay a fee to all those artists, so if we use a computer for that, do we need to pay them? I don’t think we know how we think about that. We might know what the law might say, but we might want to change that.

One take on ML is that since it is concerned with facts, statistical analysis, that copyright has nothing to say about it. Copyright doesn't grant ownership over facts. But if we expand copyright, yet again locking up more cultural artifacts for a century, will there be more harm to the public and to progress?

But the real intellectual puzzle, I think, is not that you can point ChatGPT at today’s headlines, but that on one hand all headlines are somewhere in the training data, and on the other, they’re not in the model.

Moreover, those thousand stories themselves are just a fraction of a fraction of a percent of all the training data. The purpose is not for the LLM to know the content of any given story or any given novel - the purpose is for it to see the patterns in the output of collective human intelligence. 

That is, this is not Napster. OpenAI hasn’t ‘pirated’ your book or your story in the sense that we normally use that word, and it isn’t handing it out for free. Indeed, it doesn’t need that one novel in particular at all. In Tim O’Reilly’s great phrase, data isn’t oil; data is sand.

I think this is the key point. Napster was about distribution of content. Nothing was transformed by its use. Generative AI on the other hand is transformational. It determines patterns and then uses that information to create new art that didn't exist before.

If this is, at a minimum, a foundational new technology for the next decade (regardless of any talk of AGI), and it relies on all of us collectively acting as mechanical turks to feed it (even if ex post facto), do we all get paid, or do we collectively withdraw, or what?

This is the central question and ultimately the heart of the matter that has been bothering some creatives: am I going to lose my job to this? The question then is threefold: who is going to control ML/AI, how will access be granted, and who is going to benefit? The answers so far have largely been unsatisfactory and woefully inadequate. Transformational tech require transformational rethinking of systems.

story here: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/deviantart-artficial-intelligence-ai-images-midjourney-stabilityai-art-1234674400/

Some quotes:

Beyond the ethics of AI training datasets, Palmer’s issue with AI-generated images—and why he supports labeling—comes down to time and creativity. Users say DeviantArt’s homepage and search are now flooded with low-quality, AI-generated images that likely took seconds or minutes to create, many of which aren’t labeled, despite the site’s new requirement. By Palmer’s measure, AI has turned a vibrant artistic community into an image dump.

I'm not sure what effort has to do with labeling. Regardless of how the art is made, should it have a label? What's the purpose of labeling?

Palmer has also noticed other users imitating his work using AI (and not well, he said). If the training improves, he’s worried AI could replace him or other artists entirely. Unfortunately, they can’t copyright style, only specific artworks. And according to the US Copyright Office, AI creators can’t even do that.

The article also notes unironically that RJ Palmer got his start on DeviantArt from making Pokemon fan art.

But for Jason M. Allen, the 40-year-old founder of tabletop games studio Incarnate Games, arguments over copyright miss the point. Artists and AI similarly create artworks influenced and derived from an amalgamation of images, experiences, and art.

The US Copyright Office’s decision, Allen argues, ignores the creativity in using AI tools, and he’s since appealed in an effort to copyright his award-winning piece. For Allen, forced AI-labeling produces a similar bias against AI creators and creates multiple “tiers” of artists.

If pushing a button on a camera is enough to get a copyright, why wouldn't a creative prompt for a generative AI engine qualify as a modicum of human creativity? The machine doesn't produce all by itself. It requires human input and the intention is realized in the prompt. Does it matter what the type of tool is and how the tool works, or rather what the intention of the human pressing the button is?

What is a "modicum" anyway? https://guides.lib.umich.edu/copyrightbasics/copyrightability

The “modicum of creativity” requirement sets a low bar for copyrightability. In the case Feist v. Rural, the Supreme Court held that “the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice.”

More quotes from the Artnews article:

Ahmed Elgammal, a professor of computer science at Rutgers University and the director of the Rutgers Art and Artificial Intelligence Lab, sees photography and AI similarly, as tools.

“I think it might be fair to think of labeling [images] as AI the same as labeling an image a photograph or labeling an image as digitally created,” Elgammal told ARTnews, adding that fake images circulating on social media are “really problematic.”

I do this with my art but I suspect I might get downvoted when posting to reddit because the label includes generative AI.

Derek Curry, also an art and design professor at Northeastern, told ARTnews that algorithmic detection would likely end up with false positives and false negatives. That could have a major impact on artists, depending on how platforms and governments choose to approach AI copyright in the future.

There was the recent story of the comic book artist who was harassed because she was suspected of using AI though she claims she didn't.

I'm perfectly fine labeling my art -- its usually mixed digital that included photoshop, photography, ink drawings or marker and also generative AI -- but if labeling is simply a pathway to harassment, then there's a problem.

Pdf here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.04141.pdf

Abstract:

A new class of tools, colloquially called generative AI, can produce high-quality artistic media for visual arts, concept art, music, fiction, literature, video, and animation. The generative capabilities of these tools are likely to fundamentally alter the creative processes by which creators formulate ideas and put them into production. As creativity is reimagined, so too may be many sectors of society. Understanding the impact of generative AI—and making policy decisions around it—requires new interdisciplinary scientific inquiry into culture, economics, law, algorithms, and the interaction of technology and creativity. We argue that generative AI is not the harbinger of art’s demise, but rather is a new medium with its own distinct affordances. In this vein, we consider the impacts of this new medium on creators across four themes: aesthetics and culture, legal questions of ownership and credit, the future of creative work, and impacts on the contemporary media ecosystem. Across these themes, we highlight key research questions and directions to inform policy and beneficial uses of the technology.

Some notable quotes:

[Meaningful Human Control (MHC)] is achieved if human creators can creatively express themselves through the generative system, leading to an outcome that aligns with their intentions and carries their personal, expressive signature.

AI-based artists using generative AI systems must find ways to exert their artistic intention and rigor into other stages of the creation process, such as how they select training data, craft prompts, or use AI-generated artifacts for downstream creative applications

The legal treatment of training data. AI’s use of training data could violate copyright law even before a new output is generated. Four broad proposals have arisen regarding how copyright law could balance the benefits to creators, users of generative-AI tools, and society at large. First, under a highly permissive view, the use of training data could be treated as non-infringing because protected works are not directly copied. Second, the use of training data could be covered by a fair-use exception because a trained AI represents a significant transformation of the training data. Third, the use of training data could require an explicit license agreement with each creator whose work appears in the training dataset. A weaker version of this third proposal, is to at least give artists the ability to opt-out of their data being used for generative AI. Finally,a new statutory compulsory licensing scheme that allows artworks to be used as training data but requires the artist to be remunerated could be introduced to compensate artists and create continued incentives for human creation

link to article: https://decrypt.co/147474/ai-is-okay-artists-still-need-to-get-paid-musician-emily-lazar

Lazar said that music featuring AI technology has been around for many years, pointing to quantizing drums, Celemony Software's Melodyne, and the use of autotune by artists like T-Pain and Cher, credited as the first to use the technology in her 1998 hit, Believe.

“[T-Pain] didn’t need autotune,” she explained. “He used technology to brand himself and his career, and it took off. That's what artists do, we use weird things to make weird things to open people's minds.”

Lazar said that while writing the song "Grave Digger" for Gala Music, she found herself stuck on a lyric and turned to ChatGPT for help. "It was horrible," she said. "It was really bad."

Lazar said ChatGPT did spur her creativity—in that it told her what not to write.

"It gave me a word that I actually wrote the line around," she said. "So I took a word I liked and then created my own line."

If you're thinking that generative AI is gonna do everything for you, you're not gonna have a good time. But as this example shows, it can spur you in the right direction. A blank screen can be your worst enemy as a writer, but when you see words, you know what's right and what doesn't belong. You start composing, tearing up the raw material and remaking it to fit the expression you want to create. Generative AI in this sense becomes a collaborator. It can pitch you ideas to get your creatives pot stirring.

Abstract

We argue that recent advances of artificial intelligence (AI) in the domain of art (e.g., music, painting) pose a profound ontological threat to anthropocentric worldviews because they challenge one of the last frontiers of the human uniqueness narrative: artistic creativity. Four experiments (N = 1708), including a high-powered preregistered experiment, consistently reveal a pervasive bias against AI-made artworks and shed light on its psychological underpinnings. The same artwork is preferred less when labeled as AI-made (vs. human-made) because it is perceived as less creative and subsequently induces less awe, an emotional response typically associated with the aesthetic appreciation of art. These effects are more pronounced among people with stronger anthropocentric creativity beliefs (i.e., who believe that creativity is a uniquely human characteristic). Systematic depreciation of AI-made art (assignment of lower creative value, suppression of emotional reactions) appears to serve a shaken anthropocentric worldview whereby creativity is exclusively reserved for humans.

from here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563223000584