Artificial intelligence causing ethics controversy among artists

CHARLOTTE — You may have tried one of the new websites that allow you to create your own art simply by typing words into an artificial intelligence art creator.

Breathtaking images have been made from websites such as Open AI’s Dalle, the creators of ChatGPT.

However, it’s creating controversy about ethics and compensation for real human artists.

Channel 9′s Scott Wickersham spoke to Charlotte artist Darion Fleming, who is working on a mural at the Relatives, a resource center for at-risk youth.

His creations can be seen across Charlotte, including a huge mural on a parking garage in Noda. But Fleming is concerned that AI will replace designers’ work.

“[It’s] kind of scary because it could very potentially replace a lot of what designers and artists are doing,” Fleming said.

The designs Fleming creates are something artificial intelligence could create in just seconds.

“The moral line right now with this technology is just very blurred because there are many, many artists out there whose work is being used on quite a large scale with dozens and dozens of different programs that are being used by tens of millions of people daily,” Fleming said.

Getty Images, which owns and charges royalties for millions of images, announced in January that it was suing Stability AI for copyright infringement. Getty accuses them of copying and processing millions of its images without obtaining the proper licensing.

Queens University Art Professor Eric Mullis told Wickersham that AI-generated art reminds him of the debate about Napster, the music app that allowed people to share music for free in the late 1990s. Napster received a flurry of lawsuits.

“People made the argument that you’re essentially stealing from the artists who made the music,” Mullis said. “And so fast forward, a similar argument is being made by Getty Images now that the algorithm is going and learning based on all of its imagery and then combining it and basically collaging it into something new.”

Just like how streaming music had litigious beginnings, Fleming hopes the new tool will be a good thing for art and artists down the road.

“The benefits to the development of design are massive for this,” Fleming said. “They can help with the efficiency of design and how you communicate back and forth with a client in order to add things into the design.”

Wickersham reached out to AI companies Open AI and Night Cafe for a response about how they use images from artists and companies. He has not heard back.

Along with Getty, artists are now filing a class action lawsuit against several companies, stating they used billions of internet images to train their AI without consent or compensation.

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