Musings on technology, AI, and the future of capital-A Art

We’ve all heard the stories about how the latest artificial Intelligence (AI) programs, trained on millions of human-created artworks, are now “creating” images, song lyrics, poems, essays, and more. Some Canadian artists have embraced the potential of AI, including Midjourney and DALL-E: visual artists Amber Frid-Jimenez and Rebecca Brewer are compelling examples, as highlighted in a recent story by Kate Taylor in The Globe and Mail. In other cases, the effects of these tools can be quite scary: when an algorithm created by Frid-Jimenez applied what was available on the internet to Madame Bovary, a new version emerged full of sex and repeated death scenes of the central character. For the many artists and creators I work with every day, the ground is shifting beneath their feet. While some artists like Frid-Jimenez have long been working with technological tools like AI, for others, the shadow of another machine replacement looms just around the corner. Illustrators, graphic designers, photographers, and voice actors have all woken up to discover that their human-made artworks (or content) have been gathered or scraped from the internet, silently, without their knowledge. The AI, and other similar tools, then take that scraped content, and use it to assemble new works derived from user prompts. Cue the lawsuits: Getty Images has brought a copyright infringement action against the makers of Stable Diffusion for training its software on their images without permission. More will undoubtedly follow. Martha Rans, KC, is a copyright lawyer, born of a curator and writer, and has worked with artists in all disciplines since 1995. For the many artists and creators she works with every day, the ground is shifting beneath their feet. Photograph courtesy of Martha Rans In 2011, at a conference in Vancouver, Cory Doctorow asked “What do we want copyright to do? ...and which copyright will do that stuff? A good copyright system results in more people making more creations. One of copyright’s most important goals is serving creators.” Like Doctorow, I have seen how our current emphasis on enforcement on behalf of certain industrial models and practices distracts us from what we should actually be doing, which is ensuring that each of the new models provide direct remuneration to the very creators who are so often left out of the equation. Big Tech has indeed captured culture, as argued by Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin’s 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism. These brave new tools have no consciousness, aesthetic discernment, ethical framework, or authorial intent. They do not differentiate between art and “content." An instructional cooking video looks the same to the algorithm scraping the web as a new Taylor Swift song or Margaret Atwood’s new novel. If there is any distinction to be made between art and “content,” it is lost on Big Tech (and has been so since the advent of search engines, I would argue). Will technology extinguish art as we know it? Undoubtedly not. But most Canadians would agree that artists, who are predominantly living near the poverty line, ought not have their work disposed of as often as we might replace our phones. If we actually valued art, we would be thinking of ways to ensure artists’ survival. It is past time to put the artists and human creators, not the consumers nor the industry intermediaries, at the centre of any review of the Copyright Act, or an AI Act. Let’s hear from those most affected who are often without recourse whether their work is scraped by an AI or ripped off on Pinterest. We could also ensure that access to legal advice is as available to actual artists and creators as it is to industry. We urgently need to reaffirm our collective recognition of artists and the intrinsic value of human creativity. Or will we watch as, once again, artists are sacrificed at the altar of capital and rendered into content machines. Pablo, are you listening? Martha Rans, KC, is a copyright lawyer, born of a curator and writer, and has worked with artists in all disciplines since 1995. She is the co-founder of the Artists Legal Outreach in Vancouver and the architect of the National Network of Legal Clinics for the Arts, dedicated to ensuring that artists have access to legal advice from Coast to Coast to Coast. Her present interest is in advocating for the development of contractual terms that recognize, respect, and enforce s. 31 of UNDRIP. The Hill Times

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Musings on technology, AI, and the future of capital-A Art

We urgently need to reaffirm our collective recognition of artists and the intrinsic value of human creativity.

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