Readings

Use of AI generates questions about the future of art video

• Refik Anadol’s data painting on giant screen
• AI art revolution
• Who is the artist?
  • According to Refit, The human is the artist but they are assisted by a machine
  • “Refer constantly to the machine dreaming”
  • “Machine is helping to think”
• LACMA representative
  • “What is new now is access”
• Artist
  • See a world where “Illustrators are completely replaced by apps because they can make images faster and cheaper”
  • “AI is trained on our stolen images”
  • I.e. AI book covers
  • Images themselves reflect biases
  • “Who and what is training the ai? What sort of data is it using? Does the data perpetuate power dynamics?”

There’s no Tiananmen Square in the new Chinese image-making AI from MIT Review

• Certain words - both explicit mentions of political leaders’ names and words that are potentially controversial only in political contexts - were labeled as “sensitive” and blocked from generating any result.
• In the case of ERNIE-ViLG underlines the question of where exactly the line between moderation and political censorship lies
• Baidiucao - censorship driven by moral concerns should not be confused with censorship for political reasons
• The difficulty of identifying a clear line between censorship and moderation is also a result of differences between cultures and legal regimes

We Asked A.I. to Create the Joker. It Generated a Copyrighted Image.

• Key question: were the tools exploiting artists and violating copyright in the process?
• Reid Southen generated a picture of The Joker that was almost identical to the copyrighted one from WB
• “What they’re doing is clear evidence of exploitation and using I.P. that they don’t have licenses to” - Southern
• AI companies operated under ‘fair use’ copyright law
• Bug called ‘memorization’ produces images that are too close to copyrighted images
• Concern that “AI systems could replace and devalue artists by training off their intellectual property”
• Professor Conrad stated “This is a Band-Aid on a bleeding wound [...] This isn’t going to be fixed easily with just a guardrail.”