The artist world is many things, beautiful at times, confusing at others, and nothing if not entertaining, but it is always a maze. Not one thing can be made without the inspiration from another. As Carl Sagan said, “If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Despite this, intellectual property is one of the greatest issues in the world of creating art, was it an inspiration or was it a copy? Where is the line?
This maze has increased in complexity exponentially in recent years, with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence. Even if we can properly draw the line for how inspiration should be used as people, can AI play by the same rules? Can an artist using AI claim Intellectual Property? These are questions that are not quickly or easily answered; despite this, we must try. The rules must be rewritten, which is not really a bad thing, as they were certainly never perfect to begin with; a sentiment well-articulated by Kirby Ferguson, in Everything is a Remix, “We are saying Goodbye to the old world and a new one. But we are not obligated to accept the new world as is.” (Everything is a Remix). We must move forward with the understanding that nothing is ever truly original.
Even so, Artificial Intelligence removed the very things that create originality in the human sense of the world: not completely new but working to redesign something out of what previously existed. AI removes the need for human labor, removing the impact and connection from the newly designed production. As humans, we have an innate sense as to how a piece of art was created, which defines the existence of art as a whole. Effort, and imagination must be put into the creation of art, even if it is not original, it can be impactful. Artificial Generation removes this necessity, the system does not labor, and it does not imagine, as humans do. It rewrites code, remixing, but doing so without emotion, and without any struggle.
Context makes art, who the artist is, where they are from, when they lived, and what influenced them. Stripping these things away, the product loses all meaning, it becomes simply decoration. Unfortunately, however, as the quality of Artificial Intelligence production improves, it is becoming more difficult to differentiate real art from Artificial productions. In the recent weeks we even see actual AI creations topping music charts across genres, without listeners knowing that it is an Artificial Generation that they are listening to. The more specific issue that must be tackled is how copyright laws should reflect these ideas about AI productions. For example, should AI users be compensated the same as actual artists by streaming platforms? To most people, the answer is probably no, but there is still substantial opposition. It is an extremely quickly growing industry, and many do not want the money they are getting to stop. But we must protect artists, every dollar given for AI production is stolen from a real artist, and we must discover a way to prevent this.
I did not use generative AI to write this essay. 