Press Release Artificial Intelligence Art Heroes
Stealing or inspiration?
Stealing or inspiration? Dutch art scale-up sells AI art and seeks answers on the same AI
Haarlem, 22 March 2023 - The demand for AI art is on the rise and online art platform Art Heroes sees this happening daily. Art Heroes is proud to be at the forefront of contributing to the discussion around Artificial Intelligence (AI) art. Sales of AI works are steadily increasing and the number of people searching for AI art is also rising. With this increase in sales, the discussion on the ethics surrounding AI is becoming a frequent topic.
Is it copyright infringement or not?
To create AI art, models need to be trained to create an interpretation of the requested subject. AI models gain this knowledge by "viewing" millions of images. These images come from public sources and are collected by so-called scrapers, only to be used again by commercial AI art parties. The grey area that Art Heroes now have a problem with is whether "viewing" or "interpreting" is or is not copyright infringement.
Waiting for good legislation
For a platform like Art Heroes, the answer is not straightforward. However, Art Heroes remainsremain positive in its attitude towards offering AI art. Of course, copying images, or impersonating another artist, is not allowed and Art Heroes takes strict action against this. Scraping and training models is seen by Art Heroes as 'automated and data-driven inspiration' and as such is not restricted. Art Heroes does try to actively combat scraping for all image creators by enforcing this on the processing parties, by indicating this in the features of the images in the technology behind the site. However, until there is proper legislation for this, it cannot yet be enforced and depends on the goodwill of the scrapers and processors to accept this.
Despite being in the art business, we are really a tech company at heart. Developments like this get us very excited. It's just a matter of waiting for proper legislation where image-creators can choose for themselves whether to be included in these training models.
Jasper van der Meij - Founder Art Heroes
Ethics surrounding AI art
A polarised debate about AI currently prevails: is it stealing or is it inspiration? This is what Art Heroes wants to guard against, and for Art Heroes, the intention of the image creator is leading. If you create a completely different image, but still in the style of Rembrandt or Vermeer, that is allowed on the platform. As an image-creator, if you pretend to be another image-creator, make claims that are not true, or try to copy work, then you cross the line as an image-creator. For Art Heroes, the technical tools for creating AI art are no different from Photoshop, and training these AI models is equivalent to inspiration, albeit automated and data-driven. This creates debate as to whether the image is being stolen, or whether this training tool is just using it as inspiration.
Whether AI will cause the same revolution as the internet and the smartphone, we don't know, but what we see happening now is pretty cool.
Jelle Swaan - Marketing lead Art Heroes
Inspiring trend
With the recent emergence of Artificial Intelligence Image Generation Tools such as Dall-E, stable diffusion and Midjourney, it is possible for any artist with an internet connection to create AI art. Whereas until a year ago this was only possible for research purposes, AI art is now available to everyone. To train these models, online databases of image-rich websites are 'scraped', with this data then fed to a training algorithm. The scraping of these websites, of which Art Heroes is one, is done without the permission of the websites or image creators concerned. At Art Heroes, everything possible is being done to protect image creators, but ultimately a decision will have to be made in legislation. For Art Heroes, the range of exceptional AI art on the platform in particular is an inspiring trend.
Note to editors
Click here to find the AI art collection:
For more information and contact:
Jelle Swaan, Marketing & Community Lead
jelle@artheroes.com
