There’s a lot of conversation about the ethics behind Ai Generated art right now .I use Midjourney AI for the majority of my ai-generative work. I always make changes/manipulate and add my own ideas to anything that is generated in ai art. This is for two reasons: 1. There's almost always detail problems in ai generated art. And 2. Technically ai-generated art is not copyrightable yet under US law, so I am conscious to manipulate and edit my images to prove ownership if there's ever (very unlikely) an issue. Finally, 3. I like creating collage, it’s not fun if my ideas for a composition are not driving the final product of a work.
I'm always happy to discuss the ethics of this too. In my attempt to use these tools ethically, I avoid using artist names in my prompts, or I use multiple names so that there's not just one person's style being used. I think that should be an encouraged practice. But as the developers have mentioned in conversations about how the backend of Midjourney works, it's very difficult to get a "replica" of anyone's work even if you do try to do that. Every time you prompt Midjourney AI (I don't know enough details about SD or OpenAI to confirm this is how they work...) the prompt wording is interpreted by the compiler. The compiler pulls up 100s of source images. They are based on the prompt you use. It then sends those images to the "artist" computer, but there's not enough memory for the "artist" computer to receive your text prompt or have the bandwidth to interpret a text prompt the way that the compiler does. So the "artist" computer is painting a picture (generating) based on the source images. Because of this chain of development, I feel comfortable that my images are made ethically even if the data-sets used were made from millions of copyrighted images. The reason being that copyrighted images are allowed to be used in art if they are manipulated and changed in a way that changes them from the original source and original format. That at least is my limited understanding of fair-use copyright law that protects things like satire.
Either way, I have come around to the mindset that AI Generative Art should not copy traditional art or digital art even, it should develop into it's own style. This was eventually the idea behind fine art photography, in that the photographers quickly began creating art that painters could not do and the two tools did not overlap as much. That's been my approach anyway.
As a collage artist by digital means and traditional medium, I find ai art exciting. It’s possible now to add elements to a composition that I could only imagine in my head. There’s spaces in my imagination that I will be able to share with the world now using these tools.
This page has ai-generated work. Many of my prints use generative art within the collage, but heavily manipulated, color corrected, adjusted, edited and changed.
Ai generated work examples:
