Artist in Focus - Art & Artificial Intelligence
Rosenstiels has always been open about what is important to us as a company: quality, service, integrity, and personal relationships. Relationships with our clients, our artists, and our colleagues.
With the advancement of artificial intelligence, we felt it was important to speak on the matter of AI within the art industry. First and foremost, Rosenstiels stands firmly alongside artists. We know that art is more than just the result. It is the original idea, the journey, the mistakes, and the final creation.
Art is a life lived. It is born from moments, memories, experiences, and agendas. It is messy palettes, sketch work and moments behind the camera. It comes in many tangible and real forms of creativity. What makes art so special is that each artist interprets something they see and feel within - and through them it can exist externally for the World to experience.
More than just the threat to the human element of creativity, we understand and echo the concerns about the ethics of AI art. Art is no longer confined by skill if it can be created from a simple textbox. How does AI produce imagery and who holds the ownership of each piece? Currently, Artificial Intelligence has no ownership and no regulation.
AI goes beyond just blurring ethical and creative boundaries, it is a high-tech form of plagiarism: a mimic of the thousands of real artworks that have been fed into a generator so it can produce a picture from a simple sentence, seemingly in minutes.
Currently there are numerous legal proceedings against Artificial Intelligence companies. Getty Images, the stock photo company, is accusing Stability AI of having “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright’. In another similar fight, a trio of artists have commenced a lawsuit where they allege that Stability AI and Midjourney have infringed on the rights of artists. That AI has, without consent or compensation to the artists, used original art to create supposedly ‘new’ images.
When we pay an artist, it includes paying for their knowledge, their experience, their training, their life lessons, and all the hard work they have put into becoming who they are. Creativity is one of the great positives of human life. Rosenstiels stands by those that are speaking out about the threat of AI. We stand and ask, where is the emotion, the nuance and memory in computer generated imagery? It simply is not there because it can't be there. Artificial intelligence cannot create, it can only copy.