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Artificial intelligence is an evolving and emerging area of law and is at the forefront of many professions, including art.
Artists and business leaders gathered Friday for a panel “ARTificial Intelligence” to discuss how the changing technology is affecting their work.
Linda Calvin, chief impact officer at Reboot Representation & Founder of Transcend Consulting, moderated the panel.
Her first question for the panelists was how they see AI evolving in the next decade.
Angie Carel, a marketing consultant at Angie Carel Marketing, said she’s reluctant to add AI to her workflow because the process she goes through when creating is very valuable to her.
“I’m predicting a sort of evolution of people understanding why they create in the first place,” Carel said.
Quincy Owens, artist and owner of Quincy Owens Sculpture-Fabrication said, as artists, their language is more visual but AI is more verbal and written.
“We are going to have to think about language more than ever,” Owens said.
Calvin’s next question was if AI-generated art is true art.
Indianapolis artist Shaunt’e Lewis said she knows of people who created and submitted AI-generated art to well-known museums and were accepted into art shows.
“I think that a lot of us true artists do get offended when we work so hard to get our artwork in the museums that we can’t get to. And AI-generated artists are coming up with these artworks that they just type in a few words, and it just generates it,” Lewis said.
She added that she uses ChatGPT for writing and can understand how a writer would be offended by that.
Owens said that he doesn’t want people to start saying art can be all things but AI.
“It’s at least a way to tap into some level of creative potential,” Owens said.
Barnes and Thornburg LLP Partner Angela Freeman said, at the moment, in the legal field art has to have a level of human creativity attached to it for it to be copyrighted.
She mentioned how copyright is a good way for an artist to protect their work.
“Copyright law is one of the strongest rights you can have. It lives beyond the life of the artist,” Freeman said.
The registration fee to get one’s work copyrighted ranges from $35 to $55.
“There’s a whole lot of unknowns right now. There’s a whole lot of case law that hasn’t been judged yet that we don’t have holdings on, that’s going to define the course of the next year or five years,” Freeman said.
A recent case in California federal court against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI’s artificial intelligence-based image generation systems filed by visual artists claims the companies are infringing their copyrights.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick wrote in an order denying a motion for dismissal that the artists reasonably argued that the companies violate their rights by illegally storing their works on their systems.
At Friday’s panel discussion, Carel talked about how her six-year-old son uses Midjourney to bring his imagination to life by voicing his ideas and watching the program create it.
“His vocabulary has flourished because he’s been able to use his words to construct prompts in Midjourney to identify what’s in his imagination and make it a reality by generating images in Midjourney,” Carel said.
She gave the example of a generated image of a translucent squid wearing sunglasses and orange neon boots.
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