I am an artist and a professional photographer who has a profile on Getty Images and iStock and I received this communication via email yesterday. It seem to me the beginning of a war between creators and distributors.
The attempt to plug a volcano in full eruption.
Artificial Intelligence and the creation and modification of images through programs such as E-Dale, Midjourney and AI generation content, is having a huge spread and a big success. The communities that have been created around the use of these programs are very big. And the images created by artificial intelligence, very often “are more beautiful than reality”.
In some cases it are images new that we haven’t never seen before and we remain pleasantly surprised and attracted.
I follow these works with a lot of interest and I am discovering very interesting things.
But the Getty email made me think deeply.
Copyright on the net for artists has never worked. A work of art becomes famous when its diffusion becomes so wide that people flock to it to see it in person.
There are queues for hours to enter to see Botticelli’s Venus in the Uffizi in Florence in Italy or the Sistine Chapel in Rome or Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris.
But how many people have made money just by reproducing these images and turning them into objects to sell?
So copyright and paying hefty fines has been every time the only brake on mass diffusion. (Then NFTs were invented but this is another big topic to talk about).
But without that attempt to escape the rules, “the sharing” we would not know many contemporary works of art.
Will they really be able to manage an evolving situation such as that of the growing advancement of AI in the art and photography sector?
Are we not experiencing a historical moment in which art as we know it is “blocked” in its most common expression, but thanks to new technologies, has it found a new way of expressing itself?
Who are the creators of digital images made with AI? Can we define them as “Artists” in the same way we defined Michelangelo Buonarroti and Leonardo Da Vinci as “Artist”?
Will Getty Immagine, together with all the other photography agencies, be able to “slow down” the diffusion of digital images within their photographic archives?
Shouldn’t we define new boundaries and new words for art? We should not perhaps establish new parameters of judgment with respect to art created with AI?
Are we facing a new artistic current?
I don’t have all the elements to give you these answers yet, but if you are a digital artist involved in AI Generated Content write me.
Reference: Getty Images AI image rights issues – 18.913 impression by Cecilia Lascialfari
Cecilia is also an artist, photographer, videomaker, community manager and International Journalist. She is the organizer of AWE Nite Florence and she is the Italian Representative for Artivive.
Cecilia is a member of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA is a member of the EurAI/ECCAI) which includes professionals from the most important research institutions and Italian universities.
Cecilia created a project called “Flying Into The Metaverse Through Books & Culture”, which is a series of interviews with the most important professionals in the XR field and manages an online Journal called ARea6DoF, registered to the Italian Court, where she writes the articles about the different topics she is concerned with.