Artists vs. AI

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Advancements in artificial intelligence are making replicating the work of artists much easier. Some artists are arguing that AI art generators have been breaking the law to do this. Today, we talk to an artist whose paintings are at the center of a class action.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:12.0	You might remember last summer when it seemed like everybody was making these strange
0:16.6	images from something called Dal e Mini.
0:19.6	You'd go to this website and you'd type in some text and it would make a picture of
0:23.4	whatever you wrote.
0:24.4	I don't know, Albert Einstein in a hot air balloon in the style of Claude Monet.
0:31.7	And then it would show you something that would kind of look like Albert Einstein in a hot
0:35.9	air balloon kind of in the style of Claude Monet.
0:38.1	I mean, that's amazing.
0:39.1	I mean, the faces can you remember that they were pretty melted and scary looking, but
0:43.6	hey, it was a pretty fun distraction for at least a few minutes that summer.
0:47.5	And since then, the artificial intelligence art generators, they've gotten a lot better.
0:52.2	The faces are a little less melty, the styles are more precise, so much so that some artists
0:57.9	are getting a little freaked out.
1:00.0	And that includes Kelly McCurnen.
1:02.1	Kelly makes these ethereal kind of paintings with femme figures.
1:06.5	And in one day, Kelly learned that a lot of people on the internet had been using the
1:10.5	name Kelly McCurnen a lot when they were trying to create prompts for these AI art generators.
1:16.6	It's as if it studied my sketchbook or like a part of my brain that I don't
1:22.2	share, you know, it felt really intimate.
1:26.8	These images were incredibly similar to Kelly's style and so much so that Kelly decided
1:31.7	to take action.
	...

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