Text to image AI tools are taking the internet by storm, but is it art?

Or is it the end of art?

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Korino.

Image is created by artificial intelligence programs like stable diffusion or dolly or

everywhere now, dazzling users with their ability to instantly create any image you could

dream up.

The AI works by scraping billions of images from the internet, images often created by artists

who may not be thrilled their life's work is helping build technology that could threaten

their livelihood.

Steven Zipada is a professional designer, illustrator, and art teacher in New York City

who has big concerns about what this means.

My main concern is the precedent that we would be setting here by allowing these systems

to scrape the creative labor of millions of people off of the internet and to train

models that then go on to compete with the people that they trained off of in their

very same creative markets.

We were to decide collectively that that is somehow okay and legal and ethical.

That basically leaves open this giant legal loophole that will allow this to happen again

and again in every market that these systems come to.

It doesn't make sense to allow any startup machine learning company to have carte blanche

to use all the creative work that people have shared online to make models that will

compete directly against those very same people.

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