Hey, guys! Welcome back to another episode of Art News; where I give you a rundown on what's been
going on in the art community in the past couple months. I'm your host, Celestia, and I'm sorry to
say right off the bat that in this episode all of the topics we're going to be covering are related
to AI art because there are just so many and they're all so bad. Every time I sit down to write
this script, I have to stop and revise it because I got another update about another development
in the world of AI art that more than warrants discussion here. And, shockingly, to absolutely
no one, that's never been because it's good. But before we get into all of that news, I want to
clarify one thing for both, those of you who are new to my art news videos, and those who have seen
them before it's a little long, but the video is chaptered, so feel free to skip it that way and
get to the point if you don't care. These videos are not intended to give my opinions on the news
discussed in them, unlike my commentary videos, but are rather just supposed to be summaries of
those events with as little personal bias as possible. There will always be some, because
I am a human being and some degree of it is inevitable as a result, but I will do my best to
leave it out. That said, I received some comments on my last art news video criticizing me for that,
claiming that, because I have an anti-AI art stance, the whole video in terms of AI art related
news is inherently biased. And, to a degree, I understand. Just as left-leaning and right-leaning
media tends to report on subject matter that pertains to their particular standpoint, my
anti-AI art stance means I will be reporting on AI art developments from the perspective of how they
negatively impact artists. But, to be abundantly clear, I have no intention of misinterpreting
those developments to suit the narrative that they're negatively impacting artists, but rather,
factually and objectively explaining to the best of my ability how they are doing so. Left-wing
and right-wing news sources will report on the same event with different interpretations of how
the event impacts society based on differences in perspective, but so long as they're still
delivering those reports in a factual manner and simply highlighting different ramifications of it
based on those perspectives, I think it's still actually a really helpful and beneficial way
to ensure that all sides have their viewpoints acknowledged and the topic at hand is examined
objectively through multiple lenses. It's the same with AI art; I am not saying AI art is bad,
regardless of whether or not I actually think it is. I'm just reporting on the negative impact
it has on artists with as much objectivity as possible because I am an artist whose perspective
is defined by being effectively inundated by that negative impact at all times. Other channels will
report on AI art without saying it's good, but while sharing their views on the positive impact
it could have, or is already having. And while both have the bias of personal perspective, both
are still - in my opinion - very valid methods of reporting on these developments. And just as I
personally consume both right and left-wing media to get the full perspective, I would encourage
you to watch videos on both ends of the spectrum of AI art, as well. I acknowledge the bias of my
perspective, but while the topics I choose to discuss in these videos may reflect it, I will
never skew, alter, or deliberately misinterpret any of the facts of those topics as a result of
it. I just wanted to clear the air around that because it's a valid criticism, but one that I
felt needed more context. That out of the way, let's get into what's going on in the world of
AI art since my last art news video, linked in the card above. All topics will be chaptered
so you can skip to those that interest you and all sources will be linked in the description.
First off, let's start with Japan. There have been some conflicting updates from Japan as of late in
terms of copyright protection in AI training data sets. Which is largely going unaddressed outside
of Japan, due to the language barrier. Also due to that language barrier, my own understanding
of the situation is limited because, while I do speak conversational Japanese, a lot of the
terminology used in the original publications is a lot more formal and technical than I'm familiar
with. As such, I'm relying largely on coverage from individuals and a few English articles, so
please forgive me if I get anything wrong. Anyway, on May 30th 2023, the Agency for Cultural Affairs
of Japan released a document detailing updates on the relationship between AI and copyright,
which has been reported on… inconsistently. Some articles interpreted this document as Japan saying
that AI can be trained on copyrighted material without that constituting copyright infringement,
whereas others interpreted the document as saying that AI generated art used commercially
is considered a copyright infringement. Both sides seem to convey completely different tones,
with the first half deeming this a huge blow to human artists and the latter half considering it a
win, but technically, from my understanding, both statements are true, making it fall somewhere in
between. The conflicting reporting was really frustrating to deal with during research,
actually, because some articles were very aggressively claiming that all AI art was now
eligible for copyright and that this was a huge disaster, which, after looking into the matter
further, I find very misleading. if I understand correctly, this document asserts that, yes,
copyrighted images can be used for training in AI data sets without the owner's consent - which is,
admittedly, not ideal - but only for educational, recreational, and research purposes. According to
the general understanding of the document alone, that's where it ends. When it comes to commercial
use, images generated using data sets trained on copyrighted work are not going to be eligible
for copyright. So, basically, AI generated images will be held to the same standard as human created
images. If they're too similar to someone else's copyright material, they will be penalized. Now,
obviously, many agree that it would be better if all AI art trained on copyrighted material was
deemed to be copyright infringement by default, rather than judged based on its similarity to
existing copyrighted works, given that that's just so unbelievably difficult to quantifiably
decide. But, when I started writing this script, most media reports had me believing that all
copyrighted content was free for AI to train on and all AI art was eligible for copyright,
and that's just not the case. It's vastly more nuanced than that. A little too nuanced for me
to confidently dissect for you, actually, because there's just so much conflicting information right
now that it's difficult to say what a lot of the vague terminology used on paper will actually mean
in practice. For example, we've established, that according to reports and loose translations of the
document, copyrighted materials are eligible for use in the training slash research stage
without the owner's permission. But, also, that that's only the case for research, recreation,
and education. That said, here's a statement from Takashi Kii, a member of the House of
Representatives for the Constitutional Democratic party of Japan, and it sets off some alarm bells:
“We ask questions about generative AI from two perspectives; copyright protection and utilization
in educational settings. In Japan, works for information analysis can be used regardless
of the method, whether for non-profit purposes, for profit, for acts other than reproduction,
or for content obtained from illegal sites.” The key words to pay attention to are: ‘for profit’.
Information analysis - presumably meaning the training of AI on copyrighted data sets - can be
used for profit. So, essentially, the implication, if I'm understanding it correctly, is that AI
models can be trained on copyrighted art and those models can be used for profit for their
creators. The resulting material is then subject to scrutiny, just like any human art would be,
when determining copyright infringement. It's judged to determine how similar it is
to the subject material that it's referencing and, if deemed too similar, it's infringement.
The problem with this is that major companies can ostensibly train models on copyrighted art with no
legal intervention at all, benefiting from the art of artists who are not being compensated and only
if the resulting outputs are deemed adequately similar to the work of any one individual artist
will any legal action be taken. And not against the companies who made and are profiting off of
the AI models, but just against the individuals using them. Some are suggesting that this may be
a move to protect Japan in the arms race that is AI development by ensuring that developers
of these models are free to move ahead of other countries that are bound by stricter laws, but
that is just a theory. Regardless, while it's not as bad as some media coverage makes it out to be,
based on my limited understanding it doesn't seem to be great, either. We have no idea how
they'll judge what AI art is similar enough to any particular piece from its training data,
what criteria will be used, or how claims will even be able to be submitted, and that's scary.
Even so, Takashi Kii also acknowledged that legal minefield, saying: “The fact that it can be used
even when it is against the will of the copyright holder is problematic from the Viewpoint of Rights
Protection.” And that he thinks there's a need for, quote; “new regulations to protect copyright
holders”. It's impossible to predict exactly how this will turn out and there is so much
conflicting information circulating that it's difficult to even interpret how it already is,
but I'll keep you guys updated. Next up is Adobe Firefly; a topic I discussed in my previous Art
News compilation video. Adobe decided to join the AI art bandwagon and create their own model and,
at the time, did so in a legitimately promising way by only using their own stock images to train
it, therefore avoiding infringing upon artists rights. It did sound cool and technically, on
paper, it does follow through with that promise, but only in the snakiest way possible. See,
their library of stock images is composed of works from artists and photographers around the
world who license those works to be used as stock images. All of whom did so before the creation of
Firefly with the belief that they would only be used as stock images. Instead, Adobe used them
all to train Firefly, apparently with absolutely no warning at all to any of the artists whose work
was submitted to their stock and most definitely without asking their permission to do so. And,
unfortunately, they were well within their legal rights to do so. According to their stock
contributor agreement, dated March 1st of 2022, all stock artists agree to the following terms:
“You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, fully paid, and royalty-free
license to use, reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, distribute, index, translate,
and modify the work for the purposes of operating the website, presenting, distributing, marketing,
promoting, and licensing the work to users, developing new features and services, archiving
the work, and protecting the work.” And, according to legal experts commenting on the issue,
that particular stipulation effectively means that all of the artists who license their work
to Adobe as stock can do absolutely nothing about the fact that they've been used to train Firefly.
From an onlooker's perspective, it sure looks a lot like Adobe took advantage of the fact that
many artists don't read the massive contracts they sign when trying to get any amount of compensation
for their work that they can. And the fact that, when they signed them, Firefly's development was
not publicly known. So, it may not have occurred to many of them that that stipulation could ever
apply to something like this. And it only gets worse. Firefly's very existence is diminishing
consumer need for human-made stock images with its text to image and generative background
fill features allowing users to generate custom images rather than relying on the already made,
comparably less specific, stock images created by humans. Not only that, but Adobe Stock is
one of the few stock websites accepting AI art submissions to their library. Meaning that not
only did Adobe deceptively use its artists work to train their model, it used them to train their
own competition. Now stock artists are forced to compete with AI generated art that was literally
trained on their own and there's nothing anyone can do to hold Adobe accountable beyond refusing
to support them in this. Naturally, it goes without saying that Adobe Firefly has moved
from its previous Art News label of Potentially Cool too Quantifiably Harmful, so that's… that's
great. Moving on, let's talk about how AI art is continuing to steal the jobs of actual human
artists because there's no shortage of news in that area, either. In one article discussing
the Chinese video game industry, a multitude of artists expressed how AI art has impacted
their careers as it's become more and more normalized and professionally acceptable. And,
unsurprisingly, that impact has been unilaterally terrible. Amber Yu, a freelance illustrator in the
gaming industry, used to make the equivalent of anywhere between 430 and 1,000 dollars a
month creating promotional posters for games. Now, Amber reports that, with AI's growth, improvement,
and convenience, she makes a tenth of her former rate because the only jobs available to her now
are making minor tweaks and revisions to AI art, like adjusting the lighting and fixing
skewed body parts. Another illustrator reported that, in the studio he works for, 5 out of their 15
character designers were laid off, something he is confident is due - at least, in part - to the
comparative ease and cheapness of AI art. The same artist also explained that studios are actively
encouraging illustrators to utilize AI in their work, elaborating that at his studio, for example,
AI generates the clothes and accessories for human illustrated character sketches,
as well as treasure chests and gold coins. So, it's really no surprise that, over the last year,
the number of Illustrator jobs in China has dropped by roughly 70%. Yes, that's partially
because of regulatory issues and economy issues in general but it's impossible not to acknowledge the
impact AI art had on it too. But AI stealing artist’s jobs is not limited to China, coming as a surprise
to exactly no one, I'm sure. Marvel's joining the club now too. As many of you have probably already
heard Marvel's new series, Secret Invasion, used AI to generate its intro and people are reasonably
upset about it. Now, according to Marvel, no human jobs were lost due to the use of AI, as the intro
was, according to them, created by a team of artists simply using AI as a tool, with credits given to
an AI technical director, animator, VFX technical director, art director, and creative lead - something
that Method Studios, the group they consulted for the project, has corroborated. They also justified
the decision by saying that because of the subject matter - a Skrulll Invasion masking themselves as
humans in plain sight, a parallel to AI's own quote-unquote “invasion” of human society -
the use of AI was fitting. That said, I personally am not particularly convinced of the validity of
that defense, although that is, admittedly, just my opinion. I genuinely do not believe that this intro
could have been made without AI without hiring a human artist to do what the AI did. Probably
multiple human artists. And while that's just speculation, it's a sentiment that even Marvel's
own staff members have been open about sharing. It doesn't help that the project's director
openly admitted that he had no idea how AI even worked or how it was being used in the project.
It doesn't spark confidence! Regardless, artists and viewers alike are viewing this as one of the first
examples of AI art making a very unwelcome entrance into mainstream media. And while we
can't actually be sure one way or another whether human jobs really were lost in this instance, it
certainly sets the precedent for them to be in the future. But wait! Just… just wait! For the millionth
time, in this video alone, it gets worse. AI isn't just stealing artist’s jobs or being immorally
utilized to exploit them for profit by massive companies, it's now being used by individual people
to steal commissions from individual artists. This development was one that really shook me because
I expect nothing more than absolute garbage from AI art companies and government legislation, but
this is a new low. Clients looking to commission artists are now using AI to avoid paying them
full price. This practice was first uncovered by a Twitter user from the furry community who
found a tutorial being circulated on how to get a fully rendered commission from an artist for
the price of a sketch using AI. Now, this Twitter user has been heavily scrutinized for bringing
attention to the tutorial, given that doing so might make the practice more commonplace and
well known. I do understand that criticism, but I also think spreading awareness is incredibly
important as well so that artists can learn about new threats to their livelihoods so they
can protect themselves. As a result, I will not be showing this tutorial or how it works, but rather
just summarizing it. It will also not be linked in the sources because I don't want people clicking
it. The bottom line here is that this tutorial teaches clients how to commission an artist
to draw a sketch or line art of what they want and then follow some alarmingly easy to follow
steps to have AI models use that sketch input to generate a fully rendered image, giving them
a fully colored piece for the price of a sketch. It's a ridiculously, unbelievably exploitative
new practice that completely devalues the work of artists everywhere. And it shows that
this isn't just affecting industry artists anymore, but now everyday artists just taking commissions
online too. Personally, when I found out, I closed my sketch, line art, and flat colour commissions to
avoid the risk of being taken advantage of by this method, but I know a lot of artists aren't
in a position to sacrifice that income. There are still some other ways to defend yourself
against it though, so I want to take a brief moment here to go over them. First: terms and conditions. I
always recommend having terms and conditions when accepting any commission. And using platforms like
Artistries means that the client has to accept them when they confirm their commission. Having
a legally binding agreement that says the client can't modify the completed work in any way could
help protect you from this kind of exploitation. At least, in cases where the artist (I think she meant “client”) doesn't just
do it anyway, in private, without posting it online. Finally, you could also use Glaze: a tool designed
to add a layer of adversarial noise to your work and therefore protect it from AI mimicry. But an
individual has already published a workaround to the process, accompanied by a tutorial on how
to effectively un-Glaze an image. I will not be naming the individual, sharing this tutorial, or
explaining the process because, quite frankly, I do not want that information spread any further by
my own platform. But it is becoming increasingly well known, leaving Glaze's effectiveness with
an unfortunately poor prognosis in the long term. Another alternative, called Mist, is making its way
into the community as well, allegedly with similar functionality, but higher success rates. Although
it's difficult to say whether or not it will face the same kind of workarounds in the future. Either
way, artists are being warned against publicly announcing their use of AI protection tools at all
and the reason for that is deeply disheartening. Those workarounds are being found because AI Bros
deliberately seek out Glazed works to test them out on, using them to improve their effectiveness.
Some sites are even tagging Glazed art or any piece with adversarial noise, which these
individuals are allegedly then intentionally targeting for these tests. And even un-Glazing
their work, supposedly, simply because they know that the artists don't want them to. Fortunately,
programs like Glaze and Mist are being developed at the same rate as those AI Bros are working to
bring them down. And that will likely always be the case, so there's at least the Silver Lining that
the tools to protect us are seemingly improving at the same rate as those designed to attack us. But,
for now, that's where I'll end off because, quite frankly, if I have to say the word AI one more
time today I'm going to have an aneurysm. I know that things can feel really hopeless for artists
in the grand scheme of image generation these days and I know this video probably didn't help and I'm
sorry about that. This was a lot of bad news, but there will be good news to come too. And I'll be
here to share it with you when it does. Thank you for watching and I hope you enjoyed today's video
or at least found it informative. Special thank you, as always, to channel members: Cafe Soleil, Joseph
Solomon, TC Pratt, Juho Uusi-Hakimo, Haruki Kenway, Art of Amethyst Fable, and ZeldaDevorak42. As well as patrons:
Batman, Kyle Low, blueswanson, Cora Feere, Jamesha Walker, Elenxji, Kim Nguyen, Shamil sheep, crazyhussar,
GhenTuong, Jacobus Peterson, GraysonXavier, Eeyore Hee Haw, MG, BlahMage, TC Pratt, Fihyn, Stephen Jett, Ash W, Insidechaos,
Eldritchia, TheStrayDogg, Uluru, and Greg Noble for their support and I'll see you in the next one!
[Music] influx