The art generators vs. the artists

Samdoesarts is a digital artist who became famous for his anime style drawings and has amassed 2 million followers on Instagram and almost 1 million followers on YouTube. A few months ago Sam found out that someone on Reddit was using his artwork on a Stable Diffusion model as training data and trying to create a model that could replicate his iconic art style, but without his consent.

Understandably, Sam was hurt by this. Imagine spending years of your life studying art for pure pleasure, from scratch, slowly learning how to draw, how to paint, how to use color theories and spending hours and hours on these pieces, then putting your art on the internet for free for everyone to see, cultivating a unique style of art that is associated with your own personal brand, even offer advice to help other young artists develop their skills based on what you've spent years learning, and then someone, without even considering asking your permission, uses the fruits of your labor to create an AI that basically replaces you and does what you do in seconds. While technically Sam doesn't have a copyright on his style and technically you can't own a particular art style, Sam does own the pieces he has made and should have a say in how they are used. However, as AI art generation technologies are very new, they are currently in a legal gray area and there are no laws protecting artists from having their artwork used as training data in these algorithms.

The Backlash

Instead of contacting the Reddit user, Sam decided to post the situation on his Instagram stories to his 2 million followers, along with the person's username. This, unsurprisingly, led to so much harassment that the user deleted his Reddit account as well as his Twitter account, as well as the model.

Interestingly, doing so did not stop the model from being published but prompted several others to start working on their own Samdoesarts imitation models with the intention of publishing them out of revenge. Reddit users argued that you can't copyright any art style and that many people have similar styles to Samdoesarts or heavily replicate from references, but that's not considered a problem because they paint the pieces themselves. But why does the method of creation matter at the end of the day? Both people are emulating their style.

Sam and others have a different opinion: Sam believes that an artist's style is a very personal thing that reflects their unique identity and life experiences and automating artists' styles without their permission crosses a moral line, and I think he's right about consent and having your name and brand attached to images you didn't create, especially if people decide to create controversial images in your recognizable style.

The Kim Jung Gi Ai and The Hollie Mengert Ai Situation

Hollie Mengert is a 2D character illustrator who discovered that her work had been used to train a Stable Diffusion model without her consent. Although she didn't feel present in the characters created by the AI and didn't see the AI making decisions that she herself would make, she was frustrated because she felt that the model wasn't really mimicking her style and yet her name was still linked to the tool. Menger wondered if the creator of the model just didn't see her as a person and thought of her more as a brand or something rather than as a person who worked on her art. She feels that certain things she illustrates are a reflection of her life and experiences, and that having her name on them is uncomfortable and invasive for her.

Something similar happened with the famous artist Kim Jung Gi, who died recently of an unexpected heart attack at the age of 47. Someone used AI to create a Stable Diffusion model of the artist, something that many people saw as disrespectful.

Do AI artists respect the artists they reference?

Several artists are in a similar situation to Kim Jung Gi and Holli Mengert , some AI art enthusiasts seem to lack respect for artists and seem to have no appreciation at all for the work done by human artists to create these tools. Although almost all jobs in society will be replaceable at some point, it is understandable that artists fear losing their jobs. It is important to be mindful of these feelings and treat artists with respect and empathy.

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© Emby Lat

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