AI Generated Art
Using the public domain
(I have written about this already here: PlagAIrism)
I read an interesting piece on substack recently:
This argues for using public domain images, instead of generating them from AI. The justification for this boycott is the use of copyright images in training of the models. I do agree with this, as I’ve already written. However, I have continued to use AI generated art for AI Cassandra. This is in part to demonstrate the oddness we sometimes (ok, it’s often, though less often) get with the images. Numbers of limbs or digits being the most obvious. It also amuses me immensely that Gemini cannot recognise Nano Banana when I credit it.
It’s a fair point that there are a lot of non-public domain images in the training data, and I shouldn’t be tacitly or implicitly supporting this theft. For my new parallel blog, The Thin Startup, while I did use Gemini to create a Dali-style logo, I intend to use only public domain images in future, as it’s not about AI. For AI Cassandra I am going to go for a two-tier approach. I will use one public domain image for the main image, and a second AI generated image to illustrate the more surreal aspects of AI art.
This sitting between stools is poor, but the problem is, I WANT to use AI to generate art for these posts. I think it’s relevant. And I know that despite the claims of the AI industry, a lot of images were scooped up in the training data. Purging all of those now might be tricky. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t try. When adding images to wikipedia articles it is important to be aware of the copyright situation. I have uploaded some images, usually my own photos where I can explicitly provide the assurance that wikipedia can use it (the Boreray Ram on the Boreray sheep page was ours). It’s a bit of a faff otherwise, so I tend to avoid uploading anything else unless I’m really clear. I don’t want to upset anyone. Fair use is sometimes invoked, but those seem murky waters to me.
For the moment I’m going to continue down this middle path, and see where it leads. Either way, I shall continue to keep an eye out...
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