The morality of using AI-generated art in my web app
Hey, good people of Tildes!
I'm building a self-help web app, a small part of which I'd like to involve some pixel pets. I like pixel art and it'd be great if I could create some. Though, the truth is, I can't draw for shit, I have little to no imagination, and I'm afraid even if I put the time and effort into it, I still may not produce something I'd call good enough to put on the website. I also lack the motivation to spend a lot of time learning how to create good pixel art, as I only need it for this project.
I thought about paying some professional(s) to do it but that would probably break the bank for me, as I want to offer the users a lot of pixel pet options, which brings us to what I guess is the only remaining option.
I found some services that offer AI-generated pixel art. This one in particular looks like what I'm looking for and also offers animations. While watching a demo of it on YouTube, I noticed a few comments voicing concern about the ethics of selling art that's generated using models trained off of unpaid artists' work. While this is not a new topic, I admittedly hadn't given it much thought before, as I've never used, or planned to use AI-generated art in a meaningful capacity.
While I'm not sure whether it changes much, for what it's worth, I should note that my web app is going to be free, open-source, and ad-free forever.
What are your thoughts? Also, I'd love to know if there are options that I missed!
If you can afford to hire somebody, do it. But if bespoke commissioned art is beyond your budget, then generating your own isn't taking business away from anyone. Just be up front about it.
This is not a good take imho. This stinks of the usual "oh we budgeted 8 hours for this 2 week job, you make it work" energy and i am not a fan. Your measuring stick is just too vague for my comfort.
Someone is actually out there working for exposure, thats just the nature of creative work. So id say yes, you're stealing business from someone.
On a more radical note, I think the suggestions of commercial vs free are still not very good either as youre profiting off of ai art regardless as im sure youll include it in some work reel. And that means someone's work helped prop up yours. I do recognize that im very hardline on this subject though. And people will always justify their actions, regardless of morality.
Isn't hoping to snag someone "working for exposure" one of the toxic behaviors that artists always point out? I'm all for hiring someone on commission where possible, but hiring someone for less than a fair rate and placing the balance on exposure is not a good practice either. Filling the gaps in the industry where it's not economical to hire an artist for fair pay is what we should all be hoping AI is used for, since nobody should be subjecting themselves to those working conditions.
No, i think i worded that segment of my response poorly. I mainly didnt like the idea that "youre not stealing business if you weren't going to pay for it in the first place" but i didnt want to really tackle it yesterday so i reduced my thoughts too much and left a shit statement.
Truth be told i dont want to tackle it now either, im way too hungover.
I don’t think artists have a right to work. But all people have a right to a certain standard of living regardless of their ability to get paid for their work. That gets into the same debate as with tipping in the US. The waiters are often underpaid and if you can afford to eat there you are probably financially able to help them out. But it also really shouldn’t be the customer’s job to make the decision of whether the wait staff gets a living wage. Ideally we’d have a completely different social structure where regardless of automation everyone would be safe. But we don’t.
If you’re able to pay a person to do work and they need the money then you’re doing more good than finding a way to get the same result for free.
Im not sure i get your point. I think there's a difference between paying wait staff a tip out of gratitude for a pleasant evening and collaboration with an artist to produce something that integrates with your work to increase its value.
The point is we're reaching a time when the client has a choice to not pay an artist for their work due to the indirection of large AI models built through scraped artwork posted online. Just like how you can decide to not tip.
That’s the logic people use to defend piracy. Granted, I don’t think piracy is as bad as the entertainment industry CEOs think it is. But it’s interesting to hear in this context.
There's a lot of asset packs out there that are cheap or free to use. Itch has a lot, I got a bunch with the racial justice bundle from 2020. There are sites dedicated to sharing assets as well, though I'm not sure which have good reputations. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a suitable pixel pet pack somewhere out there already.
I'm not some arbiter of morality. But I wouldn't take issue with someone utilizing AI art in a free, open source, ad free app. Just cite the source instead of claiming it as your own.
good call on Itch. https://itch.io/game-assets/5-dollars-or-less/tag-animals/tag-pixel-art
lots of good stuff
I hesitate to say this knowing that my opinion on this will be quite unpopular here, but I don't see any issue with this, even for commercialization, as long as the terms of service of the AI service you are using allows for commercialization. I understand the viewpoint of AI art "taking" work from actual artists, but I see it as just shifting that work from artists to AI developers. It's no different from previous technological advances, such as automated telephone switches replacing switchboard operators. As the needs of our evolving society change, people need to change their skills along with it.
That being said, my viewpoint is influenced by the fact that I don't see art as being nearly as valuable as other people see it. Just because someone spends a lot of time on it and pours their heart into it doesn't make it valuable. But that's just my opinion on art in general.
I see zero wrong with AI art generation. Literally every artist alive learned by copying what others did before them, and modern generative tools open up whole swaths of the creative space that were simply unaccessible before. And I earn a decent chunk of my income from creative endeavors that are directly impacted by this, so I'm not just talking from the sidelines, I use these tools in my daily work. Hell, AI-enhanced masking alone is amazing. The bright line is not to sell a generated artwork as someone else's original. Other than that, have at it. Modern tooling is amazing, and exploring it a delight.
There was a recent online controversy in portuguese circles over the new official symbol of the portuguese government (top: the old one, bottom: new one)
https://executivedigest.sapo.pt/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/gagpxoqw0aeobh-570x450.jpg
The controversy came mainly from the cost which was 74k euros, some people came to defend how there’s an entire process of designing until reaching the final product.
Which is true. But at the same time most people forget that most people don’t care about the process. If I don’t like caviar, I don’t care about how much work it was to put that thing on my plate. Same for pretty much anything else.
Same for this debate about AI’s. If they get good enough, I personally wouldn’t count on society to suddenly grow a conscience and reject to use it on moral grounds. If that was the case, we wouldn’t have a lot of products on the super markets, and I for sure wouldn’t be using the phone I’m using right now to type this message, and who knows what’s the story behind the manufacturing of the servers hosting this thread
Honestly 74k euros is fairly cheap for that sort of thing, but wow that new logo is horrendous. If they wanted to make it more vector-friendly they could have just replaced the coat of arms with the yellow circle and called it a day. Even the font is bad, it looks less modern than the old one.
Ai developers source the images to train their models from the artists whose work you dont value. Inherently, the value of the ai developer's work is tied to the value of that original art. Furthermore, the ai developers would not even have a job in the first place as there would be no art to use in the model itself if the artists did not exist.
I dont think the comparison to a switchboard operator makes sense, i think in your example the thing being replaced would be the telephone signal by the automated switch. It serves no purpose anymore regardless of the innovation because the original data has been replaced. I dont know how clearly that will come through, and im too sleepy now to touch it up.
Modern day ai is nothing more than another tool of the creatively bankrupt to steal value from the labouring class, in whatever form it takes.
Completely agreed. It's stealing without compensation yet again. I'm sure few artists would complain if these training models offered residuals for everytime a piece of their art was sampled. But like every other piece of the entertainment industry, companies will fight tooth and nail to extract talent and payout pennies for it.
They'll pay an AI dev hundreds of thousands a year to get it all up and running, but won't pay a team of artists that same amount to produce the data needed.
I agree with you on this one, but the issue is not the art and its worth, but how those AI developers got their source material. If they used only material that they had the right to use, for instance because it was part of the public domain, then there is no problem at all.
If, however, they had no license to use it, or the AI was built violating some other copyright law, then you might say that buying from that company is not morally right, because parts of their product were obtained illegally. Similar to that you might not want to buy a car if you know that the engine in it was stolen.
The problem is of course that no-one saw this coming and there were almost no rules for the use of material to train your AI. And that all those AI firms are very shady about the origins of source material. So there really is not enough information to make a decision.
Yeah, that's a fair nuance to this whole thing. Maybe someday there will be some kind of certification process that certifies that the training material was obtained legally. But you really run into those kind of risks buying anything.
that's where the real dark art is coming from (no pun intended). similar to how FB became a trillion dollar tech industry underneath the guise of "hey you can post on a wall to your friends" by selling mass amounts of data to the highest bidder, we're already seeing dubious methods to "legally obtain" training material.
Adobe's already updating licenses to say "anything you draw in our suite can be used as training material" for their Midjourney art. So now artist have a choice to keep using Photoshop/Illustrator/After Effects/etc. and essentially feed their job away to a machine, or to ditch the most prolific artist tools, tools that may be required to use to get through a job interview, so they can maintain ownership. All because of a rugpull under a constantly updating piece of software that they cannot stop updating.
People only seeing the surface of "artists losing their jobs to progress" are missing a huge part of the conversation. They are being hardballed into losing ownership of their own work. Again. If people were following the voice actor's strike and how Hollywood wanted to be able to sample a person's voice and even likeness for AI in perpetuality, it's the exact same issue.
Why care what the ToS for the AI service says?
Because if you're going to use the service for commercial purposes, and you don't obey the ToS for the service, you're opening yourself up to litigation. They probably won't go after individuals who violate the terms because there's not much to be gained, but companies sue each other all the time over stuff like this.
Fair, but how well could they prove it was their AI generator and not someone else’s? Unless the images are watermarked or your model has telltale bugs, AI images aren’t distinct between companies. Perhaps they store copies of generated images and then trawl the web seeking unlicensed matches on commercial websites.
Did the US copyright office reverse their ruling that AI images are inherently public domain?
(I was thinking strictly in terms of morality when I made my first post and not about litigation mitigation)
AI-generated images are indeed not copyrightable but that doesn't mean that more strict requirements on how you use them in the ToS aren't enforceable. It just would be a ToS violation rather than a violation of copyright law.
I think that falls into the whole "identification of AI images" issue that is trying to be solved. Not just for "ownership" purposes, but to differentiate between a real photo and an AI generated one. Google kicked off SynthID, for example, which is an invisible watermark that survives resizing and other modifications to the image. Something like that could be used here to prove a ToS violation.
I think "AI" generated art often looks awful and unprofessional. As in, it looks like the developer doesn't really care, just wanted to throw something out there.
Just keep in mind you can't protect AI generated images as your own, so if another project or service wants to rip your AI art assets whole-cloth you won't have any legal recourse in most of the world. I personally prefer when there's a wide variety of decent AI art over very minimal human-made art (since artists can get pricey).
The main consequence of this is that Midjourney itself can't copyright the images they automatically generate for you. Guidelines from the US Copyright Office explain that it's possible to combine human authorship with an AI-generated work, through editing or even arrangement of AI outputs, and the result can be covered by copyright. So people could reuse any individual image you put up that's unedited, but if you substantially further edit the images or say build a site template out of them, those results are your own.
This isn't the case per Midjourney's ToS, unless I'm missing something.
https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/terms-of-service
In the terms, Midjourney assign to you the rights that they have in the art. The problem is that for AI generated art current case law (in the US at least) is that no copyright exists in the first place because it was not created by a human author.
So if I understand correctly, it's not that you cannot protect it, but that you will be in the forefront of the AI legal case law developing around it if you do?
All current case law says that algorithmically generated art cannot be copyrighted. A human must personally create the work to be eligible for a copyright.
Interesting, if it's not too much trouble, do you have any links to more information about this? My understanding was different, so I'd like to read up.
See this comment from Macil. Exactly how much human authorship is necessary to make the art eligible for copyright is extremely unclear right now.
I think to get a concept or placeholder, AI art is fine. And obviously things like a personal DND game or whatever it's not hurting anyone to use it.
But once you're commercializing it feels really unethical. It can't cost that much to hire someone to do some pixel art for you.
I am never going to make any amount of money off of this web app at any point, though. How does it count as commercializing in that case?
Regarding your point about hiring someone to do it, perhaps I overestimated how much it would cost based on what I think it should cost. I ought to check the going prices.
Thanks a lot for your input!
I think a starting point (at the very least to see what the other end of the price spectrum could be) would be to have a look through fiverr or similar sites.
if it's not commercial you got nothing much to worry about then. I think it's more about the potential to commercialize it. Time change, people change. If you one day want or need to make some money and throw on google ads, then the issue becomes much more thorny than if you procured the art in a commercially responsible way.
Thank you all very much for your input! I've gone through all the comments and decided to buy Aseprite and at least semi-rely on AI-generated content.
Aseprite is a good tool, and pixel art is not that hard to grasp. It can be quite rewarding to create, so I think you made the right decision.
One could use the generated stuff as placeholders but not as final product since your own creations will always be exactly what you want them to be. And if not, there's bazillion artists there who will be willing to work with you, and don't necessarily ask much money either, if any at all.
Since your app is going to be free (as in freedom and beer) and open source, you have even better chance to get artists help you. It requires some talking with people, but well made art is a delight to see.
I agree with @venn177, that if it's for your own use and especially for a quick project, go for it, but if you're planning to monetize from this, there's going to be people who feel concerned about it. You mentioned it'll be free and open source but still. If I write a free blog it doesn't make it okay for me to plagiarize, right?
It does gets tricky though, because even if you hire someone, they could just go ahead and use that site and sell you art they didn't make.
the biggest risk would be that you end up inadvertently using art that belongs to another company that wants to sue or take down your project.
For example, from your link to the PixelLab home page. Scroll to the "Rotate your characters" section -- Yellow straw hat, open red shirt, blue shorts. Guess who?
I'll share another story. On Telegram, folks from Hong Kong use animations and stickers of Pepe the frog a lot, unbeknownst to them that Pepe is an icon of the alt-right in America. If you use art that you didn't create, even if you paid for it innocently and fairly, they've already shown on their front page on spotlight that they steal art. You might inadvertently put up art that has connotations that would harm your visitors, without ever meaning to or knowing about it.
So, aside from the ethics of it, I personally wouldn't because it sounds risky to me.
Tangential but thought I'd mention:
To be fair, Pepe has been reclaimed back from the alt-right in a lot of cases. Pepe was not created as an alt-right figure but was co-opted by them and plenty of people refuse to let the alt-right steal it. Plenty of left-leaning Twitch streams use Pepe emotes from BTTV/7TV, same with left-leaning discord communities. There are pro-LGBTQ Pepe emotes, etc.
Nearly all the use of Pepe I see on a daily basis at this point has no tie to the alt-right. Though I understand in HK it was being used in a political context which, typically so far HAS unfortunately been tied to the alt-right, so your point stands about inadvertent connotations.
From wikipedia:
The original creator of Pepe has even gone so far as to enforce copyright where possible to prevent some alt-right/fascist outlets from using the character.
edit - apologies you asked for alternatives. How about licensing art or license stock photo pixel art?
or, use stock photo as a base, and convert them into pixel art?
trade art with an artist who needs something else?
Adobe Firefly is an AI art generator that they say only uses properly licensed images for training:
If you're worried about the ethics of it, maybe try that one?
Ooh this is awesome. Thank you!