AI tools can create new images, but who is the real artist?

NEW YORK — Countless artists have taken inspiration from “The Starry Night” since Vincent Van Gogh painted the swirling scene in 1889. Another lawsuit in a U.S. federal court in San Francisco describes AI image-generators as “21st-century collage tools that violate the rights of millions of artists.” The lawsuit, filed on Jan. 13 by three working artists on behalf of others like them, also names Stability AI as a defendant, along with San Francisco-based image-generator startup Midjourney, and the online gallery DeviantArt. Stability AI said in a statement that “Anyone that believes that this isn’t fair use does not understand the technology and misunderstands the law.” In a December interview with The Associated Press, before the lawsuits were filed, Midjourney CEO David Holz described his image-making service as “kind of like a search engine” pulling in a wide swath of images from across the internet. To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it’s fine.” The copyright disputes mark the beginning of a backlash against a new generation of impressive tools — some of them introduced just last year — that can generate new visual media, readable text and computer code on command. There’s plenty of room for fear, but “what can else can we do with them?” asked the artist Refik Anadol this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he displayed an exhibit of climate-themed work created by training AI models on a trove of publicly available images of coral.