Is AI changing the face of creative labor? The web has been awash with AI-generated art in recent months. Photo-editing appLensa, which lets users create ethereal digital paintings of themselves in a variety of genres like fantasy and sci-fi, has taken social media by storm, with over 4 mn people downloading the app within just the first five days of December. Art generatorMidjourney creates complex photorealistic or fantastical images of whatever the user fancies following just a few words of description, gaining traction as what Bloomberg calls “the architect’s favorite artificial intern.” In a popularvideo challenging AI to come up with a “a better Drake song than Drake,” ChatGPT andUberduck were used to deepfake a humorous song contending that the rapper doesn’t like beans — in his own voice and style.

The technology has hit home for some artists…: Leaning into the unlimited abstractions and freedom from practical constraints afforded by Midjourney, Egyptian LA-based designerHassan Ragab uses the tool to dream up strikingly fanciful architecture that pays homage to Alexandria, his hometown. The art nouveau that characterizes some of the city’s downtown architecture permeates his images. “These days, it’s hard to implement your ideas unless you’re a very famous architect,” he tells Bloomberg. “This tool is a great way to explore new visual libraries for architecture, instead of just going on doing what we always do.”

…And earned others awards: At the Colorado State Fair’s art competition in August, game designer Jason M. Allen took home the first prize for emerging digital artist for Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial, an image he generated through Midjourney. The artwork, which took more than 80 hours to complete, was no simple matter of “smashing words together and winning competitions,” he told CNN. After creating a preliminary version of what he envisioned, he tweaked his prompt to produce 900 iterations. Of those, he chose three to edit in Photoshop and run through resolution-enhancing software Gigapixel AI, arriving at his final submissions for the competition.

But the opposition is strong: Allen’s prize sparked vehement backlash on Twitter, with artists voicing concerns about being displaced by AI. “We’re watching the death of artistry unfold before our eyes,” one Twitter user wrote. “If creative jobs aren’t safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete. What will we have then?”

Jitters are growing over AI art’s violation of intellectual property: These open-source programs are trained on mns of publicly available images scraped from the internet, including copyrighted work, according to the Independent. They essentially “harvest the stylistic DNA of individual artists,” often without consent or credit. Some lament that AI-generated images go as far as to contain warped traces of the original artists’ signatures. “We could say that, ethically, it’s stealing,” CBC quotes Polish Dungeons and Dragons illustrator Greg Rutkowski as saying. Rutkowski’s name has been directly used to create images more than 93k times on text-to-image generatorStable Diffusion.

The muddled relationship between art and AI has culminated in court battles: In January, stock image supplier Getty Images, which has more than 135 mn copyrighted images under its belt, filed a copyright claim against Stable Diffusion developer Stability AI for having unlawfully used mns of images to train its models, theFinancial Times reports. While Getty has licensed its images to other AI firms, it claims that Stability AI did not seek licensing rights. The lawsuit is a landmark case; the decision of the UK high court, awaited keenly by the likes of Google, will set a precedent for the legal rights and limitations of firms building AI. In the US, a class-action suit has been filed against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt by three artists whose work had been used to train the firms’ AI systems.

But AI firms are standing their ground: Prisma Labs, the company behind Lensa, maintains that while “AI produces unique images based on the principles derived from data … it can’t ideate and imagine things on its own,” it wrote on Twitter. “As cinema didn’t kill theater and accounting software hasn’t eradicated the profession, AI won’t replace artists but can become a great assisting tool.”

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