Can There be Art Without an Artist?
This work addresses ethical and economic concerns for artists in the age of generative AI, though it is incremental in its analysis.
The paper examines the impact of generative AI on artistry, addressing issues of plagiarism and profit shifting from artists to model owners, while proposing that responsible deployment could make AI a positive new art modality without harming artists.
Generative AI based art has proliferated in the past year, with increasingly impressive use cases from generating fake human faces to the creation of systems that can generate thousands of artistic images from text prompts - some of these images have even been "good" enough to win accolades from qualified judges. In this paper, we explore how Generative Models have impacted artistry, not only from a qualitative point of view, but also from an angle of exploitation of artists -- both via plagiarism, where models are trained on their artwork without permission, and via profit shifting, where profits in the art market have shifted from art creators to model owners. However, we posit that if deployed responsibly, AI generative models have the possibility of being a positive, new modality in art that does not displace or harm existing artists.