Is It Real or AI?
It’s important to acknowledge that it’s become incredibly popular for people now to use AI for art purposes, and this has gone even further, to where people have asked AI to create concept art sheets for their own personal characters. Fellow digital artist Roxane Lapa highlights that true creativity is within the ideas that concept artists develop, and although AI does something similar, it does it every time without consent. AI accomplishes this by collecting data from real artists and storing it in a gallery of over 5 billion images, where users can then generate whatever they want using these stolen art styles.
From Jussi Kemppainen (credited above), he explored the process of using AI software to create a prototype of a 2.5D point-and-click style game. Everything from the character design sheets to the game itself was developed by AI. While he attempted to be considerate of the artists out there, worded by him it is “Impossible to not get influences from a bunch of artists.” The result of his game did reflect the “unemotional” aspects of AI, especially in the background, but you can see the most detailed aspect of the game, the character’s movement, was in fact produced by him, not AI.
Personal Reflection: Throughout my research, I wondered would AI art would ever be considered ethical? The short answer is probably not because you would have to go through the effort of crediting each artist you’re taking the art from, and the chances of that even happening are incredibly low due to the backlash AI receives from the art community. Although AI art has evolved incredibly, the creativity and morals surrounding it continue to be questionable.
Sources: Lapa, R. (2023, August 6). Montreal Ethics Institute. https://montrealethics.ai/the-impact-of-ai-art-on-the-creative-industry/