Isabelle Levent

“There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery,” said Peters.

There’s another edge case as well; in theory, with the same prompts and the random seed that’s used for generating the images, you could end up with someone else generating the same, or a very similar, image as what you created. 

Academically, this is a collision of everything from computer science and art history to media studies to disruptive innovation to labor economics, and no one of these disciplines seems sufficient to cover the topic. 

Instead, I’d like us to ask: in whose voice do our machines write? What voices do they obfuscate? Where do their words come from? In short, I’d like us to ask questions about power, and the ways in which it functions through and around language. 

In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity–especially the need to maintain critical technological systems as smoothly working entities–have tended to eclipse other sorts of moral and political reasoning.

In particular, anthropomorphizing the AI system mitigates the responsibility to the artist, while bolstering the responsibility of the technologist. Critically, this suggests that the responsibility that will be allocated to individuals in the creation of AI art will be dependent on the choice of language and framing used to discuss it