Hey everyone. So we've got a bit of a mess on our hands involving AI generated art. I recently launched a product that got an immediate and a very large backlash. People thought I had generated a bunch of images with AI so that I wouldn't have to pay an artist. The art was actually made by an artist I hired, but he did choose to use some AI elements. And I'd like to discuss that today and take responsibility for it because a lot of you raised very valid concerns about how AI is threatening artists jobs. Some of you said that you feel AI art is in opposition to human creativity. It's too easy. It's making us lazy. It doesn't have the same soul as human made art, things like that. And some people said that they were against any use of an AI that was trained on people's work without their consent. So I'll address all of this. And I also want to be transparent about how the product came together. I'll show you how the art was made. But the most important thing I'd like to say is that I understand that it's a worrying time for artists. And I'm sorry for not being more sensitive about these issues until now. I think I've been in a bit of a bubble with a lot of friends who are artists and are okay with AI or who even have embraced AI. But of course I'm aware that not everybody's on board with it and I'm hearing you. And I will entirely stop using any AI art in my work until, and unless we reach a point where things have changed and we generally feel like these issues have been resolved. In whatever ways we might not agree on everything in this video, I want you to know that I respect you as artists and as people, and I want you to feel welcome in this community if you want to be here. So all of that is much more important to me than any reason why I might do anything more that involves AI art. So here's what happened. I created this deck of cards. It's called the Book of Chances. Here's an example card. Aside from the normal playing card stuff, you've got an inspirational phrase, obviously the artwork, which is unique on each card. And then there are things like chord symbols and rhythms and notes. So you can draw cards out of this deck and get some random inspiration. The art actually wasn't part of my original idea for the deck and it doesn't change how it functions, but I ended up thinking that it would be extra special if each card had some unique art on it. So when I decided to bring this project to life, I found this artist named Scott who I hired because some of his pieces had this really surreal style that I liked, and this was in 2021. So it was before the AI art phenomenon took over. We didn't have any of the tools like we have today for just generating this stuff from a text prompt. I wasn't trying to cheap out on the art by using AI. It just wasn't even an option at the time. I was trying to find a real human artist and pay them whatever they needed and let them take whatever time was needed. So Scott started working on these cards and sending me a lot of cool looking art. And I knew that his process involved incorporating different third party images that he would Photoshop and manipulate in different ways. So I confirmed with him that we'd be legally allowed to use any of these assets in a commercial product. And he assured me that would be the case. He only used royalty-free stock images. During the process of working on these cards, AI art exploded in popularity. At one point, I did ask Scott if he had started using AI on the cards and what he described to me sounded pretty minimal. So I just left it at that. And I was willing to believe that he was still doing all this work on the cards because for months already, before any of the AI tools existed, he had been sending me stuff in the same style. Of course, this became a problem when the Book of Chances came out because the cards struck a lot of people as being fully AI generated. And that's fair. The style that they use is now associated with AI in a lot of ways. There's high detail, but also a certain softness to the lines. A lot of the images are kind of surreal or unrealistic. So people were upset about this. And I wasn't able to tell anyone very much about the art because I just didn't know. So I went back to Scott and I got him to go through a lot of the cards with me. He showed me what was AI and what was just stock imagery. And he made it very clear that there was nothing that was fully AI. And there was a lot of art that was not AI at all. But of course we can only take his word for it. I did ask him to send me a screen recording of his process so that we could understand how a lot of things that we might interpret as AI generated could be created by a person manipulating stock images and creating these surreal collages. This is a long video, so I won't show you the whole thing, but for full transparency, I will upload it as an unlisted video and link it in the video description. I'll just let you know that in this example, Scott generates three things with AI to incorporate into the piece. But I think it's also clear that he is putting a lot of work into this. He's exercising a lot of skill and creativity. And I also don't know that many people could reliably guess what was or wasn't AI in this image. You can let me know if I'm wrong, but I believe this demonstrates that a lot of the art people reacted to could have been made by a person rather than AI. And I actually had someone comment that they had a terrible experience of being accused of generating AI art when they had made it all themselves. So we're living in a time where some people might want to avoid some types of art because of anti-AI sentiment, but AI is just gonna keep getting better and better. So unless we wanna keep reducing the range of our expression to fit in with what AI can't yet do well, I think we need to exercise both skepticism and trust and be aware that there are very real risks because we can't fully believe everything we see online, but also it's possible that we can overcorrect. Of course, none of this changes the fact that the Book of Chances does contain things that were generated with AI. And depending on how much trust you're willing to give Scott, maybe you think it contains a lot of AI. So I wanna respond to the major issues that you raised with me. And I would love if this could turn into a healthy discussion in the comments because I certainly don't have all the answers and I'm open to being wrong, but given the situation, I feel I should be transparent about where I stand on things. And I would just like to remind you that I'm not an expert. I'm just a guy who wanted to make a deck of cards. Issue number one, AI is killing creativity and I'm someone who's been a big supporter of artists and creativity, so it's shocking or disappointing that I would engage with AI art at all. Going forward in this video, there will be a little recurring theme, which is that two contradictory things will be true at the same time. I do believe that AI is killing creativity. I also believe that AI is fostering creativity. I'm a person who deeply believes in the importance and the joy of people expressing themselves, making art and empowering others to be able to do that. I'm also someone who's interested in what technology is capable of and how it can support our ambitions and what it can create when we just give it a few parameters and also more broadly, just how our art can be expanded upon by expression that's not necessarily our own, by ideas that come from other people or from nature or even from machines. You've seen my ridiculous synthesizer over there. I get that to generate melodies for me all the time. I think like many tools, it depends how AI is used. Certainly someone can just type in a prompt and take the resulting art and try to pass it off as their own, and that sucks. Someone could decide that they'd rather do that all day than develop any traditional artistic skills. But like most technologies, there are ways to use it that are malicious or lazy, and there are ways to use it that are empowering or that make life better. I believe AI can be one more tool that artists can use in ways that I don't think take away from the humanity or the creativity of their work. It can generate inspiration or different perspectives. It can be used to quickly iterate on things or prototype an idea, and it can take over a lot of the tasks that you don't find meaningful so that you can spend more time on what is more creative or rewarding or fun or whatever it is that you wanna get out of your process. I think whether Scott is using an image generated with AI or a stock photo or a 3D asset he created himself, his work displays a ton of creativity. I also think there are always going to be the people who want to do the hard work regardless of what shortcuts exist, and there are always going to be people who appreciate that. In music, we've had royalty-free loops around for decades that anyone, musician or not, can mash together, and sometimes those kinds of assets can show up in powerful works that touch a lot of people. But the part that touches people and what stands the test of time is the human part. It's not which loop is the coolest, even in the most loop-based forms of music. It's never about that. It's always what did the artist do with it and what did they add to it that came from them? Issue number two, AI is taking jobs away from artists. This is absolutely true. AI is taking jobs away from a lot of people. The labor market changes with every big technological shift. As a musician, I've seen music become continually more devalued in my lifetime because of technologies like digital media and the internet, making it really easy to copy music and distribute it. And at the same time, I really believe that it is the best time in history to be a musician because of those exact same technologies. My music can be heard around the world instantly without having to mail anything, without having to tour. Social media allows me to build an audience without having to deal with any gatekeepers. I don't have to work with a record label, so whatever your feelings on record labels, maybe you'd consider that a job loss, but now I am paying a social media manager. The availability and the value of jobs under capitalism has always changed with technology, but I believe as a whole that technology has been beneficial and has given more agency to the average person, and I wanna believe the same can be true for AI. Now, I'm open to the idea of things going in many different directions. I'm not some huge AI lover. If it comes across that way, it's just because in this video I'm responding only to anti-AI comments, and some of them were kinda mean. Two opposing things are true. I think AI is bad, and I think AI is good. I'm not attached to a particular outcome for its place in our lives. If AI ends up being banned or severely limited or whatever the case may be, I will not be fighting to get my AI back. I just hope that wherever we land with it results in the betterment of people's lives. What I'm trying to do is face the likely reality that AI is here to stay, and it's not like I don't have concerns. It could negatively affect my career and probably already is. Many people believe that streaming services are filled with passable AI-generated music so that the platforms don't have to pay artists as much. Just like the generative AI art tools, there are generative AI music tools with parallel threats. Companies hire me to make music, but if they can get something good enough with AI, they might just go with that. And then on the YouTube and social media side of my career, AI's are churning out content these days. There's more to compete with than ever, but even with all that, I'm not anti-AI. I'm also not pro-AI. I just don't think it's going away, so I'm trying to be optimistic about how we move forward. So looking at the good, there are ways that AI can help artists with their work as well. AI can take care of a lot of the really mundane parts of the creative process, like sorting samples or cleaning up audio. My editor was just telling me about all the hours he used to spend rotoscoping, and now instead of frame by frame tracing people out in a video, he can just click his mouse a few times. I've seen an AI platform where artists can train a model on only their own work so they can create stuff in their own style more easily, and that of course allows them to work faster and even take on more gigs. Again, I have to come back to the world I know. When computers got good enough, all of a sudden it was possible to do all this music creation without having to hire session players or engineers. You could just do it by yourself at home, and maybe that made it so that there was less work for engineers and session players, but it also made it so that millions of kids who couldn't afford session players and engineers anyway could learn their craft, could create art, could express themselves and develop skills that they eventually could turn into their own career. I was one of those kids, and in this situation that I found myself in right now, AI did not replace any artists. Scott chose to use AI, but if he hadn't had access to it, he would have just kept on going with his usual process of manipulating stock images. In the screen recording I showed you, maybe he couldn't find the right image of a kid sitting on a dock, but if AI wasn't around or if he was anti-AI, he wouldn't have asked me to hire another artist or photographer to create that asset. He would have just changed his idea. Issue number three, AI should not be able to train on anyone's intellectual property without their consent. Some folks came around when I shared that Scott had only used some AI on some cards, and it was very much his own creativity at work in the project. But others said that they believed that these AI tools were trained unethically, and so any use of them at all was unacceptable. A few people told me that after following my work for years, just seeing these cards made them instantly done with me. So it's a very strong feeling, and I can understand that a tool like this feels wrong or threatening. And as I said earlier, I want to respect this perspective, and I won't be using these tools anymore. But I know this is not the answer that some people are hoping to hear. Where I personally stand on the issue is that I just don't know. There are two opposing ideas, and I see them both. I agree that it doesn't seem fair that an algorithm should be able to learn from someone's work without their consent when it can so easily reproduce their work. Also, I agree that this technology is so new and so completely different from what's come before that it doesn't seem to fit in to our current understanding of copyright. So just to make sure we're all on the same page, I feel like it may be necessary to address that some people think of a generative AI art model as a massive library of all different kinds of images, and when it's given a prompt, it takes a bunch of little pieces of whichever images it needs to in order to create what you asked for. And while it can produce results that appear that way, what it's actually doing is creating a new image based on all the patterns it's detected in language, in images, and in the associations between the two. The big issue is whether training a model on someone's work without their permission amounts to copyright infringement. Many artists feel that this is a rights violation, and they should have a say over whether they allow an algorithm to be able to learn and reproduce their style, and they should be able to be compensated if they opt in. I absolutely understand this. It feels unfair and scary that a computer should be able to so easily do something that humans work so hard at and hold dear. The other side of the argument is that a machine learning algorithm extracts patterns from what it trains on and makes connections between all these different patterns, but it doesn't actually store any of the original work to be used when it does its image generation. However, it is so well trained and so good at image generation that it can create an image that looks like a copy of something it was trained on. So the point where it would become copyright infringement is if an AI generated an image that looked like a copy of someone else's work and then someone used that image in an illegal way. Some people compare it to human learning. You could look at as many SpongeBob pictures as you want. You could draw as many SpongeBob pictures as you want. You could get really good at drawing SpongeBob, and you could use those drawing skills to draw other things. The point at which it would become copyright infringement is if you released a commercial product that was covered in your SpongeBob drawings. Another analogy is photography. Cameras are able to very easily capture copyrighted visual work, and in the case of cameras, they actually do store everything they capture. Taking a photo of something copyrighted is not illegal. Storing those images is not illegal, but there are ways that you might use those images which would be considered copyright infringement. For another example of training, the MP3 encoder was developed by listening to lots of tiny snippets of audio over and over to see how well they'd compress, and copyrighted material was used in that process. I don't know if I can say that those copyright holders should have had to consent or be compensated for their work being used in this way, even though the resulting product could be used in ways that infringe on their rights. So these are some of the ways that I think about it and why I don't feel I can say that it's a cut and dry issue even though the products can be damaging. A bunch of people right now are fighting it out in the courts to try and figure this out, but it is tricky. We have never seen anything like this before. So that's why right now it's not illegal to train an AI on copyrighted material. It's not illegal to charge people to use that AI that was developed with copyrighted material, and it's not illegal to commercially use the assets generated with that AI except when those assets happen to look like a direct copy of someone else's work. And all of that, of course, is really bad when you're thinking about the use case of being able to easily copy an individual artist's style, but there are lots of other roles that AI can play. My team and I use AI for noise reduction, rotoscoping, subtitling, all kinds of things, and we have no idea what these tools were trained with. These tools have improved the quality of our work and have rerouted countless hours of our lives away from mundane tasks and into more meaningful creative work. And it's not just niche audio tools either. AI is unavoidably pervasive now. If you believe it's unethical to use a model that trained on copyrighted work without permission, that includes chat GPT, which most coders now use regularly. I was recently talking with someone who works at Shopify. They use chat GPT at their job. At this point, the platforms we're engaging with daily on our devices almost certainly contain chat GPT-assisted code, and then there's the fact that the devices themselves are usually made with conflict materials by exploited workers in terrible conditions. So like many things with ethics, it's very hard to be ethical unless you remove yourself from the entire messy system. People have asked how I'd feel about a model being trained on my work without my consent, which has probably already happened. They're scraping up everything. I'm pretty sure that chat GPT learned from me because once I asked it for video ideas and it gave me exactly a video format I'd already done years before, including the exact same title. Of course, I don't like the idea that somebody could use AI to create work exactly like mine with little effort, but AI or not, there are already people out there trying to copy my ideas or pass my work off as their own. And of course, I think the whole situation would be better if we can figure out consent and compensation, but if you were coming to this video hoping I'd take a hard stance on the ethics one way or another, I'm sorry to disappoint you and I don't just want to tell you something that I think you want to hear. Again, I'm not trying to argue for or against AI. I'm just trying to be honest about how little I really know, and that's why I'm not full steam ahead with these tools even though I've tried them a few times. That's also why I'm not ready to condemn or tear down any artist who might choose to use them. But let me end by trying to share my optimism. We know that the arts have been through ridiculous technological changes before, and it's my belief that great art always perseveres. Sometimes its shape changes or it grows to include things that we never before knew were possible. But recording didn't kill live music, photography didn't kill painting, printing didn't kill storytelling. From where I'm looking, creativity and humanity have always shone through more than anything else. So lastly, let me tell you what I'm going to do with the Book of Chances. I'm going to reach out to everybody who currently has an order in. I'm going to tell them about how the AI was used. I'll share this video with them and I'll offer them a refund if they want it. I'm not shutting down the orders because I believe it will be a bigger positive to donate the remaining money than to just cancel everything in the name of not printing some art that incorporated some AI-generated assets. So I will not be profiting from these sales. I'm going to give all the money to Sketch, which is an organization here in Toronto that provides arts programming and meals for marginalized young people. I've known this organization for a long time. I have a couple friends who used to work there. So I know they're making a big difference to a lot of people. For the next batch of cards, the art will be completely redone. And of course, AI will not be involved. I hope there's one other small positive that can come out of this, which is if we could have a respectful discussion in the comments. I think we all could learn a bit from each other and understand things better. I probably won't have time to respond to everybody, but I am reading the comments. I am listening to you. I'm open to having my mind changed on things. Thanks for watching.