december 2023 the New York Times becomes the first major US media company to sue Open AI for scraping millions of their articles to train chat bots others soon follow suit in 2024 fast fashion giant Shiin is accused of using AI to track and copy designs from other sites giving them an unfair edge it's a knockoff of my silk lace cami to the tea it's exactly the same soon other platforms like Meta begin updating their terms allowing them to create derivative AI content from users posts and data adobe actually just announced that they are stealing your work and using it for a profit they're spying on your computer every time you open up Photoshop Illustrator After Effects whatever app that you use though hailed by technologists and users for its innovative potential generative AI also has many others worried everything that I am my background my history it's just all stripped away and fed in through a machine now artists and writers are saying "Wait a minute how did you make these tools where did you get all the material?" The stakes are high with the Gen AI market exploding across the world these individuals are sounding the alarm it really is something that can be used to reshape our society and in the wrong hands uh with the wrong intentions it could do very bad [Music] things i photograph people for my work primarily a lot of fashion and beauty and celebrity work yeah that's nice singaporean photographer Jang Jingner's work is recognized around the world she's become known for her unique style that crosses eastern and western art traditions i kind of mix my Asian background together with kind of painterly touch and influences from anime manga and fantasy art i think photography is an art because it allows you creative expression through imagination you know willing something in your mind in to existence i think that's very cool in 2017 she created a compelling image that would later spark an international controversy this photo was taken in uh November 2017 and photographed as part of a series of photos for Hapas Bazar Vietnam when we had a model's special feature cover story fast forward to 2022 jinga discovers that a painting with an uncanny resemblance to her photo is getting a lot of attention online i'm seeing that this particular painting was receiving these accolades and praise calling it original and winning award and it was even shown on newspapers and TVs it felt like a slap on the face awarded a prize at the prestigious Luxembourg Bionali the painting Churandot by artist Jeff Dishberg bears striking similarities to Jingna's photo this is my original photo and this is the painting by Jeff in terms of similarities well it's a flipped version of my work you know the model's likeness is quite close to how she looks and the draping of the clothing the petals um very closely replicated as well winning a €1,500 cash prize Dishberg puts his art on sale for €6,000 jingner decides to sue him for copyright infringement in Luxembourg i'm not pursuing this case for money is really about trying to bring awareness to the public that this is not okay to do to artists and creators at first Dishberg claims that his painting is an example of the fair use principle using an existing artwork to create a new one the doctrine of fair use means you are allowed to infringe on copyright in certain contexts fair use is extremely important to art and journalism over the years the concept of fair use has enabled the creation of all kinds of new works in the arts and entertainment industry from famous paintings to musical parodies but a prerequisite is that the new content needs to transform the existing one in a significant way essentially when you look at whether something is transformative you're trying to figure out whether it makes the original work different enough to justify the copyright infringement determining if fair use is justified in art can be highly controversial in 2015 transformative artist Richard Prince took the Instagram posts of various social media users without permission altered them with his own comments and sold them in a gallery for $100,000 each a really important case that examined this question of whether something was transformative or not was just heard by the Supreme Court andy Warhol decided to paint Lynn Goldsmith's photograph of Prince in a magazine goldmith was arguing that it wasn't transformative but also that it caused market harm to her and to photographers everywhere because if you're allowed to just silkcreen a version of a photograph how does that not put photographers out of business uh just lowering the power sure sorry my career is made by me being on the internet and I thought that would be really good for younger generations web generation artists and creators to tell people hey you can't use my work this way jing Na's argument was that the painters work was not transformative enough to justify imitating her work but copyright laws differ from country to country here in Luxembourg Jingner must also prove that her photograph is an original creation the important point is whether the photograph was sufficiently original to be protected by copyright and there the judge felt that there was not enough evidence to prove the originality of Yinga's photos in December 2022 the Luxembourg court rules against Jingna [Music] i was I was very devastated by by the result the judge said that my work was not original enough to receive copyright protection and because my pose was not original because it's a classic pose and the thing is if a pose a singular thing is what it takes to to receive copyright protection then most of art in the world are not going to receive copyright protection and that does not seem right undeterred Jingna appeals the ruling but the case starts to attract more attention online and things take a darker [Music] turn my life has been on a hold i I couldn't sleep normally for a long time i would also receive continued harassment for being a Chinese person who is complaining about copyright about me being a woman calling out men i will also receive messages saying that I should kill myself soon i abandoned a lot of my web presence online while dealing with the fallout a new and bigger threat emerges one that will change Jinga's life and the face of copyright forever dolly 2 is a new AI system from OpenAI that can take simple text descriptions like a koala dunking a basketball and turn them into photorealistic images that have never existed before research organization OpenAI launches Dari a generative AI tool that allows people to produce images from words other major companies like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion soon follow with similar AI programs enabling the creation of any image in just mere seconds a lot of the major AI companies came out with consumer AI tools that were trained on the works of artists and writers taking from publicly available sources Genai learns from books websites social media and more enabling it to generate works that can often closely resemble those of others leading to accusations of copying suddenly anyone could become an AI creator i discovered that my work and my name was being used in prompts for generative AI pretty early on people use Gen AI to make copies of this work and spam it a 100 times just to harass me right and then now they're just putting in your face to remind you well your work is worth nothing i can copy it so many times so easily now artists and writers are saying "Wait a minute how did you make these tools where did you get all the material?" Despite the harassment Jinga isn't giving up for the sake of her future and that of fellow creatives she's decided to take the fight up a notch there were also many many non-artists who don't really understand how copyright works and they would say that because uh she posted her work on the internet it means that she has given up copyright of her work that misconception is so widespread that we are seeing it with generative AI companies right now so that has become something I've been trying to fight and raise more awareness for because it's not right and it's not okay embroiled in a copyright lawsuit over her work renowned photographer Jung Jinga is now facing another predicament like many other artists around the world her distinctive visual style is being copied by people online using AI and it all starts with a prompt a prompt is oftentimes a sequence of words that describes what you want to see in the image they can say "I want this to be cinematic i want this to be high resolution i want this to not have you know six fingers on her hand." It's novel it's something that people have never used before and so when you try something which normally takes you 10 hours to do and is now done in 10 minutes it blows people's mind and so it's always a factor of wow that you can create a picture you can create a video like that in seconds in minutes that's groundbreaking boris L daxon from Germany is among the new wave of artists eager to show the world how to create art using AI prompts once a traditional photographer he now calls himself a promptographer for me promptography is working with AI in collaboration i started two years ago and I got sucked into it immediately it was very addictive spending all nights trying to create images with words also completely new way of creating images i'm going to show you how easy it is to generate an image with text i'm using midjourney as a platform a chimpanzee and he should uh look like me now AI is trying to come up with an image that is related to the words I used in the next step I just want to improve the classes something like mirrored ski classes so here we are different classes potentially I can steal them from the internet i can photograph in museums i can photograph books and cataloges and the sad thing about it is that style has no copyright so right now there's nothing you can do as an artist with AI enabling anyone to create endless versions of any image traditional artists like Jingna don't stand a chance the harm is on a personal level how dehumanizing it has been to see my name used in prompts tens of thousands of times everything that I am my background my history it's it's just all stripped away and fed in through a machine right there is no regard for my copyright jinga is not alone in her plight over 2,000 m away another artist is facing a similar battle for over a decade Kelly Mccernan has built a reputation with a bold and distinctive surrealistic style the work that I create comes from a very very deep place where I'm compelled to express something whether it's trauma whether it's love and I was able to put my art on the internet and good faith because I wanted to share it but I also wanted to build community like Jinga Kelly's art has been caught up in the generative AI storm i believe it was March 2022 when I began to see these images being shared on Twitter with artists being referenced but it didn't look like their work i didn't realize yet the implications of all of this so midjourney starts popping up as this thing I keep hearing about in these really strange intricate images that don't really look like a human made them i do some more research and discover that myself and many of my peers ended up in it because we have very distinct illustrative styles and at that point that I think that my name had been used thousands of times already it was very eerie i kind of felt like they were unfinished sketches from my brain on the screen there was a lot of shock and wonder and an ominous feeling how oh this is going to change everything are you ready to learn about a free AI art generator that can create this or this or even this by feeding it the right prompt by 2022 AI tools become mainstream very quickly everyone from artists to amateurs rush to cash in no art training needed imagine making money with art without actually having to be an artist for creating a children's book in just one weekend using Chat GPT to using MidJourney to illustrate an entire graphic novel many artists fear that there's more to come regardless of how many decades you spend honing your skills as an artist overnight you could become a prompt and all of a sudden you no longer own your style if you Google many artist names you have to be very careful because many times the results that you get back are not actual paintings by that artist they're mimics of that artist style you know submitted and uploaded by random AI user somewhere and so this is incredibly distressing i think it even took the AI companies by surprise just how quickly this has all taken off and gone mainstream graphic designers are wondering if they're going to have jobs because if you are just looking for a decent illustration AI will do the trick now so these consumer tools have completely upended a number of industries already i'm having such a hard time selling my work in a competitive market now with so much fake art and most people don't know the difference artists and creators are being harmed by their own work and and that's just awful on in so many different ways the fear within the arts community is twofold the creative and cultural industries are afraid that if we don't adopt generative AI fast enough we're going to miss the boat we're going to lose a lot of money the arts and cultural sector which is visual artists individual artists content creators the fear of these people in that sector are numerous loss of income loss of the real true meaning of what art might be uh the loss of freedom by 2023 the age of AI has arrived and everyone is hooked in just over a year more than 15 billion images are created on AI platforms or over 34 million images a day a number that continues to grow for these artificial intelligence platforms the secret of their success lies in a database that contains a list of over 16,000 artists and links to their creative works i discovered that these lists that were being shared in midjourney there's a lot of long deadad artists but I also see the names of my peers people who are still alive and the members in the Discord encouraging others to try out combining artists or creating you know images in the style of artists in the spreadsheets but how and where did all these artist names come from behind this phenomenon lies a data mining operation that never stops picture a relentless army of spiders known as web scrapers their one job to crawl and hunt the web for data what scrapers are doing is they find all of the links to images they turn those into giant spreadsheets and they say "Ignore everything about this website except for the images and just download as many as they can as quickly as possible." Scraping is this simple idea of writing a piece of software that will go out online pretend to be a human being and then basically consume and download data it's long been used as a research tool in the late '9s when the internet and the web was just becoming viable commercially in the 2000s pioneering organizations like Common Crawl began scraping the internet to archive website pages for research purposes people were writing scrapers just to you know make backups of content uh the Wayback Machine the Internet Archive to record the evolution of the internet working relentlessly over the years scrapers have amassed billions of images audio and texts from users without their knowledge creating a gold mine of data for AI companies to train their models with no laws in place to stop data scraping anything published online is fair game over the years it's really become clear that scrapers are very very difficult to stop when they're being used without consent and the justification is nothing should really stand you know in the way of technological innovation in 2022 Lion the German largescale artificial intelligence open network releases the world's largest collection of image data for public use so Lion 5B is a data set that contains billions of links to images and it also has the captions the alt text for those images and those together the description of the image and the image itself are what powers these machine learning models although supposedly created for research and educational purposes the Lion 5B data set is quickly exploited by companies to train commercial AI systems a lot of the AI companies really heavily lean into the term publicly available to justify how they got their training data but anyone who produces content would tell you just because you see an image online doesn't give you license to use the image the Lion 5B database enabled all of these companies to take and profit and not even go through legal means to do it we have questions like why didn't why did you speak to a single one of us meanwhile other concerns have arisen with web scrapers before anybody knew it every single image on the internet was already being trained into these models so all sorts of questionable things you know uh images of of violence illegal things abuse of all different types incredibly private images from hospital beds and and people's private photos all that was sucked in as long as it was public on the internet reachable by some crawler somewhere in December 2023 a controversy ensues when images of child sex abuse are found in the Lion 5B database this forces Lion to remove and review their data set for safety before releasing it again online but some wonder if more could have been done right from the start we're going back to a discussion where AI ethics was not even actually a discussion and I remember going to calls from the government where they would say "What do you mean ethical implications there are no ethical implications this is science it works." It's moving so fast that a lot of people are very concerned that they haven't had a chance to even examine what these companies are doing with their work whether or not that ends up being legal it already happened we can't go back in time in 2023 Hollywood fights back against AI screenwriters and actors go on strike raising concerns about the use of AI tools to write movie scripts and replace their likeness some also fear that companies intend to use AI to reproduce their faces bodies and voices on screen i won't say the name of the production but it was a requirement under the last contract that I be scanned for that production so I don't know the uses of that i did give my permission but I don't know what the further future uses of that material my scanning of my likeness and my voice would be more alarms are raised in 2024 when several engineers from Open AI and Google sign an open letter warning about the serious risks posed by artificial intelligence they call for stronger oversight and transparency ai companies are increasingly secretive about what they've trained on so I think realistically if if we want AI companies to tell us what they're training on we we need to pressure the government to pressure them to do so this is a technology that's clearly very powerful and that we cannot say with certainty exactly what's going to happen but it's easy to imagine that it's going to have like massive effects on the world and that it could go very wrong meanwhile some working in the AI community have begun to take action in 2022 Spawning a startup led by artists and technologists launches a free website to help artists find out if their work is at risk from AI scraping so have I been trained as a website where creatives can search the largest AI training data set for images they can search for themselves find their work and then register an opt out which is a machine readable opt out which we then communicate to the AI companies to say "This person does not want you to use this image in their training." An artist like that might be Kelly McCernon we can see that quite a bit of her work was captured in this Lion 5B data set we could also look for Jinga Jang and uh sure enough there is quite a bit of her photography here over a 100 images that has appeared in the most popular data set for AI training and if she'd like to opt those out she could then click select all and ask to mark all of those items as do not train when she does that AI organizations can check if any of those uh images that they're about to download have opted out then we will tell them that those are off limits so far have I Been Trained has helped artists to opt out over 2 billion images from AI data sets but it has limitations there are still many other databases that are likely being used so the process of opting out is complex there really is no practical way yet to remove images from models that are already trained so really the only thing that artists can do with the opt- out mechanism is get themselves out of future models meanwhile the ongoing legal controversy surrounding her copied photo has taken a toll on Jinga i have this ongoing copyright lawsuit in Luxembourg where it's just been eating away at my life you know where I was harassed uh doxed with my home address leaked and even though I was doing really well in my career before this happened I had just photographed Michelle Yo for the cover of the Hollywood Reporter and I I had no choice but to pass on all of this opportunities and give up on my career because I I had no bandwidth and no mental ability to to deal with that with her career largely on hold a major announcement from two popular art sharing websites soon gives her a new purpose when the news broke of platforms like ArtStation and Deviant Art uh saying that you know they were going to opt in uh their users to have their work scraped for AI training automatically i was horrified right these are art platforms and they should try as much as they could to be protective of their their artists their users because I saw that nobody was thinking about this I ultimately decided that I should step up and create KA after weeks of work Jingna and a team of volunteers launched the beta version of KA in 2022 it's a social media platform where artists can showcase their creations unlike other sites their artwork will not be opted in for AI use so currently there is no technology on earth that could prevent someone's work from being scraped uh by AI like if you post it online it could be scraped right so what we try to do is the most basic thing that all social media and art platforms should be doing which is to opt people out of being scraped by AI by default because opting people in by default is wrong car's mission to host an AI free art community is met with a mix of curiosity and caution but Jinger is undaunted for everyone else from tech giants to big brands though the race for more data has already [Music] begun from films to music cataloges creative assets are now being openly sold to AI companies who are eager for more content to train their machines on [Music] and it remains to be seen if anyone can do anything about [Music] it in the spring of 2023 an unprecedented event shakes up the world of art a portrait named the electrician wins a Sony World Photography Award one of the most prestigious prizes in the field but no one including the judges knows that this is AI generated the picture was created by prompttographer Boris El Dagon people are attracted to the image because it has an emotional quality many people criticize AI for having no emotion having no soul but that image shows that it can have it depends on the person producing the image the people do with AI is often very futuristic and science fiction and this is what I liked about Boris work it it seems like pictures taken in the Second World War or in the 1940s and that's why I think he won the Sony awards because the jewelry did not realize that it was not a real picture you know revealing that he used AI at the awards ceremony boris refuses to accept the prize he argues that he submitted the image for a reason to provoke a discussion about the use of AI in photography my mentality was uh one of a hacker it was a kind of a prank here because that was the necessity i saw a chance to do something good for the photo community that I'm part of as more and more people adopt the technology pundits like Boris feel that people have no reason to fear AI if you're not using AI tools in 2025 my friend you are missing out hi everyone I'm Ishan Sharma and in this video I'll share with you seven amazing AI tools that will help you save time make more money and have a better quality of life ishan Sharma is a popular business YouTuber in India who relies on AI to help produce content an AI evangelist he believes the positives of using it far outweigh its faults i know what many of you may think AI art should be legal since it's stealing artwork of hardworking artists my take is to understand how AI works we need to first understand how humans create things and what is creativity from scratch creativity in simple terms is you mixing all of your experiences to make something new and original we've been mixing multiple concepts and beliefs for centuries to make new reforms arts rules etc and AI is doing nothing different i think it's the same situation with Ford so when Ford introduced its first cars there were people using horse cars to actually travel they changed from the horse cars to the to the actual cars and they were able to save time and do things faster to all the people who are watching this video who are afraid of generative AI in general I would suggest you to just use it once and see how it can help you accelerate in your work in your day-to-day life in May 2024 Jingna wins the appeal in her copyright dispute against Luxembourg painter Jeff Dishber the court rules that her work was copied without her consent i feel really relieved and glad and grateful it also means a lot to photographers and artists that you know copyright is being upheld and I hope that this can also aid in regulations and legislations being passed to protect creatives especially as AI become more and more widely adopted across various industries while Jinga's victory marks a turning point the battle is far from over for the creative industry at a US Senate hearing over AI leading advocate Carla Ortiz becomes the first artist to outline to the government the potential harms of technology these work and used to train for As the debate over the issue grows she launches a class action lawsuit with fellow artists against AI companies like Open AI and Stable Diffusion for infringing on their copyrights jingner also decides to join them i have known Color Autist for many years she knew about the copyright lawsuit that I've had going on for the last 2 years so ultimately I thought it was really important to be part of this i want to take the opportunity to show that no is it's actually not okay so currently we have 10 artists who are suing um these generative AI companies for the use of our work in their machines i know this is a marathon and we're going to be doing this for many years things are about to really go uphill get a lot tougher but this is what we want with the laws still unclear on governing AI though the road to justice won't be an easy one a lot of the lawsuits against the AI companies are arguing that the data is being illegally copied the AI companies will tell you that technically they're they're not storing a copy so it's not really a reproduction so I think the way that AI companies are going to respond to these complaints is to assert fair use they're going to say that the models are transformative they don't output exact copies of the inputs what these models are learning are just statistical patterns out of these images and not the images themselves trust issues remain as tech giants continue to scrape user data by getting consent via their terms of service each time anyone logs on in 2024 Meta declares that all user content posted on Facebook and Instagram will also be used to train AI overnight these terms trigger an exodus as hundreds of thousands of artists sign up for KA the anti-AI platform started by Jingna jingazang creator of the new art and photosharing social network cara posted new users on the platform had crossed a 100,000 a few days later 300,000 new users and then just yesterday a half a million and artists are leaving Instagram in droves for this new site elsewhere technologists like Ben Jao are coming up with innovative solutions designed to protect the works of artists from data scraping i run a lab uh co-directed with my colleague Hedo Jung and you know we have a lab of a few graduate students PhD students we spend our days thinking about how to mitigate harms of generative AI on human beings the team's expertise in building cyber privacy tools would prove to be a gamecher for artists against AI they develop a software called Glaze it adds a layer on the artwork that confuses web scrapers and prevents AI from copying details of the original image think of it like if you can imagine putting on UV glasses that enables you to see an image in a complete different spectrum or frequency right so a set of images that for example start as charcoal portraits very dark and moody and low contrast for example um can be altered by glaze you know through a digital transformation process you feed it in it changes a bunch of pixels out comes a separate image a second image will be altered in such a way that even though it still has that same almost exact same look but AI will look at that altered image and see something completely different instead of a dark charcoal portrait you know ideally you wanted to see like cartoony super vibrant colors artists can download glaze on their computers to treat their images before posting them online more artists learn about the software through KA the first platform to integrate Glaze it's a sign of more solutions to come [Music] so today we are at Lightbox Expo in Pasadena and it's a 3-day event for industry artists in films video games animation some illustration to kind of come together listen to panels and we have a booth for KA here people have been coming up to us and it's been very nice to talk to people face to face i like that we exist that that we made an impact on someone's life that's meaningful you know i just feel very optimistic seeing other artists take action because I think it gives us hope i think artists often they they can feel very small as individuals and actions like creating car so I I think what she did was just incredible i'd personally like to really thank Jingna uh Carlo Ortiz Sarah Anderson at Lightbox Expo this year because they try to make a difference as this new technology of generative AI is coming in without them there wouldn't be really anybody to help fight for us some tech startups are now hoping to create a more positive relationship between the creative industry and AI companies one built on consent and fair compensation the source plus is a marketplace so creatives can go and offer their data for sale ai companies will be able to go and get opted in data that compensates the creators we do think it's possible for image models to be trained without infringing on artists these new initiatives are giving the creative community hope but even as they continue to find solutions others feel that more needs to be done in a landmark decision in 2023 China becomes the first country to recognize copyright in AI generated art [Music] vote is closed and it is adopted congratulations then in August 2024 the EU approves the world's first comprehensive legal framework to regulate AI acknowledging the risks of manipulation and misuse what is created by AI should be identifiable so in this way we can give some support to authors to creatives that need to know when creative material that they produced was used to train the AI so that they can check if the copyright law was respected or if it was violated but in the US and other countries the laws are still evolving and the debate over who owns AI generated art continues an AI model is an imitation of human art without a human teaching them they have no idea what is good art so if you take human art out of the equation then they are just copying from other copies and the only question is where is the human artist going to be in 20 years what's happening in some of the art schools our students are dropping out because they don't want to be affected by AI and there's going to be very little human art to help AI learn in the future an AI is just gonna be stuck learning from its own copies and just getting worse and worse and worse generative AI really represents a threat to art and to culture not in the sense of just loss of income but also once it is adopted more broadly across society that's when it starts to represent a real risk in terms of what stories we read and what images that surround us and how we think because it can become a way of standardizing how we express ourselves and even manipulating public opinion by a handful of companies for artists and writers the loss of the human touch with the ongoing adoption of generative AI is perhaps the greatest concern of all the AI companies and the AI researchers don't think of themselves as you know villains sneaking in and and stealing data they think of themselves as uh researchers who are sharing all of the tools that that are creating these quite magical systems these folks actually do think of what they're doing as as impactful for the future of humanity in some cases they're right what they don't understand though is that we have artists who uh are going to very likely lose work because of these systems and if we were able to better communicate I think we would have a lot better uh solutions to these problems [Music] 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