Whose art is this, really? Inside Canadians’ fight against AI

Sam Yang likes creating art, making a living off what he creates and teaching it. What he doesn’t like is people using artificial intelligence programs to emulate his style.

So in a bid to stop people from using their work, Yang and other artists have raised concerns about a surge over the past year in people doing just that.

Recently, the use of such technology to create images and text has raised many ethical questions about who is employing it and how. For Toronto’s Yang, it became a concern when he discovered a number of people using image fragments from as many as 300 of his works to create derivative AI images.

“My content is not to be used for commercialized purposes. I am the owner of this copyright,” Yang told the Star.

Art is Yang’s career: he’s a digital artist who works from home, drawing every day to sell illustrations for educational and commercial purposes. He also spreads his passion via his YouTube channel, Sam Does Arts, where he gives art instruction to nearly a million subscribers; the internet has helped him gain a following but is also one reason for his problem.

It can seem as though AI software is creating the images from nothing, artists like Yang say. But in reality, it is assembling them using fragments of actual images gathered or “scraped” from the internet and stored in massive databases.

Trained on the scraped images, algorithms called models are used to create new ones in a specific style via prompts typed by users. Some models aren’t just used but sold to people who want to create art in specific styles.

After discovering a person was creating images via AI and posting them on the online forum Reddit, saying it was meant to look like Yang’s work, Yang spoke up.

“I told people about this and how this was not right,” Yang said, but those in the forum hit back.

“They decided to retaliate and made a multitude of new models based on my work.”

The AI-generated pieces were released to the public and a contest was held by Civitai, a company that shares models, to see who could best recreate Yang’s style. He said those involved even asked him if he would judge the contest.

Civitai sent Yang an email that he alleges was meant to taunt him.

“As you may or may not be aware, (you’re probably aware),” it reads, “your reaction to calling out this individual and his work created a Streisand effect, resulting in a slew of aspiring AI artists taking up the task of creating models in your style. SamDoesArts is now not only one of the most copied models but also the most downloaded.

“In the event you’re actually some kind of reverse psychology savant, and wanted this to happen to better spread your style (and marketing) then bravo, fantastic job! If not, well, unfortunate.”

Civitai told the Star in an email it had tried to contact Yang regarding his complaints about people using his work. It did not address the email’s tone but pointed to its statements posted on Reddit as its “official response” to artists’ concerns.

The company said it has a complaint function on its platform called “This uses my art” for those who believe an image has been made from their work without permission. Once an artist fills that out, the statement said, the company will review the claim and it will be “delisted” if found to be credible.

Yang said he hasn’t seen it happening. “There’ve been many artists, in fact, report the models on this website and they still have not been taken down,” he said.

Civitai’s Reddit post says many people cannot afford the works made by artists and this gives them a chance to own something in the style of an artist they like. Of the proceeds, 70 per cent “will go to the artist and/or model creator,” reads the statement.

Yang insists there’s nothing altruistic about the strategy.

“You’re kind of centralizing the power now, where the corporations hold all the power,” he said. “The individual artists are going to be screwed over.”

Stories like Yang’s have led to artists around the world rallying to fight for their copyrights and stem the use of their work by AI.

Jon Lam is a Vancouver artist who does storyboard work for video games, but defending the integrity of artists’ work has recently become another priority for him. He and other artists found some AI images that so blatantly scrape their art that fragments of the artists’ signatures can be seen in them.

“Everything that is on the internet, they are scraping it,” Lam said.

With so much art in program databases, AI can easily come up with something that would appear to be unique, but is actually just cribbed and reassembled from artists’ creations, he said. Lam added that when there’s not enough scraped art to draw from in a certain style, the programs start overusing certain images and the art all starts looking the same.

Now, Lam and others have spoken to legal experts and plan to speak to politicians next month trying to stem the infringement of artists’ works, including via the hashtag #createdontscrape.

But the legalities around AI art are in a grey area in Canada, according to Victoria Fricke, a German lawyer studying law as a graduate student at McGill University.

Fricke said while the creators of the images own the copyright to them in Canada, there has yet to be a court case involving their use in AI imaging. So while there is some potential protection, it has yet to be tested in such a case in Canada.

“They can always sue for copyright infringement and for compensation,” she said of artists. “But, since no one did yet, we don’t know how the courts will interpret that.”

Lawyers who work in copyright are waiting for such a case, she said, adding that the question of who owns the copyright on the AI images is also unresolved.

In Northern California, the legal battles have already begun.

In January, a group of American artists launched a lawsuit against four AI software companies — Stability AI Ltd., Stability AI Inc., Midjourney Inc. and DeviantArt Inc. The suit alleges the companies have created products that infringe on the rights of artists and others.

The Star contacted all companies named in the suit but only received a response from Stability AI. “Please note that we take these matters seriously,” the statement from the company reads. “Anyone that believes that this isn’t fair use does not understand the technology and misunderstands the law.”

Lam said he expects the proceedings in the U.S. to eventually have a trickle-down effect on the Canadian side of the issue, but he hopes Canada can help lead the charge. While he waits for any such effects to hit Canada, he said the intention is to continue pushing to raise awareness about the threat the software poses to artists.

He said the term “AI” is really being used as marketing; while current tech represents a threat to people like him it doesn’t represent actual artificial intelligence.

“True artificial intelligence would be a computer being sentient, self-aware, waking up and deciding it wants to paint one day,” Lam said, as opposed to “a database collecting every image from the internet, ever, being compiled and compressed and being drawn from when a user is typing in certain prompts.”