So the rise of generative art has many of us debating questions of ethics that really we should have been debating for ages. For years, scholars, business people, students, and pretty much everyone else has been “scraping” the Internet for images. We take those images and cram them into powerpoints, documents, marketing shill, etc. Sometimes we credit the source from which we took them. But the producers never got paid.

Now AI image generators have access to the Internet’s data and are creating “novel” art out of it. In some sense, a novel powerpoint is also a remix of someone’s work, but it directly uses that person’s creation without even hiding it as an indecipherable mash-up of content and algorithmic process.

Artists are 100% right to be unhappy that Dall-E, stability.ai, etc. have turned their work into profit generation for someone else. They would have been right to complain about all the other uses too!

So what to do?

1. We know with fair certainty that the algorithmic process will be largely a black box and it probably won’t be possible to track exactly which content an image generator used to build a specific image. But is it possible for programmers behind the scene to calculate the overall usage drawn from particular source materials in their total process? I’m not sure, but that would allow for compensation if so.
2. Should the producers of AI generators be unable to track in any way whatsoever which sources their algorithms use and to what extent, then we could legally require that they profit-share into an artists’ collective fund that would be used to, as they say, pay it forward to artists.
3. Me? Myself? I? Obviously I’m not in a position to decide for corporations all by myself. But I am in a position to decide on my own account. And so I’ve reached out to a couple of artists whose work I really like and want to use in my own powerpoint presentations. I am trying to build a small financial model where I can offer them something at least in return for their creative work. I don’t get paid for some of the talks I give (e.g., conferences) and, compared to the labor and time I devote to them, I don’t get paid a heck of a lot for the other talks I give (e.g., at universities). So I don’t have a lot of money for this. But I’m going to keep doing what I can. I’ll cite my creative commons and similar sources, and I’ll try to compensate a few artists so that I can include their work in good conscience.

I’m excited that the ethical debate over generative AI also has me thinking about the ethics of my own choices. How can I pursue justice in my own work? One little piece will be to try and reward artists.

For the time being, I hope that my new approach offsets a few occasional uses of Dall-E. Feel free to debate that in the comments!