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My friends and I use a website for tabletop role-playing games (think Dungeons & Dragons). When making a character for a ‘‘Lord of the Rings’’ game, I found what looked to be the perfect piece online: a Celtic-looking warrior in the style of Alphonse Mucha.
We attempt to attribute art whenever we can, and anything that’s only for purchase we either avoid or pay for. This particular piece seems to be available only in an Etsy shop, where the creator apparently uses A.I. prompts to generate images. The price is nominal: a few dollars. Yet I cannot help thinking that those who make A.I.-generated art are taking other artists’ work, essentially recreating it and then profiting from it.
I’m not sure what the best move is. One justification for A.I. art is that humans create the A.I. prompts that produce the images, so the resulting pieces are novel works. That seems wrong. I could bring an A.I.-generated image that I like to a human artist and ask them to ‘‘rehumanize’’ it for me. But that doesn’t feel right either — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist:
There’s a sense in which A.I. image generators — such as DALL-E 3, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion — make use of the intellectual property of the artists whose work they’ve been trained on. But the same is true of human artists. The history of art is the history of people borrowing and adapting techniques and tropes from earlier work, with occasional moments of deep originality. Alphonse Mucha’s art-nouveau poster art influenced many; it was also influenced by many.
Is a generative A.I. system, adjusting its model weights in subtle ways when it trains on new material, doing the equivalent of copying and pasting the images it finds? A closer analogy would be the artist who studies the old masters and learns how to represent faces; in effect, the system is identifying abstract features of an artist’s style and learning to produce new work that has those features. Copyright protects an image for a period (and just for a period: Mucha’s work is now in the public domain), but it doesn’t seal off the ideas used in its execution. If a certain style is visible in your work, someone else can learn from, imitate or develop your style. We wouldn’t want to stop this process; it’s the lifeblood of art.
Maybe you’re worried that A.I. image generators will undermine the value of human-made art. Such concerns have a long history. In his classic 1935 essay, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ the critic Walter Benjamin pointed out that techniques for reproducing artworks have been invented throughout history. In antiquity, the Greeks had foundries for reproducing bronzes; in time, woodcuts were widely used to make multiple copies of images; etching, lithography and photography later added new possibilities. These technologies raised the question of what Benjamin called the ‘‘aura’’ of the individual artwork. Our concern for the authenticity of a painting — is it really a da Vinci? — is connected with the idea of it as the unique product of a historical individual. Benjamin thought that mass reproduction would diminish the aura of the original. But zillions of photographic reproductions of the ‘‘Mona Lisa’’ haven’t deterred people from flocking to see the actual painting.
An aura can attach to reproductions themselves. The value of an ‘‘original’’ photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron is undiminished by its reproduction in books and magazines. Alphonse Mucha himself specialized in illustrations meant to be reproduced in quantity, and a poster that brought him to wide notice in Paris was created, in 1894, for a play starring Sarah Bernhardt; she had thousands of copies made of it. Collectors prize those old color lithographs. In the digital era, contrivances like ‘‘NFTs’’ (nonfungible tokens) have been used to secure a similar effect of scarcity and specialness. Don’t count aura out.
Don’t count people out either. As forms of artificial intelligence grow increasingly widespread, we need to get used to so-called ‘‘centaur’’ models — collaborations between human and machine cognition. When you sit through the credits of a Pixar movie, you’ll see the names of hundreds of humans involved in the imagery you’ve been immersed in; they work with hugely sophisticated digital systems, coding and coaxing and curating. Their judgment matters. The same might be true, on a smaller scale, of the fellow who sold you this digital file for a nominal fee. Maybe he had noodled around with an assortment of detailed prompts, generated lots of different images and then variants of those images and, after careful appraisal, selected the one that was most like what he was hoping for. Should his effort and expertise count for nothing? Plenty of people, I know, view A.I. systems as simply parasitic on human creativity and deny that they can be in the service of it. I’m suggesting that there’s something wrong with this picture.
Readers Respond
The previous question was from a reader who was torn about whether to make a donation on behalf of his sick mother. He wrote: “My mother has late-stage dementia. I handle her finances, which includes making annual donations in her name. One of the aides who cares for her has asked me to make a donation to the aide’s church. I said I would, but when I looked up the church I saw that they will not perform same-sex weddings and that they believe homosexuality is a sin. As a gay man, I won’t support any organization that doesn’t support me. While my mother’s money is not mine, is it wrong of me to deny her aide’s request?”
In his response, the Ethicist noted: “Your job, as a trustee, is to represent your mother’s values and interests. In general, you should use her money to support causes you think she would want to support, at least within reasonable bounds. Before her current condition, you could have discussed the matter with her, expressing your deep personal misgivings. Sadly, you’ll have to proceed without consultation. If you’re uncertain whether she would have wanted to make the donation, you’re free to have second thoughts and decline to add to the church’s collection plate. If you’re certain she would have wanted to make the donation anyway, you should do so, as an expression not of your values but hers. It isn’t enough to have ethical objections to a prospective beneficiary: A number of contentious issues divide our society, such that people on either side have ethical objections to the other. I’m not saying that any donation is OK; I am saying that, unless you stick to a very minimal notion of what’s morally acceptable, you may simply be supplanting her views with yours, and to your credit, you’re clearly worried about doing so.” (Reread the full question and answer here.)
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As usual, an excellent response from the Ethicist. It is good to take into consideration the possible good the charity may do, but there are many charities that are more “charitable” toward others. What if the aide was asking the letter writer to contribute to an anti-abortion group, or to the N.R.A. or white nationalist groups who might be actively opposing views his mother might have had? — Art
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As both an experienced fundraiser and longtime caregiver, I take issue with the advice provided. It is not proper for the caregiver to ask the letter writer for funds for her church. It puts him in the awkward position of having to say yes so he doesn’t alienate her. I would recommend he give the aide a very small donation and explain to her that he is giving out of respect for her but won’t be contributing any further. — Claudia
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When I began caring for a man with Parkinson’s dementia, he was already past the point where he could acknowledge my presence and communicate with me; I work at the direction of his wife. If the aide in question did not have a relationship to the letter writer’s mother before dementia set in, it strikes me as presumptuous of her to ask for anything other than a paycheck. — Gregory
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Having recently served as a trustee to my sister as she lost her abilities, I think another consideration should be how difficult it might be to find another aide. When I was helping to care for my sister, we did a long and exhaustive search in our community to find a paid aide in addition to the assistance hospice was providing; it proved to be impossible. While the letter writer may not approve of the caregiver’s church, if failing to make the gift would result in the loss of an aide who is comforting and confident, then the decision should be considered very carefully. — Victoria
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It’s confounding how we resort to philosophical discussions just to avoid talking to people. The letter writer should talk to the aide about his point of view and see if he can compromise on a donation that will please both of them. If an honest conversation doesn’t work — and I bet it will — only then will he have an ethical dilemma. — Tom
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