The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.
All of these images are AI-generated, and stolen from an artist named Michael Jones.
It absolutely is not “stolen” from Michael Jones.
He made, in real life, a wooden statue of a dog.
That certainly gives him no exclusive right to make images with a wooden statue of a dog. And he is definitely not the first person to do a carving of a dog in wood; dogs and humans have been around for a long time, and statues of dogs predate writing.
The problem that someone like Jones has isn’t that people are making images, but that Jones doesn’t have a great way to reliably prove that he created an actual statue; he’s just taking a picture of the thing. Once upon a time, that was a pretty good proof, because it was difficult to create such an image without having created a statue of a dog. Now, it’s not; a camera is no longer nearly as useful as a tool to prove that something exists in the real world.
So he’s got a technical problem, and there are ways to address that.
He could take a video – right now, we aren’t at a point where it’s easy to do a walkaround video, though I assume that we’ll get there.
He could get a trusted organization to certify that he made the statue, and reference them. If I’m linking to woodcarvers-international.org, then that’s not something that someone can replicate and claim that they created the thing in real life.
It might be possible to create cameras that create cryptographically-signed output, though that’s going to be technically-difficult to make in a way that can’t be compromised.
But in no case are we going to wind up in a world where people cannot make images of a wooden dog statue – or anything else – because it might make life more difficult for someone who has created a wooden dog to prove that they created that statue in real life.
Even if we rewind to before the advent of AI generated images, if someone were to take his photo of his art, and painstakingly use Photoshop to create a believable second image with a different person standing next to it representing it as their own without giving him any credit, we would call that process “stealing”.
It absolutely is not “stolen” from Michael Jones.
He made, in real life, a wooden statue of a dog.
That certainly gives him no exclusive right to make images with a wooden statue of a dog. And he is definitely not the first person to do a carving of a dog in wood; dogs and humans have been around for a long time, and statues of dogs predate writing.
The problem that someone like Jones has isn’t that people are making images, but that Jones doesn’t have a great way to reliably prove that he created an actual statue; he’s just taking a picture of the thing. Once upon a time, that was a pretty good proof, because it was difficult to create such an image without having created a statue of a dog. Now, it’s not; a camera is no longer nearly as useful as a tool to prove that something exists in the real world.
So he’s got a technical problem, and there are ways to address that.
He could take a video – right now, we aren’t at a point where it’s easy to do a walkaround video, though I assume that we’ll get there.
He could get a trusted organization to certify that he made the statue, and reference them. If I’m linking to woodcarvers-international.org, then that’s not something that someone can replicate and claim that they created the thing in real life.
It might be possible to create cameras that create cryptographically-signed output, though that’s going to be technically-difficult to make in a way that can’t be compromised.
But in no case are we going to wind up in a world where people cannot make images of a wooden dog statue – or anything else – because it might make life more difficult for someone who has created a wooden dog to prove that they created that statue in real life.
Even if we rewind to before the advent of AI generated images, if someone were to take his photo of his art, and painstakingly use Photoshop to create a believable second image with a different person standing next to it representing it as their own without giving him any credit, we would call that process “stealing”.