AI: Greg Rutkowski - Digital artist's work copied more times than Picasso

[Omah]

AI: Digital artist's work copied more times than Picasso

Genuine

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing life as we know it, but for digital artist Greg Rutkowski it is causing big problems. He said his name had been used as a prompt in AI tools that generate art more than 400,000 times since September 2022 - but without his consent. When he checked, his name had been used as a prompt more times than the artists Pablo Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci. Polish-born artist Greg has had his work used in games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, but said his new found AI fame has caused concern for his future work.

Sites like Midjourney, Dall.E, NightCafe and Stable Diffusion are known as generative AI because they can make new, artificially-generated artworks in seconds from prompts that users type in. They have learned to do this by scraping billions of existing images from the internet. Artists are complaining this has been done without their consent.

Greg said: “The first month that I discovered it, I realised that it will clearly affect my career and I won’t be able to recognise and find my own works on the internet. The results will be associated with my name, but it won’t be my image. It won’t be created by me. So it will add confusion for people who are discovering my works. All that we’ve been working on for so many years has been taken from us so easily with AI. It’s really hard to tell whether this will change the whole industry to the point where human artists will be obsolete. I think my work and future are under a huge question mark.”

AI

Opening a can of dragons …

[butterscotch]

I wonder if he’s easier to copy because he’s a digital artist. Perhaps it’s harder to copy something on a canvas in digital format than it is to copy something that’s already digital.

I also wonder if traditional artists were complaining about him, a digital artist, at one time in the not-too-distant past.

I also wonder what distinguishes him as an artist if he doesn’t recognize his own work.

So many questions.

[Omah]

@butterscotch

I wonder if he’s easier to copy because he’s a digital artist. Perhaps it’s harder to copy something on a canvas in digital format than it is to copy something that’s already digital.

AI art is not actually copied - it’s generated - think of it as “in the style of”.

In the style of Impressionism:

In Harmony with Nature

The above are only examples - there are millions more and the software/skills are improving exponentially.

[butterscotch]

@Omah

AI art is not actually copied - it’s generated - think of it as “in the style of”.

In the style of Impressionism:

That said, is there a reason that the person in the article has a style more copied than other more known artists?

[Omah]

It’s not clear in that article or others:

This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it.

Rutkowski is a Polish digital artist who uses classical painting styles to create dreamy fantasy landscapes. He has made illustrations for games such as Sony’s Horizon Forbidden West, Ubisoft’s Anno, Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering.

Many of Rutkowski’s artworks have been scraped from ArtStation, a website where lots of artists upload their online portfolios. His popularity as an AI prompt stems from a number of reasons. (1)

(1) None specified, though.

Presumably, the computer fantasy game fanbase are AI users and besotted fantasy art generators …