A continued look at what’s going on in AI. This time we take a look at everything from AutoGPT and a fake AI Drake to AI art and copyright law.

Legal Eagle Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS8pAPN9Er0

ChrissaBug Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx3ROK9nOYE

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Hi, welcome to another episode of ColdFusion.

Most people think that they can tell an AI image apart from a real 1.

But this image might call that into question.

It won first prize in the Sony World Photography Award, 1 of the most prestigious photography competitions on earth.

And as you can guess by the context of this episode, it's not a real photo, but AI generated, and it fooled some of the keenest eyes out there.

The prompter of this image, Berlin-based Boris Eldagson, has been a photographer since 1989 and jumped at the opportunity to explore the creative possibilities of AI art generators.

He rejected his creation winning the prize because he thought it was inappropriate.

Quote, How many of you knew or suspected that this was AI generated?

Something about this doesn't feel right, does it?

AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this.

This highlights a glimpse into the future where AI creations become indistinguishable from reality.

The world has just changed and we're going to be coming to grips with what that means for a while.

The field of the Creative arts has been hit the hardest by AI.

And I'm sure you've all seen AI images all over the internet.

It's crazy how we can go from this, to this, in the span of a few years.

This rapid change has seen fierce resistance from artists around the world.

Professional artists devote everything to their craft and now AI can do it in seconds.

And to add insult to injury, it's been trained on some of their work.

And how can an AI steal from humans anyway?

And if so, don't all humans take inspiration from others?

But when a machine starts taking ideas from humans, it feels different.

So today, we'll look at how AI can make such artwork and why the process is stirring legal controversies surrounding copyright laws.

And we'll also take a quick look at some other insane things going on in the world of AI.

Before we get into the main episode, let's look at some things that have been going on with AI in the field of creative art.

First up, Runway ML version 2 has dropped and people are having fun with it, creating whatever cool videos they can imagine.

It's at its early stages, but Runway seem to be proving to be the leader in AI video production.

Google wants to have a slice of this pie, and they're going full steam ahead with their generative video AI, Dreamix.

It can create videos from a reference video or photo and the results are pretty good.

Just a few days after Google, NVIDIA throws their hat in the ring announcing their AI video generator which also looks pretty decent.

Meanwhile, 2 computer scientists managed to fool a bunch of redditors into giving them money.

They used stable diffusion to generate fake images of an attractive female and convinced the men to give some money if they wanted to see more pictures.

I'd imagine that this was 1 of the easiest scams to pull off, and unfortunately, there's going to be plenty more like it.

An AI version of Drake and an AI version of The Weeknd collaborated in a fake song called Heart on My Sleeve and it was doing the rounds on social media and Spotify, gaining hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify alone.

Universal Music caught wind of this and pulled it down from streaming services.

In a statement they stated that they wanted to ban the technology and called it a fraud.

But the thing is it's happening everywhere with big artists like Kanye West, Jay-Z and Ariana Grande.

People are creating backing tracks and putting AI generated vocals on top of it.

Music labels may be angry now but once they figure out how to do it themselves you can just bet that they'll be making money from AI generated music of artists who have passed away.

In more general AI news, science gets a boost.

It was found that GPT-4 answers US medical exam licensing questions correctly more than 90% of the time, better than some licensed doctors.

He gave GPT-4 a real-life case that he treated several years earlier.

He gave the machine a few details about the case and it was able to diagnose a 1 in 100, 000 condition.

And on top of this, multiple papers have now come out stating that GPT-4 can improve its own output when asked to reflect on its performance.

What's taking the world by storm now is Auto-GPT and similar systems.

These are AI agents that can go out into the online world and do tasks for you.

You just say the task that you want and that's it.

What type of pizza would you like to order?

I will first search to find a good pizza place in your area.

I have found a pizza place called Zappizza.

I will now create a pizza ordering bot who will call this location for you and will order your pizza.

Super amazing pizza ordering bot, reporting for duty.

I have been instructed by the other AI to order you a pizza.

I will now call Zapizza using the Twilio Voice API and order you a pizza.

Hello, I would like an 11-inch regular pepperoni pizza for pickup, please Just a plain 11 inch pepperoni pizza, please Okay I would like it now, please Yes My name is Josefina.

right, so as you can see there, it worked.

So now I'll actually show you how I built it.

So let's first talk about how agent AIs are kind of working these days.

So there's no individual lines of code in here.

The AIs I'm using here are GPT-3, Chat GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and Whisper.

When it needs to speak, it'll use 11labs.io.

The AI agents don't wait for you to ask more questions, or wait for your response for the next step.

They just do it automatically by prompting themselves until the objective is met.

These AI agents can do much more than just order pizza.

People have even asked them to do market research and come back with a report.

And just to be clear about the new world we're living in, the heavily used baby AGI tool was created by a single guy called Yohei with no coding experience in just 3 days.

He had the idea to create this crazy app, so he just asked ChatGPT to write the code for him.

In other AI news, Samsung caused Google's stock price to drop by $55 billion because Samsung hinted that they were going to replace Google Search as the default to Bing AI and Bing Search on their Samsung phones.

Whatever happens, it seems that investors are worried about Google losing some market share.

Google would hit back with the announcement of Project Magi, an AI-powered component to Google search.

Meanwhile, Snapchat users get an AI bot, and Elon Musk announces his own AI project, TruthGPT, and we could just keep going with the news, but there's literally too much happening and not enough time for this video.

So let's get back onto the topic at hand, how AI images are coming into conflict with human artists, and the law.

Did you know that the Mid Journey team only consists of 11 people?

Just a few years ago, before the advent of capable generative AI, even the world's largest companies with all their resources would struggle to produce AI images with such quality and coherence.

It's almost like this has always been possible.

From mid-journey to stable diffusion and dream up, any user can now create stunning and surreal images from text prompts in under a minute.

But the thing is, the real magic is happening in the background.

Well, without going into too much detail, these AI systems use a method called diffusion.

This is essentially where an AI learns to create images by starting with a picture and destroying it with noise.

It then goes through a series of steps to reverse the noise and reconstruct a new image.

Understanding how all of this works is beyond the scope of this episode, but what is pertinent to this discussion is the training data used to achieve this.

So we need to look at how these systems are trained.

Most AI image generators get their training data from an unexpected place, a small German non-profit.

This company has a dataset called Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network, or LAION, which consists of over 5 billion indexed images.

Unfortunately, this includes the works of many unsuspecting artists and also copyrighted images such as those from Getty Images.

Some see this as a democratisation of art and a source of inspiration.

Others see it as a threat to the originality and value of human creativity.

Mid Journey claims it does not copy or infringe on any existing images, but rather synthesizes new ones from scratch based on text input.

However, when you look deeper, things get more complicated and not everyone agrees with Midjourney's claim.

Critics also point out that these AI systems are not truly creative or artistic, but rather rely on existing data to produce derivative and superficial outputs.

Is it simply the human mind remembering past inputs and mashing them together in a new way?

Don't humans borrow from each other all the time?

Steve Jobs once quoted Picasso stating that, quote, good artists copy and great artists steal.

Even further back in the 19th century, the poet W.H.

Davenport Adams wrote, great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.

Although these quotes are the opposite way around, they both indicate something interesting, taking the ideas of others in art is a practice as old as time.

But what if creativity is more than that, the sparks that seemingly come from nowhere?

Consider the situation of a musician sitting at a cafe.

Some innocuous sound or smell triggers a distant memory in their mind and it inspires them to write a masterpiece, a biological and uniquely human process.

But it's seeming like regardless, AI is mimicking creativity.

Despite the controversies, AI art has been featured in various exhibitions, competitions, magazines and of course social media platforms.

To give you an example, this cover of the magazine Cosmopolitan was created by Dali too.

An AI artwork called Portrait of Edmond Bellamy won first prize in a prestigious art competition in France, beating out hundreds of human-made artwork.

The painting was later sold for more than $400, 000, becoming the first AI-generated artwork to be auctioned by a major art house.

This image, titled Space Opera Theatre when translated from French to English, won first place in the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts competition last year, and the category was Digital Arts slash Digitally Manipulated Photography.

All of these examples just underscore the sheer scale and somewhat wide proliferation of AI art.

And because it's accessible to anyone, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter are flooded with them.

It's all happened so quickly, and remember, the technology is in its infancy and it's the worst it will ever be.

In light of all this, artists are left devastated.

Making the process of creating art easy and for everyone has devalued the price that clients are willing to pay for it.

Why would a client pay thousands for a custom work of art if they can get the same thing essentially for free.

If needed, it can be touched up for a fraction of the cost.

If you're not an already established artist, it's going to be a really tough time right now, and I do feel for the artists out there.

Obviously things around AI art have been developing very quickly.

On a level, it's of course very heartbreaking.

And then also seeing like on a collective level for the community of artists out there who are suffering, it's also, it's just so heartbreaking.

Really sad to see younger artists or any artists out there who feel like they have to give up drawing because they think it's not gonna be a viable career and I don't know.

I don't know what the future holds But Remember why you draw and why you started drawing because I would guess that most of the time

you started drawing because you enjoy it.

What happens when their art is used within an AI's training dataset?

Kelly McKernan had to find out the hard way.

A rising star in the art world, McKernan is known for their distinctive style.

Their paintings combine fantasy and sci-fi elements with bright colours.

On Discord's Midjourney platform, their name appeared in over 12, 000 public requests, resulting in images that resembled McKernan's work, but with different themes and subjects.

If you remember my early AI videos, this is called a style transfer.

But for McKernan, the use of their name crossed a line.

They've now joined a class action lawsuit in January of 2023 alongside 2 other artists, Sarah Anderson and Carla Ortiz.

They filed the lawsuit against Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DreamUp for infringing on their artistic identities.

The legal battles against AI art generators gained more headlines when Getty Images, 1 of the world's largest stock photo agencies, sued stable diffusion for allegedly infringing on its copyrights.

Basically they're saying that stable diffusion was selling and licensing AI generated images that were derived from their collection but without permission or attribution.

Although the AI image produced is borderline grotesque, they are suspiciously alike, and the AI even copied the watermark at the bottom.

Legal analysts suggest that the Getty Images lawsuit has a stronger case against AI art generators than the artist-led class action lawsuit, but predicting the outcome is still difficult.

Aaron Moss, a copyright lawyer at Greenberg Glasgow and publisher of the Copyright Lately blog praised Getty's complaint on Twitter.

He stated that it was better focused than previous lawsuits.

Moss believes that the case will address the issue of ingesting copyrighted images to train data, and it seems like this will lead to a potentially fascinating fair use legal battle.

If a robot makes images, Does that mean anyone can use them, even for commercial purposes?

The debate surrounding AI-generated works and copyright protection is very complex.

On the 1 hand, there is an argument that AI lacks the creativity that's characteristic of human beings, and thus does not meet the originally stated requirement for copyright protection.

However, others say that AI-generated works do show some degree of originality and creativity.

It all depends on how the model is trained and the degree of human involvement in the creation of any artwork.

In late 2022, an AI-generated comic book named Zaira of the Dawn by Chris Cashtenova was initially granted copyright protection.

The copyright protection was later revoked, because the author didn't disclose that the images were created with the help of Midjourney.

And the US Copyright Office said something very interesting about the ruling.

They decided that only human-created works can receive protection.

The Images themselves are not protected by copyright, but the text and the arrangement of the images are still protected, and this is because they're the creative work of a human author.

Interestingly, the standards for determining originality and creativity differ between different jurisdictions.

In Chinese courts, the rulings have gone either way for granting copyrights on AI-generated art, depending on how much human involvement there was.

In Europe, copyright protection for AI art is still up for debate.

The UK and Ireland have specific provisions for computer-generated works, while France and Germany require human authorship.

I sat down with Devon Stone of Legal Eagle to discuss some of this.

It's ingesting a bunch of artistic works, which would otherwise be considered copyright infringement, but it is producing something entirely different.

That's not really going to compete with the original artworks.

And someone else could come to the opposite conclusion, which is that, of course, the AI generated works are going to compete with the original works and they're stealing from the authors and they the the works that are created by by the AI should be considered infringement and it's going to put a whole bunch of authors out of work.

If you want to hear the full interview, I'll leave a link for it below.

There's no clear consensus or established law on how to handle AI-generated works.

Whether we like it or not, AI-generated works will become increasingly pervasive as time progresses.

1 possible way to approach this question is to look at how art evolved over history and how new technologies have influenced its development.

For example, when photography was invented in the 19th century, many painters felt threatened by its ability to capture reality more accurately and quickly than they could.

They all feared that they'll be put out of business.

There were also privacy concerns as people could now take pictures of others without their consent or knowledge.

As photography became more widespread there were legal battles over who owned the rights to photographs and whether they could be reproduced without permission.

1 important legal precedent was the case of Barugal's Lithrographic Co.

This case established that photographs were eligible for copyright protection just like other works of art.

This case helped establish photography as a legitimate form of artistic expression and paved the way for copyright protection for photos.

After its launch in 1990, it quickly became a popular tool for artists, designers, photographers and advertisers.

For the first time, the general user could crop, resize, filter, layer and blend their images.

Photoshop was initially met with resistance and suspicion by some artists.

They feared it would undermine the integrity and authenticity of their work.

They argued Photoshop would enable fraud and deception, as well as diminish the skills and talent required for photography, art, and even painting.

Photoshop became widely adopted and embraced by many photographers and artists.

They saw it as a powerful and versatile tool for enhancing their work.

These are some historical examples of how these new technologies can both challenge and enrich art and creativity.

They do show that Art is not a fixed or objective concept, but a dynamic and subjective 1 that continues to evolve with time and culture.

So in the future, will AI art be just another tool?

In terms of deception, will societies learn to adapt to AI images and look deeper into their origins as a reflex.

Only time will tell, but the nagging thing for me that makes me think that AI art may not just be another tool is that this is the first technology that isn't static, it can actually learn.

So, this new world of creative AI, and in this case, specifically AI-generated artwork, is fascinating and complex.

As with anything AI, there's both immense opportunities and challenges, and in this case it's both for artists and society.

Maybe it's time to rethink our assumptions about art.

Taking a look at these pictures, maybe it's clear that they're AI generated.

But the thing is, the idea behind them is powerful.

Powerful people in the world that have untold riches being in places of poverty.

The visual aspect wasn't done by a human, but the thought is very human.

And are you for or against copyright protection for AI made artwork?

It's definitely an interesting discussion, so let me know what you think in the comment section below.

Don't forget to check out our podcast channel, Through the Web, for the full AI copyright discussion.

I'll leave you with some AI artwork of my own.

I created a mock-up music video for a track I did.

My name is Dagogo and you've been watching ColdFusion, and I'll catch you again soon for the next video.

See all ColdFusion transcripts on Youtube

AI is Evolving Faster Than You Think Pt. 2 (Art and Beyond)