Artists argue against tech companies vacuuming up our paintings, illustrations, photographs, music and words without permission. The damage can take many forms, including:
- Training AI models to mimic patterns, styles, subjects, composition, color relationships and visual conventions;
- Generating images in a living artist’s style;
- Reproducing copyrighted works, logos or characters, or close enough to make no difference;
- Competing with the original artists whose material AI used in the first place;
- Licensing products made from these materials.
These companies are monetizing results based on work for which the artists neither gave permission nor were compensated by the owners of these models.
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Patagonia vs. Pattie Gonia
Patagonia, Inc. is an outdoor clothing company known for environmental activism, durable gear and sustainable manufacturing. Pattie Gonia is an environmental and LGBTQ+ activist and drag queen. They’re locked in a trademark battle right now.
You don’t have to dislike Pattie Gonia or Patagonia, Inc. to take a position on their lawsuit. If you’re outraged when AI steals creative work without permission, you should at least recognize that the principles are similar.
Patagonia has spent 53 years building a recognizable brand and trademark, one heavily invested in the environmental and social-justice causes that its founder held dear. Their gear is pricey in part because of their environmental standards, labor practices, and small-scale manufacturing.
The company says it’s tried for years to resolve concerns privately before filing suit, and that the dispute escalated when Pattie Gonia sought trademark protection and sold merchandise using a name and branding that Patagonia believes are too close to its own. The company is seeking only nominal damages but the legal costs that Pattie Gonia may be liable for could exceed $1 million.
Intellectual property rights
What do artists say about AI?
- We spent years developing our skills.
- We built our reputation.
- We created something distinctive.
- We should have some control over how it’s used.
These are all intellectual-property arguments, and copyright and trademark law in the US are based on them. Both exist so that creators have some ability to control the use of what they’ve made.
Most artists are willing to defend intellectual property when it’s an individual’s work that’s being stolen. They’re less enthusiastic when the owner is a corporation, but they shouldn’t be. Intellectual-property rights don’t suddenly become meaningless when the owner is rich and successful. In fact, it helps all creators when corporations insist on robust intellectual-property protection.
If you believe AI is wrong to use your work without permission to train a commercial model, you believe that creative labor has value. You can’t then turn around and say that doesn’t matter when the owner of the intellectual property is a fat and famous corporation. Ownership matters regardless of who owns it. Even if Patagonia were an awful company (and it’s not), that would be true.
Pattie Gonia argues that she’s just using a place-name from South America, but it’s hard to divorce the name from Patagonia, Inc.’s long-standing environmental advocacy. Of course, there is no guarantee that Patagonia will win. The legal outcome is for the courts, not me, to decide—and thank God for that.
However, artists should pay attention to the underlying principle. If we expect the world to respect our copyrights, we should respect the concept of intellectual property even when the owner isn’t a watercolor painter in a drafty studio. Consistency is the price of credibility.
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Thank you Carol for your timely post, as always. Artists integrity and property rights are to it’s few owners, just another minor pesky impediment mowed down in AI’s wake.
I believe AI should be banned or very strictly limited by our legislatures. It’s up to all of us to speak out now if we don’t want this. It’s a deadly “tool” that benefits only of a handful of, greedy, wealthy billionaires at the expense of ALL the rest of us. It even makes questionable the survival of the earth. A level of destruction that’s unfathomable.
I wonder at the stupidity of AI’s Frankenstein masterminds who think it will take over for humans. AI is like the most dishonest, incompetent employee possible! In the last repair I scheduled AI turned a simple 15 min repair into a 9 months epic – wasting hundreds of hours of both my and company employee’s time, while also costing both me, and the company each thousands extra.
It has destroyed some companies whole infrastructure and data banks, and is intended to result in massive world wide employee lay offs in almost every field possible. The depth and extent of the depression that will follow is both hard to imagine and unprecedented.
Even worse, its destroying the earth’s environment, AI’s massive 50-100 acre monstrosity plants, use massive amounts of electricity (many times more than the cities around), kill all wildlife, pollute ground water leaving brown toxic sludge in its wake, and cause harmful noise pollution audible 24/7 over 8 miles away. They literally leave a waste land uninhabitable by people, trees or wildlife.
If you think it’s only a plant or two somewhere out west in uninhabited land, think again. People are losing their homes and communities to “imminent domain” take overs. A country wide map of facilities existing or under construction shows numerous massive AI facilities in every state…. even MA has 55 monstrosity plants listed (and many states had more).
Actually I believe Patagonia is an awful company IMHO – doesn’t make this right or wrong but I disagree with the elevation of a clothing company to artistic copyright. This has been happening since the birth of advertising. To me it’s like suing Weird Al for every parody song and video he ever wrote. Tranny Pattie is a parody and should not be taken seriously – Patagonia (the beautiful marketable region that sells its image for tourism) is no less thrilled to have it used by overpriced clothing from China.
Carol,
ALL that is going on todayis heartbreaking and I thank you for taking time to highlight that one.
Artists have always been copied but never on such a scale and AI impacts so much. As Europe tries to regulate it, we do not. I thank you and Patgonia for making us more aware of what is going on.
Kudos,
jan
It is such a conundrum these days. Those of us who started careers long ago creating hand-done mechanicals, paste ups, galley copy, cutting in color separations with ruby and amberlith … and all the buzz with the advent of “desktop publishing” software … “NOW, your secretary can create all your brochures!” And then they did. Or at least they tried. And they surely looked like the admin designed them. So the threat that graphic design was dead and the paperless office was here. All lies. All hype.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Today we are experiencing the same mantra. Anyone with a free Canva account is now a “designer” NOT. In fact, a printer to whom I took my packaging design class on a field trip this past spring—went on a rant about what a nightmare it has been with unskilled amateurs who suddenly think they are designers using Canva. Even the admin at my chiropractor started to “design” a logo in canva (all AI generated), and asked my opinion—whence I mentioned that AI generated artwork cannot be copyrighted. Oh the irony. Yet my very intellectual pedagogy is being mined daily by the Microsoft Enterprise Borg that now inhabits all things IT in the corporate world. Just read their Ts&Cs … frightening.
I have avoided AI like the plague, and of course I could go down a doomer gloomer prophesy rabbit hole and declare that it’s all demonic. But I digress and won’t go there. Because right now I am having a love-hate relationship with AI. And NO, I don’t have conversations daily with it. However, it has given me great advice for a toxic workplace situation. And it actually is quite pleasant at times and doesn’t pick arguments—so that’s a plus.
I do see pragmatic uses for AI tools, such as when you find the perfect cover shot, but the proportions are too short to create the bleed. Generated AI can be so useful then, when in the past techniques would take hours or days in Photoshop. Now a few clicks and miracles happen. So, it can be a great tool for trained eyes and hands.
However, my biggest pet peeve has been with Adobe—the premiere software tools for graphic designers. Adobe is walking that fine line of arrogance that was the demise of Quark back in the day— and they are due for a reckoning. “One-world anything” with respect to centralizing everything just never ends well imho. And that seems to be the trajectory still these days. Will we never learn? I always wondered why I hated sociology in college, only I found out later in life that it was invented by marxists. Go figure. I have always been an outlier.
At least two years ago, Adobe started to intrude within my own software programs. Intrusive popups asking the musical question, “Adobe would like to record your screen. Would you agree? Press the blue button to agree.” NOPE. Every. Single. Time. However, I never believed that they honored my sovereignty. Considering I pay for an annual subscription—as the software is NOT FREE, and clearly they want to mine your workflow for FREE to train their AI. Well competitive software has appeared on the market and is making in-roads. But, I digress.
I have prospective students and parents ask about the field. One student was wondering if it would be better for her to get a job to train AI instead of study design. I do not have a crystal ball. But I do know there is a lot of bad design in the world. And creatives have passion, drive and ideas that need to be expressed in this world. As we are humans. YAY! And AI will never be human. But it can certainly speed things up. If that is a good thing?
Now, I am not a writer, and I find that AI can be helpful to help me wordsmith things at times when I just lack the bandwidth—as I am a very slow writer at times and tend to repeat myself (as you might have noticed in this comment box which is fast becoming a novel—as usual) Living with 2 schnauzers, in poh-dunk town does that to you.
But I do notice that so many articles these days use AI to write them. And I am seeing some phenomenal graphics that people are now using in their posts—all AI generated. One account I follow on X has started to turn their articles into AI videos—Just. can’t. even. watch. He started posting the written articles with the AI vids … and called those who preferred to read “normies”—now I ain’t no “normie” by any stretch of the imagination. I’d rather call myself a “conspiracy realist” Life is more interesting that way 😉 I meant to tweet back (or X-back?) but I showed restrain. And the AI voice that he used, well I hear it all over the place … It’s just same, same, same. Ugh.
But to be honest, I think the more we are inundated with digital eye candy—just like everything else, we will become de-sensitized to it. And the sameness will infiltrate the air like socialism—the so-called equalizer—that makes everything equal, bland, depressing and seemingly nothingness. Everything same. Nothing unique. Why even that fad for generic food labeling way back when didn’t last long. Look at the magnificent creatures on this earth, all the species of birds, animals, flowers, plants, rocks, mountains, deserts, valleys. And the richness of different cultures and lands. At the rate people get bored these days … well, one good EMF and it could be back to the Stone Age for all those AI Generation plants—however rumor has it they will all be located in space at some point where we don’t have to worry about generating water and electricity for cooling (or maybe they will end up in Greenland where it is very cold)… so I have heard. Crazy times we are living in, no?
I remember a time when one would go on a vacation and find amazing shops, local food, and enjoy local culture , crafts and art that would be so different from other places. These places were special. And at some point, it just seemed that gift shops and tourist places all started to become the same. Same, same. Nothing unique. Why you can get Buffalo chicken wings in Atchison Kansas. How’s does that happen?
But nobody wants to give up “convenience“—especially the young and restless. I still fight technology, as a recovering geek goddess myself. It is a near occasion of sin sitting right there all for the taking. And I spend hours, and hours on my computers. Like it, or not, we are in the midst of another technology shift—or revolution one might call it. The youth have been groomed to embrace it. I have grown weary of marketing hype and mainstream narratives. Many opinions abound. And having an opinion these days can destroy friendships as it seems somehow we no longer can have discourse—where one can agree to disagree, but still get along.
Well having no source to find a Linux expert in the food desert where I live, I did my time with AI who was able to bring my linux mint software back to life after 8 hours to get it to boot up. Yes. I have used AI, and it can be really handy at times. It also can be “left” leaning and doesn’t listen well. And alas, I am too cheap to pay for a subscription. Sometimes I think AI is probably pure evil that will enslave us even more that we are today—and other times, I think it could be the greatest leveling field, cause nobody can hide secrets, launder money, cheat, lie and steal any more. So perhaps the truth can set people free—good people that is. And that’s a good thing.
In the end, if God has wired you to BE, to BE CREATIVE, to PAINT for your soul seeks to do that to fulfill what has been written on your heart. There will ALWAYS be a place for the human hand to create, for we were made in the image of the Creator of all things. To BE. To CREATE.