Giving Ai a bad name

[Deb]

So, as many of us worried about, that people using Ai would start stealing designs, recreating them and either using them or selling them, an article came across my email I thought I would share:

https://medium.com/ai-art-and-business/best-way-to-re-create-any-image-d8c134b1c02a

‘Medium’ being a popular platform for learning articles, this writer decided it was a good idea to write an article on how to copy designs using various ai platforms.  Just exactly what many of us have been concerned with.. I encourage you to read and comment on this .. to let the community know .. we are watching. 

[Lais]

This is kinda proving something I heard a while ago: that AI is a "super copy and paste machine" and that's it. 

[Deb]

Used with discretion and used properly it can be a great tool - but  used indiscriminately and with the purpose of copying - ruins it for everyone. 

[Deb]

well I have been blocked form this users  page - because I reported and left a message that basically said shame on you..   this is my  response to her article

[KeegansCreation]

Good letter. I agree. I use Midjourney and DALL-E (via ChatGPT) and had never heard of Wirestock. To be honest I find it odd and alarming that Wirestock recreates so very close to the original image. As she notes, both Midjourney and DALL-E don't recreate uploaded images but rather make something new but related. I use both to upload my old art and get interesting new designs that are similar (a tiger will still be a tiger) but in no way a re-creation.

As an experiment I uploaded a photo of my daughter to DALL-E and it morphed her into a man of roughly the same age and wearing a similar shirt but not someone who would even be mistaken as related to her. I was greatly relieved by this. It is clearly by design. Midjourney and DALL-E have apparently made a decision to alter uploaded designs far from their origins even though the AI capacity exists to recreate them nearly exactly as Wirestock shows. Yikes!

[ShadoWind]

AI is horrible and IMO it doesn't need articles like this to give it a bad name...there is no real good use for Ai as far as i can see. It trains using artists work and give them no compensation, and it is flooding the whole market with images generated with a few key words and clicks when real artists like myself spend hours, days, and months slaving away to create our works. All I have to do is type in "Dragons" in the zazzle search bar and I swear more then half the images that come up are AI and I'm lucky if one or two of my hand drawn or painted dragon products show up.... Ugg

[Lais]

AI is good for brainstorming, though it's not necessary because we have other simple options (like using Pinterest for example). I can't see much more good use for AI other than this. Despite this, I fully agree with you. 

[KeegansCreation]

Just for fun, here's an example of what I consider a positive use of recreating an uploaded image. The top image is a vintage seafood collage I made years ago for kitchen stuff. I asked DALL E to recreate it just now. It gave me a "vintage" seafood collage that includes a woman at a table, a barrel, a fish, a blue crab and the word Seafood just as in my upload. But it is undeniably a different image. With some reworking and rearranging I could likely get something usable out of it that nobody would confuse with my uploaded image yet it has similar elements. I consider this a positive use of AI image recreation capabilities. DALL E seems to be programmed to make something thematically similar but the similarity ends there.

my vintage seafood collageDALL E's seafood collage

[Deb]

example of how accurate wireframe is.. and very upsetting TBH - you can see how  Midjourney takes the 'idea' and creates an image - nothing at all like the original .. this is fine IMHO, but wireframe?  hmm not so much .. I'm thinking this could open up a huge class action  if enough artists got together .. very upsetting to say the least.. and apparently no scruples. 

[KeegansCreation]

Wow! I was wondering if she was fudging some because the article was basically an ad for them. But that is very much the same rather than Midjourney (and also DALL-E) which are only thematically related.
For thieves who right click to snag an image, there has always been the problem of low resolution. This solves that problem for them. 😮

[Deb]

and sadly.. none of us are immune.. our  graphics are out there.. and any can be used.. I admit I do use midjourney -  almost all of my  cover images are from  MJ.. its quick and easy and it makes nice  backdrops.. I have done some  art with it as well.. it's like having your own private digital art factory - BUT that being said.. you Must be honorable and not use other's images, their names or likeness  while  writing your prompts..  and usually I add  digital art in either PS or Procreate to the works I get from MJ before I ever use it .. Wireframe????.. WOW that's a whole  story of it's own.. And that is frightening.. 

[Connie]

Wow, that is brazen theft!

[Jadendreamer13]

I won’t be using AI to create artwork. On a side note, as a subscriber to CreativeFabrica, it’s distressing to me how quickly that platform has been overrun with poorly generated AI clipart by non-artists. The amount of scrolling I have to do to find tasteful, traditional art created by skilled artists is ridiculous. There is currently no search filter option to turn it off. I’m sure the same situation exists on any platform that allows the presence of AI art. Not a fan at all.

[KeegansCreation]

My solution for that situation was to Favorite artists doing high quality work. Now I have a large Favorites list of people who upload quality stuff. Adding somebody new to the list takes a fair bit of scrolling through the MP but it at least gives me some reliable designers to start with.

[Jadendreamer13]

We shouldn’t have to do that. We should have the option to filter out AI created artwork.

[Deb]

Not all Ai art is bad.. it's the user who are the abusers, I consider my work to be fairly high quality - some of it has been purchased art, some I have drawn and painted myself, and some now is ai..  and I would bet dollars to donuts , someone would be hard pressed to choose which of mine is what I have purchased, what I have painted or drawn myself and what I have created using ai. It's all in the prompts you create and what you  filter out and what you accept and change before you get a good piece using ai - and one that is your style.. but it can and should be done this way.  My point was that someone, and I am sure there are many more, actually promoting copying someone else's work as stated in my original post. 

[peekaboohime]

I know the pain. I am a clipart seller that hand paints their art with watercolor and my work is buried under all the AI art out there now. 😞 no one finds my work anymore so I barely get sales.

I am a full time seller on Etsy but I'm going to start selling on Zazzle more because of this issue. 

[Connie]

That's really a shame! I am always looking for real hand painted graphics, but it's so hard for me to find it now, buried under all the AI stuff! Design Bundles is the same as Creative Fabrica. If they allow AI stuff, they should at least have a filter to exclude it.

[TabbyG · Accepted solution]

Comments appear to be disabled on that article now... but I think also people should report that writer - i just checked mediums rules, and "Facilitation of copyright or other intellectual property violation" is against their rules, so 🙄

[Lais]

I wonder if she wrote this article by herself or even used AI to do so, as it's written clearly about image theft here:
it is now just stealing and selling the image as your own

[ColsCreations]

I couldn't read the whole article as it's for members only, but that part your quoted had me scratching my head when I got to it. My conclusion was it's a typo and was supposed to be "(no, it's not just stealing and selling the image as your own)" included as an attempted proactive defense to people thinking, uhm yeah that's exactly what it is.

[CreativeLeahG]

If you create art using AI a useful thing to do is run the results through Google IMAGE search, then you can see if it has 'stolen' or it has indeed generated something new. This isn't fool proof bit it xan reassure those who do feel they might be copying or stealing or worried their AI is too close to an original etc. 

You can also do this to check if your original art or even AI art has been duplicated after the fact.

Keep original Ai art files to show the dates they were generated should a dispute later arise the same way you keep a record of when you upload original artwork to the web.