Day 6 of the 12 Days of AI has us thinking more about intellectual property and copyright, particular given the ways that Generative AI plaforms have gobbled up works of art and writing and images from the Internet, often without any permission from the creators and artists (thus, lawsuits are underway). The prompt today asks us to try to get an AI platform to use an existing work of art, but with a slight twist.
I went into Adobe Firefly, and wrote this prompt: Recreate The Persistence of Memory, 1931, Salvador Dali but instead of clocks, use flamingos.
Firefly did not like that, and responded with a monkey face, saying ” uh oh,” and saying my prompt had not met its guidelines for AI image creation. It did kick out some flamingos and clocks, but nothing that would resemble the style of Dali and his famous painting.
Which is good, right? It means that Firefly has some built in protections of copyrighted material. (One of the reasons I lean towards Firefly is that it used its own art database to build itself, not other works of art from outside its internal data). Since I could not get what I wanted, I just started to play around with some of the filter and tools and got the art above.
I tried to do the same prompt in OpenAI’s Dall-e but I guess it is closed off for free users (??). So I tried a site called Img2Go, and it didn’t seem to have many qualms about my prompt. I did a free version so I didn’t get too many options to tweak the settings, but I suspect I could have done more to get to the heart of my prompt if I had a paid account.
And I did the same with Stable Diffusion, and didn’t get any warnings but didn’t get a great piece of art, either in my free account.
This little experiment just shows that the lack of rules and regulations means that copyright infringement and the protection of intellectual property is still cloudy in these (still) early days of Generative AI. I hope that we can find some balance — paying artists for their work in databases and allowing users to be creative, without outright theft of identity, style and material.
Peace (and flamingos),
Kevin