You don’t owe money to the brush company if you sell your art

In my previous post, I explained how the future of the content is AI. Also, in an older post, I was talking about how AI generated content can revolutionize the world of interior design/architecture. In this post however, I’m not talking about these topics and I’m going to talk about legal issues and questions about AI generated art, and there will be a twist at the end. Wait for it 😁

AI content creators are concerned about legal stuff

Yes, they are. If they are not, they are making a very very big mistake. When you create any form of content, one of the most important aspects of publishing it is the legal issues.

These legal stuff are usually about the rights of content creators over their content and also the rights of companies who develop the tools for content creation.

In this part of the article, I am talking about what I guess is the important legal topic in this new generation of content creation.

The Ownership

The very first time I posted about my own AI art generator model Voyage in a Telegram chat room, one of my friends asked Who owns the generated art? You? Or us? and I explained since you have to run the generator on your own computer, you are the owner of the generated art and you don’t owe me anything.

By the way, most of them gave me huge credits when they posted their artwork on social media or even on the very same chat room.

But I found out most of those proprietary art generators like Midjourney don’t act like that. They make you pay them if you want to own what is your own. Let me make this a little bit clear.

Imagine you are going to buy a nice set of brushes and colors. You paid for it, right? Now you made a beautiful piece of art with those tools and now you want to sell it. Now imagine the brush company asks for shares! Isn’t it hilarious? of course it is. I believe this must be considered by AI Artists who use these proprietary tools to generate content.

Use by and for minors

another important topic in the new generation of content creation tool is always how minors will use it? and it also concerns me a lot (specially since Stable Diffusion 2.0 has no NSFW filtering). So what should we do for our younger friends? A lot of content creation platforms like YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, DeviantArt, etc have their own policies and filters for public content distribution.

For example, I’m a big fan of horror movies and when I search about content about them such as reviews, fan arts and even scripts, I usually face the age confirmation pages and modals. Now you can understand where will I go with this topic.

AI is dumb, it cannot understand what it generates and we need a little more human observation on the generated content. For example in Stable Diffusion’s discord, I remember reacting to NSFW content by a certain emoji, could mark it as potentially harmful and then they could improve their NSFW filtering system.

Plagiarism

I guess you thought I don’t give a fine F about copyrights, right? No it’s not true. I believe artists and content creators should be credited well. So let’s talk about another topic which seems very important.

The very first day I started AI content generation, there only was a good free (in any sense of the word free) and it was VQGAN+CLIP. It was a great tool to make art and even today it has a unique quality of art comparing to other tools.

But even those days, I had a huge concern. What if I plagiarize another artist’s work? and this concern was at its highest form when I figured out adding names of well known artists such as Greg Rutkowski, James Gurney, Thomas Kinkade, Salvador Dali and thousands more can alter the result for us! So as both AI generator developers and artists, we should pay attention to this matter as well!

And last but not the least: Fake Art!

One of my most favorite activities is trying new artist names in my prompts. I love to see how their minds would paint what I’m thinking of. But there is a problem, What if I say this is an unreleased painting by a well known artist? and this can lead us to a huge money fraud.

I never could stop thinking about these matters, and as a person who developed a model and generated tons of content with AI, I never want to be classified as a fraud or scammer or even a person who disrupts the work of other artists.

I guess we talked enough about legal issues, let’s get to the big plot twist of this blog!

Big Twist!

The young blonde woman in the picture is beautiful. Isn’t she? I made it using my model Voyage which I introduced earlier in this blog post. You want to use Voyage and create your own art? Fine. You won’t owe me anything if you do. And if you want to use it in Google Colab, here is the link to the notebook!

Voyage is trained on the data crawled from OpenArt and as you can see, it is a model which can work with a very artistic feel comparing to other models which are available.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we discussed about one of the important aspects of AI content creation/generation which is legal stuff. We also have to fight for our rights of ownership as content creators. In my personal opinion, it is okay to ask for money for a service. We pay a lot for infrastructure and computing power as developers or companies but if we make our users pay us shares, I guess it’s not fair.

In the other hand, we need more and more open source tools for AI content creation. Big tech companies are ruling the market in this world as well and it never is good.

I hope this article was useful and if you like more content like this, please consider sharing it with your friends 🙂

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