THERE’S NEVER BEEN a more robust public conversation around artificial intelligence and ethics than since late summer 2022, when a small handful of tech companies released the first proprietary text-to-image AI art generators to the general public.
For the unfamiliar, the growing field of AI art refers to machine learning platforms trained on vast amounts of text and visual data scraped from the Internet, which, when combined with text-to-image technology, allow users to describe any scene at all in natural language (human as opposed to computer programming languages) and have it output any number of fantastical images based on the text prompt. As PCWorld describes the process, it “takes user-generated queries, runs them through an AI algorithm, and lets the algorithm pull from its source images and apply various artistic techniques to the resulting image.”
The biggest early flashpoint in the debate occurred when the Lensa app gave everyone with a smartphone and a selfie camera the ability to create otherworldly profile pics of themselves (called “magic avatars”) in a vast array of painterly artistic styles reminiscent of popular artists both historical and living. This created a rapid explosion in usage, followed by an even swifter backlash for reasons ranging from the perceived devaluation of human artists’ skills to questions concerning the murky online sources for the massive image database the algorithm was trained on.
The fact of AI already being a part of everyday life aside, the emergence and swift
