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"ow, legal redress is all very well, but it's usually beyond the resources of working artists. And lawsuits are almost always retrospective, after the damage has been done. It's sometimes better, as in rugby, to "get your retaliation in first". Which is why the most interesting news of the week was that a team of researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a tool to enable artists to fight back against permissionless appropriation of their work by corporations. Appropriately, it's called Nightshade and it "lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it's scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways" - dogs become cats, cars become cows, and who knows what else? (Boris Johnson becoming piglet, with added grease perhaps?) It's a new kind of magic. And the good news is that corporations might find it black. Or even deadly."

"SoundCloud announced on Tuesday it would become the first major streaming service to start directing subscribers' fees only to the artists they listen to, a move welcomed by musicians campaigning for fairer pay. Current practice for streaming services including Spotify, Deezer and Apple is to pool royalty payments and dish them out based on which artists have the most global plays. Many artists and unions have criticised this system, saying it disproportionately favours megastars and leaves y little for musicians further down the pecking order."

"Robot dogs have unnerved and angered the public. So why is this artist teaching them to paint?"

"All of this probably means I should be worried about recent trends in artificial intelligence, which is encroaching on voice-over work in a manner similar to how it threatens the labour of visual artists and writers-both financially and ethically. The creep is only just beginning, with dubbing companies training software to replace human actors and tech companies introducing digital audiobook narration. But AI poses a threat to work opportunities across the board by giving producers the tools to recreate their favourite voices on demand, without the performer's knowledge or consent and without additional compensation. It's clear that AI will transform the arts sector, and the voice-over industry offers an early, unsettling model for what this future may look like."

"This study therefore concludes that file sharing has not reduced the creation of new original music. It may have led to fewer works as a result of fewer new artists entering the field, but it was also associated with an increase in output by those artists who chose, despite the lower returns, to devote their talents to making music. Given that file sharing undeniably promotes the broad dissemination of existing works, this conclusion suggests that file sharing is both fully consonant with copyright's constitutionally-delimited purposes and welfare enhancing."

"Consider abstract art. We've noted that machine learning, in aiming to make an accurate prediction, constructs a high-dimensional feature space that contorts and reconfigures the data representing features of the natural world. Likewise, artists "mash and rip" features of visual reality to create a system of forms, texture, and color that richly represent features of visual experience in an alien way. The subject of representation is abstracted but represented none-the-less. "

"Some are outraged at what they consider theft of their artistic trademark. Greg Rutkowski, a concept artist and illustrator well known for his golden-light infused epic fantasy scenes, has already been mentioned in hundreds of thousands of prompts used across Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. "It's been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won't be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art," Rutkowski told MIT Technology Review. "That's concerning.""

"Until recently, I was deeply sceptical of the idea of AI art. I saw it as hype and casuistry, and with some cause: widely publicised efforts such as Ai-Da the robot artist obviously exaggerate the independence of the machine and play on our fascination with sentient artificial beings. But now the dream is coming true, at least in art. And art is surely one of the most inimitable expressions of the human mind."

"Artists say AI image generators are copying their style to make thousands of new images - and it's completely out of their control"

"The post sparked a debate in the comments about the ethics of fine-tuning an AI on the work of a specific living artist, even as new fine-tuned models are posted daily. The most-upvoted comment asked, "Whether it's legal or not, how do you think this artist feels now that thousands of people can now copy her style of works almost exactly?""

"According to the website Lexica, which tracks over 10 million images and prompts generated by Stable Diffusion, Rutkowski's name has been used as a prompt around 93,000 times. Some of the world's most famous artists, such as Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci, brought up around 2,000 prompts each or less. Rutkowski's name also features as a prompt thousands of times in the Discord of another text-to-image generator, Midjourney. Rutkowski was initially surprised but thought it might be a good way to reach new audiences. Then he tried searching for his name to see if a piece he had worked on had been published. The online search brought back work that had his name attached to it but wasn't his. "It's been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won't be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art," Rutkowski says. "That's concerning.""

"A robot that can decide whether or not to inflict pain has been built by roboticist and artist Alexander Reben from the University of Berkeley, California. The basic machine is capable of pricking a finger but is programmed not to do so every time it can."

"And, of course, there's the law-enforcement angle. Instead of relying on sketch artists and police lineups, a real-life version of a Recaller could tap into a witness's memory and reconstruct what they saw. Forget security-camera footage - cops just need your thoughts."

"Beginning in 2017, I did a project with artist Trevor Paglen to look at how people were being labelled. We found horrifying classificatory terms that were misogynist, racist, ableist, and judgmental in the extreme. Pictures of people were being matched to words like kleptomaniac, alcoholic, bad person, closet queen, call girl, slut, drug addict and far more I cannot say here. ImageNet has now removed many of the obviously problematic people categories - certainly an improvement - however, the problem persists because these training sets still circulate on torrent sites [where files are shared between peers]."

"But because of "security issues" that may include concerns that she is part of a wider espionage plot, both Ai-Da and her sculpture were held in Egyptian customs for 10 days before being released on Wednesday, sparking a diplomatic fracas."

"An art historian, a critic and a gallerist are tasked with guessing whether a piece is by an important artist or a clever bot. It turns out it's harder than it looks"

"Will this AI take jobs from artists? Where does copyright law land? Can machines ever truly produce something original? Should I feel guilty for making a picture of Tony Soprano having a cappuccino with Shrek and sharing it with my group chat?"

"Musicians are therefore worried - about being made to perform material they otherwise wouldn't, or being usurped by a fantasy. "I can't help but think that I can be easily replaced," says Flora Rose, a singer-songwriter on TikTok. "I'm spending months crafting my debut EP, [and meanwhile] people can make tracks in one click." When it comes to the arts, AI tends to provoke horror or ridicule - as when an AI photograph won a major photography competition, or when ChatGPT declared young adult weepie The Fault in Our Stars "one of the best books of all time". In February, the lawyer behind a lawsuit on behalf of visual artists whose work was being used to generate AI art called any generative image "an infringing derivative work"."

"Carolan, who is 18 and has just completed an art foundation course in Cardiff, decided architecture would be a safer path to follow. "It feels like it will be a more secure degree. Lots of psychology goes into architecture," he says. "You need to understand the core of what you're doing." He is doubtful that images made by artificial intelligence will replace the art exhibited in galleries, but he worries that commercial projects previously requiring a team of artists may in the future need only one to work with AI and neaten up the final product. "The options will probably get limited as time goes on. Personally, I'd find it a bit depressing if there wasn't a human element, but whether or not we'd notice I'm not sure. I always thought things like art would be one of the last things robots would be able to do.""