These days, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between some of the art now proliferating the internet that has been created by AI image generators and the real thing.
With new AI art creation engines, such as Craiyon, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, being used by multiple millions of people each day, real artists and other creators like photographers all over the world are worried about their copyrighted material being infringed upon.
This is because these artists believe that they have been made unwilling participants in the creation of these AI services, which used their copyrighted material to ‘learn’ by scraping their images off the internet.
So, does Craiyon steal art? Do the other systems? Well, the answer isn’t as simple as you might think. Read on for an explainer…
Does Craiyon Steal Art? What About Midjourney and Stable Diffusion?
Some of you may be old enough to remember the early days of digital music, before the likes of Apple Music and Spotify launched their popular streaming services. All the way back in 1999, along came something called Napster, which was a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that people used to share their digital music files.
It was the dawn of the mp3 file, and people uploaded their CDs, as well as rare analog vinyl and cassette tapes, into the format, which allowed anyone with an account to share them. At one point, Napster had more than 80 million users registered, allowing billions of music files to be shared. However, almost all of the music on the site was uploaded without copyright approval.
Napster allowed people to upload their CDs, as well as rare analog vinyl and cassette tapes, into the format, which allowed anyone with an account to share them. At one point, Napster had more than 80 million users registered, allowing billions of music files to be shared. However, almost all of the music on the site was uploaded without copyright approval.
So, the Recording Industry Association of America stepped in and filed a lawsuit, and Napster was soon shut down.
This is the same scenario that many artists and photographers are now hoping for, after a class action lawsuit was filed in California, alleging that new AI image-creating software is breaking copyright law by stealing their licensed material.
So, does Craiyon, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion steal art? Well, if you ask most artists, they believe this to be true.
There has also been a lawsuit filed by Getty Images in the UK, as well as in Delaware, against Stable Diffusion’s parent company, StabilityAI, claiming that it misused over 12 million of its photographs to train the AI, and didn’t have a license to do so.
All of these art creation AI models are based on generative artificial intelligences, which are systems that are meant to emulate the technique of the great old masters. The most popular GAI at the moment is DALL-E 2, which is an OpenAI system, now launched as Craiyon.
It’s the same company that launched ChatGPT last year, and was co-founded by rocket boy himself, Elon Musk.
And though it seems like these companies have got away with ‘scraping’ artwork (as they call it) from the websites of the original creators, they do have their own rules when it comes to how users utilize their services.
For example, the prompts that you give these AI art generators are generally successful, to a point. That’s because the developers have implemented controls, such as misuse rules, which won’t allow people to intentionally create images that people would find offensive or distressing, (which is subjective, to say the least).
So, these AI companies have their own rules while making profits on the generation of AI images, even though there are no such rules for the art and photographs that they scrape, which belongs to those they’ve sourced from.
Such is the way of AI, it seems. But let’s take a closer look at Craiyon, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion to see what they can produce…
How Good Is Craiyon?
Once known as Dall-E Mini, because it is an open-source model based on OpenAI’s creation Dall-E 2, Craiyon is an AI art generator that was developed by Frenchman Boris Day, who produced a more accessible version of the AI art generator for the general public to use.
Probably the easiest prompt you could give Craiyon to start, is to ask it to create an image that is in the style of a particular artist, like Andy Warhol.
So, we tasked Craiyon to produce an image of Taylor Swift by Andy Warhol, and this is what happened:
We then decided to challenge the AI art generator by giving it a prompt to create an orangutan picking daisies at Disneyland:
And this is what Craiyon generated:
Googley eyes aside, it’s a pretty decent result, although Mickey Mouse and the Magic Kingdom is nowhere to be seen.
How Good Is Stable Diffusion?
UK-based company Stability AI launched its open-source model Stable Diffusion back in August of last year. The company calls the service a text-to-image diffusion model that uses AI to create “photo-realistic” images from simple text input.
Millions of people have already used the platform since its launch, and it includes a search engine and Magic Prompt generator to help take your AI artwork to a whole new level.
We took Stable Diffusion for a spin and have to admit that the artwork it produced was also rather crude. The prompt we decided to show you, the same one we gave to Craiyon, was the best of the bunch:
Yes, the AI produced an image of an orangutan among some daisies with a vague-looking amusement park in the background and a blurry Mickey Mouse shaped thing. However, the orangutan looks too disturbed for our liking.
Perhaps if you were using the image for meme-making, it would do the job. However, the quality was too low for our standards. Still, Stable Diffusion is free to use, and you never know what you might get.
How Good Is Midjourney?
Back in September of last year, the founder of Midjourney, David Holz, actually admitted in an exclusive interview with Forbes magazine that the company never got consent for the multiple millions of images that it used to train its AI art engine.
Back in September of last year, the founder of Midjourney, David Holz, actually admitted in an exclusive interview with Forbes magazine that the company never got consent for the multiple millions of images that it used to train its AI art engine.
Obviously, this admission angered the many photographers and artists that Midjourney blatantly stole from, especially since it makes a pretty profit from their work after taking their copyrighted material without compensation.
The theft is nothing more than blatant copyright infringement, which if it had been done by any individual, they would find themselves in some serious hot water.
Saying that though, the AI images that were created by this service were much better than those from Stable Diffusion and Craiyon.
Midjourney is also free to use to start, but in order to access it, you need to have a Discord account and go through a sign up process. Follow this link to be added to the Midjourney Discord server.
In order for the service to work, you’ll have to use the command ‘/imagine’ so that the prompt box appears. From there, you can input your prompt, and Midjourney AI will then generate the images for you.
You’ll get 25 free trials, after which you must pay for a subscription, which starts at just $8 per month for basic users, and rises to $48 per month for the ProPlan. And you can save 20% off the subscription price if you pay annually.
See also:
- Prompts For Creating Characters In Midjourney
- Midjourney Prompts for Portraits – A Guide for Stunning AI Portraits
Final Thoughts
Currently, there isn’t any legal framework to protect artists from AI image generators. So technically these companies haven’t done anything illegal. But this also means that our current laws really need to catch up to protect those artists who have been affected.
At the moment, it is more of an ethical issue, and as we are all too well aware by now, with the recent Twitterfile leaks and previous Facebook court battles being among the most high profile, Big Tech companies are hardly known for their stance on being the most ethical of industries.
So, does Craiyon (and MJ/SD) steal art? Well, basically yes. In order to build their AI search engines, they’ve definitely taken the work of most of the artists affected without their permission or licensing approval, which is stealing by definition.
Whether the litigation that’s been filed against these companies comes to anything is anyone’s guess. But for now, if you choose to use these services, just don’t expect to become the next Picasso overnight.
