By: John Limbaugh

Imagine you are an up and coming artist. You have attended countless art shows since you started pursuing a career as a digital artist. your dream is to one day be an animator for a big budget company like Dreamworks, or Disney.

As your work starts to improve, you decide to enter one of your pieces into a state fair and see how well you do. If you can get a few awards under your belt before you graduate art school, you may have a shot at catching the attention of one of the companies you dream of working for.

Unfortunately for you, someone else has entered a piece that seems a little too perfect to have been made by human hands. The piece you spent months on is brushed over for a more appealing piece that a computer program created in under one minute.

: Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial,” which was generated by the AI Midjourney won first place at the Colorado State fair in September.

A situation like this occurred last year at a Colorado state fair. A digital piece created by an AI art generator named Midjourney took first prize in the digital art category. The judges at the time were not even aware that the piece was not man-made.

The piece was entered by Jason M. Allen, a table top game developer who runs a studio at Incarnate Games. He began experimenting with MidJourney last summer after joining a discord server that was testing the AI.

He was curious how the new breed of AI image generators would compare with the human artists whose works he had commissioned. Allen was shocked with how intuitive the program was.

“The program uses a complex process known as “diffusion” to turn text into custom images,” Allen said in an interview with the New York Times. “The user types a series of words in a message to Midjourney and the bot spits back an image seconds later.”

AI-generated art has been around for years. But tools released in 2022 – with names like DALL-E 2, Midjounrey and Stable Diffusion – have made it possible for rank amateurs to produce complex, abstract or photo-realistic works by simply typing words into a text box.

The surge of AI art generator apps have made many human artists nervous about their futures in the industry. The popular use of these apps on social media platforms, particularly art centered channels, have sparked debates about the ethics of AI-generated art.

Copyright violation is the biggest concern alongside the debate on whether AI-generated images are real art at all. It has been questioned who regulates digitally created art and whether the courts can prevent theft of creative ideas and techniques in the process of its generation.

Toward the end of last year, popular use of the Lensa AI app, which creates stylized portraits based on the users’ uploaded selfies spurred the latest round of controversy over the ethics of AI-generated art.

This piece was created by Lensa using a selfie of a real woman as a model.

Some commentators have noted that these programs are making art more accessible. Stable Diffusion is a free-to-use image generator and Lensa sells its portraits for as little as $3.99.

According to the Regulatory Review, “LGBTQ users of Lensa have shared that the avatars created by the app, which allows users to specify their gender, have made them feel joyful and aligned with their true gender identity.”

Others however, have voiced concerns over the mechanisms the algorithms use to generate images. The developers of these A.I. use captioned imaged to teach the AI algorithm the relationships between textual and visual representations.

For example, Stable Diffusion trained its algorithm on data sets collected by LAION, a German nonprofit, which has collected billions of captioned images from art shopping sites and websites such as Pinterest.

It has reportedly done so without consent, causing artists and advocates to raise copyright concerns. Some artists have complained that AI-generated images are mimicking their art and drowning out their own work.

The difficulty with the copyright issue is that copyright law provide protections for creative works only of they are man made. The Copyright Act of 1976 provides copyright owners of artistic works with exclusive rights to reproduce and adapt their works.

Some experts have pushed for federal statutory privacy protections to allow people to protest the use of their images by these platforms, Still, others have suggested that the Federal Trade Commission employ algorithmic destruction, an enforcement tool that it has used to address illegal collection of personal data.

A common trend of the twenty first century is the tendency of technology to get ahead of regulation. Even now, within the first years of the advent of AI-generated art, the road to laws and regulations regarding the subject is hazy at best.