Originally published in The Peak magazine

On June 21, Marvel Studios’ released their new show “Secret Invasion.” The title sequence of “Secret Invasion” was created using artificial intelligence. This comes after they employed incredibly talented artists for the creation of the hit movie “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.”

Artists and visual effects creators have called for unionizing and regulations to protect their jobs in the wake of AI being used on as big of a project as a Marvel television show.

Since the twentieth century, when artists began employing AI to make art, the usage of AI-generated art has prompted several debates. Some of these claims have questioned whether AI art can be considered as art and what impact it will have on artists.

What is AI Art?

Art generated by artificial intelligence involves applications that invite users to submit a prompt of anything they can imagine. The artificial intelligent application will create an image based on that prompt.

Artwork created by artificial intelligence isn’t new, since it emerged in the 70’s. What’s new is that everybody is talking about AI as it relates to all aspects of life. Modern AI has some excellent applications; like transcribing audio and isolating the voice of a Beatle on a lost track.

In recent years, AI-generated artwork has exploded in popularity. Image and art generator apps like Midjourney and DALL-E have been under scrutiny for claims that they unethically steal human artists’ work and compromise creativity.

Criticisms of AI Art

While advancements in artificial intelligence have undeniably revolutionized various industries, a growing number of critics argue against the use of AI-generated artwork, citing concerns about artistic authenticity and the preservation of human creativity.

From graphic designers to digital artists to tattoo artists, Instagram is a vital way for creators to showcase their work for the public and potential employers. Popular AI art pages on Instagram often have more followers than human art accounts.

While a person may be behind the scenes writing the prompts for an AI art account, they aren’t putting in hours of work to complete a single piece of artwork for one Instagram post. Human artists are using hashtags such as #artbyhumans, #noAI and #notoAIgeneratedimages to show their opposition.

There is an argument for AI art that people can’t afford to pay to commission human artists. Tools like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E are free to use. A more advanced AI art generator, Midjourney, is $96 annually.

There are also inexpensive options for commissioning/using human artists’ skills. The widely used application for creating digital art, Procreate, is a one-time purchase of $13. Picrew is a free online tool used for creating images and avatars that only uses images with permission from the copyright holders.

Critics of AI-generated art say that it shouldn’t be called AI art at all, that it is just AI-generated images based on data from billions of human-made artworks.

How do AI image generator apps get their data?

Midjourney (along with Stability AI and DeviantArt) have been less than forthcoming in answering that question. So much so that a group of artists sued them for their use of Stable Diffusion, which is, according to plaintiff Matthew Butterick, a “21st-century collage tool that remixes the copyrighted works of millions of artists whose work was used as training data.”

Stable Diffusion is informed by LAION, a German organization that scrapes the internet and uses that data to create large datasets for AI companies; all without consent, credit, or compensation to the original artists whose work is being used and profited from.

In another lawsuit, Getty Images sued Stability AI (The developer of Stable Diffusion) for infringing on its intellectual property rights. In a press release, Getty Images said “Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright” and did so without licensing. Getty points out that they are in support of innovative AI endeavors; in fact, have provided licenses to tech companies for the purpose of AI training.

Artists aren’t for the abolition of AI-generated art. They state their terms clearly. In the art world, it is known colloquially as the three C’s; consent, credit, and compensation.

Positives of AI Art

Art generated by AI is almost limitless. Any prompt you can think of will have a result. Through a process known as “inference tuning”, an AI-art generator will scrape its dataset for any specific prompt that you provide. The quality of results vary, of course. People who have rarely seen themselves represented in art can generate that representation. For these photos, I wrote prompts that included fat women walking the runway in a fashion show and an interabled couple getting engaged. You could still commission an artist to do this work, but it would be a lot more expensive than the $10 per month for unlimited images in Midjourney. And something like a photographic representation in the photo of the fat woman is almost unheard of in society.

AI art doesn’t have to exist in contention with human artists. Comic book artist Dash Shaw said, “Sometimes I think everything I draw is just a combination of all of the millions and millions of drawings I’ve seen.” Austin Kleon wrote a whole book called “Steal Like An Artist.” AI-generated art could be considered a combination of all art that exists on the internet. Regardless, artists whose work is being used as a learning model should be aware of their work being used and fairly credited and compensated. Intellectual property lawyer Kate Downing commented on the Stable Diffusion Lawsuit, saying that companies using the LAION datasets “produce results with markedly different qualities.” In other words, typing the same prompt into an AI art generator twice could yield two completely different images. She says any claims that are made that AI art copies human art directly is deeply misleading.

Copyright Law/Fair Use

What is Fair Use?

Certain copyrighted content can be used without the permission of the copyright owner if it meets the fair use criteria.

The US Copyright Office defines fair use and identifies the criteria:

In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Fair Use is the use of copyrighted content in a transformative way. Examples of this include using a soundbite or lyrics of a song for commentary and/or criticism in a music review or parodying songs like Another One Rides the Bus by Weird Al Yankovic. Other examples of fair use is content used in news reporting, teaching, or research.

How does this apply to AI-generated art?

Courts have consistently ruled that AI-generated artworks cannot be copyrighted. The training that goes into creating the massive datasets that applications like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney use to operate their platforms is informed by LAION, specifically LAION-5B. To put it simply, the LAION-5B data is not actually images, but rather image-text pairs. The program adds “noise” to the images, corrupts them, then trains the AI to eliminate the corruption. After that, they train the AI to compare/contrast the images and associated text. Then the AI clusters together similar data.

This process is transformative and falls under Fair Use. The images in the dataset are used as just that; data and not for their artistic value.

What is art? Is it the human component? Or is it the conversation, the interpretation around the artwork? Is there something intrinsic to humanity that cannot be recreated, even with billions of data?

Movie theaters that once were crowded and abuzz with excitement now feature hushed hallways and empty queues. Movie premieres like the much-anticipated newest Wes Anderson project, “Asteroid City,” were met with a less than enthusiastic turnout. “Asteroid City” grossed just $53 million worldwide compared to Anderson’s earlier film “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, which grossed over three times “Asteroid City” at $174 million.

Beyond major box office hits like “Barbie” and “Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3”, movie theaters sit mostly empty during the matinee hours. An employee of AMC Theaters says population density “comes in waves depending on what movies are out.” Once a popular pastime for many demographics, today many theaters play movies to an audience of one or less.

Being alone in a movie theater, especially during a highly-anticipated release raises questions about the loss of community and increase in individual experiences rather than experiences that benefit the collective.

Why are people staying home instead of going to the movies?

Film critic Cristina Escobar says, “going to the movies and
experiencing the movie theater is a critical part of the film experience.” Streaming services and movies that are quick to release at home have influenced and perhaps desensitized movie-goers from the magic of the experience.

In today’s era of instant gratification, leaving one’s house to experience something you could do at home without distractions like phones or the ability to pause is less than desirable for some. Escobar says this changes the movie-going experience and can even “change how you feel about the films.”

Movies are too long. People don’t want to sit in a theater, unable to pay (more money now than ever) to pause a film if they need to get up and use the bathroom, for instance. Larrie Dudenhoeffer, professor of Film Studies at Kennesaw State University, points out, “It’s fine for Martin Scorsese to release a three-and-a-half hour “[The] Irishman” on Netflix during the pandemic, but I don’t want to see “Killers of the Flower Moon” in theaters because it’s 210 minutes [3 hours 30 minutes] long. I’ve got a life.”

Both studios and theaters are following the subscription service model. More movies are released directly to streaming every year. Monthly theater subscriptions with perks like free snacks and flat ticket rates like AMC Stubs, Regal Crown Club, and Cinemark Movie Club have risen in popularity in recent years. However, Dudenhoeffer says, “There’s only so much of a ceiling that they [studios] have to operate with, especially if they’re not raising their subscriber rates. It’s a completely different business model, and they’re going to have difficulties negotiating it, which we’ve seen with the writer’s strike.”

Young people are saving the movie industry. Specifically, young people ages 18–35 who love seeing superhero films. These films took five out of the ten top-grossing domestic movies in 2021. This year, there are three, both internationally and domestically, according to data from Box Office Mojo. The success of films like “Spiderman: No Way Home,” “Black Widow,” and “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” show viewers’ commitment to franchise superhero films.

People want to see themselves in the media they consume. This is not a new revelation, but certainly one that Hollywood has been slow to embrace. In recent years, box office hits like “The New Mutants” and “Raya and the Last Dragon” prove that people show up when they are represented in both the cast and the story.

Escobar was on a panel in November called “Beyond Latinx Erasure in Hollywood,” where UCLA Director of the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative Ana-Christina Ramón said that during the height of the pandemic, Latinos saved the theater business. Ramòn co-authors the annual Hollywood Diversity Report, which documents changes in gender, race, disability, and other factors in television and film representation. She says that diversity sells. According to the 2020 report, “In 2019, the 15 top films with casts that were from 41 percent to 50 percent minority were released in the most international markets.” The statistics speak for themselves; the more diversity, the more distribution. This should be a warning sign for the industry. As Escobar says, “If Hollywood doesn’t start to do a better job [with representation], then they are going to lose the younger audience, and that will trickle on to a big problem with their business model.”

Date from UCLA’s 2020 Diversity in Hollywood Report

Escobar says viewers are tired of the status quo, “Not just that people want to see themselves, [although] that is an important part of it. If [the film] is supposed to be your reality and it feels more like a white male fantasy of what reality is, why engage with that?”

Films look different than they did twenty years ago. The 90s and 00s were peak times for romantic comedies, which were popular with women viewers. More romantic comedies might be a way to get audiences back in theaters. “‘Barbie” was so popular because a female demographic was being tremendously underserved for the last five or six years, and Hollywood was sort of under the impression that they could incorporate women into action in superhero films and be done at that,” says Dudenhoeffer. “Barbie” is the top-grossing film worldwide this year. He says that meeting the new cultural climate for young adults is key for studios to adapt to changing attitudes around movies and movie-going.

What can theaters do to bring audiences back?

Escobar leans into going to the movies as a unique and vital experience. She says that communities, particularly underrepresented ones, attend theaters for classic film events. Theaters can do a lot in their local communities to promote attendance and sales. Events like Studio Ghibli Fest and AMC’s $5 Fan Faves help remind people about the art of going to the movies. “Being a little more creative about serving content that your community actually wants can help make a big difference.” says Escobar.

Do you remember dollar/discount theaters? After a couple of months in traditional movie theaters, films would be released to play in dollar theaters, where the ticket price would be a fraction of the price of the first theatrical release. Take St. Andrews Cinema 3 in St. Charles, Missouri, where “All shows $1.00!” was their sole promotion. Discount theaters made the movie-going experience accessible to people who couldn’t afford to see the first run of the theatrical release. Dudenhoeffer says, “The financial undertaking for a family, even just a couple, but a family of four going to the movies is so much, and there’s so many people who would not be able to pay for that. The dollar theaters serve an invaluable purpose.” He posits that the process of theatrical release to home viewing should include discount theaters somewhere in the middle, “If you want to see this movie, then you have to see it in theaters.”

Longer theatrical releases with increased inclusion of discount theaters would benefit studios and audiences. The money studios make from monthly subscription prices for services like Hulu and Netflix is risky.

Dudenhoeffer doesn’t “see how companies can bank on these films making money when there’s sort of a flat monthly rate that they have to keep raising.” Given the recent writers’ strike and settlement with studios, Dudenhoeffer says studios will have difficulty negotiating the new subscription business model. Netflix has steadily increased the monthly price for their most basic (now called Standard) plan, starting at $9 per month in 2008 to now, where the price is $15.49 for new subscribers.

Going to the movies has been a historically accessible activity that all types of people enjoy. Rising ticket and concession prices have made theaters less accessible. “Maybe they are becoming a luxury in a different way than a more common experience, which I think would be a shame,” says Escobar.

The magic of going to the movies isn’t dead, but it has lost some of its life. Escobar says streaming movies at home is its own thing but shouldn’t replace movie theaters. Studios and theaters are responsible for grabbing viewers’ attention and offering a memorable and affordable experience.

Beyond Brushstrokes: Exploring the Pros and Cons of AI Art