The temptations of artificial intelligence to produce images… an insult to artists
Over the past few months, major brands, including Coca-Cola, IKEA, Wacom and Hasbro, have used AI-generated images in their products and promotional materials.
Sometimes this use of new technology passes with little comment, and other times it faces backlash from artists and patrons.
So when should a company apologize for using AI-generated art? The short answer is that it’s all about context.
The temptations of artificial intelligence
As a photo editor for Fast Company magazine, I can understand the temptations of this new technology, perhaps more than most.
AI image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion will burst into the public consciousness in 2022 with a new way to produce images quickly, cheaply, and, if we don’t look carefully, with amazing results. Closely.
And no one can resist the promise of getting any image you can imagine delivered in seconds, limited only by your descriptive capabilities, at almost no cost. This is really confusing for someone who is responsible for getting a large number of images every day, like me, often under tight deadlines.
Dazzling and offending in synthetic images
But for every “wow” moment produced by artificial intelligence, there also comes a moment accompanied by a little “abuse.” Which partly explains why we see brands facing a lot of criticism for their use of AI imagery.
AI image generation models are currently in a golden age, with developers paying little attention to the boundaries of established intellectual property. Since the first announcements of these tools, artists have been raising the alarm about the possibility of their work being used – without compensation or without credit – to train these models.
The recent revelation of a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence photo company “Midjourney” seems to confirm these allegations. Even setting aside (alleged) intellectual property theft on a historically unprecedented scale, these models suffer from bias issues, similarity issues, and general quality control issues.
Excluding the human element in creativity
Proponents of AI art portray these issues as mistakes to be overcome, but the root of AI’s problems lies in the exclusion of human judgment from the creative decision-making process. It’s a target built into technology. And brands, whether keen to grab headlines with new technology or hoping to go the extra mile and speed up production, are moving forward with this approach.
When an image becomes an insult
Last August, Dungeons & Dragons fans discovered strange images included in a preview of the upcoming campaign’s sourcebook (a $30 book that guides players on an adventure). The book featured Frost Giants with unnaturally pointy feet, strangely blended armor, and weapons of meaningless proportions (even by fantasy standards).
The images were quickly identified as being produced by artificial intelligence. Fans were upset at the apparent cutting of Angle. Wizards of the Coast, which owns the game Dungeons & Dragons and Magic – The Gathering, issued a clarification, promising not to use artificial intelligence in its work in the future.
Then, in January 2024, Magic – The Gathering’s account on the X platform posted an ad showing a suspicious scene of a Steampunk laboratory, and fans pointed out the use of AI-generated images in it. After the company’s initial rejection, Wizards issued an admission of error, placed the blame for the image on a third-party vendor, and promised to re-evaluate its practices moving forward.
Digested rights of talented artists
Wizards of the Coast is a brand that has been made famous through the contributions of artists and art directors for over 30 years. Dungeons & Dragons and Magic – The Gathering products are collectible pieces of art with attached game systems.
Many of the artists who helped build the brand have found their names on the recently discovered Midjourney roster, so it’s fair to say that using a machine to chew up their work and spit out poor imitations of their work as a cost- and time-saving measure is an insult to contributors and fans alike.
In the first week of 2024, computer accessories manufacturer Wacom launched a New Year-themed marketing campaign featuring artwork that was quickly classified as produced by artificial intelligence.
Wacom’s customer base consists almost entirely of creative professionals, the same people who face an uncertain future as new AI tools, and are trained by their efforts, without their compensation. Wacom has issued an apology for its action.
Commercial companies employ artificial intelligence
However, other brands have recently emerged into AI art, seemingly without backlash. In the spring of 2023, Coca-Cola launched a marketing campaign inviting the public to play with a new website it had created in partnership with OpenAI and several artificial intelligence artists.
The site contains a specially designed artificial intelligence tool that was trained using elements from Coca-Cola’s extensive image archive, allowing visitors to create marketing materials specific to the brand. The results were exactly what you would expect; A lot of nostalgia for the past, Santa Claus, and various forms of previous famous “Coca-Cola” campaigns.
More recently, IKEA’s “Life at Home Report” showed fantastical and semi-realistic sci-fi images of what home life might look like in 2030. These images were generated by artificial intelligence, but there seems to be no sense of betrayal. If IKEA had not used AI, it could have used other digital methods (3D rendering, Photoshop compositing), with greater time and cost savings (and perhaps better results).
Without knowing whose work was used to train the model that produced the images, it’s impossible to determine how ethical this use of AI is, but the project seems like a bridge to a more likely future use case for AI images by brands and artists.
There’s a future for AI image generation that doesn’t involve mass plagiarism, the elimination of human talent, and questionable results.
An ethical future respects the human beings who create and consume work. At the consumer level, we all know the foolishness of what we see, and a company that undermines its core mission of saving a few dollars off the purchase of art will soon feel the consequences.
* Fast Company magazine, Tribune Media services.