Monday Thoughts: September 25th

Down the AI rabbit hole I go!

Yeah this is coming out early. I have it ready, my week is busy and I just want it off my to-do list. I’m sure you all understand the autumn struggle.

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The Blog

Due to said crazy schedule, I didn’t have any time to make a new post this past week.

However, last week’s listing, Heather, seems to think that calling me “nasty” would help her case when begging me to take her post down. She claimed that all the stolen images were taken down, I found dozens more. She said she swore this time they REALLY were all down, I found more ads… etc. etc. etc.

Needless to say, I didn’t give in to her demands and the post remains up.

The Gossip

When it comes to AI, does prompting a bot to create an image equal actual art? If you manipulate said art, does it then become your copyright? If you feed a portrait you created into an AI art creator, and use the artwork it inspires, is it still yours? Are you legally allowed to sell these creations to other creators to use in THEIR art?

I’ve been asking myself this a lot since this landed, a few times, in my inbox.

At first glance, I’m sure most that are unknowing assume this is art that Meg is creating with her own two hands either on her computer or at an easel. A closer look shows notable AI tells - mostly in the hands with extra fingers.

Yet… Meg has made sure to watermark some of these creations.

And where there’s Meg doing something different, you know there’s people in the comments already throwing money at her begging her to teach them her ways.

As usual, Meg is being very coy in the comments, not really saying what is afoot and either deleting comments or not replying to those asking about AI creations and replying stating to email her to anyone wanting to give her money to make them something similar.

Do I have a way to prove Meg didn’t sit at her desk/easel and paint these creations? No. Do I think there is a possibility that at least a portion of these creations are AI assisted? Yes.

What I can say is that I gave AI a whirl and came out with this in a few seconds after prompting it for, “watercolor, realistic, image of toddlers with a fluffy brown puppy in a winter scene, snow, trees. Illustration for a children's book”

Mind you, I’ve never AI’d anything beyond Generative Fill in Photoshop so I have no clue what I’m doing. At all.

Then I did a beach scene:

A girl in winter catching a star:

A girl spinning at twilight (even got the 6th finger!):

It’s curious how close they are to her posts isn’t it? Especially for someone who has no idea what they’re doing and just giving it a whirl.

Then I reverse searched one of Meg’s images trying to figure out if the background of this photo was stock or something because it tingled my brain for whatever reason (probably wondering why a child would have a china cabinet in their bedroom?).

Google Images pinged a match.

The match was not Meg.

It was someone else who posted a strikingly similar post two days before Meg’s went public on Facebook.

The backdrops are identical, the child is identical. The child in Meg’s is a bit larger and tucked in. The child on Lisa’s is sitting on top of the bed. Lisa’s was posted first… what the hell is going on here??

Finally, after a lot of digging I found that Lisa calls it these an “asset” in one of her comments and since I have no clue about AI I don’t know what that means so I googled asset + Meg Bitton and BOOM. It turns out Meg is selling these “assets” (backgrounds, children, props) as .png files people can create their own “art” with. In the description she plainly says, “Use the assets for commercial or personal projects.”

If Meg did create these by hand, you can easily see the issue: until I dug I really thought Lisa or Meg had stolen from one another since they both had the same ‘photos’ on their PHOTOGRAPHY pages and claimed they were original art. If I hadn’t pinged the “assets” comment I’d probably still be knee deep trying to sort out WTF was going on here.

If Meg used AI tools for any part of the creation of these assets, well, that’s a whole new mess. AI art cannot be copyrighted. I’m not sure of the legalities regarding creating and reselling AI art for others to use for their promotional images but I’m betting there’s a lot of red flags flying for any legal expert reading this.

My hunch (JUST MY GUESS!!) is that it’s possible Meg is feeding whatever AI machine she’s using with her own images and prompting it to make it into whatever style for whatever scene. Maybe the backdrops are stock images fed into the AI bot with “watercolor cottagecore illustration” for the style. Like I have said, I don’t know but there’s too many kids with extra fingers and too many objects with weird tells (jack o’ lanterns missing eyes, kites with ribbons out one side, flip flops designed for two left feet etc) for me to think this was hand drawn and 100% human generated but I absolutely could be wrong.

All of this to say - what the fuck. Don’t do *waves hands* any of this. If you want to play around with AI art, own it and make sure you make it known it is such. If this isn’t AI art, don’t be coy and email/message links to the assets.

Ugh. UGH.

Now I can’t help but wonder after all my adventures with Lisa Saad how many of these “assets” are going to wind up on the walls at WPPI/Imaging/AIPP (I kid, I kid) with gold awards?

EDITED 9/26 at 10PM

Meg has posted a few things (and deleted a few things) throughout the day but I’ll take this as her final word regarding this controversy:

If you’re squinting and trying to figure out how that edit is the same as the others, me too my friend.

It took me a minute to figure out what the hell it reminded me of and a friend pinged it quicker than me.

The Tip

I’m outta words and brain cells. AI is for fun, not posting on your photography page or reselling as “assets”