Artofficial Inktelligence: A human-generated story in 3 chapters: 1/ Mad Journey.

This article’s been a long time in the making.

Not being able to ‘get to it’ has hassled me for ages but, as I finally get my assorted notes and thoughts assembled, I realise that quite unintentionally, the right time is now.

I’m writing about AI. Of course I am. Not only am I expected to have an opinion on it, as an artist (I do), but every man and his hamster knows about AI and moreover, also has an opinion on it. This is no bad thing; but you know that something’s ‘made it’ into the public consciousness when you’re asked to talk about it live on local radio; literally ‘the man in the street’ invited to share their thoughts on the matter, before switching to Sarah on the mic.

But more on that later.

In 2015 I began to play with Google’s DeepDream. Our mate Kev told us about it. You had to input a picture and wait for it to render — a long enough wait that you could go away and do something else, like have dinner and sleep, as opposed to Midjourney’s amphetamine-rush of fired-out images made in moments. In fact, facebook tells me I uploaded it on 30th July, and got the result on 2nd August:

So this was my first AI picture, and it’s a horrifying belter:

Kev, Sarah and Leigh, after 3 days Deepdreaming.

We laughed and pulled faces at it and then I forgot about it, and about AI for the most part other than following a few scientists on tumblr who were doing silly and very funny things with neural networks; getting them to write recipes, for example (generating the bewilderingly unappetising meal equivalent of what you see above) and poems. I would chortle at their painfully awful but nearly-there attempts, helplessly projecting human concepts like ‘trying really hard’ onto what I knew was not an earnest seven year old, but early machine learning.

A bit later I got to try out Adobe’s Neural Filters in a new PS update. I shoved a picture of my face into it and played with the sliders that deployed artificial intelligence to change expressions and age. The results were deliberately awful, because I knew I would never actually use them, so I went to extremes and pinged them off to family for Whatsapp LOLs. Regardless; the very gentlest of alarm bells was ringing. If I can change a face to this extent so easily, what’s to stop someone else changing a face for nefarious purposes?

Fast forward to 2022. Our mate Kev Again — featured previously after his mauling by DeepDream — mentioned an AI programme he’d been using to create pictures. He was having rather a lot of fun with it, and I had a go myself. Hm, I thought, yeah, it’s quite fun! (“Pin all the things”.) But I couldn’t really see how I might use it in my work, even if I’d wanted to, and besides, my contracts for client work are pretty much 85% a giant sign held aloft that says Thou Shalt Not Submit Any Work That Might Ever Have Had Anything To Do With Anyone Else Ever.

So, NightCafé Studio was also just a toy, then, and I forgot about that as well. Besides, at that very moment we were too busy getting excited about NFTs to think about artificial intelligence (more on THAT later, too).

And then; out of the blue I got an invite to beta test an app called DALL*E, which made artificially generated pictures. As you might be able to tell by now, I’m never one to back away from the thrill of a new piece of kit or technology, especially one so apparently BRAND new that it isn’t even out yet, so I seized the day. I asked it rather predictably at first to make a picture of ‘a night-time street scene in an 8bit art style’, because I was deep into my vaporwave playlists that week. And it did. Not bad, so long as you don’t want to print it at any sort of acceptable resolution or pass it off as your best work:

I did it again; this time, ‘shopping for pens and ink in a haunted pen shop in the style of Aubrey Beardsley’. Hm; it made a decent fist of that too. In fact, I liked them quite a lot. They had a certain charm.

After a great deal of messing about, I realised I should really have a look at whether it could reproduce anything that looked ‘like me’ — I don’t mean ‘a portrait’, though that’s happened since (it didn’t work very well). I wanted to know if the system could produce work that looked like mine. For the first time, I got the barest inkling — pun entirely inktentional - of the theory of a notion of an idea of a suspicion that this might, at some point, perhaps be a threat.

Let’s go in with possibly THE most widely-known of my pieces of work, I thought. Let’s ask it for a cover for To Kill A Mockingbird. I could see from the results exactly what it had been trained on — I could even name some of the illustrators — but nothing was usable beyond rough concept sketches or layouts, with useless lettering.

I then asked for ink drawings of Christmas iconography — I thought I’d try some old and very mainstream work that’s been out there a long time. And it made some alarmingly naturalistic looking stuff. Immediately I was put in mind of all the times I’d been ripped off in the very early days of doing hand-lettering, by people and companies who should know better but were seeing hand-drawn type for the first time (we’re talking late 90s and early 00s) and weren’t thinking that lettering was capable of being plagiarised as well as images.

…hmmm.

Despite the minor shudder, I kept on. I asked it to make words with ink. Totally illegible, though the energy was kind of there. Then logos. Then ink bottles. The cross hatching. Then illustrations for horror stories for kids…in black and white. Then landscapes in ink. And on it went.

It did them all, with its only stumbling block being that lettering was entirely unusable and hands were snigger-at-the-screen terrible. This was still only about a year ago, but even at that point a tiny but chilling voice was whispering Banksy’s ‘Laugh Now’ into my brain.

Over the course of the rest of the year I kept on playing. Kev Again was integrating AI into his image-making, and nicely so. Hands continued to be grim. But humans in my creative orbit began to make uneasy noises. I love tech, especially the sort that enriches my work and my process — whether the ancient Adana, my 80s Gocco printers or the latest Adobe feature, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be threatened by any of it; try it, learn it, and find out how I can deploy it. Another thing in the pencil case. But…but.

Never mind. On with the work. As well as playing with AI I was simultaneously immersing myself in the Web3 world, buying crypto, building an NFT collection and spending sometimes too much time in Discord because such things, just like Apple Pencils, Photoshop and magical things before them, are always just the next step in how we make, share and sell things. Nothing phased me — peak excitement was reached when minting a hotly-anticipated NFT after getting a whitelist spot. WAGMI! It was later stolen, but…yep, more on that later.

Around summertime I dove into Holly Herndon’s Spawning project. A lifelong lover of electronic sounds, I knew her records and was enthralled by her conjoined-twin Ai+Holly progeny. At the same time, she and her colleagues had developed Have I Been Trained?, a site which claims to allow artists to choose whether or not their images can be scraped for use by Stable Diffusion, MJ and OpenAi. I thought long and hard about what to click, yes or no. Did I want my images included in any large image training model? In what feels like a lifetime ago, I had a rather generalised feeling at the time that I didn’t want to be *excluded* from the world of AI, so clicked ‘Yes’. But that wasn’t actually what was being asked, and by the time I understood the specifics of the question some time later and went back to change it to a ‘No’, the site had inverted its system to one where, rather than choosing to opt in or out, you had to manually seek out any images of yours in the system, and ask for them to be excluded one by one (that’s still the system they’re using today).

I carried on. Towards the end of the year the world of commissioned work began to feel distinctly odd, with subtle but long-in-the-making shifts in modus operandi, their origins in the pandemic, finally manifesting in the way that work was coming in (awkwardly, unpredictably) and being managed (slowly and painfully). I began to see colleagues talk publicly about work being ‘weird’, and turnover being down. Against this landscape, my social media feeds began to fill up with people excitedly spewing out picture after picture made mainly in Midjourney, some calling themselves…artists. I, businesslike as ever, shut down the usual quarterly roundup of IP violations on Redbubble and Etsy, annoyed by the usual brazen help-yourself attitudes to artists’ work in the public domain — something which feels quaint now — and continued to stay abreast of the NFT world despite a sobering wallet theft, a gifted NFT stuck in cyberspace and a shady ‘buy it back’ deal with an anonymous stranger.

In the run up to Christmas I was busy with the annual seasonal promotion, the demands of the daily Inkvent project and assorted client jobs. I didn’t ‘play’ with AI again until the new year, using it to generate some atmospheric 80s-style pieces as refs to try and capture the vibe of some upcoming illustration work, and to experiment with layouts for a looming book project. We used MJ to make targets for my Dad’s shooting practice — zombies who may or may not look like certain politicians, all OK because of course they weren’t real people — and introduced my Mum to AI, whose first Midjourney piece was a beautiful Japan-inspired coastal landscape rendered in ‘ink’. She was fascinated, and loved the process — “I can put away my paints now’”, she said. “So can I”, I said, trying not to let inherited gallows humour extinguish her lovely anticipation.

I made a part-AI-part-Photoshop-part-Procreate leaving card for a mate, and used it to help make a silly birthday card for my sister. It was useful for generating some demographically accurate reference figures for an artwork I was making. And I did some more of those 80s experiments. I even started an Instagram page to capture the best ones. Kev Again continued to deploy AI subtly and successfully in his design work, and although I still hadn’t found where AI might ‘fit’ into my work, I still felt like it was a friend rather than a foe.

And then…and then. I joined the Midjourney facebook page, and at the same time, people calling themselves ‘professional prompters’ (to a great deal of derision and hilarity) and ‘AI artists’ began writing about how ‘real artists’ had somehow been gatekeeping, hiding secrets and lying about how long it took to create work. Look! many of them said; it IS easy after all! How dare those artists charge so much to do this!

I love this picture. She’s beautiful. I made her. Or did I? I didn’t. I asked a machine to make her, in quite a lot of detail. I worked with a machine. Or did the machine work with me?

Almost overnight, the world seemed flooded with articles about AI: the threats, the warnings, rabid defence of it, declarative statements against, over-confident opinions thrown in all directions. People fought to defend their use of AI, to explain why human artists didn’t deserve to keep working, and others outlined how the world could never be without human-made objects and pictures. My stateside agency had begun to talk about it in their newsreels, and my Medium feed was suddenly full of tediously repetitive articles loudly telling me how to generate five-figure sums with a ChatGPT side-hustle. How to generate pictures in Midjourney and flog them back to people via Adobe Stock. How to bypass concerns about copyright to make AI pictures to print and sell on Etsy…oh, yeah, Etsy. Back to that old chestnut.

I talked about AI at length with my agency’s boss, collected opinions and followed real-world artists creating beautiful work using AI as one of their tools, trying to keep healthy, future-positive role models in my line of sight. I remained determined to be neither for nor against AI, neither scared nor cultishly absorbed by it. And despite wanting to pontificate in the public domain many times, I held off writing about it, not wanting to add another voice to the clattering hubris of prompters calling themselves artists, and artists throwing shade on users; the world did not need another article wanting to sound knowledgable and finite.

So I didn’t, until a single tweet brought me to the BBC’s attention.

Chapter 2, in which I talk about my research with regard to AI + copyright + IP, follows.

To My Insurance Company.

I've been engaged in a battle to renew my business insurance lately. It's gone on for an unbelievably long time, because I can't find anyone to insure us properly.

When asked about the reasons why companies are - I'm going to say 'scared' - to insure my business, it seems to boil down to two things. 

1) The majority of my work over the last ten years or so is for North American clients. This seems to terrify them.

2) The insurers seem hell bent on protecting the mythically vulnerable from me - rather than the other way round, in a system that protects other people from being copied by me.

As most illustrators will know, we are most at risk from being ripped off by a third party - including large companies and startlingly high-profile corporations who ought to know better (we all know who I'm talking about, insert your own anecdote here) than we are at risk of plotting to rip them off, or each other.

These things are new. Or maybe they only seem new; when I reflect on it, there's been a growing sense of anxiety in the voices of those I speak to every time I ring up for annual insurance. It explains why I've moved companies so often. It contextualises why I'm constantly getting new quotes, from fewer and fewer companies. And it reveals an increasingly protect-the-big-guys modus operandi; if a missed deadline means Acme PLC can't make their print date, if Josephine Bloggs thinks I've copied one of their images, if XYZ Corporation has to clean paint up off their floor on one of the astonishingly rare occasions I have to work on-site, they're protected - what I mean is, I'll get help from my insurance company to defend myself, as long as whoever I need to defend myself against is in the UK, of course.

But as the explicit and very focussed questioning of each company I've spoken with has revealed, if I see someone using or copying my work commercially, their insurance policy affords me no protection.

In a nut shell, they don't have my back.

This might seem like moaning, but it is not. This is my business, built up over almost 30 years, and heavily, deeply invested in, year on year, not only materially, but emotionally and spiritually, and with an incalculable amount of hard work. When I hand over money to protect that investment, I expect more than my iPad and my paper stacks to be protected.

The reason this issue creeps beyond the scope of the mere mathematical technicality of insuring a few Apple devices and a load of inks against fire or theft is because it speaks to the much larger issue of copyright theft, and image and style misappropriation, an article about which I've been sketching out for months. Why are insurers more nervous about me stealing a company's work? Why is there a chilly gaping hole where there should be a policy that kicks in to help me take action the moment a serious IP theft is discovered and the infringer decides, for once, to fight back?

No, really, it's OK; I've paid four figures for a 'comprehensive' insurance policy, but you sit back lads; I'll tackle that one myself, especially the new NFT 'company' who've decided to mint my work for their own profits (true story).

Now, of course it's my job and my responsibility to take all the available steps to make sure my work is 'protected', so that I don't need to take action against anyone. It's quite literally part of my job; reading the contracts; knowing what I'm signing; reading the NDAs. Use lo-res images online and watermark and make online images non-grabable if you must, but none of these things will protect an image from being misappropriated, whether that's reproduced through mimicry or used and applied wholesale. People who aren't so intimate with the subject will talk sympathetically but a little glibly about 'registering' the copyright of an image, but copyright is covered by the Berne Convention; the right to be identified as the creator of your own work at the point of creation, rather than as a result of 'registering' it in some way, is a human right.

One or two companies said they would insure me to make a claim - but only if, like me, the infringing party was based in the UK. To date, I've had infringements in the US, Australia, New Zealand and Germany - and just one or two in the UK. And those are the ones I know about.

So why isn't that taken into consideration when a company draws up an insurance policy for a creative business? Perhaps I'm being too picky; I can certainly be that. But it just feels like an absolute basic protection in the contemporary creative market.

Here's the email I sent to the most recent insurance company I spoke with at length. I was fed up with saying the same things, and I decided to write it down so they could actually address the problems within their policies.

Whether they read it or not I have no idea; the courtesy of a response wasn't forthcoming.

But I'm posting it here and sharing it in on order that other companies, who might actually offer positively evolved, customer-centric policies which are different from those I've dived into thus far, can talk to me if they see fit. 

And having learned during the course of my research that a great many illustrators have no insurance AT ALL, I'm hoping I'll hear from other creatives who have had the same problem, or are looking for insurance at the moment - and more helpfully, from people who have solved the issue with an appropriate policy.

If you have thoughts or experiences that resonate, I welcome them. In the meantime, I have my pens pencils and hardware covered, but for now, I feel that the industry is set to either put this issue even further at arm's length, as it decides it's too 'Wild West' an issue to successfully navigate/monetise, or it will be forced to evolve in a fast-moving world of NFTs, social media and visibility, and in doing so recognise what the dark matter, the heavyweight inner core of any creative business that needs protecting actually is - its creations.

Some details in this email have been slightly changed for purposes of making the scenarios easily understood by the recipients who are outside the illustration industry, and to avoid identifying individuals. 

If at times it sounds like I'm explaining what an illustrator is or does, it's because that's exactly what I've had to do. Many times over.

~ † ~

Dear Insurance Company Person,

Thank you for forwarding the documents for the policy you propose for my business, after speaking with me on the phone for forty minutes yesterday. I'm unable to accept it, because it does not cover my needs.

What’s quite bewildering at the moment is that, after almost 30 years in this trade - and I mean, wholeheartedly, professionally immersed in nothing but this trade, on a worldwide scale - I’m finding an increasing reluctance to insure me and my business. For over 20 of those years I’ve worked with American and Canadian clients, and clients elsewhere in the world, and historically it’s never been ‘a problem’ nor subject to any additional questioning or clauses.

Over the last 4-5 years I’ve seen a creeping nervousness around that, and I do not see a reason why this would be. I don’t know of a single case of an illustrator being sued - for any reason - other than by another illustrator  in cases of blatant copying. This happens - there was a case a few years ago of two American illustrators fighting it out over alleged copying, but it was eventually resolved without resort to legal means, which remains the preferred way of resolving such things. 

What I don’t see reflected in your policy, but do see happening around me frequently, is cases of the illustrator having to fight a case of having their own work infringed by companies - both small and large.

To cite one example, a couple of years ago the large high street chain **redacted but named in the email** copied a colleague’s very distinctive work; that colleague had to fight that case of (very blatant) copying, and that colleague 'dealt with it satisfactorily' and got the work withdrawn. It was 'cut and dried’. 

There are myriad examples of large clothing companies helping themselves to artists’ work online, without permission.

I myself have had to deal with over 60 copyright infringements of my work by other people to date - and I have dealt with them, successfully, without ever having to resort to legal means, because I know the business inside out and I know copyright - as it applies to my trade - inside out.

The only recent example I know of which speaks to the kind of scenario that form the basis of this particular fear from insurance companies, is this. A very, very well-known British high street chain hired a design agency (standard practice) for a campaign that involved an illustrator creating a ‘friendly monster’ for a Christmas campaign. They would have briefed the illustrator closely for such a high profile campaign, and the resulting monster, once it hit the internet, was immediately recognised as a close copy of a long-existing famous character illustrated by an equally famous illustrator.

The illustrator whose work had been copied, although within his rights to pursue the case, was maturely philosophical, resolving the issue with humour and grace:

 "Talk of legal action has flooded my Facebook feeds, but I won’t be pursuing that. Instead, I hope that advertising agencies and the big companies they work for, take care to credit creative people whose work they might reference. We have the finest children’s book writers and illustrators in the world – their work should be cherished and credited properly." 

The key issue though is even if legal action had been taken, it would have been the design agency hired by the company who was challenged, NOT the illustrator, as the design agency was responsible for the creative direction taken.

(In this case the illustrator, who was relatively inexperienced and no doubt very excited to have received the commission, was unlikely to have questioned their commissioner’s art direction.)

But if that illustrator had chosen to pursue a legal route (and presuming he has insured his business) he should surely have been able to do that with the backing and confidence of his insurers, to whom he had paid money to protect that business, the IP in which forms the substance of the business in a far more meaningful way than his easily-replaced pens and pencils.

Such cases are not common. But my point is that what I am way, way more at risk of having MY copyright infringed, than I am at risk of infringing someone else’s - my job is to create original images, and I have created thousands of them.

The other scenario an insurer might be fearful of, and one that has been posited to me many times now, is an illustrator delivering work late, and thus triggering a sequence of damaging events such as missed print deadlines. But I have never heard of this happening; when deadlines are running close, they are modified, or the work is adapted to suit the timescale, or, in some cases, a client can choose to go with an other artist or buy stock imagery to meet their deadline - there is always a way forward, and I know because I have been involved in some extremely high profile jobs with their attendant deadlines, budgets and pressures, and successfully carried out every one of them.

I’m not suggesting that legal challenges never come up, but the emphasis on a client suing an illustrator suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of the job of an illustrator and the industry at large. And this fear of legal challenges seems to be infiltrating the insurance industry, even those pitching themselves as specialists to the creative industries.

I can’t go with your policy as it’s not right for me, but I welcome the opportunity to highlight why that is, and why the thinking underpinning the policy feels flawed, and outdated.

All the best,

Sarah.

~ † ~