Can AI and Artists Coexist?

After recording last week’s episode of On Taking Pictures, Bill sent me a link to a video that’s both fascinating and deeply disturbing, called “AI vs Artists: The Biggest Art Heist in History.” The video presents some of the grim facts around how images, including the 5.85 billion uncurated images in the LAION-5B dataset, are being illegally scraped and used to generate derivative work. The dataset was initially intended for research but has since been made available commercially and has been used to train AI models, including MidJourney and Stable Diffusion. While it does contain images from the public domain, it also contains millions of copyrighted images, as well as explicit content. As they say in the video, no consent was obtained, nor were artists given the opportunity to opt in or opt out—and this is really at the core of why so many artists whose work has been stolen are so upset.LINKSJuxtapoz articleWolfe von LenkiewiczAI algorithmsDiscussion on ThreadsGagosianIf you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.CONNECT WITH MEWebsite: https://jefferysaddoris.com  Instagram: @jefferysaddorisEmail: talkback@jefferysaddoris.comSUBSCRIBESubscribe to Almost Everything with Jeffery Saddoris in your favorite podcast app. You can also subscribe to my newsletter on Substack.MUSICMusic For Workplaces by Jeffery Saddoris