The ethical concerns around AI training data apply to both image generators and large language models (LLMs).

Image generators like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E were all built on a dataset called LAION that was created from billions of images in Getty Images, Flickr, Behance, Pinterest, and websites. There’s a good chance, if you had photographs on the internet any time between 2008 and 2021, your images are in there somewhere.

For LLMs, Common Crawl was the foundation dataset, and it went through 3.1 BILLION web pages including blog posts, forum comments, Reddit threads, and personal websites. Online newspapers, like The New York Times, Forbes, The Atlantic, as well as Books3, which contains nearly 200,000 copyrighted books, also got sucked into the training data.

No one asked for permission. No one was compensated. And no privacy law can remove your content once the training is complete. You can block future crawling, but the data already collected is baked into the already deployed models.

There are several real concerns when it comes to AI. One of them is about resources, specifically water and power. Datacenters or “server farms” require fresh water to cool down and power to work.

The concept of artificial intelligence has been around for a while. Alan Turing proposed a test to check the sentience of artificial systems back in the 1950’s. So, I’ve often said that AI has been around forever and then talk about autocorrect, spam filters, and fraud detection. That is technically true. But when it comes to the current concerns about resources, copyright, and the potential SKYNET situation, we’re talking about the third generation of generative AI (image and video) and large language models (LLM) that power the AI assistants.

Was Artificial Intelligence (AI) part of your vocabulary prior to 2022? AI’s been around for decades, and you’ve been using it every day. Have you used Google Maps or Waze to get to a destination recently? AI. Used your face to unlock your phone? AI. Asked Siri or Alexa a question? AI. Autocorrect, spellcheck, Google search, customer service chatbots, texts about weird charges on your credit card, photographing a check to deposit, Amazon and Netflix recommendations, auto-masking in Photoshop… that’s all powered by AI.

These applications of AI technology haven’t raised much concern or controversy. But professional photographers and artists worldwide are in an uproar and asking questions about an AI usage that applies to nearly everything we do. AI Art.

Exactly what is AI art? Is it legal, copyrightable, ethical? Should you use it? Will AI art kill fields like professional photography, graphic design, and illustration? By exploring the history, mechanisms, and current legalities of AI art, perhaps we can reach some conclusions.