The Ethics of the Creation of AI
“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good.”
February 21, 2024
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” – Genesis 1, New International Version translation
“In the island, which I have said before was called Hispana, there are very lofty and beautiful mountains, great farms, groves and fields, most fertile both for cultivation and for pasturage, and well adapted for constructing buildings. The convenience of the harbors in this island, and the excellence of the rivers, in volume and salubrity, surpass human belief, unless one should see them.” – translated excerpt from Christopher Columbus’ letter describing the island of Guanahani in the modern-day Bahamas
When I first created the hero image for this site with Leonardo.AI, I worried about showing it to my friend Skye, a graphic designer. While I was proud of finding the right prompts, inputs, and upscaler to create a stylistic image that felt like “me,” I knew Skye might take offense to the image. Or, at least, she might be disappointed that I had used generative AI to create it.
Image-producing generative AI isn’t magic. It isn’t God snapping His fingers to create the heavens and the earth. It was built by inputting vast amounts of images into a machine-learning algorithm. These images were taken from the internet, but credit and compensation have not been given to the artists, photographers, and models.
Instead of creating an entirely new world like God in the book of Genesis, generative AI is built by colonizing original human works. When Columbus arrived in the islands now known as the Bahamas, he immediately began taking “possession of all of them for our most fortunate King by making public proclamation and unfurling his standard, no one making any resistance.”
Although generative AI has made image creation so much more accessible to vast amounts of people, that ability was built on plagiarism and intellectual theft. Instead of creating an entirely new world like God in the book of Genesis, generative AI is built by colonizing original human works. When Columbus arrived in the islands now known as the Bahamas, he immediately began taking “possession of all of them for our most fortunate King by making public proclamation and unfurling his standard, no one making any resistance.”
Creators have learned from history. In January 2023, a group of digital artists and illustrators raised a class action lawsuit against the creators of three AI art generators: Midjourney, DreamUp, and Stable Diffusion. Similarly, a group of authors sued ChatGPT for allegedly training its models based on their books as opposed to using summaries scraped from the web, as ChatGPT says.
As of this writing, the suits don’t look favorable for the creators. Legal technicalities let tech giants skirt copyright infringement laws. Regardless, the genie won’t go back in the bottle. Generative AI is here to stay, whether one chooses to use it or not.
In my case, I will continue to use this technology, even though I can’t give individual credit to the artists whose work was used to train the models that generated my hero image. However, I believe it’s crucial for gen AI companies to provide full transparency on their training practices. It’s the only way to maintain integrity in this brave new world.