If you’re a digital art enthusiast, social media user, or artist yourself, you will have inevitably come across the debate regarding AI art. Below is a statement from 3dtotal regarding our thoughts about AI art.
1 - When an artist creates original art it belongs to them. For this reason artists in our books and publications sign licenses to give 3dtotal restricted permission to print their art. AI art tools have been informed and educated using art that belongs to someone else, and it was done without express permission, and without any future benefit to the artist. In our opinion this is a violation of an artist’s copyright and is obviously unethical. To do this without permission, and then allow users to create art using an artist’s name/style as a prompt is clearly wrong. We are optimistic that in time law will correct this due (in part) to the response of the art community, but until then we will not knowingly promote art created with AI tools.
2 - Visual art is uniquely engaging, as it represents the life of its human creator. Within an image you find both the artistic influences of an artist, and a concentrated representation of their human experience. The artists we love the most are not simply the most skilled, but the ones who create art that resonates with us for human reasons. When 3dtotal make an art book our objective has to be to capture some of the personality of the artist in the book, that is what makes a special bond between the book and its reader. This is a very powerful thing and should not be automated by a computer. The adoption of AI art tools for professional creative uses would stifle the development of meaningful human artists around the world, and 3dtotal can’t support that.
3 - For many, working in concept art or the animation industry (for example) is an aspiration. These industries are populated with passionate individuals who have dedicated their lives to their careers, and have provided us with life changing movies, animations, and computer games. These dedicated pioneers will increasingly lose contracts to AI prompt artists that can tackle the workload of teams of artists. We know this is happening already. The implications of this will be a reduction in creative careers and a lack of true innovation in media - which is not something 3dtotal could ever support.
"3dtotal has four fundamental goals. One of them is to support and help the artistic community, so we cannot support AI art tools as we feel they hurt this community."