There was recently an interesting article in Japan Today, the English language news site, regarding the growing backlash among traditional artists against the new wildly popular AI imaging apps, such as Midjourney, they see as a threat to their own livelihood. The protest has taken the form of lawsuits filed in both the UK and the US by disgruntled artists. The US filing complained that AI images "compete in the marketplace with the original images. Until now, when a purchaser seeks a new image 'in the style' of a given artist, they must pay to commission or license an original image from that artist." The basis of the suit is therefore an argument against the misappropriation of images without due recompense to the artists who created them and in that sense is very similar to the lawsuit recently filed by Getty Images against Stable Diffusion.
While it's entirely understandable that traditional artists should feel entitled to payment when their images are "scraped" without their permission from the internet to become part of an AI imaging app's dataset, I think there's much more to the current backlash than just the monetary damages to the artists' income. To me, the situation is reminiscent of the controversy that erupted in the nineteenth century following the invention of traditional photography when it was questioned whether the new medium could truly be regarded as an art. Of course, photography was eventually accorded it's place in the arts and I feel fairly certain that the same will hold true for AI imaging once users discover the medium's ability to create new forms rather than simply copy the conventions of traditional art.
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