Many artists today showcase their work on social media or other online platforms, seeking recognition and community from others. However, the rise of artificial intelligence has created obstacles for keeping original art safe online.
On Sept. 27, 2023, Meta announced in Privacy Matters: Meta’s Generative AI Features that "Publicly shared posts from Instagram and Facebook – including photos and text – were part of the data used to train the generative AI models underlying the features we announced at Connect."
Take Part In Art, founded by Alexandra Jacapraro, a junior studying aerospace engineering, has dedicated itself to supporting artists through numerous activities, including advocating to protect artists from AI exploitation, promoting artwork and spotlighting local events.
Jacapraro, who participates in pageants such as Miss Valley of the Sun, was motivated to found Take Part In Art as her community service initiative after reflecting on the issues that the artist community has had to face.
"Art is near and dear to my heart, and when it came time to pick a community service initiative, I thought, what better outlet to go than art?" Jacapraro said. "There's no real protection for the artist community, and this goes for … all arts too, not just visual, so that's why I started Take Part In Art."
The organization also promoted the NO FAKES Act of 2024 after it was introduced to the Senate on July 31. The bill aims to protect the voice and likeness of all individuals from AI and other technologies used without their consent.
The concern about AI's role in art creation is shared by many. For School of Art co-directors Cristóbal Martínez and Forrest Solis, AI is nothing more than a tool.
"It does not feel emotions and therefore cannot overshadow human creativity," Martínez said in an email. "It only has the capacity to emulate us, but this tool does not have the intellectual capacity to feel emotional about what it generates. AI may generate interesting images, but in the end, it is still left to our human creativity to determine the meanings of images."
Given these limitations, it becomes clear that the one key strategy to minimizing the negative impact of AI on the art community is ensuring that human creativity remains at the forefront.
"We must always seek to maintain our humanity by developing critical thinking skills," Martínez wrote.
In addition to fostering critical thinking, there are emerging technologies to help protect artists' rights. These tools include Glaze, an app designed to protect artists' works from AI by disrupting style mimicry, and Nightshade, a tool that actively poisons AI by transforming images into a data sample unsuitable for model training.
The Glaze Project, which includes free-to-use Glaze, Nightshade and other programs, is a research initiative led by computer science professors and PhD students at the University of Chicago. Its ultimate goal is to develop tools to protect human creatives from unauthorized or exploitative use of generative AI.
"What Nightshade is doing is similar to the dog-cat analogy thing where, if you have an image of a dog, the AI comes over, or somebody sends this image to an AI, and its data is poisoned, so that AI reads it as being an image of a cat," Jacapraro said. "Every time somebody asks that AI, 'Can you please give me an image of a dog?' It’s going to give you a cat, because it’s been given poisoned data."
