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Japanese Art, Content Sites Tighten Policies Around AI-Generated Art

Last week, AI-generated drawings of anime characters eating ramen went viral in Japan. The amusing thing about the trend was seeing AI come up with technically impressive art that nevertheless gets strange details wrong, like characters eating ramen with their hands. The meme inspired human artists to draw parodies and comics with good-natured humor, but not all uses of AI art are as well-received.

An example of AI ramen art:

An example of an artist's parody:

As AI artwork has been improving in leaps and bounds over the past few months, there's been heightened conversation around the ethics of claiming creative ownership of AI art, using artwork posted online for AI learning without the artist's permission, and other thorny issues. This month, Japanese art/content websites FANZA, DLsite, Skeb, and Niconico have issued statements to users regarding their policies on AI-generated art.

FANZA posted an announcement for registered doujin circle creators on October 7 stating that it has blocked sales of submissions between October 7-10 that are believed to be AI-generated. All AI-generated submissions henceforth need to be tagged as such.

DLsite also announced on October 7 that it is temporarily suspending sales of AI-generated works as it works out an appropriate system for differentiating between human and AI work. This is to prevent unnecessary restrictions in the future, as many areas in the advancement of AI technology occupy a legal grey area right now.

Skeb posted a tweet on October 13 stating that it will be introducing methods to make it more difficult for scraping tools and bots to extract artwork posted on Skeb for AI learning programs.

Niconico announced on October 19 that AI-generated works will be excluded from the service's monetization program. Although the service will not restrict the creation or distribution of AI work, users will not be able to make money off auto-generated work. However, if AI art is only a small component of the overall creation, and the rest is created by the individual posting it, then it will still be applicable for monetization. Users are also permitted to monetize AI output if they developed the AI themselves.

As Niconico elaborates in its blog post, the reason for these distinctions is because the monetization program was designed to financially support creative labor. A work which is produced without any labor defeats the purpose of the program.

What are your thoughts on the divide between AI and human art, and where the technology is headed in the future?

[Via Automaton]