One of the great criticisms of art generated by artificial intelligence is that the companies producing the art make money from the unauthorized use of existing works of art created by artists in the flesh and bones that computer programs learn from. In January, three artists filed a class action lawsuit against Midjourney, DeviantArt, which is behind DreamUp, and Stability AI, the company that launched Stable Diffusion, claiming that the AI image generators used their works without their consent.
Ascendant Art, which launched this month and uses AI to generate avatar images, promises to pay royalties to artists who voluntarily submit works on which these programs are trained. So far, nearly two dozen artists have signed up.
“We all thought it was terrible that AI art was just stealing from artists and threatening their livelihoods,” CEO Mitch Randall told Artnet News in an email. “It was obvious to us that artists should collect a royalty on the reproduction of their art. We decided to make this app because we wanted to show how to do things right.
So far, the company has trained its AI on public domain images. Ascendant Art also promises that it doesn’t allow robots to scrape its site, so artists who license their work with Ascendant won’t get ripped off by other image generators.
Ascendant, headquartered in Colorado and currently employing less than 10 people, sells avatar packs at various prices, ranging from a 10-pack for 99 cents to a 200-pack for $9.99.
If an avatar image ends up using more than one artist’s styles, the royalty will be split between them based on the amount of each artist’s style used in the final image, which will be determined by (what else ?) an AI
“We definitely took the hard route,” Randall said. “It took a little longer than expected and involved more technology development and legal and business work. We’re really pushing our resources trying to do the right thing. But we believe in what we’re doing and we believe that we’re going to be wildly successful. We might even be the only ones left standing if a lawsuit ends up shutting everyone down for copyright infringement.
Yet artists are already speaking out against the model, with Molly Crabapple in a statement to Hyperallergiccomparing it to the Spotify model.
But Randall refutes the comparison.
“Assume there are 100,000 purchases per month resulting in net income of $420,000 per month,” Randall said in his email. “Assuming we have 24 artists signed up, then, on average, each artist would receive $4,375 per month. From what we know of the market, the number of downloads should be much higher, but I just wanted to give a low example. It’s not like Spotify – the royalty percentage we got is huge by comparison. At one point, one of our competitors was making $8 million a day in revenue! »
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