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Artist Karla Ortiz sees AI 'identity theft', not promise
About a year ago, Ortiz discovered Disco Diffusion, an open source AI-based image generating tool, but it is not easy to use for those less tech savvy.
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Illustrator and content artist Karla Ortiz poses in her studio in San Francisco, California, on March 8, 2023. Ortiz and two other artists have filed a class-action lawsuit against companies with art-generating services.
(AFP/Amy Osborne)
F
or artist Karla Ortiz, the explosion in artificial intelligence that can stand in for flesh-and-blood artists is nothing more than identity theft.
A native of Puerto Rico, Ortiz is a California-based designer, a concept artist and painter who has worked for videogaming giant Ubisoft, Marvel Studios, the Wizards of the Coast fantasy game publisher and has exhibited her work in galleries.
But now her profession could be completely disrupted by generative AI, the technology behind apps such as Dall-E and ChatGPT, which in seconds can crank out original content -- illustrations, poems, computer code -- with only a simple prompt.
About a year ago, Ortiz discovered Disco Diffusion, an open source AI-based image generating tool, but it is not easy to use for those less tech savvy.
At first, she thought it was an interesting experiment, but quickly she realized that the program was using the work of many of her friends without them knowing it.
They asked to have their work removed, but to no avail, and they backed down. She told herself art theft is nothing new in their line of work.
"It's weird that this is happening, but whatever," she told herself at the time.
