AI furry art - intellectual theft or helping dead artists live on?
Regarding the use of AI to recreate Krezz's characters by bbmbbf < Journal | Inkbunny, the Furry Art Community
Kind of ironic that I find myself advocating for using AI to keep someone's memory alive right after I wrote an article noting that Black Mirror isn't happening with today's technology, however, I'm talking about immortalizing someone in a different manner, that being their art.
Not familiar with the artist the OP is talking about and he's got comments turned off, likely to avoid the inevitable drama and flame wars which would erupt if he had them on, but the concept does warrant discussing.
Furry fandom has been around since the 80s which means that a lot of artists are getting pretty long in the tooth, never mind the problem of furries not being the healthiest group to begin with - in other words, posts like the above noting that someone has passed are going to get more frequent.
Which calls into question whether folks should do fan art using an AI to clone the style and characters of a particular artist.
Yes, I know that's opening up a five gallon can's worth of worms as far as problems go, but that sort of stuff is already happening with live artists and isn't the point, instead, it's the memory of the dead ones.
The way things normally go on different forums and other places art is posted where comments can be added is that someone will ask who did a particular pict, be informed that the artist in question has either quit drawing or, more frequently now, died, at which point the person asking notes "oh, too bad" or words to that effect and the discussion ends.
While that individual may continue to seek out art by that artist, eventually they find all they can and the artist ends up forgotten in a file somewhere due to there being no new art to maintain the person's interest.
As time goes by, less and less art by the artist in question gets shared and posted until one day they're forgotten entirely as old files/forums/boards get deleted/crash/whatever and new uploads of existing art stop being made.
Take my friend and art god, Jim Hardiman for example - since he passed, when I was still paying attention to fandom, I noticed that he was being forgotten very quickly as I would run into a lot of folks and posts who weren't familiar with him.
But if all of his existing art could be loaded into an AI, it could be trained to start generating new stuff to be shared, thus keeping Jim in the public's eye and resulting in his original stuff being sought out and maintained with the AI stuff.
In light of how incredible his art was, should the fandom still be around in a few decades when all of us who either personally knew, met or at least were fans of his are long gone, Jim could not just still be remembered, but potentially still be a major part of fandom due to how exceptional his art was.
There are a number of other artists who I feel are talented enough to also warrant the time and effort being put into creating an AI model of their work and I'm sure many of you can likely think of a few - some of whom are probably the same as my thoughts - whose work should live on and not be forgotten.
And yes, there will be abuse - art will be created which is either out of character for the artist in general or specific characters, fakes claiming to be "lost" originals will be generated and of course you'll have the usual thieves either trying to sell the stuff or just pass it off as their own for praise.
But again, we already see stuff like that today and I'm thinking that ensuring that artists whose work we care about isn't forgotten is more important than the problems which we're already dealing with now.
Anyway, that's my thought on the subject.