Unpacking the Debate Over AI Art

FEATURING NATHAN ROBINSON - You may have recently noticed friends on social media posting cartoon likenesses of themselves in various fantastical formats. They didn’t commission digital artists to create those renditions. They generated images through a free trial of a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) digital art program called Lensa.

Lensa is just the latest program in a wave of AI art software. Other programs include DALL-E and Stable Diffusion that generate imagery based on descriptive text entered by the user. There’s even a print version of such software called ChatGPT that writes essays based on keywords.

Not surprisingly, the technology has sparked a raging debate about how it exploits existing artists’ work and has the potential to displace the need for human artists altogether.