Evolving Understanding
Creating Images with AI: Collaboration and Serendipity as Frameworks
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Madeleine Sorapure
As we teach university students to communicate with images as well as words, we need to understand how AI image-making can be incorporated into creative and communicative processes. My study focuses on collaboration and serendipity as two frameworks for understanding how students—and other visual communicators—can understand the role of AI in their work. What does it mean to collaborate with AI when you create a visual composition? In what ways is the collaboration similar to our familiar collaborations with programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, where we rely on preset filters, adjustments, and various other tools as we create digital images? What do AI programs add to the mix and how do they cause us to redefine our approach to collaboration with non-human, algorithmic entities? Can a re-examination of how artists work with physical mediums help us understand collaborations with AI? Serendipity is also an element in image creation with software programs. There can sometimes be the “happy little accidents” made famous by Bob Ross, where a mistake becomes something unexpectedly good, like a smudge on the canvas that becomes a bird: voila, just what the painting needed! The promise of AI is that you can create something unexpectedly beautiful—or at least appropriate for the context—in just a few clicks. Serendipity draws on both randomness and expertise, and so the introduction of AI into the mix invites us to reconsider this aspect of image creation.
Re-Examining Interests and Rights in Modern Image-Making
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session S. Che Ekaratne
Technological advances now allow photographic images to be readily produced and rapidly disseminated. Such advances also increasingly permit significant manipulation of a person’s photographic image. While earlier image-manipulations were unsophisticated and easily detected, modern forms (such as AI-generated deepfakes) are highly realistic. When such images feature identifiable humans without their consent, the resulting harms can be severe and traumatic. Conflicts can thus arise between various rights and interests: such as freedom of expression, autonomy and dignity. This paper focuses on and re-examines key issues that arise when photographic images of humans are manipulated without their consent. I first identify relevant interest-holders including image-subjects, image-viewers, image-disseminators and image-creators such as photographers. I then examine copyright law as a legal tool often employed for the interests of subjects and photographers. Next, I analyse illustrative cases and examples to demonstrate how copyright law frequently disfavours interests of certain image-subjects and image-viewers. This analysis highlights how the balance of interests can skew in favour of other interest-holders. I therefore recommend exploring alternative options to better consider the wide range of relevant rights and interests, ending with specific suggestions. By offering a combination of legal and ethical perspectives, this paper advocates for photographers, other creative professionals, legal professionals and the public to collectively participate in improvements, especially for those most vulnerable to unauthorised image use. The paper's relevance to image work encompasses photography, film, advertising and social media.
