Who owns the art when AI is your collaborator?

Even our ministers got into the Ghiblifying fun with these AI portraits that they uploaded on their individual social media accounts. Guess who is who. — Social media/Agencies

LAST month, the prestigious auction house Christie’s held its first artificial intelligence (AI) art auction.

While the event prompted protests from groups of artists, this is not the first time the auctioneer has featured AI art.

In 2018, Edmond de Belamy, a portrait painting constructed by French arts collective Obvious using AI technology, was sold for US$432,500 (RM1.9mil at today’s rates) at a Christie’s auction.

Even back then, the painting sparked a global discourse on copyright and authorship concerns when it was revealed that the portrait was mainly created using code implemented by Robbie Barrat, a then 19-year-old AI artist who was not affiliated with Obvious.

Fast forward to the present day, and there still isn’t a clear consensus on copyright and authorship in the age of AI.

In creative industries where authorships and intellectual property are core to the business model, this presents a major dilemma as the current legal frameworks are not equipped to handle this yet, says Malaysian architect Ihsan Hassan.

“Who owns a piece of AI-generated work? Is it the person who wrote the prompt, the company that owns the platform, or is it together? What about the artists who form the invisible data set behind the work? We have to debate who should be paid,” he says.

National Artificial Intelligence Office (NAIO) head Shamsul Izhan Abdul Majid says several layers of policies could help protect industry professionals.

First are the national-level policies, which he says NAIO is still in the process of drafting, followed by sector-based policies. The latter, he feels, could possibly be self-driven, with NAIO interfacing so the agency can also build that national and international conversation.

“The sector conversations can be self-driven because they have more nuances in terms of how AI is being applied in their respective domains,” says Shamsul.

He also acknowledges the importance of making sure the country’s copyright laws and other relevant regulations are kept up-to-date, so that they can reflect upon the modernisation of creative spaces.

“Copyright laws and other policies can be safeguards just to make sure that, as a consequence of humans being in or not in the loop, there are some known outcomes that the policies and guardrails can protect.

“And maybe there’s a need to update in terms of royalties and other peripheral rights that might be imposed on creative content,” he adds.

But as AI policies are still being reviewed and refined, Shamsul says for now, creative professionals should be aware of how data privacy, security, and governance work to protect their copyright.

On the flipside, he says developers of AI tools need to include requirements that consent must be obtained at certain points of the process, especially where AI tools can easily consume another artist’s work.

Shamsul also expresses optimism in the AI tech industry’s ability to self-govern via a high level of peer-to-peer endorsement.

“This means that when a developer produces something and it is not used by the ecosystem and therefore not ranked highly by the ecosystem of other developers, then they also know that maybe they are not in line with the best practices of whatever they are doing.

“If it is not endorsed by their community, it is buried behind so many layers people don’t know about,” he says.

Musician Azmyl Yunor and Ihsan are far less optimistic about what Ihsan describes as the “cloud capitalists” – a handful of corporations and private individuals in Silicon Valley and China who own the entire infrastructure of AI in the world.

Azmyl cautions that these Big Tech companies are always observing and learning how to capitalise on trends.

As someone from Gen X, he has had firsthand experience of how the Internet democratised societies and marginalised voices simultaneously.

“It doesn’t take long for these companies to regain their monopoly by selling the idea of ‘access’, which after a while becomes ‘excess’,” he says.

Meanwhile, Ihsan believes the concentration of the AI infrastructure in the hands of a few risks a new kind of feudalism where creative autonomy, public accountability, and democratic norms can be eroded.

“They can just switch it off and then destroy your businesses or livelihoods, so we really are at the mercy of the owners of this very crucial technology for human development.

“It’s not a sci-fi dystopian future; it’s happening right now, in America, for example.”

It is for this reason, he adds, that the international community, especially voices from the Global South, must push for a binding global treaty on AI governance.

“If AI is the defining tool of the 20th century, it must be shaped by all humanity, not just who owns the servers,” he says.