The recent protest against OpenAI by its unpaid beta testers has once again demonstrated that the goals of well-funded AI companies are often at odds with the goals of the artists whose time is used in testing or whose work has been used to train the AI in the first place.
In the most recent protest, the ‘red teamers’ (beta testers with privileged access) who OpenAI invited to test Sora, its long-awaited AI video-generating software, decided to leak the full Sora to everyone while posting an open letter on Hugging Face about their reasons.
The letter explains: “We received access to Sora with the promise to be early testers, red teamers and creative partners. However, we believe instead we are being lured into "art washing" to tell the world that Sora is a useful tool for artists. Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the program for a $150 billion valued company.”
When I contacted OpenAI for comment, a spokesperson told me, “Sora is still in research preview, and we’re working to balance creativity with robust safety measures for broader use. Hundreds of artists in our alpha have shaped Sora’s development, helping prioritize new features and safeguards. Participation is voluntary, with no obligation to provide feedback or use the tool. We’ve been excited to offer these artists free access and will continue supporting them through grants, events, and other programs. We believe AI can be a powerful creative tool and are committed to making Sora both useful and safe.”
OpenAI does indeed support some artists through grants, including at Tribeca, Charles Lindsay, and the Strada Gallery.
Portrait of the artist
But while the artists involved in the Sora testing protest were not against using AI technology as a tool for the arts, there are plenty of other digital and traditional artists who are, or at least think they’re being given a bum deal. According to the Art and AI 2024 survey by Hiscox, the specialist global insurer, 77% of art collectors and 78% of art enthusiasts said artists should be fairly compensated for using their work to train AI platforms.
To demonstrate the ethical dilemmas surrounding AI-generated art, Hiscox unveiled the first ‘self-portrait of an AI artist’ in collaboration with 40 established artists, whose work is often ‘borrowed’ without permission to train AI platforms.
Each artist contributed their headshot, and those images were blended into a single face using a coding program called Facer. The image was then transformed into a stylized self-portrait painting to symbolize how an AI artwork is, at its core, a composite of human endeavor and creativity.
Big business
AI art can be big business. A portrait of English Mathematician Alan Turing by robot artist Ai-Da was recently sold at auction in New York, fetching $1.08 million. While robot artist Ai-Da is a pretty unique case, it highlights how AI can generate art for money without real artists being compensated.
But while many AI platforms don’t compensate the artists whose work they use to train their models, things are slowly changing. Meet Tess, one of the first ethical AI image generators and the first of its kind to pay artists royalties when their styles are used. Artists can use Tess to create and license their own AI model, based on their own art, ensuring that they get paid fairly for their work, and the user can generate images without fear of copyright infringement.
While we’ve still got a long way to go before artists are properly compensated for their work by AI companies, with protests erupting against OpenAI already, it does feel like the landscape is slowly beginning to shift in the artist's favor, and 2025 could see more protests building against the AI industry.
Let’s just hope there are enough real artists left to benefit once the AI industry gets around to realizing the importance of human artists.
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