Game that raised over $1.5 million on Kickstarter defends its use of AI art: 'It's certainly going to hurt people [but] I don’t think this is going to go back in the bag'
It's been less than two months since Kickstarter updated and outlined itspolicy on AI art, and it's already not going well.
The policy states that while Kickstarter is «on the side of creative work and the humans behind that work,» projects will be approved based on «what those tools are, and how you’re planning to use them.» The rest of the policy does not explicitly forbid AI generation in Kickstarter projects. Instead, it broadly asks for full transparency.
The issue remains, however, that AI art tools need heaps of reference material to work. They only function if they're hooked up to a database, one which allows the program to make (very accurate) guesses as to what it should make in response to a prompt. While the end result may look bespoke, for many artists this data-scraping feels like outright theft. At the start of this year, a massive class-action lawsuit was filed against these tools, as the class-action itself noted:
«DreamStudio and other image-generation products charge users per 'generation,' but none of that revenue goes to the artists who created the works those generations are based on. Even if the prompt is 'Dragon in the style of Artist Doe,' Artist Doe is not compensated, nor are they even consulted or told before these products are built on their work.»
Kickstarter does call for a "Consent & Credit" policy, noting: «if the database or source provider doesn’t have processes or safeguards in place to manage consent, such as through an opt-out or opt-in mechanism, then Kickstarter is unlikely to allow your project.» This policy does not appear to have played out in quite the way a concerned artist might've hoped.
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