INNOVATIONS
AI art’s hidden echo chamber is about to implode
ANALYSIS
Artificial intelligence creates millions of images a day, flooding the internet. But what happens when it starts to train on its own data?
I n the past year, art created by artificial intelligence (AI) has gone from being the subject of research papers to emerging as a niche fad, all the way through to becoming an internet-dominating tool producing millions of images a day.
To get to this point of ubiquity, however, all the AI models had to be trained. And their training involves a hugely comprehensive deep-dive of the internet, in which they scan billions of images along with the images’ corresponding descriptive texts.
Not only does that raise some major ethical questions around copyright, it also begs one question for the future: what happens when the internet becomes flooded with images made by artificial intelligence?