Shutterstock sells images generated by users using the company’s on-site AI model trained on their images and as a result does not have this problem.Ī SIDE-BY-SIDE OF AN ADOBE STOCK IMAGE LISTING AND ITS USE ON AN AUSTRALIAN COMPANY’S WEBSITE. The company requires sellers to only submit images for which they own the intellectual property, but it’s not clear how this is policed. While many images are vaguely listed as being “Aboriginal” or “Indigenous”, some are more specific, like a Shutterstock image based on a prompt “Australian Aboriginal Art showing Gwion Gwion Bradshaw figures and Wandjina rock art depictions of the Kimberley Region in Western Australia”.Īdobe allows people to upload AI images for sale and earn money every time they’re purchased. On each of them, there are dozens of fake Indigenous art-style images for sale (that have been marked on the platform as AI-generated). Now, AI-generated Indigenous art is appearing on online marketplaces where art and derivative products are sold - often directly competing with the work from real Indigenous artists - despite the platforms often having policies that are supposed to protect Indigenous culture.īoth Adobe and Shutterstock run popular stock image websites where people can buy AI-generated images for a variety of commercial purposes. A group of researchers from Washington University and New York University analysed data from the popular freelance platform Upwork and found that freelancers are already experiencing less employment and income since the launch of ChatGPT. While this new technology does add to the artist’s toolbox, workers say that AI is already taking their jobs.

Usually trained on data scraped from the internet without permission, publicly available text-to-image generators let anyone produce instantaneously new images with just a few words. Indigenous artists in Australia say their work is being stolen and turned into another threat to their livelihoods and cultures while they are already struggling to compete with the tens of millions of dollars worth of fake art produced every year by non-Indigenous artists.Īmong the many jobs affected by the rapid development in generative AI, few have been as directly and immediately affected as visual arts workers. People are training artificial intelligence (AI) on Indigenous art without the artists’ permission to create inauthentic works, which are selling online on platforms run by companies such as Adobe and eBay.

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