My father, Elliott Miller, was deceived. Desperate to support his family as a poor artist, he sold a painting called “Father’s Love” and all the rights to it to a company that went on to sell millions of dollars in reprints. Although the company made a profit, years of struggle ensued as he fell further into debt and poverty.
All of this happened before artificial intelligence became a force in the art market. Now, AI has institutionalized this practice on a large scale, invalidating artists’ intellectual property rights and culling them from vast bodies of work without attribution, effectively banishing them from their jobs. .
Currently, my father also has dementia and is losing his ability to create art. AI appears to have replaced the same corporate bigwigs who were ripping him off in the first place.Only this time he’s fighting his own mind. and the man.
Over the years, dealers and retailers have stolen millions of dollars worth of Dad’s work, and that doesn’t include the distributors who made more than $10 million from Dad’s work. I also met a black artist who began his career working for the distribution company that sent his father’s most famous work, the lithograph “Father’s Love,” overseas. The rights to this photo were sold in their entirety by a naive young father who just wanted to put food on the table for his family. What makes this picture and my father even more memorable to me is my father’s love.
“A Father’s Love” by Elliott Miller.
Provided by Alex Miller
“Father’s Love” is not a difficult picture to understand. In front of a background as dark as midnight, a black man is holding a child, holding his head in his hands and his legs in his forearms. The boy looks into the eyes of his guardian and somehow knows who he is. The father stares back, willing to do anything for his child. The man’s skin tone is complex, weathered and slightly distressed. A smart and textured blend of browns. Babies have a solid ebony shine because they haven’t experienced life yet.
When it was released in the early to mid-90s, Black art exploded like a balloon with a grenade inside it. It was what everyone wanted, and what everyone wanted to turn into money. Artists like Charles Bibbs, Wack, and Larry Poncho Brown were some of the most famous geniuses of this craft that I remember from my childhood.
Unfortunately for my father and all of us, he was never able to do that. just Draw or draw. He worked three or four jobs, after that Be an artist when you can. He sold the artwork, which took days or weeks to create, for $50, just to keep the lights on from time to time.
“Father’s Love” was the masterpiece that Dad spent his life creating. His love for his work often didn’t endear him to others. The love he wanted to be given by his father. Black men’s struggles in Jim Crow in southern Missouri. His father and grandfather were preachers there, and it was unthinkable for a “colored” man to become an artist. That picture meant the world to me as a child.
That is why I am raising such questions about so-called AI art.
“Look at my latest work,” a friend wrote in a Facebook post, referring to the beautiful landscape DALL-E created featuring mountains, winding rivers, trees, and birds in flight. While his father has dementia and is starting to have trouble making art, the AI image generator continues to create “art” with the push of a button. International courts decide how much non-human-created works of art are considered originals, but my father often forgets he’s working on a project before moving on to another. I often fail to complete most of my photos.
As practices become easier and more sophisticated, and almost anyone can create AI artwork with the right prompts, the concept of skill and mastery in artwork is becoming a thing of the past. That may be fine for the bottom lines of the big tech companies looking to profit from the technology. But today’s artists suffer because of it.
Authors are furious that nearly 200,000 of their books were used to train AI chatbots without their permission. This spurred a summer strike by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild. All of this is for good reason. In addition to potentially costing them their jobs, research even suggests that continuous training with synthetic data can lead to bias or outright illusions.
As the AI art world steals from the internet through vast databases of artists’ work without their consent, it becomes clear that many people like my father did not get a fair shake. Artists can spend a lifetime struggling to succeed at their craft, but it only takes that to train art generators like DALL-E and Lensa. Things have gotten so bad that people are creating software to tell the difference.
(Left to right) Elliott Miller and his son Alex Miller.
Provided by Alex Miller
Fortunately, most AI art is easy to find. But what happens when devices and software can’t tell the difference between what a human has done and what a machine has done?
I fear that the stories that should be told will no longer be told by humans. This fear is quickly becoming a reality as AI threatens writers’ rooms and the news cycle. But the human touch we experience when engaging in creative work is something that AI can neither give nor receive.
As a professional writer, I realize that I have influenced many readers. My father was also influenced by this. He has worked for some very impressive people and has seen grown men cry when he unveiled portraits of his recently deceased mother and father. I did. But with the onslaught of emerging technologies like AI, none of that seems to matter right now.
I don’t want to be in my 70s or 80s and not be able to afford to pay for my mental health or nursing home because AI replaces me and my technology. That’s probably my biggest fear. I wonder if the technology that is meant to make our lives better is dooming me and all other creators to obscurity.
More than that, my heart breaks for the artists like my father who didn’t have the continued exposure to AI. I fear that the harshest punishment this universe has ever given my family was a gift from my father, who never got enough money or recognition for it and fell into dementia. It’s gone. Some of my favorite memories with my dad are the moments we spent talking about everything and anything. My father would draw in his artist chair, and I would write next to him on the floor. We bonded over our shared love of art.
And now AI is making that memory even harder to swallow. Perhaps our art is following the same path as the dinosaurs. AI is simply taking something that has already been created and using it to create a ruthless replica of what a real artist could create. It makes me so scared that I can’t sleep at night.
