At least AI doesn’t ‘steal’ your ideas!

cgi of an urgent care centre for a site in Cardigan designed with BAM construction in 2016

There is a huge amount of creative, artistic and design output that is published online, and many creatives comment that AI ‘bots’ are scraping their work to enable an image that leans heavily on their work to be created; i.e. the AI platform uses their work ignoring possible copyright infringement.

My experience experimenting with AI to create illustrations for a series of books has led me to the conclusion that what AI actually achieves is a melding of a directed selection of work to create an aggregate image that is, at best, a facsimile of someone elses output; lacking in originality and without the spark of intellect that ‘art’ always exhibits.

There is no doubt that intriguing effects can be achieved but it is achieved without real effort and little learning from mistakes: to paraphrase and repurpose a Jeff Goldblum quote from Jurassic Park, creators are now… ‘so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they don’t stop to think if they should’.

However, the repurposing of someone’s else ideas is not a new one: Picasso is famous for the quote, ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ Andy Warhols work was frequently based on ideas taken from his cultural landscape and through repetition and re-framing he acted as ‘editor’ rather than creator and Damien Hirst acknowledges ‘borrowing’ from others with critics suggesting that he ‘borrowed’ from  Emily Kame Kngwarreye for his Veil Paintings and Larry Poons for spot paintings, albeit transforming them to his own*.

Originality is difficult: none of us live in a cultural vacuum and we are bombarded with images and words and music to the extent that it is sometimes difficult to know where an idea originates: In music, even the accidental use of a phrase that could be from someone else’s song is vigorously pursued, however, in art, imitation is still considered a sincere form of flattery.

While none of my artistic output seems to be imitated, my earlier career as an Architect is littered with others not merely borrowing an idea but, in some instances, directly copying it and while I found ‘homage’ mostly amusing. the practice of giving of one’s ideas presented to a client to a competitor by that client remains common place and is both outrageous and immoral.

Unfortunately, that’s the life of a designer; you pitch for a project by giving away your ideas and while AI may be seen as a useful tool, it’s use doesn’t hurt as nearly much as seeing your own ideas undertaken by others.

A few examples from my time with CODA architects are shown below: make your own minds up but just as Melanie Griffith in Working girl (1988) did, I know where the original ideas came from.

The image on the left, we designed in 1996  as a competition submission for a tower at Birmingham Exhibition centre  whereas the image on the right is of a project built in Germany in 2004 .

The image on the left , we designed as part of a submission for Walsgrave Hospital in 1997 whereas the image on the rght is of a project in London, built 2006

The image on the left is of our design of a service centre for John Lewis and built in Cambridge in 1997 whereas we found the image on the right in a magazine in 2006 of another newly built project.

Its this one that hurt though : The Cardigan Urgent care centre as designed and built by others in 2021: compare with our design at the start of this blog!

 Ref:*Freize Magazine : 26 APR 18: https://www.frieze.com/article/damien-hirst-admits-all-my-ideas-are-stolen-anyway#:~:text=The%20artist%20claims%20that%20he,the%20late%20Emily%20Kame%20Kngwarreye.