Just this week, Getty Images sued the makers of Stable Diffusion, an artificial intelligence system (“AI”) that creates art based on existing art work, like Getty’s. Long before this copyright law suit, the line between artistic “influence” and infringement had been a blurry one, but some think the very the paper it’s written on is disappearing.

The U.S. began losing its grip on copyright with an earlier groundbreaking technology heraldedby Napster, the “file sharing” (and copyright infringing) web application that seemingly everyone had in the early 2000’s. And the music industry has never been the same since.

Might AI-art be the next chapter in technology-fueled erosion of artist’s rights, where a promising new technology winds up disrupting, not enhancing, creativity?

The first time I saw a multi-million-dollar “Masterpiece” by Roy Lichtenstein, a supreme painter from the Pop Art movement, I had the same thought as almost everyone: Isn’t this just a comic?
Now, I like comics, and think they’re fun all blown up and framed, mock-seriously, on the office wall. But they’re a dime-a-dozen, not millions a pop (not even in Pop Art).
As quickly as that silly thought popped up in my mind, it popped away. Of course not! The entire art world would not be duped into shelling out hundreds of lifetime salaries each for simple enlarged comic strips. It must be some other intellectual statement, based on the underlying concept of comic books. Something deeper, I didn’t understand. Something so subtle, I needed an expert to analyze to explain it to me.