Visual artists – photographers, illustrators, designers, and fine artists – have produced works of beauty and value that have benefited our culture and society. Visual artists are valuable contributors to the US economy, producing the images which are used in publications, film productions, gaming industry products, merchandizing, etc., and which contribute to making the United States the world’s leader in intellectual property exports. In fact, image generative AI would not be able to generate quality images without having trained on artists’ body of work. And yet the very people that generative AI depends on – visual artists – are seeing their livelihoods diminished by the adoption of these platforms.

It’s an unforgiving cycle: as fewer visual artists are able to earn a living, fewer quality visual works will be created. And as generative AI platforms ingest the low-quality, largely AI-generated images flooding the Internet, generative AI outputs will degrade. It’s a no-win situation for everyone.

The Graphic Artists Guild has launched the “No Artists, No Art” campaign to highlight the need to protect artists’ rights in the generative AI ecosystem. Artists deserve to have their fundamental rights protected in a generative AI environment: credit for the work they do, their consent for the use of their work, and compensation for the tremendous value they bring.

Fundamental to creators’ rights is copyright, the means by which artists control and monetize their creations, and are incentivized to continue to produce works of great value. Strong copyright protection also incentivizes the development of innovative solutions to promote the ethical use of visual art, such as collective licensing programs and technologies to embed rights ownership and image usage. Efforts by business interests behind generative AI seek to weaken copyright protections for creators, by declaring that machine learning is categorically “fair use” and by lobbying for broad text and data mining exceptions to copyright law. These efforts undermine the ability of visual artists to continue to participate as valuable contributors to the US economy.

The Graphic Artists Guild calls upon Congress and policy makers to implement safeguards to protect the fundamental rights of creators. We encourage visual artists and other creators to join in our campaign. You can learn more by visiting our campaign page GraphicArtistsGuild.org/NANA, where you can download images and messaging.

For any questions on this initiative, please contact the Guild at advocacy@graphicartistsguild.org.

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