Ethical Implications of AI-Generated Art
new piece of art. 15 An excellent example of appropriation, for our purposes, is the artist Richard Prince, whose famous, or, perhaps, infamous, work Untitled (cowboy) is a cropped photograph of a Marlboro advertisement, featuring the famed Marlboro Man, heroically riding his gallant steed across the American West. 16 Is this work, contrary to widely held belief, not, in fact, art at all? Such a work seems like more flagrant mimicry than any work produced by means of artificial intelligence, yet it is considered artwork.
Figure 3. Prince, “Untitled (cowboy).”
This section shall close with a quote often attributed to Pablo Picasso (though it should be noted that there appears to be no basis for this attribution). 17 Nonetheless, however, it is a quote that captures the attitudes and tactics that have been discussed in this section of the paper: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” 18
15 Tate, “Appropriation | Tate,” n.d., https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/appropriation. 16 “Richard Prince | Untitled (Cowboy) | The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283742.. 17 Quoteresearch, “Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal – Quote Investigator®,” March 6, 2013, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/. 18 Jason Farago, “‘Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal,’” BBC Culture , February 24, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20141112-great-artists-steal.
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