From Development to Dissemination: Social and Ethical Issues with Text-to-Image AI-Generated Art

Abstract

Text-to-image generative artificial intelligence (AI) have made global news headlines for not only having the ability to generate high-fidelity artworks, but also for causing increased discussion on the ethicality of its impact on living artists, the automation and commodification of art production, the frequent non-consensual collection and usage of sensitive and copyrighted images as training data, and the routinely exhibited cultural and social biases in their generated outputs. In addition, there are concerns that open-sourced text-to-image generative AI models, such as Stable Diffusion, and techniques like Textual Inversion, allow for technical restrictions on the content subject matter to be removed and for generated images to be subject specific, which could be utilized as a new medium for disinformation and sexual or targeted abuse. Because ethical discussions on AI-generated art using text-to-image generative AI models have only come to light in the last quarter of 2022, academic research on the social and ethical implications of this technology have yet to be thoroughly explored. Therefore, it is imperative for research to be done on these implications with regards to the technological development, evaluation, perception, creation, and moderation of AI-generated artworks while text-to-image generative AI systems are still in the preliminary stages of public dissemination and adoption.