Who Is the Artist?

Joyce Zhang, Illustrator

With AI art there are a lot of ethical issues surrounding it. As AI learns from other art pieces from other artists, they basically interpret and fetch these art pieces to integrate into their own. This brings into question the issue of plagiarism: is the art really original? Who claims copyright to the art? Who is the artist? Can someone even do that? I think it also raises the question of what is art? Is it a piece of commerce or business that has monetary value just for the sake of marketing? Is art the end result of a piece or the process? With AI art, not only can it mimic real artist’s style, it undermines the effort actual artists put into their work, so at the end, are images generated by AI actually art?