(Photo Credit: Museum London) The Museum London store, which a local resident says could be selling possibly A.I. generated art.
Londoners have begun voicing concerns after noticing art being sold in the Museum London shop, which reportedly resembles works generated by artificial intelligence.
“You just walk into the shop, you can even do so right now if you want,” says London resident and 3D Artist, Fyodor Postnov.
“They’re upwards of $400, the price tags are right there. A lot of people go to the gift shop having no idea how AI generation works.”
With attention growing over the use of AI being integrated into creative outlets, plenty of controversy has begun over the ethics and job reductions caused by artificially generated art. This could be seen recently with the movie Late Night with the Devil, which has faced online boycotts over the use of AI art transitions used in the film.
The artist behind the works in question, Diego Tamayo, says he has turned to AI in the past, primarily for inspiration.
One of the pieces, Mercurio, being sold online and in-store with the Museum London shop.
“I want to look for many inspirations,” says Tamayo.
“I read many books about art, looking for inspiration, and sometimes I find artificial intelligence, and it’s amazing, but I want to go farther than that.”
He goes into some of the details on his prior art processes.
“Before going into photographs, I worked in oil and different techniques. My next step was doing that photography and then painting over the photographs. My inspiration was some kind of artificial intelligence, but I decided to be a part of this because I want to be different.”
The Museum London shop says that they don’t have an established process for vetting the works of those they work with through their shop.
(Credit: Diego Tamayo, @tamayoartist) A post from 2022 by artist, Diego Tamayo, referencing previous works with artificial intelligence, still focused around cats.
“We carry reproductions of original artwork, we carry original work, all across the map,” says Manager of Retail Services, Kerry Logan.
“We carry pottery, ceramics, and all sorts of things. Typically, what I would say is we wouldn’t comment on an artist’s process, anymore than I would comment on how one of our oil painters is making his finished product.”
Diego Tamayo is an artist who lives in London, born in Bogotá, Colombia, whose art is being featured and sold in the Museum London shop.
On the artist’s Instagram page, he shows that he has worked previously in AI based art as well as crypto-art, such as NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens).
“We’ve been working with Diego for a little over a year,” says Logan.
“We were introduced to Diego through an artist collective that we work with called Simple Reflections, they represent a number of different artists, musicians, and artisans who have all settled in London from South American countries. We’ve had a long standing relationship with Simple Reflections, so that’s how Diego got to be introduced to me at the shop.”
The main pieces which Postnov brings into question for AI usage, come from a new collection focused around cats.
He says that, when looking closer at the pieces, there are some inconsistencies that arise that can display the connections to AI generation.
AI detection tool, “isitai.com”, which uses machine learning models to examine images, colours, patterns, and more in art verification. Generated by Justin Koehler.
“Most of the time, they’re trained at low-resolutions than what their output will eventually end up being. They leave behind artifacts that you see in patterns, which you usually see when you zoom in. Basically, it’s repetitive patterns, it really messes those up on small scales when you have to zoom in,” says Postnov.
“You can see it most clearly on the jewellery that it generates on top of the cats. You’ll see, if it’s a pattern that it generates symmetrically on both sides, the patterns on it don’t match at all and they do have those very typical Midjourney, stable diffusion artifacts.”
When inserting some of Tamayo’s work into Google’s reverse image search, Postnov says that he and other graphic artists can see the similarities to other online pieces. Tamayo says though that this could happen with any photo or artwork.
“If you put any image into an artificial intelligence webpage, even a photograph or something like that, they will read it like it was artificially made because they describe everything. They say, “This is something with those colours, those images,” I don’t know, but someone told me that.”
Google’s services can be used to reverse image search pictures, drawing from other similar photographs, art, and more on it’s engine. Conducted by Justin Koehler.
The Museum London shop says that they have been given no indication from the artist of any use of AI in their work, but that they don’t push for specifics with any artist.
“He has never mentioned AI to me in his process. I don’t sit down and chat with everyone about exactly all the steps that go into whatever product they are selling through here,” says Logan.
“It’s all so new and evolving. We don’t have a process in place to be able to, I don’t even know what that would look like, in terms of determining if a piece of artwork has been AI generated.”
Postnov says that not all AI is bad though, with there being definite benefits to its integration.
“This is something that’s a technology that has a lot of really cool uses in terms of just scaling up production workflows and allowing single individuals to do much more than what they could do otherwise,” says Postnov.
“The problem in this case is the fact that this work is presented to not be that. This is not honestly being presented for what it is, being misrepresented as hand-painted work. That’s what ticks me off personally.”
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