As AI continues to evolve and affect life in myriad ways, we speak to Hong Kong artists who use machine learning to create art that retraces what it means to be human
Hong Kong digital artist Victor Wong Wang-tat, who practises traditional ink art as a hobby, was proud to show his work to his fellow practitioners at one of Hong Kong Ink Painting Society’s gatherings. A sturdy mountain, made up of steady, and powerful brushstrokes, sits in the centre of the rice paper; the changing black and grey gradation of the ink lines standing in stark contrast to the blank white space to create an ethereal landscape as if clouds are floating above the valleys. Wong recalls the Ink Painting Society chairman’s immediate puzzlement: “This painting shows the level of experience and skill that a senior painter has, but strangely the artist seems to paint far more steadily than most of us older artists are capable of now.”
The older man was astounded to learn that the painting had been created by AI Gemini, Hong Kong’s first AI robotic arm to specialise in ink art, designed by Wong. This revelation led fellow Ink Painting Society members to question which ink art masters’ works Wong had fed to AI Gemini’s machine learning system, and whether the resulting piece should be considered art.
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Wong isn’t the only artist facing questions from AI sceptics. Since the considerable rise in the adoption of AI around the world in the last five years, apps such as Tensorflow and Stable Diffusion—open-source AI platforms that collect artworks and images that exist online to create a database from which new works can be generated— have accumulated a solid fanbase who want to create sophisticated works in the style of famous artists with a few prompts and one click of a button. But such creations can lead to infringement—art can be uploaded without the artist’s permission or knowledge—an inundation of disinformation, and the possibility that artists will be left jobless.
At the time of writing, Hong Kong hadn’t seen any lawsuits concerning AI-generated art, according to Weiken Yau, a partner at law firm Haldanes who regularly advises on publishing and digital licensing agreements. That doesn’t mean cases won’t come about. The updated Copyright Ordinance, which Yau says would likely be the ordinance for monitoring AI art in Hong Kong, took effect on May 1 this year to “strengthen copyright protection in the digital environment”, according to the government’s news website. While there are still grey areas in the interpretation of AI art, its ownership and the liability of involved parties, Yau says it all comes down to “comparing whether the AI work created is strikingly similar to works owned by others. No exemption or allowance is granted to the users using the AI tools.” He thinks that ultimately, AI app users will bear the primary responsibility for ensuring that art generated by AI isn’t a material reproduction of artwork owned by someone else. “Otherwise, my advice would probably be that the person should seek to get a licence from the rightful owner, or [ensure] they qualify under any of the statutory exemptions that are already in place.” These include satire, parody, caricature and pastiche, commenting on current events, quotation, education and other purposes that fall within the fair dealing exception.
