My friends and I use a website for tabletop role-playing games (think Dungeons & Dragons). When making a character for a ‘‘Lord of the Rings’’ gameubet63, I found what looked to be the perfect piece online: a Celtic-looking warrior in the style of Alphonse Mucha.

We attempt to attribute art whenever we can, and anything that’s only for purchase we either avoid or pay for. This particular piece seems to be available only in an Etsy shop, where the creator apparently uses A.I. prompts to generate images. The price is nominal: a few dollars. Yet I cannot help thinking that those who make A.I.-generated art are taking other artists’ work, essentially recreating it and then profiting from it.

I’m not sure what the best move is. One justification for A.I. art is that humans create the A.I. prompts that produce the images, so the resulting pieces are novel works. That seems wrong. I could bring an A.I.-generated image that I like to a human artist and ask them to ‘‘rehumanize’’ it for me. But that doesn’t feel right either — Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

There’s a sense in which A.I. image generators — such as DALL-E 3, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion — make use of the intellectual property of the artists whose work they’ve been trained on. But the same is true of human artists. The history of art is the history of people borrowing and adapting techniques and tropes from earlier work, with occasional moments of deep originality. Alphonse Mucha’s art-nouveau poster art influenced many; it was also influenced by many.

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Is a generative A.I. system, adjusting its model weights in subtle ways when it trains on new material, doing the equivalent of copying and pasting the images it finds? A closer analogy would be the artist who studies the old masters and learns how to represent faces; in effect, the system is identifying abstract features of an artist’s style and learning to produce new work that has those features. Copyright protects an image for a period (and just for a period: Mucha’s work is now in the public domain), but it doesn’t seal off the ideas used in its execution. If a certain style is visible in your work, someone else can learn from, imitate or develop your style. We wouldn’t want to stop this process; it’s the lifeblood of art.

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Maybe you’re worried that A.I. image generators will undermine the value of human-made art. Such concerns have a long history. In his classic 1935 essay, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ the critic Walter Benjamin pointed out that techniques for reproducing artworks have been invented throughout history. In antiquity, the Greeks had foundries for reproducing bronzes; in time, woodcuts were widely used to make multiple copies of images; etching, lithography and photography later added new possibilities. These technologies raised the question of what Benjamin called the ‘‘aura’’ of the individual artwork. Our concern for the authenticity of a painting — is it really a da Vinci? — is connected with the idea of it as the unique product of a historical individual. Benjamin thought that mass reproduction would diminish the aura of the original. But zillions of photographic reproductions of the ‘‘Mona Lisa’’ haven’t deterred people from flocking to see the actual painting.

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