Blog / 2024 / Milan Art Institute’s Epic AI Error
December 4, 2024
I tried talking with Milan Art Studios privately about the unkind stuff they do in their video. They apologized for some of it, but failed to make it right. Leaving “Real Art vs AI Art - Can Pro Artists Spot the Difference?” up as-is without corrections in the video itself is disrespectful to my work and to the work of HarryArts, Komal Wadhwa, and Erin Hanson. I doubt it’s something that any of the artists who acted as judges would be happy with if the same thing was done to their work.
Also, if you’re worried that my uncopyrighting stance invited Milan Art Studios’ use of my work, please let me call your attention to Komal Wadhwa and Erin Hanson, both of whom claim copyright for their art on their sites. Ostensibly, this requires people to ask permission before using their work, but it seems that Milan Art Studios decided to ignore that element of copyright law.
I want to give a special shout-out to Mei Egoshi and Suzie Simmons, who emailed me about what Milan Art Studios was saying about my art. Without their thoughtfulness, I likely still wouldn’t know what was going on.
Liquid Glacier (Multnomah Falls, Oregon)
2021
acrylic, colored pencil, and marker on paper
11 x 7 inches
(For prints of this image visit Redbubble.)
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
The decision is in: Gwenn Seemel’s art is human-made!
Which...yeah.
Maybe you weren’t waiting for judges to speak on this particular topic. I know I wasn’t. But in a video for their YouTube channel last month, Milan Art Studios showed some images to three judges and asked them to guess which ones were made by people and which by robots. They all agreed my piece was human-made, but then, in a strange twist, Milan Art Studios told the judges that they were wrong.
The comments erupted with viewers chiming in to say they’d guessed correctly for all the images except my piece, and some lovely people came along to point out that they’d actually been right, and it was Milan Art Studios that had fumbled its research about the images it used.
This is the full piece, uncropped. It’s 100% human-made and I have the work in progress images to prove it. The painting depicts Multnomah Falls, one of my favorite places on the planet—a place where I spent many hours as an emerging artist hiking and figuring out who I was and who I wanted to be.
I’m not sure how Milan Art Studios managed to make this mistake. A lot of times these days, a reverse image search is all it takes to figure out who made an image. Google’s version of the image search is thorough, and it brings up my site right away.
In fact, it brings up info about the three other human artists’ whose work was used in the Milan Art Studios’ video, which is nice, because Milan Art Studios failed to credit any of them. They just labeled the works as “real painting” and moved on to the next image. Which is, in my opinion, not kind.
AI has a funny way of making some of us feel more human.
Not all of us—not the ones who pretend not to see what a ginormous suck of electricity AI is, or how it’s stealing from artists and writers, or how it’s harming our ability to think critically.
But for the rest of us, when the robots try to be human, it inspires us to look more closely at what makes us us, and it makes us want to be kinder with each other. It makes us want to be the best humans we can be.
It’s hard being an artist, especially when people act like it’s okay to be disrespectful to your work as long as they’re making money off of using your art.
But, when I think about computers trying to be human, trying to make art, it makes me want to keep on keeping on as an artist. It makes me want to make the stuff that AI can’t. It makes me want people try to make sense of the world through my art. And it makes me want to share that work with others. And then I want the people who see that the world needs more kindness, more attention to detail, more taking care of each other—I want those people to see my work and to know that they are not alone.
UPDATE
January 17, 2025
After the video reached 103k views and I posted a further reaction to Milan Art Institute’s unkind choices, the company acknowledged its error by adding an info card to the video and a link to my site in the description. Also in the description, they named the other human artists whose work appears in the video.
Maybe this post made you think of something you want to share with me? Or perhaps you have a question about my art? I’d love to hear from you!
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