Who is the original creator in the AI Generated Artwork "Dream" by Wombo?

Review by Betina Borza

Artificial intelligence (AI) generated artwork has become increasingly popular over the past few years. However, the use of AI to create art raises a few questions that impact the art community. For instance, who is the original creator of the artwork? The user or the creator of the AI code? 

Dream by Wombo is an AI text-to-image generator that may use VEGAN-CLIP networks to create unique artworks (Lønvik 7; Crowson 2). Dream generates art based on two factors, a two-hundred-word limit prompt and a selected chosen style. Users can pick from 39 art styles to help the generator understand the desired outcome. Users also have the ability to upload their art or images and have Dream alter them (Wombo.ai). 

Who is the original creator of the AI artwork and copyright holder? By default every person that creates something artistic, and can prove they made it is automatically the copyright holder (Office). However, when a person only wrote a few lines of text and an AI did the rest, who is the original creator? 

According to Dream, they consider the users the creator of the art. Their website and app publish the users, and they state “created by…” (Wombo.ai) underneath artworks, as well as providing the prompt and style the users chose. This unveils another question if I were to copy someone's prompt and their style, and the AI created a similar generation, would I be copying the user's work since it is not my original idea? 

For instance, user “dragonfaether” (Wombo.ai) on Dream has a very distinct style of artwork he generates. However, a simple copy and paste of one of his prompts and the AI can generate an artwork that fits in with his creations. Therefore, if the only aspect of Dream that is completely original, which is the text, is wholly copied, who is the originator? The person who came up with the concept or the person who copied and pasted the text? This demonstrated the blurred line that comes along with AI-generated artworks, clearly marking distinct points in when an artwork or idea is copied is crucial to the future of AI art. 

The originator or the artwork is neither the user who writes a prompt nor the people who wrote the code, but the art belongs to the AI. For instance, if someone were to write a prompt to draw an elephant, and a real-life person was to draw that elephant, who does the drawing of the elephant belong? The artist who drew the elephant. Furthermore, an AI robot named Sophia is considered a citizen of Saudi Arabia. Therefore, it is not far-fetched to consider an AI the creator of original art (Retto, 2017). 

The future of AI is unknown. Therefore, the future of AI art could lead to several different outcomes. A potential outcome is that every art supposedly created by users of Dream to date could become the property of the Dream AI. 

Works Cited: 

Crowson, Katherine, et al. "Vegan-clip: Open domain image generation and editing with natural language guidance." arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.08583 2 (2022). 

Lønvik, André Tørlen. "An overview of Artificial Intelligence; Application, user experience and ethical problems." (2021). 

Office, Canadian Intellectual Property. “Government of Canada.” Canadian Intellectual Property Office, / Gouvernement du Canada, 15 Sept. 2022. 

Retto, Jesús. "Sophia, first citizen robot of the world." ResearchGate, URL: https://www. researchgate. net (2017). 

Wombo.ai (n.d.) dream. Available at: https://app.wombo.art/