This artist says AI art is 'soulless,' calls on St. John's to stop taking AI submissions
Wallace Ryan says AI can’t ethically be used to make art
A St. John's artist is calling for the City of St. John's to ban the use of art made by artificial intelligence.
St. John's recently closed applications for its traffic art box program, which accepted artists' submissions — including those that used AI somewhere along the process — to re-design traffic boxes located throughout the city.
The policy frustrates Wallace Ryan.
"There's stuff out there that AI could be used for, but art is not one of them, because art comes from the soul and AI is soulless," Ryan told CBC News.
Ryan, a comic book artist and teacher, launched a petition last month to ask the city to change its course on AI art.
Ryan likened its use to an athlete using performance-enhancing drugs — if those drugs had been designed based on the "mass theft" of intellectual property, he said.
Ryan pointed to major lawsuits recently filed by Disney and Universal against AI firm Midjourney over copyright infringement. He said these companies have the right to defend their property, just as he does as an artist.
'Ethical parameters'
The City of St. John's guidelines allow AI art submissions for its traffic box program as long as the art adheres to an "artist-first approach" by disclosing AI was used and protects other artists' "moral rights and artistic integrity."
The submitters also need to "approach these technologies in the spirit of innovation, accessibility, and critical thinking."
CBC News asked the city for an interview, which spokesperson Jackie O'Brien refused.
In a statement, she wrote AI is quickly evolving and the city's intention with its new guidelines isn't meant to "broadly permit or encourage its use," but to put "ethical parameters" on its use that still protects artists' rights.
"Our goal is to support artists' creativity while respecting artistic integrity and copyright," she told CBC News.
O'Brien added none of the submissions selected for the 2025 traffic box program used AI.
'Grey room'
Blair Attard-Frost, an assistant professor of political science at University of Alberta and fellow at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, said there is nuance to the ethics of AI art.
AI images are generated by a model trained on images, which can range from thousands of images to millions or even billions, she said.
"These are often scraped from the web or taken from data sets where a lot of images have been included without consent from the creators of those materials. So it raises some ethical questions," she said.
Attard-Frost, who read the city's AI guidelines, found it to be an "interesting requirement."
"My immediate reaction upon reading it is — how is this going to be assessed and enforced? Because many of these terms are quite broad," she said. "The protection of other artists, moral rights and artistic integrity, those are big concepts."
Attard-Frostalso wonders how those parameters will be assessed by the city, what type of information the submitter has to disclose and how the judging committee would evaluate submissions.
"I think it's an interesting approach to try to create space for this new sort of creative medium of AI art while ensuring that there's some kind of critical eye to ethics that artists are taking in their use of," she said.
"But I think there's some open questions here about ... how this would all be assessed and enforced in practice."
She added maybe the committee had a checklist and has considered these issues, but on the face of it there's a lot of "grey room."
Submissions selected for the traffic box art program receive a $500 honorarium, but Ryan doesn't think public money should go toward AI-created pieces.
"It's the principle of the thing here. It is the fact that you're allowing people to use plagiarism software to make money at the expense of hard-working people. And that's it, plain and simple," Ryan said.
He said he didn't submit to the art traffic box program and won't submit anything to the city until it changes its policy on AI.
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