Bands Abusing AI Art in Music Videos – Is It Okay or Not?

The practice of bands using AI art to generate visuals for their music videos has been controversial.

This practice is said to has been exposed after someone noticing the Italian metal band Rhapsody of Fire had been using AI-generated graphics in an MV of theirs, and this prompted backlash from their fans and other Internet users. More recently, another Italian metal act, Wind Rose (famous for their cover of “Diggy Diggy Hole” by gaming collective the Yogcast), was caught using AI art in one of their animated MVs by a Twitter / X user. As of the time of writing, no known backlashes had been recorded, although some speculated that there might bound to be one befalling the band in the near future.

Drillimation’s Viewpoints

While AI has played a role over the creation of backgrounds for album covers and thumbnails for videos, Drillimation Systems founder and CEO Susumu Takajima has expressed mixed opinions over AI-generated content. He has further explained in an article published in September of last year about how AI can be used as inspiration to form a basis of an original work that involves the artist’s talent.

The problem with AI is that individuals who use nothing but AI for art assets is viewed as uncreative and diverts attention from the practice of creating the art themselves. And in terms of licenses for AI assets, they are perfectly legal to use as Section 201 of the US Copyright Act states that works have to be created and/or authored by a human being in order to qualify for copyright protection, and since it’s the computer algorithms that generate the asset, they are therefore public domain.

Studio Emiko’s Viewpoints

Emiko Hosokawa, long had been associated with Catholic beliefs and thoughts ever since the time she frequently visited churches during the first half of 2023, is known to be vehemently against AI because of two factors:

• Firstly, due to her philosophical viewpoints being influenced by Catholicism, she believes that all form of theft is wrong – including theft of digital property such as piracy (which explains why she is reluctant to pirate Touhou Project games even when the practice is commonplace within the community) and most importantly the unauthorized usage of feeding existing art to AI in order to “train” them to generate images similar to those artworks.
• Secondly, due to the incidents regarding video game illustrators boycotting game companies after they fired them and replaced them with AI, Hosokawa is concerned that if the abuse of AI-generated artistic assets goes out of hand, she would be left unemployed and thus cannot earn money to pay for the many expenses of her personal life. Unemployment has been a serious problem affecting artistic entities ever since the introduction of AI asset-generating tools.

Hosokawa herself believes that the usage of AI in artistic endeavors must be regulated tightly, or even be completely banned, especially for artistic works that are meant to be sold commercially, such as the case with most metal bands out there that are not labelled as “doujin”.

In the case of works that are distributed non-commercially such as doujinshi, she stated that a proper credit to whatever AI-asset generation algorithm being used and the exact prompt used for generating these assets are required.

Afterword

After all, a lot of companies and even educational institutions have policies when it comes to AI-generated content. But as Takajima’s viewpoints go, people end up using AI to generate content instead of using it as a basis to create an original work!