Technology

All of these images are AI-generated, and stolen from an artist named Michael Jones.

It absolutely is not "stolen" from Michael Jones.

He made, in real life, a wooden statue of a dog.

That certainly gives him no exclusive right to make images with a wooden statue of a dog. And he is definitely not the first person to do a carving of a dog in wood; dogs and humans have been around for a long time, and statues of dogs predate writing.

The problem that someone like Jones has isn't that people are making images, but that Jones doesn't have a great way to reliably prove that he created an actual statue; he's just taking a picture of the thing. Once upon a time, that was a pretty good proof, because it was difficult to create such an image without having created a statue of a dog. Now, it's not; a camera is no longer nearly as useful as a tool to prove that something exists in the real world.

So he's got a technical problem, and there are ways to address that.

• He could take a video -- right now, we aren't at a point where it's easy to do a walkaround video, though I assume that we'll get there.

• He could get a trusted organization to certify that he made the statue, and reference them. If I'm linking to woodcarvers-international.org, then that's not something that someone can replicate and claim that they created the thing in real life.

• It might be possible to create cameras that create cryptographically-signed output, though that's going to be technically-difficult to make in a way that can't be compromised.

But in no case are we going to wind up in a world where people cannot make images of a wooden dog statue -- or anything else -- because it might make life more difficult for someone who has created a wooden dog to prove that they created that statue in real life.