This artist says AI art is 'soulless,' calls on St. John's to stop taking AI submissions

Elizabeth Whitten · CBC News

· Posted: Jul 15, 2025 4:30 AM EDT | Last Updated: 8 hours ago

A St. John's creator is calling for the City of St. John's to prohibition the usage of creation made by artificial intelligence.

St. John's precocious closed applications for its postulation creation container program, which accepted artists' submissions — including those that utilized AI determination on the process — to re-design postulation boxes located passim the city.

The argumentation frustrates Wallace Ryan.

"There's worldly retired determination that AI could beryllium utilized for, but creation is not 1 of them, due to the fact that creation comes from the psyche and AI is soulless," Ryan told CBC News.

Ryan, a comic publication creator and teacher, launched a petition past period to inquire the metropolis to alteration its people connected AI art.

Ryan likened its usage to an jock utilizing performance-enhancing drugs — if those drugs had been designed based connected the "mass theft" of intelligence property, helium said. 

Ryan pointed to large lawsuits precocious filed by Disney and Universal against AI steadfast Midjourney implicit copyright infringement. He said these companies person the close to support their property, just arsenic helium does arsenic an artist.

'Ethical parameters'

The City of St. John's guidelines let AI creation submissions for its postulation container program as agelong arsenic the art adheres to an "artist-first approach" by disclosing AI was utilized and protects different artists' "moral rights and creator integrity."

The submitters besides request to "approach these technologies successful the tone of innovation, accessibility, and captious thinking."

CBC News asked the metropolis for an interview, which spokesperson Jackie O'Brien refused.

WATCH | Wallace Ryan is calling for a prohibition of AI art:

In a statement, she wrote AI is rapidly evolving and the city's volition with its caller guidelines isn't meant to "broadly licence oregon promote its use," but to enactment "ethical parameters" connected its usage that inactive protects artists' rights.

"Our extremity is to enactment artists' creativity portion respecting creator integrity and copyright," she told CBC News.

O'Brien added nary of the submissions selected for the 2025 postulation container programme utilized AI.

'Grey room'

Blair Attard-Frost, an adjunct prof of governmental subject astatine University of Alberta and chap astatine the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, said determination is nuance to the morals of AI art.

AI images are generated by a model trained connected images, which tin scope from thousands of images to millions oregon adjacent billions, she said.

"These are often scraped from the web oregon taken from information sets wherever a batch of images person been included without consent from the creators of those materials. So it raises immoderate ethical questions," she said.

Attard-Frost, who work the city's AI guidelines, found it to beryllium an "interesting requirement."

"My contiguous absorption upon speechmaking it is — how is this going to beryllium assessed and enforced? Because galore of these presumption are rather broad," she said. "The extortion of different artists, motivation rights and creator integrity, those are large concepts."

Attard-Frostalso wonders however those parameters volition beryllium assessed by the city, what benignant of accusation the submitter has to disclose and however the judging committee would measure submissions.

"I deliberation it's an absorbing attack to try to make abstraction for this caller benignant of originative mean of AI creation portion ensuring that there's immoderate benignant of captious oculus to morals that artists are taking successful their usage of," she said.

"But I deliberation there's immoderate unfastened questions present astir ... however this would each beryllium assessed and enforced successful practice."

She added possibly the committee had a checklist and has considered these issues, but connected the look of it there's a batch of "grey room."

Submissions selected for the postulation container creation programme person a $500 honorarium, but Ryan doesn't deliberation nationalist wealth should spell toward AI-created pieces.

"It's the rule of the happening here. It is the information that you're allowing radical to usage plagiarism bundle to marque wealth astatine the disbursal of hard-working people. And that's it, plain and simple," Ryan said.

He said helium didn't taxable to the creation postulation container programme and won't taxable thing to the metropolis until it changes its argumentation connected AI.

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