Behind the Scenes at Stuart Ng Books: Testimony of Karla Ortiz and others at 7.12.23 hearing on AI and IP

On July 12, 2023 concept artist Karla Ortiz was among the experts offering tesitmony at this imporant Congressional hearing. The photos below are screen grabs from the video link of the hearing.

Here's an excerpt of Karla's testimony:

“… My name is Karla Ortiz, a concept artist and illustrator based in San Francisco. You may not know my name, but you and your loved ones have almost certainly seen my work. My work has helped shape and create the worlds of blockbuster films including Marvel projects like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Loki, The Eternals, Black Panther, Avengers :Infinity War, and Doctor Strange. I have also submitted art and designs for video games such as Final Fantasy 16, and trading card games like Magic: the Gathering. I am passionate about my work as an artist. Thanks to my hard work, my passion for the arts, and the support of my community, my work has been internationally recognized, and my fine art has been presented in countless galleries both domestically and internationally. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of concept artists and illustrators like me who work tirelessly to make the films, TV, video games, and other media that bring entertainment to millions of Americans every day.

I am no longer certain of my future as an artist—a new technology has emerged that represents an existential threat to our careers: generative artificial intelligence (“Generative AI”). Generative AI is unlike any tool that has come before, as it is a technology that uniquely consumes and exploits the innovation of others. As I will explain in more detail, Generative AI relies on data it ingests in order to train models and generate its output, and oftentimes, that training data is the work of creative people like myself, taken without our consent, without any credit, and without any compensation. Based on this training data, Generative AI is capable of generating facsimiles of creative people’s work, including my own. As a result, AI has grown rapidly—in 2022, research estimated the value of the global AI market at approximately $100 billion USD, and is expected to grow to nearly $2 trillion USD by 2030. No other tool has the potential to adversely affect the rights of artists and creators. No other tool solely relies on the works of others to generate imagery. Not Photoshop, not 3D, not the camera, nothing comes close to this technology. I should know, I’ve worked with almost all those tools. And even though artists and creatives are among the first American workers who are confronting the threat posed by AI on the job market, we are certainly not the last. Generative AI threatens the livelihoods of an untold number of Americans.

I am not fundamentally opposed to Generative AI. But AI needs to be fair, and ethical for everybody—and not only for the companies that make AI products. AI needs to be fair to the customers who use these products, and also for creative people like me who make the raw material that these AI materials depend upon. These systems depend entirely on the work of humans, especially creatives such as visual artists, writers and musicians. The most important thing I can tell you is something the AI companies would prefer to overlook: "artificial intelligence" is really just human intelligence, repackaged and made available in a high-tech package. These models are useless alone, and need to be trained on an immense amount of data, including the work of artists of all creative fields. This is because generative AI is not truly “intelligent”—a Generative AI model cannot create anything it has not already seen in its training data. And therein lies the problem—the companies that make AI products have decided to neither ask for permission nor ask for forgiveness. Rather than ask artists and creatives their consent to use their work to train their Generative AI models, AI companies have instead opted to ingest massive amounts of copyrighted and licensed data to use as training data without permission, without crediting the creators of the underlying work, and without any compensation…”