The power of AI was on full display at Austin’s South-by-Southwest festival- from robotics, to transportation, and even healthcare, but what about art?

“Ultimately, what I think it does is allow more people to be artists,” explains Fiverr’s (FVRR) Head of Audio and Music, Adam Fine.

“What's going to be really interesting now is to see how people tap into this tool and unlock more to create more impressive things, the baseline will continue to increase. and we'll see that threshold for great art, great code, great writing, be improved.”

“We're gonna see how people, freelancers, professionals, experts, continue to use this tool. Ultimately humans will be the winners and we'll see humans continue to get more creative and more productive…AI can be used in music to enhance production, consumption, many different things. and I think the possibilities are endless,” Fine says.

So endless, that in just a few months AI generated artworks have spread across the internet like wildfire and developers made a boatload of money for what seemed like an original idea.

“Especially in the art space, we have lawsuits that have been taking place around representation and compensation. Artists are often having their art put into the data set to train those models without any notification and without any compensation, notice, or attribution,” Signal and Cipher CEO, Ian Beacraft told us.

“People have put out their life's work onto the internet, and now these models have come along and scrapes the whole internet and said ‘we're just training it on everything.”’

Theft of intellectual property is hardly a modern problem, but leave it to the free market to come up with a modern solution. Image licensing companies like Getty (GETY) and Shutterstock (SSTK) are diving head-first onto the AI wave, using their massive image databases to build AI content generators and sharing the profits with contributing artists.

“The way that people tell stories is continuing to evolve. At one point it was images, then it was video,and now it's music. Now it may be generated content,” says Shutterstock Chief Product Officer Meghan Schoen.

So what does the future of creativity look like?

Schoen says, “the way I describe it is you're sitting in a pitch meeting or trying to bring an idea to life and you may have a vision in your head of astronauts eating breakfast on Mars. In the past, how do you actually describe that to a roomful of creatives? To help them understand and conceptualize what you're talking about? Now, they can just describe that, get a visual, and now they're not starting from a blank piece of paper… and they can build stories on top of that.”

Video Transcript

BRAD SMITH: The power of artificial intelligence was on full display in Austin, Texas, at South by Southwest, from robotics to transportation, and even health care. But what about art, you ask.

ADAM FINE: Ultimately, what I think it does is allow more people to be artists.

BRAD SMITH: Adam Fine, the head of audio and music at Fiverr, says AI will push the boundaries of artistic endeavors--

ADAM FINE: [BEATBOXING]

I don't know. There we go.

BRAD SMITH: --like music, writing, and design, creating new avenues for what artists can achieve.

ADAM FINE: We're going to see how people-- freelancers, professionals, experts-- continue to use this tool. And ultimately, humans will be the winners. And we'll see humans continue to get more creative and more productive.

BRAD SMITH: As a musician myself, I was curious about what all of this might mean for the next generation of music.

When we think, as musicians, what the next kind of iterative phase of music is with AI layered on top of it, I mean, what does that even look like to you?

ADAM FINE: I think the possibilities are endless.

BRAD SMITH: So endless that in just a few months, AI-generated artworks have spread across the internet like wildfire. And developers made a boatload of money--

[CASH REGISTER DINGS]

--for what seemed like an original idea.

IAN BEACRAFT: Especially in the art space, we have lawsuits that have been taking place around representation and compensation. So artists are often having their art put into the data set to train those models without any notification and without any compensation or notice and-- or attribution. People have put out their life's work onto the internet. And now these models have come along and scraped the whole internet and said, yep, we're just training it on everything.

BRAD SMITH: Theft of intellectual property is hardly a modern problem. But leave it to the free market to come up with a modern solution. Image licensing companies like Getty and Shutterstock are diving headfirst into the AI wave, using their massive image databases to build AI content generators and sharing the profits with contributing artists.

MEGHAN SCHOEN: The way that people tell stories has continued to evolve always, whether it was at one point images, then it was video. Now it's music. Now it may be generative content.

BRAD SMITH: So what does the future of creativity look like?

MEGHAN SCHOEN: The way I describe it is, you're sitting in a pitch meeting. You're trying to bring an idea to life. And you may have a vision in your head of astronauts eating breakfast on Mars. In the past, how do you actually describe that to a room full of creatives to help them understand and conceptualize what you're talking about? Now they can just describe that, get a visual. And now they're not starting from a blank piece of paper, they're starting from something that humans naturally can visually relate to. And they can build stories on top of that.