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My dad Elliot Miller was ripped off. Desperate to provide for his family as a poor artist, he sold a painting called “Father’s Love”—and all of its rights—to a corporation that went on to make millions in reprints. This led to years of struggles as the company profited and he fell deeper into debt and poverty.
All of this occurred before artificial intelligence was ever a force in the art market. Now, with AI, this practice has been institutionalized on a mass scale, nullifying intellectual property rights for artists, culling from a vast sea of their work without attribution, effectively putting them out of work.
Today, my dad also has dementia, which means that he’s losing his ability to create art. AI, it would seem, has taken the place of the same corporate bigwigs who fleeced him since the beginning. Only this time, he’s fighting against his mind and the man.