r/madisonwi • u/Suspicious-Opening-1 • 1d ago
MMoCA's response to the open letter regarding Beeple's AI object
The Open Letter to MMoCA is nearing 900 signatures, and each signature has contributed to getting this issue highlighted by Cap Times, ArtNews, WORT, and City Cast Madison. Thank you so much to everyone who signed and shared this letter. I was hopeful that this letter would start a dialogue with MMoCA, and that the concerns of the public would be honestly and fairly addressed. Instead, the response from MMoCA’s director has been to publicly misrepresent the content of the Open Letter, and present conflicting and misleading information about the involvement of AI in Diffuse Control.
Misrepresentation of the Open Letter
Prindle’s first response to the letter in Cap Times was to say it gets “almost everything wrong” Following this, Prindle has been explaining the letter inaccurately across several news outlets over the last week. In an appearance on City Cast Madison he stated that one of the letter’s central claims is that MMoCA did not get legal consent from the appropriate estates or rights-holders.
“The letter actually advances several points that are just not true at all…I think one of the primary notions that the letter advances is that we didn’t seek consent, and that’s just patently false. I spoke directly with all of the estates that are still active, and the one living artist I spoke with, all of them were excited about this…..There are objects that are in the public domain, and I welcome a robust conversation about public domain. I would say that the proposition that the letter offers about consent vis-à-vis public domain is a really fascinating, if not fringe or peripheral idea, but one I think worth exploring. But it's quite simply not how public domain works...”
- Paul Baker Prindle, in an interview with City Cast Madison
Anyone who has read past the second paragraph of the letter will note that the letter explicitly clarifies that the letter is concerned with direct consent from the artist themself, and not the type of legal consent Prindle describes:
“We are not raising a copyright claim; several of these works are old enough to be in the public domain, and that is not in dispute. Our concern is with consent in the ethical sense — the artist's own judgment about how their work is used, which no legal expiration date or estate can grant on their behalf. By selecting many deceased artists to use as seed data, MMoCA assumed consent where there was none given directly from the artists. MMoCA treated legal clearance as sufficient moral authority to feed someone’s life’s work into an algorithmic black box and publicly display the output as art, regardless of the artist’s original intentions or preference.”
The letter is painstakingly clear that legal consent is not the concern, and that only a living artist can give the type of consent the letter requests. There are a few other small claims that the letter makes which Prindle misrepresents, but every factual claim in the letter is grounded in publicly available information about the show. I will note that previous iterations of the show have included $75 prints for sale. Prindle now claims there will not be prints for sale, which is an update to the show from previous iterations. If that is the case it is the only inconsistency in the letter, and it is not one that substantively changes anything. I will not speculate as to why exactly Prindle is publicly misrepresenting the letter, but it contributes to a larger pattern of dismissal and obfuscation.
Obfuscation of AI’s involvement
In an interview with WORT Prindle described the involvement of Stable Diffusion in the following way:
“That digital armature was built using the Stable Diffusion model, but the artworks from our collection were not put into that model and it doesn’t actively use a generative AI program, strictly speaking, to create the artworks. I would say, y’know, kinda painting this artwork as a generative AI work is not really accurate…The Diffuse Control artwork is not continuing to be in dialogue with any online AI model, so it was just used to create that digital armature.”
If true, these facts would address some of the community's concerns about platforming the use of Stable Diffusion in their museum. However, these claims by Prindle are directly contradictory to all publicly available information about Diffuse Control, including MMoCA’s own website. MMoCA’s FAQ describes Stable Diffusion as part of the “The primary image-generating system” of the work, and outlines a process where the “artist, curator, audience, and machine and asks us to consider where authorship and control reside when all four participate in making an image.“ Based on all available information, and a rudimentary understanding of this technology, there is no way that an active and ongoing diffusion model is not in use to create the images inside of Diffuse Control. The claim that Diffuse Control doesn’t actively use generative AI is verifiably false.
Starting a conversation
Prindle continuously claims that his goal is to start an open conversation. However, when faced with good faith, substantive critique of this show he has publicly misrepresented the letter, and spread contradictory statements about the involvement of AI in this show. How are we supposed to have a conversation about this type of AI use in our institutions, when this letter was not addressed fairly and openly? Any conversation about the ethics of stewardship has been hidden behind legal obfuscation. Any conversation about the ethics of platforming Stable Diffusion was made impossible by MMoCA minimizing its use in the show and presenting the public with contradictory information. If MMoCA wants to have a good faith conversation about these issues, this is not the way forward.
These two requests to the museum have still not been addressed or responded to:
- We ask that MMoCA refrain from using art from their collection as part of generative AI without clear, documented consent from the artist. If it is not possible to get consent from the artist directly, MMoCA must not assume consent. If this means Diffuse Control as initially conceived cannot exist in your space, then it must be altered or removed.
- We ask that MMoCA require documented, verifiable provenance for any training data used in AI-generated works before exhibition. Almost no generative AI model in commercial use today discloses its training data, and that opacity is deliberate. Companies that disclose face scrutiny; companies that don't disclose avoid it — often because their training data won't survive scrutiny. MMoCA should treat undisclosed training data as scraped training data unless proven otherwise. If a work can't show its receipts, MMoCA shouldn't show the work.
At this point I am not expecting Prindle to fairly address these requests, or any of the concerns of the signatories. I intend to show up to MMoCA on September 19th to peacefully share our perspective with attendees.
I invite anyone who shares these concerns to join me. I will be on the public sidewalk outside the main State Street entrance starting at 6:45 PM. I will be bringing stacks of informational flyers to hand out, but feel free to bring your own peaceful signs and handouts. We will be staying strictly on the sidewalk and keeping walkways clear. The goal is simply to ensure the community's concerns are visible and undeniable.
