AI Art, Creativity & Copyright with Kris Kashtanova

Kris Kashtanova: People were asking me if I know if it's corporatable.

Kris Kashtanova: So I thought, well, I'm not a lawyer and lawyers don't know. So the only way to know is actually just to try to incorporate that.

Jon Radoff: I am with Chris Cashtanova, who recently launched into some stardom, some fame around the goal of copyrighting the first AI created comic book that is Sada copy. Chris, we're going to talk about the copyright and all the legal things and what you've experienced online as a result of this work that you've done. But I'd really like to just begin at the beginning. Let's talk about the art itself. What did you set out to create? Why did you create it? What was the inspiration? Tell me the story of that.

Kris Kashtanova: Okay, hi, John. So I am actually a self-portraitist. I take self-portraits for past maybe eight or seven years. I always say seven, but I think it's been eight or nine because the pandemic completely erased two years of our lives. So I take self-portraits and pretty much all of my personal work and past years were self-portraits. I don't like the way I look and I try to get okay with that. And I thought if I photograph myself so many times that I get comfortable with it. So I was taking self-portraits and at first I was using Photoshop to add some meaning to it. It's not just usually a portrait, it's usually some environment and some story in it. And I tried to take a self-portrait every single day. And then the pandemic was really difficult for me. I lost five very close people in my life. I lost my grandma and then I lost two of my best friends and two of my quite good friends. And I was really struggling with grief and I started writing a story. And the story was about me. So it was my way to process loss and feeling isolated because of the pandemic. I live in New York and I live in Manhattan and it was a difficult time to be in Manhattan during the pandemic. So I decided to kind of take myself on this journey of writing a novel. And it wasn't 20-21. And as a self-portraitist I tried to illustrate it. So I would take self-portraits and I would create the entire world in 3D applications. I used cinema for D and I used blender. I tried to learn it. I really did the best I could because I couldn't really take myself to those amazing places. Before the pandemic I worked as a photographer and I was really fortunate because I photographed sport, I photographed yoga and I traveled a lot.

Kris Kashtanova: So for my self-portraits I could take amazing photographs and amazing locations where I would come

Kris Kashtanova: for work. But as pandemic started all my photography jobs shut down. I couldn't travel anymore. My clients couldn't come. So all I was left with was pretty much myself, my room. Also there was a space behind the house in Manhattan, like a building where I could go and photograph

Kris Kashtanova: myself against a gray wall. So I did that and I was taking photos of myself and I was putting

Kris Kashtanova: myself into these 3D scenes and I was posting one image every day and a part of my story. And at first I was telling it from from my perspective. I would create a different world every

Kris Kashtanova: single day and I would name it with some made up name that didn't mean anything but I would name

Kris Kashtanova: it and each world was connected with an emotion. This way I tried to kind of express how I felt and how each world felt. And then I did it for about 200 days and the images were okay but all of them were pretty much this vast landscape and very very tiny me because I didn't want to make myself too big. I felt so small in this big world just isolated and then one of my friends on Instagram, he's an artist, he's a painter, he lives in St. Louis and his name is Rasta and he said, oh I came up with a cool name for your series and I said yeah what is it? And he said it's Zarya of the dawn and I said look but that doesn't make any sense because my native language is Russian and Zarya in Russian means dawn. It's like dawn of the dawn. But my friend Rasta was really very convinced that this is a perfect name and I love him to bits. He is just such a gentle soul, he's an amazing person that I thought okay now I will tell it from the point of view of Zarya and I got my imagination blossomed because I didn't have to connect it with myself anymore. I could create any worlds and any situations and Zarya became someone else. Even though for like half a year I was playing that role but I would mostly never face the camera I would always be like away from the cameras I didn't matter. So this is how I was processing my laws, making those images and then I kind of gave up on it. It was 2021 there was no generator AI all my images were made with other tools like Blender Photoshop and then in 2022 in about a year I discovered generator AI and it blew my mind and I was like wow I can create all the worlds, all the images. And just what did you start? Was it

Kris Kashtanova: stable diffusion? Was it mid-journey? What did you do? It was mid-journey. It was before stable

Kris Kashtanova: diffusion times. I mean stable diffusion obviously mid-journey uses the same model but there was no way to use stable diffusion yet. I think mid-journey had access but no one else had access to those models no one could use it so like we do now. So I couldn't really train it on my own face so I had

Kris Kashtanova: to come up with a way to create a consistent character and I just watched Euphoria with Zendaya

Kris Kashtanova: and I absolutely love this TV series and love the actor so I thought okay well I can't be Zarya

Kris Kashtanova: because I can't train it on myself so I used her as an inspiration. I was writing prompts and I

Kris Kashtanova: was writing something like a woman in her 20s who looks like Zendaya and this is pretty much how I managed to keep consistency of character because it was they wasn't other way. I did try to use reference images but they didn't work as well in mid-journey version 3. I could. I made one character quite consistent but it only kind of I could make it for two pages because it was almost like you know how you do four iterations and those four faces I could use and then the rest were very very different so that I did what I could I wish I had technology that we have now but hey I'm making a new comment book now and I can train it and work on all my friends and on myself it's incredible how in just six months everything progressed so much. So you had the idea in your mind of

Jon Radoff: the character that you wanted to bring to life and and maybe someone in the past who was a painter for example could have been inspired by the same person and wanted to turn that into a character but in your case you had access to artificial intelligence technology that could help you craft

Kris Kashtanova: that to tell your story. Yeah definitely it was it was such a magical time for me because it was so new and creating one page a day and I would share and I could see the community on Facebook. I wasn't on Twitter at the time but there are Facebook groups with people who love AI and it was amazing how people were supportive and kind of I got so many new friends while I was creating it and now it grew so much that I have so many friends who also make comic books now. We even made like collectives. We made several comic books like 20 people making it. It was a great fun. I think it's just so perfect for storytelling and for like making comic books and storyboards and stuff

Jon Radoff: like that. You have a really interesting quote on your Instagram actually about storytelling. You say AI without storytelling is like an orchestra without music. What do you mean by that? One of

Kris Kashtanova: my great friends has a daughter and she is 90 years old and she plays violin and she goes to this place where she plays violin and there are like 100 more children all play violin nothing else and there was a concert and all this 100 children were playing violin and it was so beautiful but then there were six of them there were six orchestras like that and some of them could play violin really well like my friends daughter and some of them were real bothered and some of them

Kris Kashtanova: were very obviously didn't even want to be there and I thought about it and I thought hey they all

Kris Kashtanova: have violins but some of them played so nicely and so like beautiful and some of them they just were like trying to kick each other with those instruments and it made me think about it. It's like we have such power we can tell any story we can do anything but at the same time if there is no application to it it's it's like there is no music there is nothing. You discovered mid-journey

Jon Radoff: which helped you tell this essentially the story through art through your art and the story of Zarya that you were that you made into the comic book which will by the way put a link in the show notes for anyone who wants to look at it I think a lot of people have seen like the cover art I don't know how many people have looked at the story I think everyone should take a look at it. We'll include some of the art as we go through this interview as well just so people can get a flavor for it but then the whole copyright thing came up so you decided you wanted to copyright this word.

Kris Kashtanova: Why did why did that even occur to you? So there were two things that happened almost at the same time. First thing is because I am a photographer I mean at least in the past I was a professional photographer. I had a very big community of photographers around me and as soon as I started doing AI

Kris Kashtanova: a lot of them didn't like the idea of it. What did they not like? At first when it started I was

Kris Kashtanova: just posting images. I wasn't posting the comic book. I was just generating images you know how I got so excited. I think in three days I probably generated everything I could think about from Central Park in New York to Cats to Vallevo and I was so excited that I couldn't keep it to myself. That I think I posted maybe so many times a day on Facebook. I couldn't stop.

Jon Radoff: We all went through that phase when we discovered these tools. Yes. I really needed to share.

Kris Kashtanova: I didn't even care how many likes or comments I get. I was just broadcasting my joy through all the images and I think at the very beginning people were like oh but those are not photographs. Those are it's for lazy people and I was like yeah I'm pretty lazy. I love it. This is great. The images are amazing. I was like oh my gosh like something like this as a photographer I know

Kris Kashtanova: how much work it takes to take images like this. So I was very happy because I worked very hard

Kris Kashtanova: on my photography for so many years. I was relieved that now I can just type a sentence and get a beautiful image that tells the story that I want to tell. But I think at first people were more concerned that like oh they all look the same. I think kind of did in version three they were the painterly beautiful things. I didn't care. I love them so much. When I guess people got really already tired of so many posts. Some people started saying oh Cristina you are wasting your time. You are an artist and you're wasting your time because this is not copyrightable you can't sell it. And then I was like oh that's such an interesting question because I do pay for my subscription to mid-journey. What are the kind of rules? Can you sell it? Can you monetize it? I read the rules and the rules said that you can. That you can sell you can monetize it's yours. So then what I did was ask all my friends lawyers who aren't my lawyers just friends lawyers what they think. And all of them said different opinions. None of them knew what was going on. This is what I could get because everyone had some kind of different view on it. And I didn't see any other way to test it than to cooperate it. That to be honest my main goal was to know what to respond to those people who tell me I'm wasting my time. Also because very quickly I became someone who everyone

Kris Kashtanova: was asking about AI. People were asking me if I know if it's copyrightable. So I thought well

Kris Kashtanova: I'm not a lawyer and lawyers don't know so the only way to know is actually just to try and copyright that. And another thing happened at the same time. It was the time when I wasn't using Twitter at all. I had an account but was never using it. And at the time Blue Check was only for famous people. I did not have that. Someone wrote me that apparently some person who was famous posted my graphic novel on his Twitter and it went viral. And I said oh and how is it doing? And they say oh very bad. There are such terrible comments down that thread. They told me that this man posted my graphic novel and a lot of people started telling him that he's a white straight man publishing this woman of color and stuff like that. And I was like well maybe they wouldn't have the same reaction if I did that. Okay so let me just make sure I understand then.

Jon Radoff: So it was someone who took your work and was basically presenting it online. Presumably he

Kris Kashtanova: wasn't claiming it was his. He didn't credit me and everyone assumed it was his. I see. But I usually see good on people. So I asked my friends to actually message him and to ask to take it down because I didn't want to credit for it because there were bad comments. Why would I want that? And he apologized and he said that yes he did not mean to post it and to make it his.

Kris Kashtanova: The truth is he posted a bunch of things he liked that was made by AI as a thread.

Kris Kashtanova: And one of all his thread messages that one went viral and he kind of didn't know what to do with that because he didn't want to delete the entire thread. He didn't know how to handle it. But it was not malicious. I thought well but what if someone would take it? Is there a way

Kris Kashtanova: for me to do something about it? Because the truth is you in the US you when you create work you

Kris Kashtanova: have copyright but if you want to go to court you have to have a registered. If you haven't had a registered it's very difficult to go to court. So there is a reason why the copyright office exists. In other countries it's different. In those countries they don't have a copyright office

Jon Radoff: and the copyright is by default. So what has happened with the copyright process so far? I know it's ongoing but what have you learned about it now that you've gotten into it? What have the issues been?

Kris Kashtanova: So I did receive copyright when I first submitted and I did not have a lawyer or anything like this at the time so I just went to an online registration and submitted it. And then in like three or four days I received a copyright. I was happy with it. I shared about it. People started writing about me

Kris Kashtanova: like first copyright, first AI assisted copyright and then I think two months later the copyright office sent me this very long very harsh email because a journalist from the Washington Post

Kris Kashtanova: reached out to them for a comment. They looked into my work and they realized they did not know what my journey was. So they sent me a very long letter saying that I need to explain the process how I made it. I don't like getting harsh and long emails from any police really. I come from Soviet Union. It's like where I come from you could be jailed for something like this. So I was very nervous and I didn't know what to do. Thankfully I wrote to Facebook group called Me Journey Official and the moderators were like oh we can send this to a Me Journey team and see what they say and the next day two lawyers from Me Journey reached out and said we can help you if you want. A returning themselves was very helpful to you. The lawyers were helpful and they helped with writing that letter that everyone can read now they posted a tritory. It was a good letter,

Jon Radoff: it was like a poetry letter, it was really good. That's very long. We'll link it in the show notes

Kris Kashtanova: as well so people can check it out. There's a lot in there. I think two or three months for the copyright office to go through it and during the two or three months every two weeks they would

Kris Kashtanova: be like a wave of fake news that it was revoked and this poor lawyer would have to like contact

Kris Kashtanova: all the newspapers and say that no no there are no news. I don't know why you think that and finally they made a decision so they did give me a copyright but with limitation. So basically the comic book is copyrighted, the story is copyrighted and the images arrangement is copyrighted but the images one by one aren't. You can also send the link to that final letter that they wrote and I think after they wrote that letter very soon they did this maybe like two or three days after they released Generates of AI guidelines and also they mentioned that starting from April and I think for two or three months they are going to listen to lawyers

Kris Kashtanova: and AI artists and other people to kind of make a more better guidelines I guess and definitely

Kris Kashtanova: taking part in all of that and working on my next work that I would like to copyright and share a new technology because I think since August when I submitted Zara of the dawn no one uses AI like this anymore. It's very different now and I use most of the diffusion yes and I train models it's very controlled so I'm hoping to be able to copyright some images and to explain a different technologist to the copyright office and I am very lucky because since I started working on my new work I'm using stable diffusion locales of a free and I wrote again on social media that I need a very good and free lawyer and I found lawyers from Morrison and Foster and I was told they are very good and they are pro bono so and they also agreed to record a video with me for the community when we copyright something to kind of explain the argument from the copyright office I can show how I did it in stable diffusion and they can share what is the argument that that's

Jon Radoff: copyrightable. So in your latest work that I've been seeing you're using a lot more self photography it looks like it sounds like you're training the models to use your own photography as inputs into it can you just elaborate a little bit and like the changes to your process and this whole idea of training a model of your own to create the art. At first before I actually got my new lawyers

Kris Kashtanova: I started working on this like self portraits comic book and the reason why is because so many

Kris Kashtanova: people mentioned Zindaya and I didn't feel good about using someone's likeness without consent but there was no way for me to ask for her consent I did try to find any contact information but I couldn't on her website there is no way it's a contact her so I mean I never sold my comic book I never printed it it was published in several magazines but it was always for free I never monetized on it and it did end up at Comic Con in Las Vegas though and when it did I was asked how they could pay me and I said well I am not monetizing on it because there is Zindaya's likeness I have no way to ask for her consent anyway and I don't feel it's right to do so so um but we'd made the donation button for a charity that they really like that they're volunteer with here in New York and we raised like more than a thousand dollars for homeless people and it was wonderful but like other than that I didn't monetize on it and I felt really bad because

Kris Kashtanova: when I was making it I never thought it would become famous because honestly a part from Facebook

Kris Kashtanova: groups with AI people I got so little support in like anywhere so I didn't expect it so I felt completely fine I was like well if like 20 people see there is not a big problem there is Zindaya's likeness but because it became famous and a lot of news and a lot of people mentioned it I felt quite bad about it so I'm now making my own comic I thought well because I took so many self portraits I can actually show the copyright office that my process as a photographer I'm a fine art photographer so I use a lot of Photoshop and sometimes I build sets I like building sculptures so sometimes it's Photoshop and sometimes it's not and in the past people couldn't tell because

Kris Kashtanova: they don't know if I made it myself or if I would do it in Photoshop so it was kind of my way

Kris Kashtanova: intrigue people I would show them an image and they would think it's Photoshop and then I would

Kris Kashtanova: show a video harm actually building the set so I thought the same way I can do with AI so I

Kris Kashtanova: put photos I took I put Photoshop I took and then I put AI and I started asking people in social media which images they think I feel and which they think AI and no one can guess right and I said well if there is no way to tell then it means that my process with photography is as creative and

Jon Radoff: as controlled as it is with AI hmm it's the visual touring test basically yeah exactly I haven't

Kris Kashtanova: thought of that but that's such a good that's such a good comparison um but you know since I have lawyers I talked to them about it and I said to them that because now what I do actually matter so I can see how it has impact I said that maybe corporations first image shall not be my face because I don't want them to say you have to train your own model because not everyone can train their own model and also like it's quite complicated to do and also there are many tools where you don't even have to train it or if you if you don't make a portrait what if you make a forest or a house you still have to have an opportunity to copyright it and also there are so many models that are available and tools available so I thought maybe for the community it will be best if instead of myself portraits copyright coming book I will just copyright one image that I made on a standard like stable diffusion 1.5 and the create art with it but very very controlled one to show them that I'm a mastermind mastermind is the word they used to not copyright my images so now I want to show we all think you're a mastermind because when I read it I was so I said why do they write it so offensive to say and she said that my lawyer said that it's not it's it's just from from the book the the term they actually use and it was quite surprised about it I think she said that but it's

Kris Kashtanova: like the mastermind means that I am in control of the outcome and to be honest I thought a bit

Kris Kashtanova: about it have you ever tried watercolors yeah I have never in control of that but I have to prove that at least it's a similar control for like painting and watercolors and like stuff like that and I think with my control nets and stuff like that it's so much easier to show that it's not a slot machine it that doesn't give me just all the images and you pack them in the corner book and it's done

Jon Radoff: are you working with control net now for like posing in things like that yeah I work I work for drawings

Kris Kashtanova: and I work for photographs because I do have photographs and I like putting them into control nets and I like putting sketches into control nets and making art with that yeah I know so like latent couple for the for the for the areas and I keep like it's it's actually so funny because I get interviewed by different news agencies and then it takes them a while to issue it and when they message me the technology is kind of outdated the one I told them about it's already done so I tell them oh that was like last week this week is already a few more things probably while you and I are talking something else is coming out

Jon Radoff: no doubt yeah so it's interesting that so I'm not a lawyer at all of course but um you know I would think that if I got a mannequin or a doll and posed it in a scene and took a photograph of it I could now copyright that photograph very easily no no one would object to that even though everything in the scene I didn't invent I just sort of arranged it but if you do it digitally essentially the same thing there's still a question it is a question I think the question

Kris Kashtanova: is because the guidelines are so vague but also they were writing those guidelines before control

Kris Kashtanova: nets because control nets it's what like three weeks yeah it's brand new yeah very interesting yeah

Jon Radoff: control net is something everyone if you're just hearing about this for the first time you want to check it out because it gives you a lot of control I mean it's called control net for a reason you really can control the hosting of characters within scenes it can create those really interesting

Kris Kashtanova: users and I feel all of that will only move forward with ways to control because it's so much fun to make generative AI but then if you actually want to use it for some I don't know storyboards or even comic books it's nice to have some way to control it so I do believe that's that's future also like using your sketches using like ways to describe your image a little bit more

Kris Kashtanova: through like sketching it or like masking it also great so but hey who knows I really wish we had

Kris Kashtanova: the time machine to look in the year what it's going to be a little while ago you you use the word

Jon Radoff: community that you are doing a lot of this work now with copyright and whatnot for community I've also seen things that you posted online about how you're building a safe community for AI in New York where you live so first of all tell me more about that and and when you say safe where does that word come from why do you need to focus on that aspect of things when I say

Kris Kashtanova: community when I say AI community I actually just mean people at all people on internet and in real life who use AI technology and to be very honest it's all of us it's not just people who use generative AI because like if you ever use the bank card if you ever shopped online if you use Google maps you are in my AI community when something about me gets published I get this wave

Kris Kashtanova: of anti-AI comments on my social media and it was very unpleasant and then during Christmas it

Kris Kashtanova: was extremely bad it was so bad and I knew that several people who write AI comic books these basically the group are organized that some of them got death threats and I personally don't know if I got any because I actually tried to like not read a lot of comments but I did get a lot of personal messages and it was very painful for me so when that happened I just started a channel on discord it was back in December now it was actually like end of November and it was called emotional support channel for people who feel like they've been harassed by anti-AI movement and a lot of people joined it and I saw how supportive people were to each other and then here in New York well to be honest like I personally I know only a bunch of people who

Kris Kashtanova: who live in New York and who do generative AI there is kind of like very small real life community

Kris Kashtanova: here but the AI community all over the world is quite big and that's why I returned to Twitter just probably months and a half ago I got back and I was so surprised what an amazing place it has become because last time when I logged into my feed I had to deactivate it because people were saying so many hateful messages but I am so glad that like on day number 29 I restored my account and I just saw so much love and support and I think Twitter AI community is probably my favorite now and just so many amazing people everyone is sharing like today I had I was I do AI for for a job it's my job to do AI so I was I was having some issues and I didn't know who to ask because I don't know many people who know AI because I am head over AI and if I don't know no one knows so I asked don't Twitter and all of a sudden five people messaged me and they were machine learning engineers so they told me in detail the whole process and I was so surprised how helpful and supportive everyone in complete strangers I never ever talked to them before in my life and to then again I had another question later on and I just message this amazing artist named Claire who has like gazillion followers and I thought well we follow each other but we never spoke and I thought it will take her like 10 days to respond to my DM but she responded right away and she helped me and she explained like what I need to do and it was amazing so I feel very like grateful for the

Kris Kashtanova: community but the community is pretty much everyone here and whoever who knows me and who

Kris Kashtanova: likes AI or curious about AI I call everyone community so it seems like in the last several months

Jon Radoff: the last year you've seen the best of people and and yeah sounds like the worst of people as well what have you learned about people through this whole process of working on this?

Kris Kashtanova: I always tried to ask what to learn about myself I learned that I'm stronger than I thought and more patient than I thought because I did not think I was particularly patient or strong I actually thought I was very impatient but a lot of things happened and there were a few things

Kris Kashtanova: like really terrible on a personal level connected to AI and I liked how even though it was such a

Kris Kashtanova: chaos first most people who were anti AI towards me either changed their mind or apologized some of them didn't but at the same time I feel that it's kind of shifting towards people accepting it more I got a few people who are photographers reaching out to me asking if I can show them AI and honestly I didn't expect from those particular people to be curious about it and to want to learn it so I guess I learned that first there are a lot of good people also there are people who all of a sudden come to my rescue like three lawyers or I don't know people who answer my questions who want to help I also learned how difficult change is for a lot also what I learned about myself is that I don't know a lot I don't know how to solve the ethical problem of it I honestly don't I wish I knew people keep asking me about it and I'm like well if I knew I would solve it I even stopped having an opinion about it to be honest because I realized

Kris Kashtanova: the more I learned the more I see how much I don't know you discovered that people's minds can be

Jon Radoff: changed which is what a discovery in this day and age that we live in because everything on the internet tends to be so polarized so the fact that people could kind of start to learn and change their views is really interesting it sounds like you're one of those people your your learning is you're going to so this has been really just a wonderful conversation Chris I want to thank you for taking your time to talk to me about all of this stuff you're certainly a pioneer with all of this generative a.i.r. you're both a photography and control net and mid-journey and all the stuff that you're doing now very interesting and on top of that all this leadership you've offered around copyright in the community so thank you so much we thank you John for making this space and

Kris Kashtanova: I can't wait to listen to more speakers that you're involved