Elon Musk Claimed the Art This Man Painstakingly Created Was Generated by Grok
Over the weekend, Elon Musk shared Grok altered photographs of people walking through the interior of instruments and implied that his AI system had created the beautiful and surreal images. But the underlying photos are the work of artist Charles Brooks, who wasnt credited when Musk shared the images with his 220 million followers.Musk drives a lot of attention to anything he talks about online and that can be a boon for artists and writers, but only if theyre credited and Musk isnt big on sharing credit. This all began when X user Eric Jiang posted a picture of Brooks instrument interior photographs Jiang had run through Grok. Hed use the AI to add people to the artists original photos and make the instrument interiors look like buildings. Musk then retweeted Jiangs post, adding Generate images with @Grok.Neither Musk or Jiang credited Brooks as the creator of the original photos, though Jiang added his name in a reply to his initial post.Brooks told 404 Media that he isnt on X a lot these days and learned about the posts when someone else told him. I got notified by someone else that Musk had tweeted my photos saying theyre AI, he said. First theres kind of rage. Youre thinking, Hey, hes using my photos to promote his system. Quickly it becomes murky. These photos have been edited by someone else [] hes lifted my photos from somewhere else [] and hes run them through Grokand this is the main thing to mehes edited a tiny percentage of them and then hes posted them saying, Look at these tiny people inside instruments. And in that post he hasnt mentioned my name. He puts it as a comment.Brooks is a former concert cellist turned photographer in Australia who is most famous for his work photographing the inside of famous instruments. Using specialized techniques hes developed using medical equipment like endoscopes, he enters violins, pianos, and organs and transforms their interiors into beautiful photographs. Through his lens, a Steinway piano becomes an airport terminal carved from wood and the St. Mark's pipe organ in Philadelphia becomes an eerie steel forest. Jiangs Grok-driven edit only works because Brooks original photos suggest a hidden architecture inside the instruments.Left: Charles Brooks original photograph. Right: Grok's edited version of the photo. He sells prints, posters, and calendars of the work. Referrals and social media posts drive traffic, but only if people know hes behind the photos. I want my images shared. Thats important to me because thats how people find out about my work. But they need to be shared with my name. Thats the critical thing, he said.Brooks said he wasnt mad at Jiang for editing his photos, similar things have happened before. The thing is that when Musk retweets it [] my name drops out of it completely because it was just there as a comment and so that chain is broken, he said. The other thing is, because of the way Grok happens, this gets stamped with his watermark. And the way [Musk] phrases it, it makes it look like the entire image is created by AI, instead of 8 to 10 percent of it [] and everyone goes on saying, Oh, look how wonderful this AI is, isnt it doing amazing things? And he gets some wonderful publicity for his business and I get lost.He struggled with who to blame. Jiang did share Brooks name, but putting it in a reply to the first tweet buried it. But what about the billionaire? Is it Musk? Hes just retweeting something that did involve his software. But now it looks like it was involved to more of a degree than it was. Did he even check it? Was it just a trending post that one of his bots reposted?Many people do not think while they post. Thoughts are captured in a moment, composed, published, and forgotten. The more you post the more careless you become with retweets and comments and Musk often posts more than 100 times a day.I feel like, if hes plugging his own AI software, he has a duty of care to make sure that what hes posting is actually attributed correctly and is properly his, Brooks said. But duty of care and Musk are not words that seem to go together well recently.When I spoke with him, Brooks had recently posted a video about the incident to r/mildlyinfuriating, a subreddit he said captured his mood. Im annoyed that my images are being used almost in their entirety, almost unaltered, to push an AI that is definitely disrupting and hurting a lot of the arts world, he said. Im not mad at AI in general. Im mad at the sort of people throwing this stuff around without a lot of care.One of the ironies of the whole affair is that Brooks is not against the use of AI in art per se.When he began taking photos, he mostly made portraits of musicians hed enhance with photoshop. I was doing all this stuff like, lets make them fly, lets make it look like their instruments on fire and get all of this drama and fantasy out of it, he said.When the first sets of AI tools rolled out a few years ago, he realized that soon theyd be better at creating his composites than he was. I realized I needed to find something that AI cant do, and that maybe you dont want AI to do, he said. Thats when he got the idea to use medical equipment to map the interiors of famous instruments.Its art and Im selling it as art, but its very documentative, he said. Here is the inside of this specific instrument. Look at these repairs. Look at these chisel marks from the original maker. Look at this history. AI might be able to do, very soon, a beautiful photo of what the inside of a violin might look like, but its not going to be a specific instrument. Its going to be the average of all the violins its ever seen [] so I think theres still room for photographers to work, maybe even more important now to work as documenters of real stuff.This isnt the first time someone online has shared his work without attribution. He said that a year ago a CNN reporter tweeted one of his images and Brooks was able to contact the reporter and get him to edit the tweet to add his name. The traffic surge from that was immense. Hes an important reporter, but hes just a reporter. Hes not Elon, Brooks said. He said he had seen a jump in traffic and interest since Elons tweet, but its nothing compared to when the reporter shared his work with his name.Yet my photos have been published on one of the most popular Twitter accounts there is.
