Toronto holiday market organizers apologize after AI-generated art sold at fair

The Town of York Historical Society issued an apology this week after greeting cards featuring art made with artificial intelligence were sold at its recent holiday market. 

The Snowy Paper Fair ran at Toronto’s First Post Office from Nov. 30 to Dec. 1 and featured a variety of vendors, including Vintage Villages, which sells the AI-generated cards.  

Dylan Hachey is an industrial radiographer, but owns Vintage Villages as a side business. He creates the art for the cards himself using the AI chatbot, ChatGPT.

“I’m not a traditional artist by any means. I don’t think I would ever call myself that,” he told CBC Toronto. “It’s just something fun to do. It’s a creative outlet that I’ve found.”

Each card takes Hachey around four to five hours to create, he said. He provided instructions and prompts to the chatbot, which then generates the images he wants. Then he uses Adobe Photoshop to make adjustments and touch-ups and to create the layout of the cards, he said. 

Hachey was invited to participate in the holiday market by its organizers and said he discussed how he makes his cards with them ahead of the event. He also disclosed that the cards are AI-generated with a sign at his booth. 

But after the event, the organizers issued an apology on Instagram and promised to only feature human-designed art moving forward. 

Alex Miller-Gerrard, executive director at Town of York Historical Society, told CBC Toronto the decision was made based on feedback received from community members. 

“This isn’t about rejecting any innovations or dismissing anyone’s work by any means,” she said. “We greatly respect all creators, including those using new tools like AI, and we have a great amount of respect for everyone that participated in the fair,” she said.

“As a museum and a historical society ourselves, our focus is on really celebrating and preserving written word and traditional art forms.”

Market will now focus on traditional art forms 

Hachey said he respects the organizers’ decision.

“I think it was maybe just the wrong venue,” he said.

AI-generated art has faced pushback from traditional artists since the emergence of tools like ChatGPT.

Sheila Davis, a landscape painter and vice-president of the Ontario Society of Artists, feels that by using AI to create art, a person is doing themselves a disservice. 

“Part of painting a busy street in Singapore is going there and walking in the crowds and smelling and hearing the noise and the commotion and seeing the dogs running around and, you know, being encompassed in the whole society. And you don’t get that with an AI image,” she told CBC Toronto. 

On the other hand, now that the technology exists, people are going to use it, Davis said. She also noted that’s why many art societies and collectives are creating membership guidelines around AI and other new technologies. 

Sarah Bay-Cheng, dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design at York University, points out there are also issues around ownership with AI-generated art. 

AI can be useful as an artistic tool

“The images that are being used to train large language models as the basis of different AI have been scooping up a lot of images that have been created by individual and independent artists and posted online without attribution, without compensation,” she told CBC Toronto.

Bay-Cheng also agreed that the presence of AI work in the marketplace means that there’s more competition when it comes to artists making a living off the sales of their own work.

But she isn’t willing to dismiss the use of AI as an artistic tool. 

“We can’t ignore the fact that there are artists using AI and developing their own approach to digital technologies that are fuelling their art,” Bay-Cheng said. 

As for Hachey, he said he enjoys making the cards and plans to continue selling them.  

“People are buying them, so I keep making them,” he said.