this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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"Artists don't deserve to profit off their own work" is stupid as shit. Complain about copyright abuse and lobbying a la Disney and I'll be right there with you, but people shouldn't have the right to take your work and profit off it without either your consent or paying you for it.
Artists and other creatives who actually do work to create art (not shitting out text into an image generator) should take every priority over AI "creators."
No you don't understand, the machine works exactly like a human brain! That makes stealing the work of others completely justifiable and not even really theft!
/s, bc apparently this community has a bunch of dumbass tech bros that genuinely think this
Having a masters degree in machine learning doesn't make you an artist grow tf up xD
don't dismiss me, I like being spit on
And this, is a strawman. If this argument is being made, it's most likely because of their own misunderstanding of the subject. They are most likely trying to make the argument that the way biological neural networks and artificial neural networks 'learn' is similar. Which is true to a certain extent since one is derived from the other. There's a legitimate argument to be made that this inherently provides transformation, and it's exceptionally easy to see that in most unguided prompts.
I haven't seen your version of this argument being spoken around here at all. In fact it feels like a personal interpretation of someone who did not understand what someone else was trying to communicate to them. A shame to imply that's an argument people are regularly making.
My brother in Christ, they didn't even allude to this, this is an entirely new thought.
They said IP, IP protects artists from having their work stolen. The fact AI guzzlers are big mad that IP might apply to them too is irrelevant.
Digital artists do exactly as much work as traditional artists, comparing it to AI “art” from an AI “artist” is asinine. Do you actually think digital artists just type shit in and a 3D model appears or something?
And yeah I’m angry when my friends and family who make their living as actual artists, digital and traditional, have their work stolen or used without their permission. They aren’t fucking corporations making up numbers about lost sales, they’re spending weeks trying to get straight up stolen art mass printed on tshirts and mugs removed from online sale. They’re going outside and seeing their art on shit they’ve never sold. Almost none of them own a home or even make enough to not have a regular job, it’s literally taking money out of their pockets to steal their work. This is the shit you’re endorsing by shitting on the idea of IP.
Do you actually think artists using AI tools just type shit into the input and output decent art? It's still just a new, stronger digital tool. Many previous tools have been demonized, claiming they trivialize the work and people who used them were called hacks and lazy. Over time they get normalized.
And as far as training data being considered stealing IP, I don't buy it. I don't think anyone who's actually looked into what the training process is and understands it properly would either. For IP concerns, the output should be the only meaningful measure. It's just as shitty to copy art manually as it is to copy it with AI. Just because an AI used an art piece in training doesn't mean it infringed until someone tries to use it to copy it. Which, agreed, is a super shitty thing to do. But again, it's a tool, how it's used is more important than how it's made.
Lmao, I’ve used AI image generation, you’re not going to be able to convince me any skill was involved in what I made. The fact some people type a lot more and keep throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks doesn’t make it art or anything they’ve done with their own skill. The fact none of them can control what they’re making every time the sauce updates is proof of that.
If it’s so obviously not IP violating to train with it then I’m sure it’ll be totally fine if they train them without using artists’ work without permission, since it totally wasn’t relying on those IP violating images. Yet for some reason they fight this tooth and nail. 🤔
Except they totally could. But a data source of such size of material where everyone opted in to use for AI explicitly does not exist. The reason they fight it is in part also because training such models isn't exactly free. The hardware that it's done on costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and must run for long periods. You would not just do that for the funsies unless you have to. And considering the data by all means seems to be collected in legal ways, they have cause to fight such cases.
It's a bit weird to use that as an argument to begin with since a party that knows they are at fault usually settles rather than fight on and incur more costs. It's almost as if they don't agree with your assertion that they needed permission, and that those imagines were IP violating 🤔
Oh no it costs money to use the art stealing machine to make uncopyrightable trash? 🥺
"But a data source of such size of material where everyone opted in to use for AI explicitly does not exist. "
Dang I wonder why 🤔🤔🤔🤔
Because AI wasn't a big thing before 2020, and no such permission in obtained material has been legally necessary so far (lawsuits are pending of course). If something has no incentive to exist it will not be created. There's plenty of ethical justifications why no such permission is needed as well.
Oh cool, you think art theft is ethically justified as long as it's a robot doing it
But sure, go ahead! I'm sure you'll change so many minds by immediately disregarding everything they say by putting them in a box of "thiefs" because they said something that didn't fit very specifically within your "Guidebook to hating anything related to AI".
Now back to a serious discussion if you're up for it. Creative freedom is built on the notion that ideas are the property of nobody, it is a requirement since every artist in existence has derived their work from the work of others. It's not even controversial, using your definition of stealing means all artists 'steal' from each other all the time, and nobody cares. But because a robot does it (despite that robot being in 100% control of the artist using it), it's suddenly the most outrageous thing.
I know for sure my ideas have been 'stolen' from my publicized works, but I understand I had no sole right to that idea to begin with. I can't copyright it. And if a 'thief' used those ideas in a transformative manner rather than create something that tries to recreate what I made (which would be actual infringement), they have every right to as without that right literally nobody would be allowed to make anything since everything we make is inspired by something that we don't hold a copyright over. Most of the people actually producing stuff that will be displayed publicly so other people will experience and pull it apart to learn from understand we have no right to those ideas to begin with, except in how we applied those ideas in a specific work.
Think of how much actual art you could've made in the time it took you to shill for the thing that's stealing art and fucking over creatives and using personal data to spy on people
Oh yeah, shame on me, spending a part of my day 'shilling' for myself and my friends and colleagues. And 'shilling' for a better future for us all by dissuading people from weaponizing bad arguments and misunderstandings to defend themselves, because that will not help them one bit. The latter part of you sentence is such utter nonsense that I don't even need to respond to that.
First of all, your second point is very sad to hear, but also a non-factor. You are aware people stole artwork before the advent of AI right? This has always been a problem with capitalism. It's very hard to get accountability unless you are some big shot with easy access to a lawyer at your disposal. It's always been shafting artists and those who do a lot of hard work.
I agree that artists deserve better and should gain more protections, but the unfortunate truth is that the wrong kind of response to AI could shaft them even more. Lets say inspiration could in some cases be ruled to be copyright infringement if the source of the inspiration could be reasonably traced back to another work. This could allow companies big companies like Disney an easier pathway to sue people for copyright infringement, after all your mind is forever tainted in their IP after you've watched a single Disney movie. Banning open source models from existing could also create a situation where the same big companies could create internal AI models from the art in their possession, but anyone with not enough materials could not. Which would mean that everyone but the people already taking advantage of artists will benefit from the existence of the technology.
I get that you want to speak up for your friends and family, and perhaps they do different work than I imagine, but do you actually talk to them about what they do in their work? Because digital artist also use non-AI algorithms to generate meshes and images. (And yes, that could be summed down to 'type shit in and a 3D model appears') They also use building blocks, prefabs, and use reference assets to create new unique assets. And like all artists they do take (sometimes direct) inspiration from the ideas of others, as does the rest of humanity. Some of the digital artists I know have embraced the technology and combined it with the rest of their skills to create new works more efficiently and reduce their workload. Either by being able to produce more, or being able to spend more time refining works. It's just a tool that has made their life easier.
All of that is completely irrelevant to the fact that image generators ARE NOT PEOPLE and the way that people are inspired by other works has absolutely fuck all to do with how these algorithms generate images. Ideas aren’t copyrightable but these algorithms don’t use ideas because they don’t think, they use images that they very often do not have a legal right to use. The idea that they are equivalent is a self serving lie from the people who want to drive up hype about this and sell you a subscription.
I watch my husband work every day as a professional artist and I can tell you he doesn’t use AI, nor do any of the artists I know; they universally hate it because they can tell exactly how and why the shit it makes is hideous. They spot generated images I can’t because they’re used to seeing how this stuff is made. The only thing remotely close to an algorithm that they use are tools like stroke smoothing, which itself is so far from image generation it would be an outright lie to equate them.
Companies aren’t using this technology to ease artist workloads, they’re using it to replace them. There’s a reason Hollywood fought the strike as hard as they did.
The fact they are not people does not mean they can't use the same legal justifications that humans use. The law can't think ahead. The justification is rather simple, the output is transformative. Humans are allowed to be inspired by other works because the ideas that make up such a concept can't be copyrighted because they can be applied to be transformative. If the human uses that idea to produce something that's not transformative, it's also infringement. AI currently falls into that same reasoning.
You call it a self serving lie, but I could easily say that about your arguments as well that you only have this opinion because you don't like AI (it seems). That's not constructive, and since I hope you care about artists as well, I implore you actually engage in good faith debate other than just assuming the other person must be lying because they don't share your opinion. You are also forgetting that the people that benefit from image generators are people. They are artists too. Most from before AI was a thing, and some because it became a thing.
Again, sorry to hear your husband feels that way. I feel he is doing himself a disservice to dismiss a new technology, as history has not been kind to those who oppose inevitable change, especially when there are no good non-emotional reasons against this new technology. Most companies have never cared about artists, that fact was true without AI, and that fact will remain true whatever happens. But if they replace their artists with AI they are fools, because the technology isn't that great on it's own (currently). You need human intervention to use AI to make high quality output, it's a tool, not the entire process.
The Hollywood strikes is a good example of what artists should be doing rather than making certain false claims online. Join a union, get protection for your craft. Just because something is legal doesn't mean you can't fight for your right to demand specific protections from your employer. But they do not affect laws, they are organizational. It has no ramifications on people not part of the guilds involved. If a company which while protecting their artists, allows them to use AI to accelerate their workflow, and comes out on top against the company that despite their best intentions, made their art department not as profitable anymore, that will also cause them to lose their jobs. Since AI is very likely not to go away completely even in the most optimistic of scenarios, it's eventually a worse situation than before.
And lastly, I guess your husband does different work than the digital artists I work with then. You have a ton of generation tools for meshes and textures. I also never equated it directly to AI, but you stated that they use no tools which do all the work for them (such as building a mesh for them), which is false. You wouldn't use the direct output of AI as well. I implore you to look at "algorithmic art": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art