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Inside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale
(www.404media.co)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
There is so much wrong with just the title of this article:
Get the fuck outta here! This two bit blog want to call itself "a 404 Media investigation"? Maybe don't tackle subjects you have no knowledge or expertise in.
Repeat: FOR FREE! No product!
Have you seen Danbooru? Or F95 Zone? This shit is out there, everywhere. Rule 34 has existed for decades. So has the literal site called "Rule 34". You remember that whole Tifa porn video that showed up in an Italian court room? Somebody had to animate that. 3D porn artists takes its donations from Patreon. Are you going to go after Patreon, too?
These dumbasses are describing things like they've been living in a rock for the past 25 years, watching cable TV with no Internet access, just NOW discovered AI porn as their first vice, and decided to write an article about it to get rid of the undeserved guilt of what they found.
What a shitty, pathetic attempt at creating some sort of moral panic.
The danbooru aspect of the "AI" moral panic is what annoys me.
So many of my friends - many of whom are amateur artists - hate computer generated images because the copyright of the artists were violated, and they weren't even asked. And I agree that does kinda suck - but - how did that happen?
Danbooru.
The art had already been "stolen" and was available online for free. Where was their morality then? For the last decade or whatever that danbooru has been up? Danbooru is who violated the copyright, not stable diffusion or whatever.
At least computer generated imagery is different, like, the stuff it was trained on was exactly their art, while this stuff, while might look like theirs, is unique. (And often with a unique number of fingers.)
And, if "copyright" is their real concern, them surely they understand that copyright only protects against someone making a profit of their work, right? Surely they'll have looked into it and they already know that "art" made by models that used copyrighted content for training are provided from being copyrighted themselves, right? And that you can only buy/sell content made from models that are in the copyright clear, surely they know all this?
No, of course not. They don't give a shit about copyright, they just got the ickies from new tech.
no one is moral panicking over ai. people just want control over their creation, whether it's profit sharing or not being used to train models.
you really can't see how an imageboard has completely different considerations over image generating models?
or that people are going after ai because there is only like a couple of models that everyone uses vs uncountable image hosts?
both danbooru and stable diffusion could violate copyright, not one or the other.
why would someone want training models to ingest their creation just to spit out free forgeries that they cannot claim the copyright to?
Of course I see the difference - direct, outright theft and direct profiting from the theft is much worse then using content that's been stolen to train computer image generation software.
If your complaint is about the copyright infringement, then danbooru should be the target of your complaint - but no one seems to care about that. Why don't people care about that?
If the concern is that this software makes it easier to commit crimes, sure, I guess? But, again, danbooru. And like every other site on the internet.
The concern, it seems to me, is with person A being an artist, person B makes art and tries to pass it off as an original work by person A. And that's valid - but I still don't feel like it's worse than actually just taking the artwork and calling it "content" and using it to generate as revenue.
The main problem i have with this criticism is that (imo) there are much more important issues at stake with midjourney or whatever - and this (alleged) concern (alleged because it only seems to go skin-deep) prevents people from caring about the real issues.
Many many many jobs now, when a person leaves, they're replaced with 2 part time people. This benefits profits and hurts everyone else.
The issue with computer generated images is that, when a movie studio needs a sci fi background, it used to require an artist; now, it just requires midjourney - and you can hire the artist for 4 hours (instead of 4 days) to touch it up, fix the fingers, etc - which not only takes less time, but also less talent, which increases the labor supply, which pushes wages down.
This technology has the potential to take the career of being an artist and turns out into a low-wage, part time thing that you can't live off of. This has happened in so many parts of our economy and it's really bad, and we need to protect artists from that fate.
So no, I really can't muster up giving a shit about whether someone on pixiv copies your art and makes 3$ a month from a patreon. The entire field of visual arts is under threat of complete annihilation from greedy capitalists. They're the villains here, not some neckbeard's patreon.