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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Just because you've redefined theft in a way that makes you feel okay about it doesn't change what they did.
They took someone else's work product, fed it into their machine then used that to make money.
They stole someone's labor.
I haven't "redefined" it, I'm using the legal definition. People do sometimes sloppily equate copyright violation with theft in common parlance, but they're in for a rude awakening if they intend to try translating that into legal action.
Using that term in an argument like this is merely trying to beg the question of whether it's wrong, since most everyone agrees that stealing is wrong you're trying to cast the action of training an AI as something everyone will by default agree is wrong. But it's not stealing, no matter how much you want it to be, and I'm calling that rhetorical trick out here.
If you want to argue that it's wrong you need to argue against the actual process that's happening, not some magical scenario where the AI trainers are somehow literally robbing people.
Taking someone's work product and converting it, without compensation and consent, into your profit is theft of labor.
Adding extra steps, like, say, training an AI, doesn't absolve the theft of labor.
We're it ethical, the companies doing it would have asked for permission and been given cinsent. They didn't.
That's not what's going on here. The finished product contains only the style of the artist that the AI was trained on, and style is not copyrightable. Which is a damn good thing, as humans have been learning from each other's "work products" and mimicking each others' styles since time immemorial.
BTW, theft of labor means failing to pay wages or provide employee benefits owed to an employee by contract or law. You're using that term incorrectly too, Greg Rutkowski wasn't hired to do anything for the people who trained the AI off of his work.
No, I'm not using it incorrectly, I'm just not concerned with the legal definition as I'm not a lawyer or anyone tied up in this mess.
If you do a thing, and it takes time and skill to do it, then someone copies it, they stole your labor.
Saying they "copied his style", the style he spent a lifetime crafting, then trying to say they didn't benefit, at no cost, to the labor he put into crafting that style because "well actually, the law says..." is a bad argument as it tries to minimize what they did.
If their product could not exist without his labor, and they did not pay him for that labor, they stole his labor.
For, like, the fourth time in this thread: were this ethical, they would have asked for permission, they didn't.
If you're just going to make up the meanings of words there's not much point in using them any further.
But I'm not.
You're trying to say that, because this one law doesn't say it's bad it must therefore be good (or at least okay).
I'm simply saying that if you profit from someone else's labor, without compensating them (or at least getting their consent), you've stolen the output of that labor.
I'm happy to be done with this, I didn't expect my first Lemmy comment to get any attention, but no, I'm not going to suddenly be okay with this just because the legal definition of "stealing labor" is to narrow to fit this scenario.
The law doesn't even say it's okay. What FaceDeer is referring to is that copyright infringement is a different category of crime than theft, which is defined as pertaining to physical property. It's a meaningless point because, as you said, this isn't a courtroom and we aren't lawyers and the concept of intellectual property theft is well understood.
It's a thing engineers and lawyers often seem to do, to take the way terms are used in a particular professional jargon and assume that that usage is "the real" usage.