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In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
Is stealing the right word to use? Or would it be more accurate to say ‘scraping’ or ‘unauthorized use’?
Half the time its not even unauthorized. "What do you mean this website I uploaded to whose TOS allows them to license out my images licensed out my images??"
I got into photography for a while ages ago when I was in highschool and even back then for my shitty landscape photos I was keenly aware of which hosting services respected my rights as copyright holder, apparently that's too high of a bar to clear for many semi-professional artists. Now the models that did just scrape anything and everything, yeah that's outright copyright theft. And how much you care about copyright theft is something else entirely.
These companies are scraping the internet to train their models. Scraping the internet isn't bad; we scrape the internet constantly for all kinds of data. The free and open exchange of knowledge is what the internet is for. IMO you can't steal text, audio, or video that someone already put up on the internet to be looked at or listened to. It can be pirated or it can be scraped.
"When a new technology comes along that breaks copyright, it's always been copyright that must change, not the technology." - Cory Doctorow
I highly recommend Cory's now 20-year-old speech on copyright and DRM. You can find it all over the web.