This is interesting. I agree that stealing isn't the right category. Copyright infringement may be, but there needs to be a more specific question we are exploring.

Is it acceptable to make programmatic transformations of copyrighted source material without the copyright holder's permission for your own work?

Is it acceptable to build a product which contains the copyrighted works of others without their permission? Is it different if the works contained in the product are programmatically transformed prior to distribution?

Should the copyright holders be compensated for this? Is their permission necessary?

The same questions apply to the use of someone's voice or likeness in products or works.

The premise here is wrong.

The theft isn't "ai made a derivative work". The theft is "human ai bros scraped all the stuff I made, without permission or compensation, and used it as training data".

The problem is that art is being used for purposes the artist explicitly disagrees with. Imagine your artwork as a backdrop for company that steals candy from babies to feed elephant poachers. In a normal world, you can at least sue that company to take it down.

But when OpenAI uses your artwork to pump thousands of tons of CO2 into the air, you can't do shit, and according to OP, you shouldn't even complain about your work being taken.

I agree with the comment here that AI image generation is more like piracy in that you are appropriating other artists' works without their permission.

So I mean personally I agree that AI art is soulless and possibly copyright infringement but not theft, whereas for people that consider piracy theft, calling AI art "theft" is not an inconsistent or hypocritical argument, in my opinion. Machine or human doesn't make it stealing or not.

I mean even Zuck's Meta is claiming in court that they aren't stealing books when torrenting massive amounts of them for AI training, lol, so he's consistent there. But Nintendo on the other hand are probably seething at AI Nintendo art being "stolen" from them.

“It’s fine if a person does it” is a fantastic argument. Saying that it’s ok to allow robots to continue to replace every part of human life will only lead to suffering for literally everything in existence. Computers can destroy and create in milliseconds what might take humans a lifetime to achieve. If this isn’t an incredibly good reason to regulate the shit out of ai then what is?!?!?

Like yes, currently generative AI use is incredibly difficult to get something non-derivative, e.g. using it as a tool like Photoshop. But that most definitely will not be the case in a few years. This is by far the steepest, slipperiest, most ridiculous slope we could be on and it’s not even close.

This is the biggest problem with technology, regulation is reactionary and not preemptory. Not taking action immediately has already gotten earth into a ridiculously bad situation. If we continue to allow it it’s only going to get worse and harder to undo.

Lemmy's respect for copyright only in relation to the magic content robot is endlessly amusing.

I don't give a shit what public data gets shredded into a gigabyte of linear algebra. That process is transformative. If the result is any good at reproducing a specific input, you did it wrong.

Yep. I really hope that the conversation around LLMs moves away from words like "theft". Show me evidence of an artwork that an LLM has concealed artwork from the public. I've looked, and all that I've found is that they make more media more accessible. That's not theft. That's piracy. That's culture-jamming.

So if you want to call it appropriation, fine. It's classic EEE methods, applied to Gonzo, Dada & Punk ideas. Embrace - taking in everything and culture-jamming with meaningless text & images (painfully Dada). Extend - by turning this into both a toy and a corpo "tool", they extended Dada into programming, articles, news media, you name it. Extinguish - when everything is a punk remix, or everything is meaningless Dada, nothing is. Therefore the true punks will be the classicist, reconstructionists, the Bible-beaters, and their ilk. And then Punk is dead.

AI images try to replicate the style of popular artists by using their work, often including work that was behind a paywall and taken without payment, thus denying the artists revenue. AI has taken something from the artist, and cost the artist money. Until such a time as we come up with a new word for this new crime, we'll call it by the closest equivalent: theft.

Also, someone did an experiment and typed "movie screenshot" into an AI and it came back with a nearly identical image from Endgame. Not transformative enough to be anything but copyright infringement.

"I believe in you. You can come up with a better argument than just theft."

Nah, fuck that shit. It OOP feels so strongly that it's not theft and they wanna change how the population at large is referring to something, then it's on them to provide an alternative and convince others. This weird ass attempt to shame people into doing things their way, especially when they haven't really defined what they consider their way, is absolute horse shit.

This whole post is full of this. The OOP tries to completely remove intent and method from the analysis of whether something is art theft. Those things absolutely factor into it and they're only discounting them in order to push their weird narrative.

AI scrapping tons of work belonging to artists and then regurgitating that as original work is fucking gross, no matter what you call it. Theft seems fine to me, but I am open to calling it something else. Unfortunately OOP won't be the I've to convince me since they neither provide reasoning for why calling it theft is bad or what we should call it instead and why.

Yeah, I don't agree. Unfortunately I'm not articulate enough to explain why I feel this way. I feel like they are glossing over things. How would you describe corporations willfully taking art/data/content form others without any permission, attribution, or payment and creating a tool with said information for the end goal of making profits by leveraging the work of others into a derivative work that completes with the original?(Holy run on sentence) If there is a better word or term than theft for what generative ai does then they should use it instead.

Disclaimer: I've not workshopped this much, so idk if these are the right words to convey how I feel

I feel like using AI to generate images is akin to taking someone's art and applying a light gaussian blur to it or putting an uncredited artist's work in a big game.

I know it's done in a much more intricate way, and it's genuinely impressive how AI companies got it to work so well, but if I try to sell AI generated images, especially if they're meant to be made similar to an artist's work, then that's all I'm doing.

I don't necessarily see it as stealing from artists (though it is threatening the livelihood of a lot of artists), but more as exploiting artists but with a new buzzword.

If I arrange 4 pieces of art in a jpeg and then apply a whacky filter, am I actually creating anything, or am I just exploiting artists and doing something similar to copying and pasting different bits of an essay and then changing every instance of a word to a different synonym?

I believe AI does something similar to that, albeit in a more sophisticated way that looks like creativity.

Fan-created derivative works are usually only tolerated (because even capitalists realise that banning fanart would be economic suicide), they are, strictly taken, already illegal in most places. Yes, even if you don't make money off them. The US fair use thing is an exception and can still be challenged by owners of the IP.

How do you get this style of thread? I normally can only get the newer, more Twitter-esque UI.

I believe the difference to be that, no matter how much they attempt to copy or derive the art they create a person will always include their own style (for want of a better word). The subtlties from how they learned to draw/paint/whatever, the unconsious biases (good or bad) that lead to their creative decisions. A person imparts themselves, a collection of a lifetime of experiences, unto their art, whether they try to or not. AI does not have these experiences, it can only attempt to recreate from what it has seen. AI cannot add itself to the art it creates, because it doesn't have a self to add. AI art is intrinsically bad because it cannot exist in a vacuum and cannot add anything of artistic value when it exists in a world of artists.