on the other end the copyright argument against ai art is just so bad. I hate how that’s the most common one people use, like I’m sorry but an interpretation of copyright law that classifies images made with generative ai as “plagiarism” or “theft” would be a worst-case scenario for everyone except the walt disney corporation
arguments against ai art that are defensible positions:
- the output usually does not look good and I want to stop seeing it
- the ways in which the output can be “off” are often unsettling in a way that causes some people mental distress
- a lot of ai art services charge money to access open-source software, so none of that money goes to the original developers who made the code their service is using
- a lot of ai art services prioritize the output looking “nice” over the output actually matching what the user asked for, making them really hard to use for actually generating art
- most ai art services are web-based things that run on one big centralized server that processes all the user requests, but this is really wasteful when anyone with a decent gaming pc could just run the software themself without contributing to how much water that central server needs for cooling
- freelance artists and stock photographers don’t make a lot of money so it’s unethical to make a service that automates their jobs (the problem is capitalism)
- if someone theoretically spends a long time prompt engineering to try to get it to generate a specific idea they have and can’t get it to work and then they decide to commission a freelance artist instead, they might try to communicate their idea to the artist in the same way they used for the image generative ai, which for the freelance artist would be just about the most annoying possible client they could ever have to deal with
arguments against ai art that I regularly see people make:
- art is supposed to be hard to create so the concept of a thing that generates images based on a simple prompt is inherently bad no matter what
- ai art is bad for the environment (this is technically true, but it’s also not a great argument. all internet-based services are bad for the environment to some extent. it is bad how much water big tech companies spend, but they were already doing that. this isn’t a problem specific to ai art.)
- it’s unethical to download images from the internet without the copyright holders’ permission (image generative ai models do not and cannot redistribute their training data. if they’re made correctly it is not possible to extract any specific training image from the model, only images that look similar to images across the whole dataset. that’s the whole point of the training process)
- it’s “theft” to make an image in an art style “owned” by someone else (imagine if this was actually a law. now imagine what a company like disney would do in this scenario. how would this turn out for small independent artists?)
- recombining small pieces of individual images from the internet to make a new image is not sufficiently transformative and should be considered copyright infringement (this is not how ai image generation works, but even if it was this really should not be considered copyright infringement. you don’t want youtube poops to be made illegal, do you?)
I don’t really care if it’s legally theft to take the work of an artist and then turn that into a “style” for your generative AI without the permission of said artist. Be it because they are dead or because they didn’t consent. I just think it’s a very depressing and gross thing to see. Especially as many artists struggle to make a living. And yeah the root cause is capitalism, but that doesn’t exactly absolve AI from being the latest tool that capital is using to trample artists.
well. I do care if it’s legally theft or not. it’s important that it isn’t. making an ai model of someone’s art style without their permission is weird but it’s not like, stealing. there isn’t a thing that the artist had before that they now do not have. even though that can be an unethical thing to do, it’s not “theft” in any meaningful sense