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I'm going to say it again. It cannot be theft. Nothing is stolen. What did they have before they don't have now?
I see people disagree with me but they are too lame to try and say why, and they definitely could not explain how, when there is nothing in AI but a probability algorithm.
If artists were compensated for their art being fed through the AI to feed the algorithm, sure. They are not. It's not too dissimilar from our comments and data being farmed to better other LLMs and that is intellectual theft as well.
I could have that discussion. But it still wouldn't be theft. Nothing was actually stolen.
This easily results in humans having to pay licensing fees just to look at art, because humans also use past context
What is creativity? It's nothing but what you have learned plus neural noise. If we try this Luddite dogmatic nonsense we'd have to kill human art as well, fucking THINK MARK, THINK!
I'm trying to square away what the difference is between this and George RR Martin reading Homer and Tolkien and others and then producing A Song of Ice and Fire..
My understanding of AI art models is shakey at best but I think I remember that it basically uses the images to create a static (Litteral static like old school TV screen snow kinda) static model based on the image. Then it extrapolate based on 1000s of such static sudo images to create the original work. On a small scale I don't think of it as theft. It's not unlike a person using their past knowledge of image concepts to create a new image. Everyone hates AI though.
I can agree with downloading and sharing movies and media from the internet not beeing theft.
Even then it would be a copy. In this case it would be like downloading an amalgam of thousands of movies, not quite like any of them
When someone makes use of a service and doesn't pay afterwards that is considered to be theft even if the provider hasn't been deprived on anything. For example, if I snuck into an art gallery without paying I won't remove anything tangible since the gallery's overheads and running costs were fixed long before I arrived.
A better word would be copyright infringement if the AI is making use of other works without a license or other permission. Based on my reading of the article it appears those involved only fed the AI works in the public domain or works that they had created themselves. The letter of complaint appears to be signed by artists who are unaware of these circumstances.
Even in your latter paragraph, it wouldn't be an infringement. Assuming the art was lawfully accessed in the first place, like by clicking a link to a publicly shared portfolio, no copy is being encoded into the model. There is currently no intellectual property right invoked merely by training a model-- if people want there to be, and it isn't an unreasonable thing to want (though I don't agree it's good policy), then a new type of intellectual property right will need to be created.
What's actually baffling to me is that these pieces presumably are all effectively public domain as they're authored by AI. And they're clearly digital in nature, so wtf are people actually buying?
There are cases progressing through the courts. If the courts rule that copyright has been violated by the AIs under current laws then we won't need to create a new offense or expand IP laws currently on the books.
wtf are people actually buying
A unique work of art I guess since it's unlikely anyone would be able to replicate the prompt in order to get the same results.
It could of course go up to the scotus and effectively a new right be legislated from the bench, but it is unlikely and the nature of these models in combination with what is considered a copy under the rubric copyright in the US has operated effectively forever means that merely training and deploying a model is almost certainly not copyright infringement. This is pretty common consensus among IP attorneys.
That said, a lot of other very obvious infringement in coming out in discovery in many of these cases. Like torrenting all the training data. THAT is absolutely an infringement but is effectively unrelated to the question of whether lawfully accessed content being used as training data retroactively makes its access unlawful (it really almost certainly doesn't).
Seriously? They're auctioning AI generated shit? Fucking seriously?? Didn't anybody learn anything from those stupid fucking nft?
I think a lot of people's take-away from NFTs was just that there's still a sucker born every minute, and we all need money for food. No shocker there.
AI is a red herring, in my opinion.
Some artists have spent over a century trying to one-up each other to the bottom, starting with Dadaism and even before that (anyone remember Salieri's populist operettas?). It's got to a point, where a black square on a canvas, or a banana taped to a wall, got called "art".
Other artists, have been trying to transmit emotions and feelings through their work, using whatever tools at their disposal. Be it through words, paints, shapes, interactions, etc. With more or less success, but they've been trying.
An AI is another tool, like a camera is a tool, a brush is a tool, a chisel is a tool, a keyboard/typewriter is a tool, and so on. People can use their tools to produce low effort trash... or they can put effort and thought into what they want to transmit.
Good AI art, takes the same or more effort as good non-AI art, to make the AI produce what the artist intends. Retouching parts of the output, either with more AI or some other tools, refining or retraining the whole model, creating complex prompts to make the tool output something closer to the artist's vision. That vision, is the core of the art.
Low effort AI art, is mindless theft, no dispute there, good for quick memes and little more.
Thoughtful AI art, is a conversation between an artist, and a tool with massive experience in observing other's art, in order to extract the essence of what they can apply to their own. An AI works best as a brain extension, capable of reading all the books, seeing all the paintings and photos, watching all the movies, listening to all the sounds and songs, way beyond what's possible in a single human lifespan. Then it's the artist's job to sift through that.
Focusing on just the "AI" part, does a disservice to the whole art community. Focus on the person instead... and if they've put no effort, then go ahead, feel free to laugh at the "art", no matter which tools they've used... unless they admit to be still learning, in which case some encouragement and tips might be a better way.
chisels, brushes, and cameras don’t train on the existing work of humans and then “create” art. they are actual tools. ai is not able to do anything without training on and directly taking from the work of others.
if i’m inspired by dalí and rothko i can make work that references them, or even steals from them but my hand is also undeniably involved. ai is not inspired by works, it is trained on them for the purpose of copying. it’s stealing in the laziest possible way and can’t possibly include the hand of the maker because there isn’t one.
Under this logic you should pay royalties to the maker of your brush and the teachers who taught you. Maybe not everything is about owning shit.
I mean typically you buy the brushes and pay for the teaching one way or the other. AI isn't paying any artist for training upon their work.
Who do you think has paid artists throughout history?
(Patrons is the answer)
There are three things to unpack there:
Tools don't create art, neural networks wielding those tools create art.
Right now, human NNs are the most complex around the block, so our anthropocentric egotism tries to gatekeep art to humans... ignoring all the animal art out there, like for example birds building "beautiful" nests to attract mates (beautiful to each other, not necessarily to humans), all the art going on between fish, cephalopods, dolphins, whale songs, etc. There is also no guarantee that human NNs will remain supreme forever... and what then, will humans stop creating art, or will the ant tell the elephant that its art is not a thing?
Tools DO use existing human work, otherwise city photography could never be art, cultural photography could not be art, definitely a Campbell soup can could never be art... and so on. The Camera obscura has been used to "cheat" at art since possibly the paleolithic, then extensively "abused" by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci to copy both natural and human works.
Modern AI does way more than "copying", it abstracts the underlying patterns, then integrates those abstractions with a prompt, to "make up" an output. Sometimes the output of the abstraction of an "A" looks like an "A", other times it doesn't. People keep putting AI down for "hallucinating"... but you can't claim that it "hallucinates" and "copies" in the same sentence.
For an intro on how modern AIs work, I'd suggest checking: Neural Networks, by 3Blue1Brown
AIs have not been "copying" for several decades already, modern AIs are even farther away from that, and it's just the tip of the iceberg.
Humans train on past art. Fundamentally speaking there is no new thing created without millions of predecessor context.
Materialistic analysis demands that nothing exists without context, thus your point is moot.
It's not gonna work. If these art AI thieves don't care that they're stealing then why would they care what the artists do or say?
Just because it's not likely to stop the auction, doesn't mean we shouldn't scream loudly about it.
Good point.
I can't buy into the theft idea. It is like describing ideas in mathmatical concepts. The ai contains nothing of the original.
Is there another word that fits better? I don't know.
On the other hand, why would anyone buy art without knowing the artist? I commision art, I buy art, but I always get to know who it is from and in most cases how they made it: watercolor, oil, pen, etc.
I think plagiarism fits. Producing someone (or many someones) work as an original.
A lot of non creative types in this thread. We get it, guys, your mom didn't like the Valentine's card you drew her egg you were 10.
No need to be mean here, but yes, I think some people see this as just another transaction versus the expression of creativity (or lack thereof) that I see in art. Such is life.
Phrases my friends would never use:
AI Art
I prefer the term "AI Fabrications" because of the dual-meaning of fabrication. On one hand it implies industrial fabrication, on the other hand it implies fabrication as in a lie. Because AI is both of those simultaneously. It is industrially fabricated and it is a lie.
It would be kind of funny to offer AI schlock for sale and then give the buyer a framed copy of the prompt instead of the print itself
I love the high bar of philosophy and taste being set by the discussions here about what is and isn't art, so please don't let this note distract from those.
Joints like Christie's and the stuff they sell is largely a money laundering operation. Without decrying what's coming out of the modern art scene, art collection is where a lot of the capitalists rinse their stolen wealth. There's an entire economy around this practice. Here's a company that will hook you up with the vaults, the lawyers, jewelry to swap, and travel accommodations.
So obviously generative output bots do not make art and- and- BUT ALSO nothing capitalists value is real, they only believe in their fiat. It's all always just money crime game to them. Always.