The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.
AI generated content isn’t stealing. That being said, Facebook is literally only reposts, there is practically zero original content. The AI generated stuff is amongst the few things that isn’t technically stolen.
I dunno dude, taking an image-to-image generation with 90% strength to just change a few details to make it look like your work sure sounds like stealing to me
It may sound pendantic but that person is correct: It’s not stealing. Stealing involves taking a physical thing away from its owner. Once the thing is stolen the owner doesn’t have it anymore.
If you reproduce someone’s art exactly without permission that’s a copyright violation, not stealing. If you distribute a derivative work (like using img2img with Stable Diffusion) without permission that also is a (lesser) form of copyright violation. Again, not stealing/theft.
TL;DR: If you’re making copies (or close facsimiles) of something (without permission) that’s not stealing it’s violating copyright.
You may want to read through what I actually wrote again.
Someone takes an image, runs it through image-to-image AI with 90% strength (meaning ‘make minor changes at most’), and then claims it as their own.
That last part there is what makes it stealing. It’s not the theft of the picture. It’s the theft of credit and of social media impressions. The latter sounds stupid at first, until you realise that it is an important, even essential part of marketing for many businesses, including small ones.
Now sure, technically someone who likes and comments under the fake can also do the same underneath the real one but in reality, first exposure benefits are important here: the content will have its most impact, and therefore push viewers to engage in some way, including at a business level, the first time they see it. When something incredibly similar pops up, they’re far more likely to go “I’ve already seen this. Next.”.
Human attention is very much a finite thing. If someone is using your content to divert people away from your brand, be it personal or professional, it has a very real cost associated with it. It is theft of opportunity, pure and simple.
It’s still not stealing. It’s plagiarism or fraud or any number of other terms, but stealing necessarily requires the deprivation of a limited, rivalrous thing, like money or property. You can’t steal fame or exposure or credit, except poetically. And by that point, the word becomes so watered down that it’s meaningless. You might as well say I’m stealing your life seconds at a time by writing this extra sentence.
The purpose of using the term stealing here is only to borrow the negative moral connotations of the term, but it doesn’t communicate clearly what exactly is happening.
It’s perfectly valid to say you consider it morally equivalent with theft, but it’s not stealing.
It’s stealing. Training is theft. It is NOT like “a person looking at art in a museum and gaining inspiration”. AI has no inspiration or creativity. It’s an image autocomplete algorithm using millions of other people’s images as bases to combine and smooth out. That’s all it does. If I took a bunch of Monet paintings and creates some brushes in Photoshop and used it to create a new work, those brushes would still be theft. At best, it’d be a collage art piece I’d have to credit Monet for.
AI generated content is always stealing, just because I steal an entire museum full of art and then cram a ton of art pieces together until it’s indistinguishable from anything that was in the museum beforehand doesn’t change the fact that I stole the entire museum to do it.
Doesn’t matter if it’s text, art, etc. The current models of generative AI is always stealing. For some reason because it’s done in mass and automated, people think that it isn’t stealing now.
Nice essay, don’t care to read it fully since you are one of those people who unironically think computers can be conscious. And yes. Self driving cars should absolutely be banned.
Not gonna waste my time with this any more since I can see what kind of takes you have on things. Have a nice day.
I know you’re wanting to argue your point, so I’m only going to say one thing. Yes, it is sometimes stealing. Not all of the time, but some of the time. If you use a live artist as a prompt for selling and that artist isn’t getting paid (like musicians now do with sampling), then yes it’s stealing. You’re not only stealing their work, but you’re also stealing their business.
Thanks, I hate it. Your article is going into the current law and how it doesn’t compare to the new way of stealing. The spirit of copyright law is, if you made it, you have the rights to it because you made it. You can sell it, decide what happens to it, etc., for a certain amount of time. The laws need to change, not the artists just accepting that their work and style will be stolen because corporations figured out a way to steal more from the already not paid enough group.
This part especially, is absolute bullshit:
The theory of the class-action suit is extremely dangerous for artists. If the plaintiffs convince the court that you’ve created a derivative work if you incorporate any aspect of someone else’s art in your own work, even if the end result isn’t substantially similar, then something as common as copying the way your favorite artist draws eyes could put you in legal jeopardy.
They’re trying to say, “Haven’t you been “inspired” by someone else? How can you judge this widdle ole’ computer program then?” Fuckers, please. Someone being inspired by someone else is already a gray area in copyright law. See any musician being sued by the Marvin Gaye family.
Now use the analogy of taking a single artist who has a decent living making their own stye of art. Now take 10,000 artists trying to copy the "style* of that artist and put those completed works out in 10 seconds as opposed to your work, which takes skill building, your imagination and time. The current copyright laws aren’t meant for AI, they should be ignored as a basis for anything.
The article does a very good job at show how it isn’t stealing. Particularlly this part:
Fair use protects reverse engineering, indexing for search engines, and other forms of analysis that create new knowledge about works or bodies of works. Here, the fact that the model is used to create new works weighs in favor of fair use as does the fact that the model consists of original analysis of the training images in comparison with one another.
I understand that you are passionate about this topic, and that you have strong opinions on the legal and ethical issues involved. However, using profanity, insults, and exaggerations isn’t helping this discussion. It only creates hostility and resentment, and undermines your credibility. If you’re interested, we can have a discussion in good faith, but if your next comment is like this one, I won’t be replying.
I understand that you are passionate about this topic, and that you have strong opinions on the legal and ethical issues involved. However, using profanity, insults, and exaggerations isn’t helping this discussion. It only creates hostility and resentment, and undermines your credibility. If you’re interested, we can have a discussion in good faith, but if your next comment is like this one, I won’t be replying.
Not doing any of that, but okay.
Edit: I guess I was cussing, lol. It’s the internet and I think you’ll be fine.
Ai art is stealing though. Artists are afraid to post their art online and get their work used in a machine learning model by some tech guys who never produced anything artistic in their lives
Why is it that the people who decided to devote their life to filling the world with art are the most angry about custom art being abundant and free?
Because they want to fill the world with art in exchange for money.
Ideally, the solution that would benefit everyone would focus on dealing with that need for money, not on trying to keep old industries operating exactly as they always operated.
It wasn’t the windmills that destroyed the common areas, it wasn’t the sails that enslaved people the world over, it wasn’t the cotton gin that drug the freemen back to their captors. It was and still is the powerful, those willing to use violence on their behalf and those unwilling to stand against it that do these things.
Why don’t managers and doctors and tech workers offer their stuff for free now? I mean, aren’t they just filling the world with amazing products and services?
So you’re saying that every original, proprietary code can be used right now free of charge and under 10 seconds? I can just say, “app that makes pac men eat ghosts that look like Gibli ghosts” and I can claim that as mine. Cool! Where can I get this?
Here, look what I made! It’s totally mine and I’m sure Disney will be okay with it:
Yeah, you may be able to get all the way to a playable game if you use that prompt in a well set up AutoGen app. I would be interested to see if you give it a shot, so please share if you do. It’s such a cool time to be alive for “idea” people!
AI generated content isn’t stealing. That being said, Facebook is literally only reposts, there is practically zero original content. The AI generated stuff is amongst the few things that isn’t technically stolen.
You might want to read the article.
The AI generated content is the only part that isn’t plagiarism in these examples.
I dunno dude, taking an image-to-image generation with 90% strength to just change a few details to make it look like your work sure sounds like stealing to me
That may be forgery or a copyright violation, but it still isn’t stealing.
Sure it is. If you make minor AI alterations and claim the new version as yours, you’re stealing credit for someone else’s work.
It may sound pendantic but that person is correct: It’s not stealing. Stealing involves taking a physical thing away from its owner. Once the thing is stolen the owner doesn’t have it anymore.
If you reproduce someone’s art exactly without permission that’s a copyright violation, not stealing. If you distribute a derivative work (like using img2img with Stable Diffusion) without permission that also is a (lesser) form of copyright violation. Again, not stealing/theft.
TL;DR: If you’re making copies (or close facsimiles) of something (without permission) that’s not stealing it’s violating copyright.
You may want to read through what I actually wrote again.
Someone takes an image, runs it through image-to-image AI with 90% strength (meaning ‘make minor changes at most’), and then claims it as their own.
That last part there is what makes it stealing. It’s not the theft of the picture. It’s the theft of credit and of social media impressions. The latter sounds stupid at first, until you realise that it is an important, even essential part of marketing for many businesses, including small ones.
Now sure, technically someone who likes and comments under the fake can also do the same underneath the real one but in reality, first exposure benefits are important here: the content will have its most impact, and therefore push viewers to engage in some way, including at a business level, the first time they see it. When something incredibly similar pops up, they’re far more likely to go “I’ve already seen this. Next.”.
Human attention is very much a finite thing. If someone is using your content to divert people away from your brand, be it personal or professional, it has a very real cost associated with it. It is theft of opportunity, pure and simple.
It’s still not stealing. It’s plagiarism or fraud or any number of other terms, but stealing necessarily requires the deprivation of a limited, rivalrous thing, like money or property. You can’t steal fame or exposure or credit, except poetically. And by that point, the word becomes so watered down that it’s meaningless. You might as well say I’m stealing your life seconds at a time by writing this extra sentence.
The purpose of using the term stealing here is only to borrow the negative moral connotations of the term, but it doesn’t communicate clearly what exactly is happening.
It’s perfectly valid to say you consider it morally equivalent with theft, but it’s not stealing.
It’s stealing. Training is theft. It is NOT like “a person looking at art in a museum and gaining inspiration”. AI has no inspiration or creativity. It’s an image autocomplete algorithm using millions of other people’s images as bases to combine and smooth out. That’s all it does. If I took a bunch of Monet paintings and creates some brushes in Photoshop and used it to create a new work, those brushes would still be theft. At best, it’d be a collage art piece I’d have to credit Monet for.
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You should read this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. The EFF is a digital rights group that recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
jesusfuckingchrist. Regurgitate much?
What is they’re AI? Hence the regurgitation.
AI generated content is always stealing, just because I steal an entire museum full of art and then cram a ton of art pieces together until it’s indistinguishable from anything that was in the museum beforehand doesn’t change the fact that I stole the entire museum to do it.
Doesn’t matter if it’s text, art, etc. The current models of generative AI is always stealing. For some reason because it’s done in mass and automated, people think that it isn’t stealing now.
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They’re humans using brains and not algorithms trained to copy and paste
If you can keep putting artists out of work on your consciousness then sure, but some of us actually have morals guiding us.
The human bases the new piece off of it, inspiration.
The AI directly uses portions of the existing art. We get onto humans just the same who do that.
AI isn’t conscious, it can’t think, it can’t use it as “inspiration”, that is the entire point.
People who have abolutely 0 idea what art is about just get feral over this “tech” and beat down artists are absolutely selfish.
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Nice essay, don’t care to read it fully since you are one of those people who unironically think computers can be conscious. And yes. Self driving cars should absolutely be banned.
Not gonna waste my time with this any more since I can see what kind of takes you have on things. Have a nice day.
Luddites always lose. Just a reminder.
cool story, go bother someone else.
there was no purpose to what you said other than flaming. I will not be responding further.
This is an Internet forum where people discuss things. You are being a Luddite with respect to AI and self driving cars.
You cannot stop progress regardless of your opinion.
I know you’re wanting to argue your point, so I’m only going to say one thing. Yes, it is sometimes stealing. Not all of the time, but some of the time. If you use a live artist as a prompt for selling and that artist isn’t getting paid (like musicians now do with sampling), then yes it’s stealing. You’re not only stealing their work, but you’re also stealing their business.
You should read this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven’t already. The EFF is a digital rights group that recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
Thanks, I hate it. Your article is going into the current law and how it doesn’t compare to the new way of stealing. The spirit of copyright law is, if you made it, you have the rights to it because you made it. You can sell it, decide what happens to it, etc., for a certain amount of time. The laws need to change, not the artists just accepting that their work and style will be stolen because corporations figured out a way to steal more from the already not paid enough group.
This part especially, is absolute bullshit:
They’re trying to say, “Haven’t you been “inspired” by someone else? How can you judge this widdle ole’ computer program then?” Fuckers, please. Someone being inspired by someone else is already a gray area in copyright law. See any musician being sued by the Marvin Gaye family.
Now use the analogy of taking a single artist who has a decent living making their own stye of art. Now take 10,000 artists trying to copy the "style* of that artist and put those completed works out in 10 seconds as opposed to your work, which takes skill building, your imagination and time. The current copyright laws aren’t meant for AI, they should be ignored as a basis for anything.
The article does a very good job at show how it isn’t stealing. Particularlly this part:
This isn’t a new way of “stealing” it’s just a way to analyze and reverse engineer images so you can make your own original works. In the US, the first major case that established reverse engineering as fair use was Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc in 1992, and then affirmed in Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation in 2000. So this is not new at all.
I understand that you are passionate about this topic, and that you have strong opinions on the legal and ethical issues involved. However, using profanity, insults, and exaggerations isn’t helping this discussion. It only creates hostility and resentment, and undermines your credibility. If you’re interested, we can have a discussion in good faith, but if your next comment is like this one, I won’t be replying.
Not doing any of that, but okay.
Edit: I guess I was cussing, lol. It’s the internet and I think you’ll be fine.
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The Marvin Gaye comment sounds like you are defending copyright trolling
Nope, just pointing out that they won one and lost another, it’s a gray area. Nice try though.
Ah ok. Nice try of what? I don’t have a horse in this race
They’re not selling this picture…lol stop lying.
Ai art is stealing though. Artists are afraid to post their art online and get their work used in a machine learning model by some tech guys who never produced anything artistic in their lives
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Because they want to fill the world with art in exchange for money.
Ideally, the solution that would benefit everyone would focus on dealing with that need for money, not on trying to keep old industries operating exactly as they always operated.
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It wasn’t the windmills that destroyed the common areas, it wasn’t the sails that enslaved people the world over, it wasn’t the cotton gin that drug the freemen back to their captors. It was and still is the powerful, those willing to use violence on their behalf and those unwilling to stand against it that do these things.
Drug?
EDIT: Did you mean “dragged”?
Why don’t managers and doctors and tech workers offer their stuff for free now? I mean, aren’t they just filling the world with amazing products and services?
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So you’re saying that every original, proprietary code can be used right now free of charge and under 10 seconds? I can just say, “app that makes pac men eat ghosts that look like Gibli ghosts” and I can claim that as mine. Cool! Where can I get this?
Here, look what I made! It’s totally mine and I’m sure Disney will be okay with it:
https://imgur.com/a/JzK87RQ
Yeah, you may be able to get all the way to a playable game if you use that prompt in a well set up AutoGen app. I would be interested to see if you give it a shot, so please share if you do. It’s such a cool time to be alive for “idea” people!
I’m working on an art project about it right now, you can see it here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/11256654?scrollToComments=true
I’m adding quite a few more companies, so it should be interesting.
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Have you seen my new art project? https://sh.itjust.works/post/11256654?scrollToComments=true
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=Zm9B-DvwOgw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.