AI is stealing writers’ words and jobs…

[Bohandas]

To defend their own profits, large companies (especially, but not only, several in the music industry) have led us to define making a digital copy of an artwork as piracy.

And THAT, not AI, is the real problem

 

[Ryujin]

And THAT, not AI, is the real problem

Then fix that but, until such time as that happens, AI has to at the very least be held to that same standard.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Also, while I still believe that the idea that the AI is just cutting up and rearranging preexisting works is misleading and overly simplistic, even if we were to accept that explanation how come when an AI does it it's "piracy" but when William S. Burroughs does it he's a "genius"

EDIT:
Or anyone who's made a collage, for that matter

Because, at the end of the day, these aren't intelligences making something but simply an algorithm imitating something based on prompts. It has no intent, no artistic vision, etc. That just doesn't exist because it's simply taking whatever it can from whatever art it can get. If there is no author, how can something be transformative?

Someone making a collage has intent, and potentially could get in trouble for imitation if it comes close to something. But at the end of the day, they can argue for themselves the intent and the transformative nature of what they created. "AI Art" can't do this because there is no author, per current legal rulings. And someone else can't argue for the machine, unless we're going to argue ChatGPT somehow has more legal standing than Naruto does.

Also I should clarify lest some of my posts be misinterpreted, I'm not trying to be anti-Warhol or anti-William S. Burroughs or anti-collage. I'm just pointing out a double standard

But it's not. Not really, at least. The cut-up method doesn't really resemble what AI does, especially given what AI does on a large-scale. Cut-up isn't about copying, it's about random assemblage of things; at an artistic level, it's kind of the opposite, to be honest. But we're getting into stuff like being "transformative", which I'm not sure AI can be since it lacks intent since it lacks sentience, let alone sapience.

1) There is a separate concept of Fair Use for educational purposes.
2) Generative AIs are not people. Teaching them does not count as Fair Use.

This second part is a big thing people seem to miss: for all the talk of "Artificial Intelligence", that's not really what is happening here. AI can't copyright things.

You could draw me a planet or a spooky looking englishman, but that's the same thing the AI would give me. You can't correctly give me any of the details because you haven't seen them.

You're hung up looking at the wrong thing: I could get the details wrong, but AI couldn't give you anything if it wasn't able to scrap art. That's why your argument here is bad: it misses that I could indeed create art without referencing details, which AI is simply unable to do on its own.

 

[Bohandas]

Then fix that but, until such time as that happens, AI has to at the very least be held to that same standard.

I think if AI generated media spreads out of control it spell their doom. But it has to spread FAST, faster than they can react and do their thing with spin and regulatory capture and all that, and all this whinging is not helping. Instead, what's going to happen if adoption of this tech does not pick up and the tech does not remain lawless is that the handful of big media companies who already own boatloads of content are going to be the only people who are going to be able to use it. All of us plebians are going to be shut out from using it by the copyright laws you're so gleefully defending, but Disney and Turner and all those bastards will just train their own AI on their own material, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. Whereas without copyright getting in the way, everyone just gets their as much content as they want from AI and the mammonic media empires wither and die in the face of something that they simply can't compete against by honest means

 

[Bohandas]

Because, at the end of the day, these aren't intelligences making something but simply an algorithm imitating something based on prompts. It has no intent, no artistic vision, etc. That just doesn't exist because it's simply taking whatever it can from whatever art it can get. If there is no author, how can something be transformative?

Because it significantly differs from the source material. Vision and intent don't transform a thing, being transformed into something different does

 

[Justice and Rule]

Because it significantly differs from the source material. Vision and intent don't transform a thing, being transformed into something different does

No, vision and intent do transform the thing. It's why we have things like satire exceptions. AI doesn't know what satire is and can't create it. Just because a machine can spit something out doesn't make it transformative, especially when it requires the art of others to produce anything.

 

[Umbran]

And THAT, not AI, is the real problem

No, actually, it isn't the problem.

Continuing to think that one should be allowed to use other's work for free is the problem. I largely agree with copyright law here. Big companies are trying to make big money off the work of small artists, for free.

It is ethically not a good look. Just pay royalties for a license to use their work in Generative AI, and this problem goes away.

What? That'd be expensive you say? When your CEO is a billionaire, and your executive board hecto-millionaires, your ethical space to complain about the need to not pay artists, who can't even make the rent on their work, is not large.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I think if AI generated media spreads out of control it spell their doom. But it has to spread FAST, faster than they can react and do their thing with spin and regulatory capture and all that, and all this whinging is not helping. Instead, what's going to happen if adoption of this tech does not pick up and the tech does not remain lawless is that the handful of big media companies who already own boatloads of content are going to be the only people who are going to be able to use it. All of us plebians are going to be shut out from using it by the copyright laws you're so gleefully defending, but Disney and Turner and all those bastards will just train their own AI on their own material, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. Whereas without copyright getting in the way, everyone just gets their as much content as they want from AI and the mammonic media empires wither and die in the face of something that they simply can't compete against by honest means

I see the exact opposite: an environment of mass AI proliferation benefits large corporations that can afford to have their own private and new art pools and such in the future, while AIs open to consumers will have to work from the diminishing returns of whatever is currently out there since where we're currently headed is going to ravage the artist community and we get a "trash in, trash out" problem with AI trying to copy AI.

Copyright laws will defend human artists by allowing them to keep what they create, and it'll stop large media companies from destroying the art community by preventing it from making cheap imitations through large-scale internet scrapping. But that's only if we can actually do it and not get people talking about how the artist community is just in it for the money.

 

[trappedslider]

Training an AI on an image is not rebroadcasying the image or reprinting the image in any meaningful sense. A given training image has about the same effect on the AI as it would on a human artist who happened to see it once.

Not that any of you are going to care, as most of these artists and those of you who support them have made it very clear that the only thing you rrally care about is money, NOT artistic integrity. It's even right there in the title of this very thread. Artistic intrgrity is nothing but an excuse to protect your profits

If you're trying to convince others there's no point minds have been made up

This is flat out false. As you can see by the image below. It's pretty much a direct copy. And AI trainers copy the original work without permission to their databases, which is copyright infringement. Also of note, derivitive work is still under protection of the original copyright holder unless it falls under Fair Use (which most AI does not) or is radically different from the original (AI doesn't really do that), and most importantly, "The new, derivative work also can’t have an economic impact on the original copyright holder."---Pike & Lustig LLP

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So, which of the two images is AI, what model, prompts etc did you use? If you ran it local did you use automatic111 or comfyui?

 

[Ryujin]

I think if AI generated media spreads out of control it spell their doom. But it has to spread FAST, faster than they can react and do their thing with spin and regulatory capture and all that, and all this whinging is not helping. Instead, what's going to happen if adoption of this tech does not pick up and the tech does not remain lawless is that the handful of big media companies who already own boatloads of content are going to be the only people who are going to be able to use it. All of us plebians are going to be shut out from using it by the copyright laws you're so gleefully defending, but Disney and Turner and all those bastards will just train their own AI on their own material, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. Whereas without copyright getting in the way, everyone just gets their as much content as they want from AI and the mammonic media empires wither and die in the face of something that they simply can't compete against by honest means

To all of that I have a rather short response: What Umbran said.