wjfox wrote: ↑Wed Jan 25, 2023 6:56 pm
Ken_J wrote: ↑Wed Jan 25, 2023 11:18 am
the thing I find hard to grasp is how there are tech people with relatively big names and decent expertise who somehow think there is a case for art theft and use public platforms to stir opposition toward AI art.
LIke come on, I expected better from tech literate folks.
Why wouldn't there be a case? They're using other peoples' creations without royalties or other compensation.
a lot of people try and make the same argument, without really defining the concepts of "using" and "creations" as they apply in this scenario specifically. And I get how some might think this is being pedantic, but it's an Important part of the discussion.
As an artist, I do not make my own canvasses, nor do I make my own paints (well actually sometimes I do, but that for a specific purpose in select works), I don't require that any model I use be surgically created to my specifications, I don't recreate biology or matter for originality. And at the same time my model doesn't get to claim I used their likeness without permission (if i have a painting I made from a photo I took of a public space with people in it, say a street performer in santa monica pier that I used to make a scifi market place with street performers), or more clearly, the paint supply company doesn't get to sue me for using a shade or color that they create. nobody has claim to my work in part or in whole.
Likewise in my writings, I use the same 26 letters as you, and the grammar structure, and word spelling are an agreed upon training set that is common use.
This applies to concepts and even styles. Nobody can own the heroes journey, nor art deco. If I create an art deco painting of the last supper, with the figures being clearly based on celebrities. That is not theft, it's never even close to being possible to make that argument... But I had to be trained by exposure to art deco, the likeness of the chosen celebrities, the last supper etc. And the works that I am exposed to during that training do not have to be in the commons. The photo references I learn from and base the celebrities on can be copyright, for instance. It still doesn't make the work theft.
You really have to start moving in the direction of me printing photo quality images of those celebrities cutting them up and pasting them together, before it even starts to be possible to make that argument, and even then the question of transformative works and artistic input would in most cases make the argument that it's theft invalid.
A lot of these cases try and make that last argument that AI is copy pasting pieces in collage. But in most cases these legitimate AI (not basic filters or photo manipulation programs that pretend to be AI) do nothing of the sort. They do not clip out parts from any work to use in their creation. They are not using parts of other works. The data sets are used to define parameters for what a given written prompt is referring to, and then the data set is abandoned while the AI uses the parameters it built for written prompts to try and find those parameters within a random noise image.
Works that look similar or carry features of other works happen because the parameters were built on limited sample sizes, or in some cases because whole data sets have markers in the same location in lots of them, it's the equivalent of making a period drama and including things that didn't exist in the period in history because it's something so common in your experience that you couldn't imagine a time that didn't have it. The AI experience of the world includes watermarks on many of the images, it doesn't know that watermarks are not part of a baseball game. But that doesn't matter, because it's not cutting and pasting the watermarks into images or copying the base images that they come from.
Now Can an artist take a work from somebody and use it as a starting point instead of a random noise image. Yes... just like I could do a google image search grab an image and manipulate it in photo shop. That's not AI stealing work. That's literally thieves stealing work and using AI on the stolen work. Not the same thing at all, not even close.
