#anyway. if you want to make the argument that ai shouldn't be trained on people's art without their consent that's one thing

[phaedo]

okay so can everyone make art because it came free with your humanity or is art defined by how much physical effort you put into it. answer quickly

[frostiifae]

OK, I tried to put this in tags but it got away from me. OP you sound like you would be interested in a discussion but don't feel obligated, this is kinda half internal thought experiment, half me musing with mutuals.

anyway I want to like this point but I feel a lot of dissonance with the way it's specifically presented.

To get it out of the way, I already don't know how I feel about suggesting collage is totally clear of the "art theft" hurdle. When a stonemason makes you a thousand bricks and you use those bricks to build a house, you clearly made the house, but that doesn't mean you made the bricks. This difference obviously doesn't matter for houses, but I'm not sure I can put it aside so easily with artwork. How wrong is it to suggest that the person who created a piece of art is important to it? I'm not sure I'm willing to agree with a collage artist trying to ignore or downplay the creators of its constituent parts. But, the main point here is inspiration. I get what you mean by comparing AI generative art with the notion of inspiration, generally. When you are inspired by another artist's work, you are likely to want to imitate their style. An AI is merely a tool that lets you do that, no different from a brush and canvas and a steady eye. But I'm not sure I'm willing to equate them totally. When we say a person is inspired by art, the specific "act" of inspiration involves multiple steps - the observation of the inspiring art in question, the musing of its meaning and its relation to the observer, and the generation of new intent and meaning based on this musing, which can finally be output as new, "inspired" art on behalf of this budding artist. Generating images via AI works in reverse. I'm sympathetic to the argument that a person who curates an AI's generated works is, themselves, still an artist; taking a swath of AI-generated images and choosing ones that resonate with you and your intended message is an expressive and creative act. My problem is that it's optional. You don't need to do that. The images have already been generated, and the act of selecting them is superficial. This isn't a complete condemnation of the tool itself; if you were to train an AI on an inspiration, curate its works, and then train it again recursively on its own curated results - which I assume is, or will be commonplace - that feels to me like a much more artistic approach. Recursion distances you from your inspiration, at least in theory. My concern is much more practical: are people doing that? Can you blame me for being very suspect of a tool that does not require you to take this additional step (or steps) in order to produce something you can recklessly throw out into the world and call a finished, original work?

Intrinsically lost from the artist? Yes - originality. Is that worth caring about? Depends on the artist. There's a compelling, implied argument in your post that maybe it isn't, or shouldn't be. Unfortunately, this process doesn't happen in a vacuum, but in an oppressive capitalist landscape where one's art is also their brand. If your art has a unique style, it is unfortunately but undeniably real that you can find commercial success in your uniqueness, satisfying a niche interest in an audience. If a person trains AI on your work, they are threatening your market, and doing so at a fraction of the cost you paid - by using your work "against" you. I think a lot of protest against AI-generated images comes from this capitalist framing. It's right and proper to interrogate this conflation of artistic merit and the idea of what art "is" with an artist's ability to market and sell their artwork. But, at the same time, we have to acknowledge that that's the landscape we live in. The existence of AI art generation threatens the ability of the artists it's trained on to retain their economic stature. When an established business struggles against a rising competitor that thrives off of a more efficient process, we don't consider that a problem in the abstract, but I don't know that we've ever faced a situation where business B decides to compete against business A by taking A's publicly available sample products, reverse engineering them, and then mass producing the result, skipping all of the work that went into producing A in the first place. I think you would have a very hard time convincing a court that this is not theft of intellectual property in some degree.

Are photographs art? Feels a little bit like a "yes, duh" situation to me, but in a way that further reveals the capitalist motivation of the original argument. Does a piece of art need to have intent to be worth protecting from "art theft", or does it simply need to have a strong sense of original ownership? Maybe the idea that AI artists are "stealing art" has nothing to do with the merit of the results, but instead everything to do with the process by those results are created.

I don't have the original post being referenced as context and this is long enough as is, so--

This, again, feels kind of like a "yes, duh" situation. Do you believe it's morally acceptable to rob graves? Do you believe it's morally acceptable to take things from the house of the deceased? Nobody owns those things anymore, so? But for these rhetorical snarks to have any bite, you have to already agree that AI generation is theft; it's tautological. So we have to again ask why it might be theft, or what might motivate someone to care about stealing it. Does Rembrandt care that his art is being fed into a computer to generate "new" work in his style? Almost assuredly not. He is very dead. Does his estate care? Probably - but you aren't hurting them by hanging your generated art in his style in your living room. Is that theft? Do they have the right to impose their definition of theft on you? Do they have the right to own an artstyle? I'd lead this in the direction of similar questions about data preservation and "piracy", but I think the implication is good enough. At some point we have to question whether it's even possible to own something like a video game, a musical work, or the idea of a dead man's artistic style. At some point we have to acknowledge that enforcing or caring about that ownership is silly, if not outright harmful. No one is being hurt by you being proud of an AI-generated "Rembrandt" in your home, that you happily explain to your visitors was created by an AI that you trained, because you wanted to see what it could do. The best argument of harm that could be made is if you were trying to claim that you had made it "organically" (Rembrandt's second coming!!1) or that it was a lost original Rembrandt that you found. Those are both much more obviously immoral acts called "lying".

(& also 7) The very specific and limited terms of this question compel me to say, through gritted teeth, that sure - I can concede that the novelty of AI art sold with pretext as AI art is interesting. But, again, none of this happens in a vacuum. There is no harm done to me, the observer, directly or indirectly, by a commercial entity creating AI copies of Rembrandts, doing their best to make them look as faithful and accurate as possible, and then marketing them as AI copies. I love the potential this thought exercise has to force the debate over how you can even properly own an intangible idea into the public space, though I'm not sure it would resolve in the way I would hope for. However, there is harm done to other artists, for whom a precedent is established that it is commercially viable for an AI to be trained on their work, then sold separately from them. See #2. If we're going to say it's acceptable for an institution or commercial entity to train a dataset on a dead man's paintings without permission or compensation (because otherwise it clearly wouldn't be theft, would it) and then sell the resulting works, this opens the doors for smaller, less academically-minded commercial entities training their AI on niche living artists without permission or compensation, too. Anyone with a successful Patreon is suddenly, in theory, at risk of having their art business usurped by someone else who can, in theory, create art in their style but significantly faster.

The framing of AI generation as a tool, particularly as a misunderstood tool that can help create interesting artistic works as part of a longer process, is philosophically interesting, but -- I would argue -- irresponsible. We have to also directly acknowledge how it can be used against artists, intentionally or otherwise, and how it is much easier to do economic damage with it than it is to fulfill these intriguing what-ifs.

I made the comparison in #5 between generating AI art of a famous painter for one's own personal enrichment, and data preservation being considered "piracy" - or more precisely, Is It Morally Wrong Of Me To Have A Copy Of Pokemon Red Version On My Computer Hard Drive. But there's a difference here that I think is telling, too; when someone theoretically creates copies of a digital movie, or the ROM of a video game, or any digital artwork of any kind, the original intent has not been changed. Anti-piracy sentiment wants to claim that a "sale" has been "stolen". Using technology to create a perfect copy of a data pattern circumvents what businesses used to believe was the value they provided to society - the ability to mass-distribute a product of art - and so they claim that it is "theft". This is core to the social idea of theft that's being discussed in this post: when you use technology to circumvent a process, what are you devaluing by doing so?

When an AI generates images trained on an artist's work, it has done something very similar - technology has been used to circumvent the creative process of the original artist, not merely the act of putting a pen to a tablet or a brush to canvas, but the planning, the sketching, the framing and composition. The result is often absent the value of these elements, at least in the technology's current form, so they have to be added back in through curation or alterations at the end... but you don't have to. How much do we value those steps of an artist's work, then? How much do we value the time that is spent creating something "organically", through one's own brushstrokes?

There is already clearly room to argue that you don't need to manually sculpt an image from mere lines and colors in order to create art. Photography is art. An arrangement of everyday objects, displayed on a pedestal, can be art. Whether or not AI generated images can be art is not the core of the debate. Whether or not we value that art - and what value is being "stolen" from the artists it is trained on, by circumventing their effort - that is the debate.

nice job supporting ai stealing artwork dickweed 👍

First, let me start with a disclaimer:

I don't like AI art personally. Subjectively speaking, it just doesn't feel like proper art to me.

I just think that the rhetoric behind why, from an objective standpoint, AI art in particular is bad (i.e. immoral) deserves more thought.

Some questions which you might find worth answering:

Is there a means of explaining how AI art steals from artists that doesn't imply collage and/or inspiration are also forms of art theft?

For an artist, is anything intrinsically lost when their art is used as a sample in an AI's data model?

When it comes to AI generated photographs, is art theft still occurring?

Consider the post you're getting mad at me about. whompthatsucker1981's copy of the AI generated photo likely wouldn't have existed without an AI generated photo to copy. Is there no value to be found in the AI enabling the creation of the art?

Suppose I were to train a data set on, say, Rembrandt's paintings to try and generate my own "new artwork" of his - just to hang in my living room. He's famous and dead, so this action doesn't affect him at all - is anything wrong with me doing this?

Similarly, suppose a commercial entity or institution were to do the same, and sell or display it with the pretext that it was generated - would this novelty not at the least be somewhat intriguing?

How about if a team of experts assessed the product, and personally corrected and altered details to keep it consistent with his other works if necessary?

Many years ago, I met an artist called Doug Fishbone while he was doing an exhibition called "Made In China" at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. There was no clear piece on display as part of the exhibition; there was, however, an impostor. One of the paintings in the gallery had been replaced with a replica commissioned from the Meisheng Oil Painting Manufacture Co., who only ever saw the painting they copied as a high resolution photo - thousands of visitors were invited to guess which.

This both questions the value of originality in art (is the copy really less valuable than the original if you can't tell the two apart? How about if it's utilised as part of a philosophical point or artistic message?) and reveals, via the copycat painting's minor discrepancies, that even in careful replication, the preferences of the artist often shine through (perhaps this is a motivation in the encouragement of copyists by many old masters).

I would certainly agree that it isn't particularly desirable to study the "eye" of an AI all too closely - its own quirks will simply be the mean of other artists' idiosyncracies. But suppose that the image is then copied, modified, or used as inspiration - is its place in allowing for another artist to develop a concept not valuable at all?

To be clear, these questions aren't rhetorical; I'd like to hear your views. If you reply, I hope you do so in good faith.