#but thats another moral issue entirely to art theft though it's worth mentioning

[marsti]

i'd argue that is because the theft is not happening at the generated end but at the training end. the stolen images are used to train an algorithm which very much makes the companies money, meaning they ARE turning a profit off of the back of other people's work.

if i use midjourney to create a picture of hatsune miku with huge tits and an ass to match (entirely hypothetical, i could draw that with my eyes closed) i am not committing theft but i AM using a tool built on theft. midjourney, inc. stole the works allowing me to do it, by using pictures to train their algorithm to recognise hatsune miku and big tits and giant asses, but my use of the program would not be the problem here.

so all this to say this is entirely a "don't use my work for things i don't want it used for thank you very much" issue, especially since even if you can have your work removed from a training set, you can't UN-TRAIN the algorithm. once your work has been used, that's that and there's nothing you can do.

the problem is not individuals using tools put at their disposal, even if they make money off of it i'd argue it's honestly kinda whatever. who cares if johnny bluecheck makes 50 bucks a month generating mid-tier softcore porn for people who would never pay a real artist anyway. the problem is corporations turning a profit on the back of people who never agreed to have their work used in that way.

the most frustrating thing about AI Art from a Discourse perspective is that the actual violation involved is pretty nebulous

like, the guys "laundering" specific artists' styles through AI models to mimic them for profit know exactly what they're doing, and it's extremely gross

but we cannot establish "my work was scraped from the public internet and used as part of a dataset for teaching a program what a painting of a tree looks like, without anyone asking or paying me" as, legally, Theft with a capital T. not only is this DMCA Logic which would be a nightmare for 99% of artists if enforced to its conclusion, it's not the right word for what's happening

the actual Violation here is that previously, "I can post my artwork to share with others for free, with minimal risk" was a safe assumption, which created a pretty generous culture of sharing artwork online. most (noteworthy) potential abuses of this digital commons were straightforwardly plagiarism in a way anyone could understand

but the way that generative AI uses its training data is significantly more complicated - there is a clear violation of trust involved, and often malicious intent, but most of the common arguments used to describe this fall short and end up in worse territory

by which I mean, it's hard to put forward an actual moral/legal solution unless you're willing to argue:

Potential sales "lost" count as Theft (so you should in fact stop sharing your Netflix password)

No amount of alteration makes it acceptable to use someone else's art in the production of other art without permission and/or compensation (this would kill entire artistic mediums and benefit nobody but Disney)

Art Styles should be considered Intellectual Property in an enforceable way (impossibly bad, are you kidding me)

it's extremely annoying to talk about, because you'll see people straight up gloating about their Intent To Plagiarize, but it's hard to stick them with any specific crime beyond Generally Scummy Behavior unless you want to create some truly horrible precedents and usher in The Thousand Year Reign of Intellectual Property Law