#copyright discussion

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[nyancrimew]

can you explain the ai thing to me as though I were a small child I am in fact very stupid and don't understand what the point being made was supposed to be

the point i am trying to make it that ai is fundamentally a labor issue (and just more broadly a capitalism issue) and should be treated as such, any attempts at trying to classify what makes something "not real art" is a slippery slope leading towards fascism and fundamentally irrelevant in the fight against unethical (uses of) AI. the same goes for any attempts at just making copyright laws more strict, this has never helped any independent artists and never will, at best it'll make any sort of derivative art (including fanart, remixes, collages, etc) basically impossible to do unless you're a massive corporation with an unlimited legal budget.

[jabberwockprince]

─”A monstrous mouth, an endless appetite; the teeth and claws of Manus Vindictae hunt for their next meal.”    

[poetrysmackdown]

hi hiii i wanted to say that your account is so refreshing to see, esp with the passion you have for the arts. as someone who's been meaning to read (and write) more poetry, do you have any recommendations? some classics that everyone and their mothers know? perhaps some underrated pieces that changed you? or even just authors you like, I'm very open to suggestions :]]

Hi! Thank you so much for this kind ask :) So exciting that you’re looking to delve deeper into reading and writing! I had to take a little time to answer this because my thoughts were all over the place lol.

For a review of notable/classic poems/poets, I honestly just recommend looking at lists online or, hell, just binging Wikipedia pages for different countries’ poetry if that’s something you’re into, just to get a sense of the chronology. I read one of those little Oxford Very Short Introductions on American Poetry and thought it was pretty good, but online is quicker if you’re just searching for poets or movements to hone in on. Poetry Foundation also has lots of resources, in addition to all the poems in their database. I guess my one big classic recommendation would have to be Emily Dickinson (<3), but really the best move is just to find a poet you already enjoy and then look around to see who their peers were/are, who they were inspired by, who they’ve maybe translated here and there, etc. and follow it down the line as far as you can.

For some personal recs, here are some collections I’ve really enjoyed over the past two years or so. Bolded favorites, and linking where select poems from the book have been published online. But also, if you want a preview of a couple poems from another of the books to see if they interest you, DM me and I can send them over! You can also feel free to pilfer through my poetry tag for more stuff lol

Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon trans. Don Mee Choi

Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo

DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi

Hardly War by Don Mee Choi

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier

Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Mouth: Eats Color—Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals by Sawako Nakayasu

The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam trans. W.S. Merwin and Clarence Brown

The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright

This Journey by James Wright

God’s Silence by Franz Wright

Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke (the translation I read was by Alfred Corn—I thought it was great, but idk if there are better ones out there!)

DMZ Colony, Hardly War, Dictee, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and partially Whereas are all book-length poems with some prose poetry and varying levels of weirdness/denseness/multilingualism—if you were to pick one to start with, I’d say do Don’t Let Me Be Lonely or Whereas. Mouth: Eats Color is some experimental translations of Japanese modernist poet Chika Sagawa, with other translations and some of Nakayasu’s original stuff mixed in—it's definitely a bit disorienting but ultimately I remember having such fun with it, as much fun as Nakayasu probably had making it. It’s a book that emphasizes co-creation and a spirit of play, and completely changed my attitude towards translation.

If you’re less interested in that kind of formal fuckery stuff though (I get it), can’t go wrong with the other books! Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is the one I read most recently, and it’s great—Harjo also featured in Round 1! Franz Wright also featured, and God's Silence is the collection which "Night Walk" comes from. James Wright (father of Franz) is one of my favorite poets of all time, though his poetry isn’t perfect. Even so, I’m honestly surprised he’s not doing numbers on Tumblr—Mary Oliver was a big fan of his, even wrote her "Three Poems for James Wright" after his death.

I mentioned in another post that one of my favorite poets is Paul Celan, so I’ll also recommend him here. I read Memory Rose into Threshold Speech which is a translated collection of his earlier poems, but it’s quite long if you’re just getting to know him as a poet—fortunately, both Poetry Foundation and Poets.org have a ton of his poems in their collections. There’s also an article by Ilya Kaminsky about him titled “Of Strangeness That Wakes Us” (!!!!!) that’s a great place to start, and is honestly kind of my whole mission statement when I’m reading and writing poetry. Looking at the books I’ve recommended above, a lot of them share feelings of separateness or alienation—from others, from oneself, from one’s country, from language—that breed strange, private modes of expression. That tends to be what I’m drawn to personally, and that’s some of what Kaminsky talks about.

Sorry of the length of this—I hope it's useful as a jumping-off point! And if you or anyone ends up exploring any of these poets, let me know what you think! If folks wanna reply with recommendations themselves too that'd be great :)

[derpymule]

Hey, I don't appreciate you saying what I believe without even knowing me. I'm Ancom, I don't believe Capitalism provides anything but starvation wages for anyone except the rich fucks at the top. However I am pointing out that while we are *stuck* in this situation, stealing from another artist, not some corporation but an artist, is kind of shitty and taking what they could possibly need to survive.

By your logic, Disney could take someone's artwork, copy it and make it their own, with no payment, no need to do anything. Said artist could be surviving paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by, or not even surviving paycheck to paycheck, needing medical/financial help, and they're desperately trying to get commissions in order to get it. But hey it's just art and it didn't *steal* the original, right? So Disney shouldn't have to pay or do anything, right? That artist should just get fucked because they put all that work into something, and someone else came along, scooped it up, and just claimed it as their own. Personally I'd rather corporations like Disney didn't exist, but this is the world we currently exist in.

My counter is this: what exactly has the artist lost in this situation? Their followers will still know they made the work first, so there’s no loss there. People who would have found it will still find it, and if it’s posted online they’ll have proof to show those people that they made it first. It’s not like the copy entirely replaces the original, both exist and the original will remain exactly as popular as it would have been anyway.

But, there’s an added aspect. These days, if a corporation steals fanart or something, they get massively called out. The company takes a reputation hit and the original artist gains a massive following from the publicity the drama produces. This is, unequivocally, a loss for the copier and a win for the original artist, no copyright law needed. Now, why exactly do you think this wouldn’t happen in a world without copyright law? Companies may try to steal works, but they will basically always get called out on it. And even if they didn’t, they’re still introducing a large amount of people to that specific kind of art, people who may very well search for more of the same and find that original artist. And even if only something like 1 in 1000 people do this, those large corporations regularly get 10s-100s of thousands of engagements, which means 10s-100s of people redirected to this artist.

To follow up on that: is this not a huge gain for the community? If it’s art good enough that a large corporation is willing to associate it with themselves, that means it’s art that will enrich many people who see it. This would have been art only a few people saw, but now it will reach several orders of magnitude more people who may be inspired or encouraged. Imagine if the Mona Lisa, or any other incredibly influential work, had been made by a tiny artist with a negligible following. Would it not be far preferable if a larger artist, one capable of corralling a large audience, displayed it among their own work? Would that not be far, far better for the entire art world? Do you not wonder how much work, how many cultural shifts have been lost to time because a small artist was too protective of their work and so it died with them?

I should clarify, this still isn’t optimal. In the best case scenario, big corporations would take fan works and display them, but they would credit the original artist. And I personally believe this would be how it would generally go in a world without copyright law, out of fear of reputation hits if nothing else (it’s not like it costs corporations anything to credit). But my argument here is that even in the worst case scenario, where corporations “steal” art with absolute abandon, there is still no real loss to the original artist, in fact in most cases there is gain, and there is always gain for the wider community. There is literally zero downside to this scenario for anyone but the corporations themselves, who will lose their stranglehold over IP.

[falloutnewvegastransedmygender]

I swear if Hazbin/Helluva gets people to realize how stupid copyright is.

[magichats]

Man it really is a shame that as of this date (July 5th, 2023) that Cookie's Bustle is all but scrapped off the web at large.

There's only two videos discussing it directly (and that more about the take downs and not directly the game itself), with everything else turning up no results.

I know some people on twitter were thinking that it was for some sort of relaunch, but at this point I really don't think it's some sort of modern reboot.

This is really a bummer for game preservation. Also a bummer as a person who just likes weird obscure games.

[ravenmold]

Listen tumblr artists I love and respect you. Which is why I'm asking you to please - PLEASE - put your name or tumblr on any pic or piece of art you post here. Even if it's a doodle. And not in the post, in the IMAGE. If you had a hand in its creation, your name deserves to be on there. Protect your own intellectual property, but also make it easier for people across the web to find you, because chances are that it's gonna end up somewhere else.

Also you're making it through this year so well so far! You deserve a little treat

[art-that-fucks-you-up-tournament]

Do you guys know about creative commons? (if yes, ignore me :] )

I'm just asking, because (especially with that copyright restrictions apply) many museum, educational, and general open access sources use creative commons guidelines, which are a more permissive type of copyright restrictions that can be individualized per item. Many allow for reproduction as long as you aren't profiting from the work. I assume this tumblr isn't monetizing anything lol, but I wanted to make sure that you guys knew about that because I personally did not know about CC until a few years ago and copyright stuff can be difficult to navigate

To be extra clear: Mod Salix actually does have a degree in museum studies, and specifically checked both websites for information on reuse. Neither has anything about CC licensing, and the one has a specific page about copyright that not only specifies reuse, but states "You’re encouraged to use images as a way of remembering and sharing your experience of our exhibitions, but the reproduction of portraits as commercial items or the use of the images in a way that would cause offence is strictly prohibited.", and I personally am uncomfortable suggesting that pitting Maori art in a tumblr poll bracket is absolutely non offensive. Neither does it really fall under "remembering and sharing your experience of our exhibition," exactly.

At last check, we had 219 works submitted. We will already be cutting a fair number of works for much more petty reasons than "bothering an important cultural institution for an extremely ridiculous tumblr poll", but technically, yes we could bother them. We have no guarantee that they'll get back to us, much like the three (of six) tumblr artists have not gotten back to us yet, nor would I want to waste their time on it.

For the record: those two pieces I will be specifically linking after the first bracket is up because I do want to share these Maori artists that have been shared with us.

this feels a lot like you're going "ethically it's FINE because they didn't post it on tumblr yet" and that attitude got a lot of pixiv artists to delete their pixivs because people kept reposting even with credit. These two specific submissions both have specifically stated restrictions on reuse, and that made me check on both their restrictions and that made me go "hey wait, actually, ethically, this is entirely feelsbadman". Reposting is not just the nitty-gritty of removing attribution, because there are posts circulating on this site where someone has reposted it and left a "credit to artist" but no one ever goes and looks at that artist because they'd rather recirculate the repost and the repost has an order of magnitude more notes than any of the original artist/posts ever did.

Also, I live in a place that already does not respect indigenous rights enough, so I'm a little.... touchy about respecting other cultures' indigenous peoples, and if they say "ask permission before using for something that might be offensive", I'm going to actually stop to think about it a little bit.

[ferallantern]

can’t sleep so I’m reading ultimate spidey

[solarpunkani]

I think one of the first Solarpunk-adjacent medias I ever engaged with was the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise and I'm simultaneously being sarcastic but also 100% serious.

Raise your hand if you want me to talk about it.

[sjwallin]

My Hot Takes from the Copyright and A.I.: Music and Sound Recordings Listening Session

Today the Library of Congress held the final of its Spring listening sessions on the use of artificial intelligence to generate works in creative fields; today’s session was focused specifically on the impact of generative AI in the world of music and sound recordings. I’m so glad I sat in on these two panels! There was a lot discussed, of course, but I figured I’d lay out my biggest take-aways…

[orangerosebush]

Prime example of screenshots of articles being less-than-ideal means of understanding news. "Every single one [sic] needs to adapt to this immediately".

Yet in the first paragraph of the screenshotted article, it is explicitly stated that "the [PBR] design [incorporated in the HTR-PM plant] can’t be adapted to existing nuclear reactors around the world, but could be a blueprint for future ones".

PBRs, or pebble-bed reactors (PBR), are a relatively "new" reactor design in which a large number of low-energy-density “pebbles” are used as fuel; these "pebbles" contain a small amount of uranium surrounded by graphite, which can slow the nuclear reaction and withstand high temperatures in crises. According to the article, necessarily, "old" reactors cannot adapt to PBR design, and research is still being conducted into optimizing PBR design (such as the referenced work of Zhe Dong and other researchers at Tsinghua University)

Below is the text of the article, as well as a link to an unpaywelled version of the article. Additionally, I have attached a citation of the paper by Zhang et al. 2024 ("Loss-of-cooling tests to verify inherent safety feature in the world’s first HTR-PM nuclear power plant") wherein the pebble-bed reactor (PBR) design and a loss-of-cooling test are explored in more detail.

(Also, "they intentionally turned off the cooling and the reactor cooled itself down, no problem"...

1) Vastly oversimplifies the tests

and 2) Doesn't do justice to the effort undertaken by Zhe Dong and other researchers on this project.

Conversely, here is how the cooling tests are described in Zhang et al. 2024.

"To confirm the presence of inherent safe reactors on a commercial scale, two natural cooling tests were performed on the #1 reactor module on August 13, 2023 and the #2 reactor module on September 1, 2023. During the entirety of the tests, the reactor modules were naturally cooled down without emergency core cooling systems or any cooling system driven by power. Although the feasibility of realizing inherent safety has been shown by the safety tests carried out on the test reactors of 45-MWt AVR17 and the 10-MWt HTR-10.18 The inherent safety at a commercial scale, such as the 200-MWt reactor power level, has not been verified before because the major bottleneck of decay-heat removal is managing the power level."

Paper citation:

Zhang, Z., Dong, Y., Li, F., Huang, X., Zheng, Y., Dong, Z., Zhang, H., Chen, Z., Li, X., 2024. Loss-of-cooling tests to verify inherent safety feature in the world’s first HTR-PM nuclear power plant. Joule. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2024.06.014

News article text:

"A large-scale nuclear power station in China is the first in the world to be completely impervious to dangerous meltdowns, even during a full loss of external power. The design can’t be adapted to existing nuclear reactors around the world, but could be a blueprint for future ones.

All modern nuclear power plants rely on powered cooling mechanisms to take excess heat away from reactors or, in the event of an emergency, human intervention to shut the plant down. Water or liquid carbon dioxide are often used as coolants, but these typically rely on external power supplies to function.

If these systems fail, then the reactors can become too hot and lead to explosions or overheating, causing the plant to literally melt from the excess heat. This was one factor in the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011, where a loss of both standard and emergency power systems led to a meltdown.

A relatively new kind of reactor design, called a pebble-bed reactor (PBR), has the advantage of being passively safe, which means that if power for cooling systems is lost, then the reactor can safely shut down by itself. Rather than use highly energy-dense fuel rods like many other reactor designs, PBRs use a large number of low-energy-density “pebbles” as fuel, which contain a small amount of uranium surrounded by graphite. This can help slow the nuclear reaction and withstand high temperatures.

This lower energy density means any excess heat will be spread out over all of the pebbles, and so will be easier to transport away using natural cooling processes like conduction and convection, says Zhe Dong at Tsinghua University in China.

While small working prototype reactors have been built in Germany and China, no full-scale PBRs have been shown to work and be passively safe – until now. Dong and his colleagues have demonstrated that the system works with a full-scale nuclear plant, the High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor Pebble-Bed Module (HTR-PM) in Shandong.

“Up to now, every commercial reactor except HTR-PM has had an emergency core cooling system,” says Dong. “However, due to the inherent safety, there is no emergency core cooling system in the HTR-PM plant.”

To test this, which became commercially operational in December 2023, Dong and his team switched off both modules of HTR-PM as they were operating at full power, then measured and tracked how the temperature of different parts of the plant went down afterwards. They found that HTR-PM naturally cooled and reached a stable temperature within 35 hours after the power was removed.

It is rare to be able to test a working power plant fully by removing its cooling power supply, says Mamdouh El-Shanawany, formerly at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Because the emergency cooling system doesn’t depend on any complicated technology, it is very safe, he says.

Other countries might want to look into adapting this technology for their own future reactors, but we will first need more extensive measurements about the plant as it cools down, such as pressure and higher-resolution readings, says El-Shanawany."

[cappurrccino]

going grocery shopping first thing in the morning before work always sounds like a way better idea when it is not first thing in the morning before work

[miyakuli]

Same anon that asked about spam reports earlier, I meant like inactive Tumblr accounts

Hi again! well I think the staff does not distinguish between an active or inactive blog, as long as the flag is validated as spam, the post will be deleted. And normally, a blog is deleted after several validated reports, so yes.

[empress-leo]

AI art from the perspective of someone who's degree was based around AI

I realise not many people are going to read this, but want to talk about this because I both need somewhere to collect my thoughts an somewhere to comment on things.

Firstly I want to say, if your gut reaction to seeing the phrase "AI Art" is to get angry and blurt out "AI art isn't real art" or something to that effect then you really should read this, and I would ask you read all of it before you make a comment like that.

Now I'm not generally prone to sharing personal details online, but just to mention some things about my background. My paternal Grandparents are retired Art teachers and professional artists. My grandad in particular taught me how to draw. My father is a computer scientist and has done a lot of work in the field of AI. Myself, I studied art and computer science up to the end of High-School, and for my undergraduate degree I did Computer Science and AI. My entire family is either in the field of Art (My cousins run a firm of lawyers for artists and own a gallery) or computer science (My Uncle worked with banking systems mergers before he retired). It is because of these interactions with Art and Computer science all my life that I consider my opinion on AI to hold a slight bit more weight to it than the layman's.

First off, AI's are tools, no more or less than the paintbrush or digital pen, and just as you cannot ask paintbrushes or digital pens to be responsible for the art they create, nor do I think you can blame the AI. Now what I do think is that you can absolutely blame the user creating Art with the AI. If a user puts a prompt into the AI and selects an image to upload to a social media and pretends they drew it themselves, that is unethical at best. It takes no more skill to do that than a toddler scribbling lines on a paper with crayons. However technically, both are still art as the art (AI creation/Crayon Scribble) was made by someone (User/Toddler) with a medium (AI program/Crayons). Calling AI Art 'not real art' will have major implications for the abstractionists or surrealists, fields which are still considered to be art despite the amount of physical effort that goes into them. Of course the debate about what makes something 'art' is centuries old at best, and if you're not careful with your definitions then people who you didn't intend to be caught up in your campaigns will be. I would posit that rather than calling AI art 'not real art' it should be called 'low-effort Art' instead.

Secondly, I would like to address the 'AI art is stealing' complaint (this section will get a bit philosophical). Now whilst it's true that an AI model is built on hundreds of thousands of sample images (some of the modern ones use millions) the more images get sampled, the harder it is to recognise who the artists that were sampled were. My question to you would be where is the line drawn between an AI sampling hundreds of thousands of images to produce a piece of work, and an artist training themselves on previous artists works and references until they can confidently produce their own work? In the 19th Century the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the most prestigious art school in the world at the time, had a curriculum which involved copying drawings and paintings from other artists. The students were taught to copy the master's methods of producing light and shading and other techniques. Can it not be argued that this is a more streamlined version of what AI art is doing? And remember, many artists are able to be described as being 'influenced' by certain other artists, because the hallmarks and styles of one artist can clearly be seen in the other's works. One of the biggest complaints with AI art is that it doesn't reference the artists it's sourced from, but under plagiarism law, if you cannot identify any particular part of the work the was expressly copied from your art, then you cannot sue someone for plagiarism. Plagiarism law is doubly complicated in the realm of fine art, as copying a work but labelling it as a copy doesn't necessarily count as plagiarism in most cases, whereas copying an artist's style but not any specific piece then labelling it as theirs and selling it does count as stealing/fraud in most cases. (The specifics vary and I don't have time to get into all the nuances of Art Law here, but it should give you some idea of the difficulty in regulating it.) Now obviously there's a difference when you can clearly tell that the AI art was 'inspired' by some human artist's work. I see this most often in programs that are designed to take a 2D image and make a 3D model out of it. In those situations yes, the AI artist (especially if they're trying to pass it off as their own work) should be called out for their scumbaggery, though again, whether or not it really counts as stealing is dubious.

Regarding copyright, I don't think art produced solely through the medium of AI should count for copyright. Now whilst I acknowledge the existence of the Naruto case, I don't think it's the best long-term solution for copyright law. (specifically because classifying all art done as human or non-human with non-humans not being able to hold copyright will have serious implications for transhumanists and any theoretically sentient aliens that might have developed their own cultures) In my opinion a better solution would be to say that unless a piece of art is reproducible by the artist, then copyright should be withheld until an artist can reproduce the image (with about 5% tolerance). Of course the implication this has is for photographers. If you're taking a photograph of something like a thunderstorm then it's nearly impossible to recreate that image exactly. I admit I don't have a perfect solution for this, though one thing I can imagine is if the photographer takes two photos, then the metadata will show that the two photographs are technically different, but still look the same. Of course this wouldn't work for non-digital photographs, which is why I said it's not a perfect solution.

I would also like to propose two hypothetical situations, and whether or not the AI art would be considered unethical in those contexts.

A community of artists get together and produce enough works of art that they are able to create an AI art Generator based solely on their works. No works from outside the community are ever used in the AI training and every artist in the community agrees to let their works be used for the AI training. Any time a piece of art is created with the AI, part of the metadata includes a list of every artist in the community. Is producing art with this specific AI program still unethical?

You have trained an AI program to produce art based purely off your own work. No other artist has influenced the AI program. Now, anytime you get asked for a commission you simply ask the AI program to create the art for you. Is this unethical?

Now these hypotheticals may be unrealistic, but that's the point of hypotheticals. And frankly I don't think they're that unrealistic.

Lastly, I would like to remind people that the creators of these AI systems did not intend to create this problem. The reason these AI systems were created in the first place (not counting Midjourney and programs like that) was either to test theories about computing, to see if we could create AI that could recognise things we couldn't, and frankly just to see if we could. I can 100% promise you that no-one working on these projects wanted to harm you or your livelihood. To show an example of this let me share with you a short story about one of my friends and classmates who now works for a company that produces system to create AI art.

He initially joined the company right out of university. He didn't apply for the job, a member of the recruiting team came around to see his end of year project during a fair and after a short talk, hired him on the spot (unusual but not unheard of). The company he then went to work for was building AIs for medical imaging, hoping to create an AI that could recognise cancers and other abnormalities faster/better than humans could. He was doing this for 5 years and they were getting fairly far with the prototypes. It had been successfully used to detect cancer that a doctor had missed. They were working on creating a streamlined interface and controls so it could be used with minimal training and (hopefully) minimal understanding of the English language. They were hoping that by supplying this product to third-world countries that have less skilled doctors, they could dramatically increase the detection rate of cancers and thus survivability. They were being funded by a few wealthy backers plus some research grants. Then COVID hit. In order to just keep their staff employed the CEO made the descision to make the company go public. Within days, 51% of their stock had been purchased by a 'serial entrepreneur' and started to make changes. He cancelled the medical detection technology, and instead forced the company to start work on generative systems. (AI Art, AI writing, etc.) He was planning on selling it as a service to mega-corps like Disney so they could cut back on writing staff. However it was taking too long to implement and so in order to recoup the costs hey dismantled the company, selling off computers and data and laying off all the staff. My friend is okay with this. He hated working for the tech bro and hated working on generative systems. (He's currently trying to rebuild the medical detection system with the data he has at the moment).

My point of the story is that it's not always easy to change fields, especially with something as specialised as AI development. I would also like to make it clear (if it wasn't) that the skills needed to build a system to make AI art are the same ones needed to build medical imaging systems, so don't go hating and brigading against anyone involved in AI.

I suppose my overall point would be that AI systems are far more complex and multi-faceted than simply "AI art bad", and anyone trying to get you to rally behind actions based one that one statement alone probably either doesn't know what they're talking about, or are trying to get you to do something much more malicious than simply protect artist's rights. Treat every case you see individually. Some use of AI art is entirely harmless. An artist using it to get a bit of inspiration, or someone sharing some funny images with friends is all completely harmless. Don't just look at the people involved with AI art and immediately hate, that's a horrible way to live and only serves to divide us as a species.