#i'm not even arguing for or against copyright this is just ethics

[bixels]

I agree; we live in a wildly different public consciousness than the average person. I'll hear about my uncle generating an AI image of his family as the Avengers for Facebook and will say, "that's fun," because I know he's having fun with his family.

But (in response to folks in the notes, not OP) let's not pretend like artists are being unreasonable when we act frustrated or angry. AI memes, fine, whatever, but AI art is not harmless. It's not a topic that artists are removed from and are forcefully inserting ourselves into, we've been unwillingly involved since day one. We know that behind each piece of AI art is a real artist who didn't want this to happen. I have friends whose entire art styles and OCs––fucking OCs––were ripped into a image database, then sold as prompts on AI marketplaces. We have a reason to be mad. Our anger may be counterproductive, but is it apt.

Like it or not, AI art is intrinsically tied to labor politics. It isn't a online-only ideological mini culture war, it's a real problem that's happening in real life to real people.It's just slow enough and quiet enough to not make any big eye-catching waves. It only seems "online-only" because that's where the majority of people have the easiest, most direct contact with the artists who are affected and raising discourse. Just because discourse is happening online doesn't mean it's inconsequential in real life. It doesn't seem real to your average person because art is widely perceived as a "get a real job" hobby, not a viable career that's tied to labor politics or a passion that deserves respect or protection. Take it from an artist who has the great fortune (/s) of attending a tech school. Someone who doesn't know about this and ends up getting blasted will think you're insane. But let's not pretend like getting angry about people fueling an unfair situation that's affecting our livelihoods is insane too.

the thing about ai art is that to most normal, not-overly-online people, its just a little internet gimmick for them to play around with, akin to flash games or funny videos. if you see someone trying it and you come into their inbox telling them they are a horrible person who wants to starve artists, without first explaining the hundred tumblr soundbites and mini culture wars youve immersed yourself in to get to that conclusion, they are probably going to think you are fucking insane

[what-eats-owls]

This info was of some surprise to folks on Bluesky, so I'm going to repeat it here in light of the sheer number of "the Internet Archive was an uncomplicated good apart from this one weird move" posts I've seen...

Are we all aware that IA has been gradually pushing the dogma that generative AI is a net public good, and has been feeding books, music, and video into AI?

This article is about how IA is actively using AI in their archives. It's an interview with Brewster Kahle, founder and Board Chair of IA. Choice quote:

This is the blog post about the comments they submitted to the US copyright office arguing against any new copyright regulations for AI. Some more choice quotes:

You can guess how I feel about framing the writers and artists whose work BUILT generative AI as "workers" who just need to be "retrained."

Last year they hosted a zoom panel called "Generative AI Meets Open Culture: Opportunities, Challenges & Ethical Considerations." Multiple visuals were AI-generated art, the panelists were asked to avoid discussing copyright. It's an hourlong panel and I couldn't find a transcript, so I skipped around to see if anyone addressed the elephant in the room. I found at ~32 minutes, a vague gesture at acknowledging it wasn't great if you tried to replicate an artist's style, but fine if you just wanted generic art.

(If anyone finds a more concrete statement in there, and/or a transcript, I'd love to know! The tenor I got was overall "look at how cool these tools are and let's talk about how they're a public good.")

At the end of January 2024, they hosted "Public Domain Day," including a panel on incorporating Generative AI in art. They invited two artists who utilize Generative AI, and a publisher whose books go immediately into the public domain. More quotes from their own writeup:

This was an event in celebration of public domain, but as far as I can tell, they've more or less avoided even acknowledging that creators are actively being harmed by Gen AI. Again, if anyone can find a clearer statement, please share it.

Another wrinkle in this is that Kahle, on behalf of the Internet Archive, sued the US Government in 2004, challenging the law that automatically granted and renewed copyright to a creator. Previously, copyright was opt-in only, had to be regularly renewed by the holder, and cost money to do so. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2007, but was dismissed. (Scroll down to Docket 07-189, Kahle v Mukasey, for court filings.)

To be clear, this is the law that means you automatically own your own work. It's not a shock that Kahle's suit failed. But if Kahle had won, artists who didn't pay to secure and maintain copyright over their work would be SOL right now in the lawsuits against generative AI image and text scrapers.

So yeah. My tiny violin for IA continues to shrink.

[aftokrator-official]

Screenshotting because it's not rebloggable anymore (omitting OP's name for that reason) but this post - more specifically the replies to it - have been bothering me since I saw it a day or so ago and I finally decided to come back and engage lmao. (Source link from OP)

OP's totally right. OpenAI is a garbage company with garbage business practices but this is not the way to do this, people. I'm glad y'all have so much faith in the legal system here, but I don't, and if this goes through it's not going to harm the entities you want it to harm. believe me.

(i am not against AI when used ethically but i think that is a moot point here bc i do not believe OpenAI is an ethical developer of AI tech. anyway)

Here's the "rebuttal" that has been irritating me so much I couldn't leave it alone:

THIS IS NOT REMOTELY TRUE.

First of all, unless I've missed something big, OpenAI has never disclosed the contents of the proprietary dataset they use to train their LLMs. We have no idea whether ChatGPT was trained on George RR Martin's books or not. Presumably, neither does George RR Martin. So all we have to go on is that ChatGPT "knows" characters and details from ASOIAF. Okay.

The problem is that ASOIAF is a massively popular series with some massively popular multimedia adaptations and spinoffs, and processing the text of the novels is far from the only way ChatGPT could have learned to produce those details.

Let's try a little experiment.

GPT-2 is an open source model released by OpenAI when they were just starting out. It works more or less the same way as ChatGPT and its ilk, just on a vastly smaller scale. It's much, much more limited, but the underlying algorithms work on the same concepts. So, what would GPT-2 give us if we ask it for a summary of a hypothetical GRRM novel?

I typed up the first paragraph here, and GPT-2 gave me the rest. (GPT-2 isn't a chatbot, but works more like autocomplete, so I didn't prompt it directly.)

Okay, I have a feeling that plot doesn't make much sense as a prequel, but hey, it's AI (and an elderly one at that), it's not going to be particularly good at this left to its own devices. And look, it DID pull out a few details specific to ASOIAF - Jon Snow, the Night Watch, the Wildlings. So case closed, right? GPT-2 must have had ASOIAF novels in its training data too, just like its nasty little great-grandchild.

Except we know what was in GPT-2's dataset - it was trained on a 40GB corpus of data scraped from publicly-available web pages, specifically pages linked from Reddit. We don't have all the exact texts that were used, but we DO have the top 1000 domains contained in the dataset. All of which is a hell of a lot more information than we have on ChatGPT.

What websites are ranked #75 and #160 in the list of 1000 domains? Why, it's Fanfiction.net and AO3. Hmm, I wonder where it learned about the very popular fictional characters from George RR Martin's novels! (Certainly not just from fanfiction, either - sites like IMDB and Wikia were ranked much higher in the list of sources, and entertainment news and fan wiki articles would also contain a lot of text about ASOIAF/GoT.)

You can certainly argue that using these websites as training data is also unethical or should be illegal - but that's not what's being argued in this lawsuit. As far as I know, ChatGPT has never spat out a perfect recreation (or even a vaguely paraphrased recreation) of any of GRRM's writing, so the only evidence for violation of his copyright in this case is the generation of what is essentially a machine-created derivative work. That is really, really worrying, even if you don't think the machine should be allowed to do that. I'm not a lawyer, just a fanfic writer and software developer, so I have no idea how legitimate the legal argument here is... but it's going down a road that is very dangerous for fandom, whether you believe it is or not.

[ursbearhug]

One of the main reason I no longer try to argue with the folk who purchase The Antisemitic Fear Mongering the game, is because it's bascially talking a wall.

Every possible argument you make they strawman like their life depends on it (which it really does because the moment they realise they did something wrong is the end of all, instead of - ya know - apologise and go on do better) and the argument they do understand, will unlogic out to you until you die from brain malfunction. Like in Sims 3 when you asked another sim to divide 0 and they just set ablaze and die.

Examples? "Hey by purchasing the Fear Mongerer the game you help a billionaire racist and xenophobic trans-exlusionist ruin lives of milion other people" and they hit you with "well, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" (strawman; they are aware that your argument is unbeatable because it warrants 5 minutes long Google search to prove that, yes, JK Rowling is indeed that horrible of a shell of human being, therefore they take the "purchase" part and decide to fight this bit because you cannot refute them)

Or the new one I see a lot on Tumblr; "well, I donated 3x the cost of the game to "Poor organisation trying their best to shelter trans folk" so my purchase of the Racist and Anti-Semitic narrative the game is justified". No, it's not. Even if every buyer, somehowly, manages to donate triple the amount of games price, we're talking about what? 600 per buyer? To a lowly organisation scrambling for money because they fight against something that most people would rather look away from? Versus a millionaire author collecting royalties? This is also a moment where I really want everyone to step into academic field and try to write 1 (one) paper that would go through the Copy Right program without a single problem on their first try and maybe, just maybe, they'd realise how royalties, copyright and copyright theft works. Also I really, really want people to understand it's not The Witcher situation; where the author gives away the rights to the mark. Even if we ignore (which is pretty hard to do) JK Rowling's words about "folk who helps Harry Potter, help me" (or whatever the fuck) and treat that just as a "I don't want to feel horrible so I'm saying words", she still racks up obscene cash from people who's reading capabilities didn't evolve past 1st grader or are so hung up on their childhood and unable to let go. Bitches will make fun of people for buying and being invested in Pokemon and have "uwu I'm such a ravenclaw" in their profile bio and not a single spark between their last remaining braincells would be ignited in the spawn of this event. You're not ravenclaw, you're just an imbecile.

And even when you go neck deep into the issue of the game being antisemitic and not actually transphobic, they'll still manage to use their lack of common sense which can and will numb you into state of unconsciousness.

It would be easier, and better, if they just straight up admit they don't care and would rather play the poor (not really considering the price tag) man's version of Dark Souls but with wands and magic and Harry Potmaker veneer. I would have lesser beef with that because at least we're being transparent and honest, instead of making weird hills to die on that make zero sense and make all the logic roll in its grave. Like, really, just say you'd rather pay for this game and play it with 0 critical thinking involved and be done with it. It will not lesser the bullying some folks are willing to go with, but it will lessen the headache you're inflicting with your absolute lack of awareness and empathy.

[half-man-half-lime]

Okay, just gonna dump all my AI art thoughts under the cut I guess

Just to get it out of the way, we should not be building a world where it isn't possible to become an artist and also eat. If AI art is a threat to that, it's a problem and needs to be hampered in the short term. That takes top priority.

That said, UBI isn't gonna pop up overnight and there are massive roadblocks to that ever happening, we may not see it even in the next few decades. The practical truth is AI art is currently a threat to career art.

But, we should be aiming for a society where most or all work is automated and people don't need a job to survive.

AI art isn't literally collaging other art together, but the ethics are still murky. The fact that it's derivative of other art doesn't inherently make it any different from human-made art, humans also learn to draw by practicing, learning patterns, and imitating other artists.

There's a few issues there- one, the line between art taking inspiration from someone and outright photocopying and collaging stuff together didn't use to be a distinction that anyone paid attention to. It was never a gradient until new technology came along and changed how we define artistic craft, and trying to re-frame our worldview around that is tricky.

Like I said, that line is now a gradient, and at some point along that axis, it makes sense to draw a line and say "this level of similarity is definitely some sort of copyright violation. It's easy to look at some AI-generated art and see why it's scary in its detail and quality, and when it derives that much from other artists, it's hard to say "no, this isn't utilizing someone else's work without their consent or repayment".

I could be wrong, but isn't literally making collages of other people's art perfectly legal and/or socially acceptable? That's another tricky line to walk. You could say there's a difference between making a transformative work of someone else's art and trying to imitate or reproduce it, and there's different ways of interpreting that legally vs. philosophically vs. in terms of people's actual intentions.

AI/Neural Network art is a tool, it works in some fundamentally different ways from human artists, and the distinctions there matter when talking about the ethics. These are serious points against it.

Arguably, a tool that makes its own art shouldn't be held to the same moral standards and afforded the same agency as a sentient being. The AI isn't expressing its own personal creativity, it's making art at the behest of the people using it, according to the design of the people who made it and the art it was trained on. You can feasibly argue that certain things a human is allowed to do, i.e. take inspiration from someone else's art, can't be automatically expected of a machine that doesn't have its own artistic goals and sensibilities and relationship with art and artist. I'm not 100% sure on this, but it's an argument that can be made, I guess, if you're trying to parse these ethics out.

As others have said on the major anti-AI posts, an artificial intelligence can't make the same moral judgement as a human making art, and understand what is or isn't acceptable or overreaching in what it pulls from other people's art.

Tech bros are still douchey, a lot of the people who are advocating for it or will be using AI art for their company are doing so from a selfish or harmful perspective.

AI artists aren't artists. Well, in a way they are (see below), but that doesn't put them anywhere near the same level as actual people who make actual art. There's some level of personal expression, but none of the understanding of what's being expressed and how, which is a humongous part of being an artist.

Companies using AI art to replace paid artists and save money have no interest in the ethics of doing so, and likely won't care if they take improper advantage of someone's art without consent unless laws force them to. Let alone drowning out whatever artistic work exists for artists to make a living.

All the tech bro types who accuse artists of being elitist have no fucking idea what they're talking about, and many seem to want the benefits of art divorced from the real and tangible work and skill that went into making it. Wanting to eat and have one's work properly valued isn't elitist.

AI art is real art. Once you're asking if something is "real art" 90% of the time it is. The threshold for that is so very low.

Some of it is ugly, but calling it "soulless" or whatever is stupid. That's such a subjective take, there's plenty of cool or beautiful AI art I've seen. It's derivative, but again, so is literally all of art.

No seriously, most of the ad hominem stuff I've been seeing comes off as petty and Luddite. Like people realized it was a legitimate threat and immediately went to calling all AI art, or even all neural network based software the devil. It's a tool, it doesn't have an inherent moral value beyond how it's used. Artists have legitimate arguments against this stuff that relates to practical reality and harmful consequences, and going for the nuts instead feels childish and close-minded.

I think AI art is cool, and want to live in a world where it can exist. I don't know what to tell ya.

The ethical issues and tangible harm of this technology take priority over what I want.

But still, a future where machines can just... make art, it's cool. It's cool to envision a world where you can press a button and then more art suddenly exists. Art is cool and more of it existing is good. I would like to see a future where that can happen without hurting anybody.