I heard a bunch of explanations but most of them seem emotional and aggressive, and while I respect that this is an emotional subject, I can’t really understand opinions that boil down to “theft” and are aggressive about it.
while there are plenty of models that were trained on copyrighted material without consent (which is piracy, not theft but close enough when talking about small businesses or individuals) is there an argument against models that were legally trained? And if so, is it something past the saying that AI art is lifeless?
AI feels like a Lovecraftian horror to me. It’s trying to look authentic, but it’s wrong on a fundemental level. Nothing’s the right shape, nothing’s the right texture, nothing’s consistent, nothing belongs together… But somehow, nobody else has noticed what should be blatantly obvious! And when you try to point it out, you get a hivemind responding that it’s good actually, and you’re just a luddite.
But let’s assume AI stops being awful in a technical sense. It’s still awful in a moral sense.
Artists are poor. That’s a well known sentiment you see a lot and, given how many times I see commission postings, it’s pretty accurate. That artist needs to work to live, and that work is creating art.
AI is deliberately depriving these artists of work in order to give the AI’s owner a quick, low quality substitute. In some cases, it will copy an artist’s style, so you’re deliberately targetting a specific artist because they’re good at their job. And it’s using the artist’s work in order to replace them.
Yes, this. This particular comment best summarises how I feel about the topic.
Why would you need an argument beyond AI art is lifeless?
Because it means nothing to me. sorry to disappoint but I don’t even understand that argument, I saw plenty of AI images that looked full of life to me, so what does that even mean that it is lifeless? Maybe explain it instead of just being condescending about it.
It’s the difference between having a friend, and having an AI friend.
When a human creates art, there is some intent on it, some emotions they felt when they decided the color pallete, the form… The fact that someone created it and that there’s some story behind it gives the piece weight.
Why is an abstract monument created by humans something other humans like to see, and doesn’t happen the same on a landslide? Because there’s a story behind it.
AI art is lifeless because there’s no intent behind it, you don’t appreciate the skill of the author behind it. It’s just prompt mastery and anyone can replicate it, it’s cheap.
It’s like comparing human made sculptures with 3d printed sculptures, if 3d printers could create details and work in big sizes. It’s cheap.
Okay, I guess I just don’t connect to that argument because intent and understanding the artist is rarely a thing I look for in day to day art. 99% of the images I see that make me feel anything do so because of the imagery itself plus sometimes my own experience that might come to mind from it.
As an artist who has had her art stolen before for usage in an AI output, being against any and all art theft is the default and perfectly reasonable standpoint for an artist. On some art websites, AI generated images fall under the rule against art theft. This is because AI models scrape artists’ work without their consent, and the output of a prompt is reliant on the amalgamation of the aforementioned scraped artworks. I’ve personally seen some AI images in which the mangled remains of artists’ signatures are still visible.
The best analogy I can offer to explain why this is theft is that typing in a prompt into an AI image generator is like commissioning an artist to draw something for you, except the artist turns out to be someone who traces people’s art and picks stolen artwork to trace from to match the prompt, and then claiming that it was you who created the image.
This is by far the most important argument here.
Art is largely about feeling and emotion, but you insist on rejecting arguments that are arguing about emotion.
Interesting.
For professional artists, AI art is taking away their livelihood. Many of them already lived in precarious conditions in a tough job market before and this is only getting worse now, with companies increasingly relying on cheaper AI art for things like concept art etc.
For me, as a hobbyist and art consumer, the main issue is AI art invading “my” spaces. I want to look at Human-made art and have no interest in AI-generated content whatsoever. But all the platforms are getting flooded with AI content and all the filters I set to avoid it barely help. Many users on these platforms roleplay as real artists as well and pretend their art isn’t AI, which annoys me quite a bit. I don’t mind if people want to look at AI art, but they should leave me alone with it and don’t force it down my throat.
When a comedian becomes good enough at doing a Stephen Hawking impression, you don’t suddenly expect them to start publishing science studies.
It’s a form of coattail riding. It’s no different from tracing.
If you worked hard, learned a craft, and spent countless hours honing it and I took your work without asking you and used it to enrich myself and my talentless tech bro buddies, how would you feel?
It would suck, but I wouldn’t blame others for enjoying a service that they perceive as convenient. Of course I would blame you for theft/piracy, as I think artists should against illegally trained models.
You don’t make LLMs with the enormous amount of training data they require to work well without theft/piracy.
Are you starting to understand why people are upset about this?
So hear me out… I think AI could be financially very helpful to artists, while giving them a chance to do more meaningful work. Businesses buy a ton of stock photos, graphics and art. An artist could create a library of original digital pieces (they probably already have it) and use that for the source of new AI generated digital content, which in turn would go back into the source library. This reduces the cost/time associated with soulless stock/business content, but positions the artist to maintain a revenue stream. With the extra time, the artist could work on their preferred pieces or be commissioned to do one-offs.
But why would they do that when they can just generate the content, no artist required?
Because it is not as good, doesn’t have a consistent style (needed for branding), and may put the business at risk of law suits. So, buying stock images is preferred.
It doesnt matter if its half the quality if its 1% of the price. Heck, even 0.1% of the price
I do a fair amount of stock images purching, and the stance of the businesses I work with is that it isn’t worth the risk of suit and embarrassment to get a slightly cheaper image that isn’t as good. It might not be universally true, but that has been my experience at F500 companies.
There are a lot of local businesses that I could immediately tell had ai images on their website. Smaller shops, that probably also dont know the negative connotation with ai, or just dont care
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Think of AI creations as being like the TV dinners of the creative world. Is it cuisine? No. Is it productive? Not very much. Is it wrongful to make/eat? Not technically, and I’m not one to cancel, but even someone who isn’t a part of the backlash would rank it below the alternatives.
I think as long as all the training data and the results are public and free to use and modify there is no moral problem beyond artist livelihood which is sad but just a part of life. Jobs have come and gone for as long as humans exist, its something we have to accept long term.
So far artists themselves are still very good at catching even high quality AI pictures tho. AI models produce something that only looks like human art on the surface, but it still misses lots of things. In many cases it wont replace existing art because often the human and the story behind art is what makes people appreciate it.
