I used to be a very popular and successful collage artist (I’m now an illustrator, I like painting more), and my work has been copied by AI. However, I don’t really care. In fact, I was musing once the idea of licensing everything under the CC-BY license. I don’t mind if AI copies my stuff, because if eventually this democratizes art (as it has already), all the better. Yes, these AI belong to corporations, but if they’re easy to access, or free to use, all the better. I want people to extend what I did, and remix it. I don’t want to be remembered as me, as a singular artist, that somehow I emerged from the void. Because I didn’t. EVERY artist is built on top of their predecessors, and all art is a remix. That’s the truth that other artists don’t wanna hear because it’s all about their ego.
Nobody stops you to be an artist. You can still have a job that is still alive today, AND be an artist in your own free time. As I mentioned, I was a very successful collage artist (NYTimes pick for best book cover, lots of commissions, lots of print sales etc). I decided to leave the surrealness of collage behind because I enjoyed children’s illustrations more. Guess what, I don’t make a dime with my illustrations. I’ve spent $15k on art supplies in 5 years and I made $1k back. But that doesn’t stop me from painting nearly EVERY DAY. I share my work online, and whoever likes it, likes it. I don’t expect sales anymore. Be it because it’s not a popular look, or because of AI. It doesn’t matter to me, I still paint daily.
The issue isn’t ego from any artists I’ve talked to. The issue is that most enjoy DOING their art for a living, and AI threatening their ability to make a living doing the thing they love, by actively taking their work and emulating it.
Add to that, that no one seems to believe AI does a better job than a trained artist, and it also threatens to lower the quality bar at the top end.
Personally I think that if AI is free to use and any work done by AI cannot be covered by copyright (due to being trained on people’s art against their will), then I don’t have an issue with it.
If society benefits from the democratization of art/books/etc then it’s not a loss, it’s a win for everyone. There were many jobs in the past that were lost because technology made them obsolete. Being a commissioned artist is one of these professions. However, there IS still going to be a SMALL niche for human-made original artworks (not made on ipads). But that’d be a niche. And no one stopping anyone from doing art, be it a profession or not. That’s the beauty of art. If you were to be a plumber, and robots took your job, you’d have trouble to do it as a hobby, since it would require a lot of sinks and pipes to play around, and no one would care. But with art, you can do it on the cheap, and people STILL like your stuff, EVEN if they won’t buy it anymore.
If you can’t live off of doing something, you cannot dedicate very much time to it and not everyone will have a fulfilling life doing what they want on only a hobby basis.
It is not to the benefit of everyone, if most people in that sector lose their jobs they’ve spent all their working life striving to master. Artist still do commissioned work today.
If there is only only going to be a small niche of people able to do it, it will displaced all the rest of the people currently working in that industry. In which case AI is literally stopping people from doing art for a living, if they can get paid to do it.
People who followed their idea for a fulfilling life
I don’t know about you, but I want AI to do the tasks in my life that prevents me from living a fulfilling life. I don’t want it to do the things that I would have made my life fulfilling for me.
I think we might be coming at this from a different angle. You seem to think only about whether art will survive, whereas I’m thinking of the artists.
AI generated content cannot be copyrighted because it is not the product of creativity, but the product of generative computing.
This article is about a lawsuit that sounds in unjust enrichment, not copyright. Unjust enrichment is an equitable claim, not a legal claim, and it’s based on a situation in which one party is enriched at the expense of another, unjustly. If an AI company is taking content without permission, using it to train its model, and then profiting off its model without having paid or secured any license from the original artists, that seems pretty unjust to me.
If you’re at all interested in how the law is going to shake out on this stuff, this is a case to follow.
But what about models built on content licensed under things like CC BY-SA?
Not an issue either, my copied works were fully copyrighted. I wanted them to be cc-by, but I never really relicenced them, too much work for 1500 works.
Lmao, cope harder. You’re being replaced like the rest of us 🤣
Ok, dumb question time. I’m assuming no one has any significant issues, legal or otherwise, with a person studying all Van Gogh paintings, learning how to reproduce them, and using that knowledge to create new, derivative works and even selling them.
But when this is done with software, it seems wrong. I can’t quite articulate why though. Is it because it takes much less effort? Anyone can press a button and do something that would presumably take the person from the example above years or decades to do? What if the person was somehow super talented and could do it in a week or a day?
Artists who rips off other great works are still developing their talent and skills. They can then go on to use to make original works. The machine will never produce anything original. It is only capable of mixing together things it has seen in its training set.
There is a very real danger that of ai eviscerating the ability for artists to make a living, making it where very few people will have the financial ability to practice their craft day in and day out, resulting in a dearth of good original art.
Dumb question: why do you feel you need to defend billion dollar companies getting even richer off somebody else’s work?
Also Van Gogh’s works are public domain now.
I’m not defending any companies, just thinking out loud, but I supposed I can see if that’s how it reads.
I was just asking myself why it feels wrong when a machine does it vs when a human does it. By your argument, would it be ok if some poor nobody invented and is using this technology vs a billion dollar company? Is that why it feels wrong?
The issue isn’t the final, individual art pieces, it’s the scale. An AI can produce sub-par art quickly enough to threaten the livelyhood of artists, especially now that there is far too much art for anyone to consume and appreciate. AI art can win attention via spam, drowning out human artists.
A generative AIs only purpose is to generate “works”. So it’s only purpose in consuming “work” is to use them as reference. It exists to produce derivative works. Therefore the person feading the original work into the machine is the one making the choice on how that work will be used.
A human can consume a “work” for no other reason but to admire it, be entertained by it, be educated by it, to evoke an emotion and finally to produce another work based on it. Here the consumer of the work is the one deciding how it will be used. They are the ones responsible.
If someone studies Van Gogh and reproduces images, they’re still not making Van Gogh - they’re making their art inspired by Van Gogh. It still has their quirks and qualms and history behind the brush making it unique. If a computer studies Van Gogh and reproduces those images, it’s reproducing Van Gogh. It has no quirks or qualms or history. It’s just making Van Gogh as if Van Gogh was making Van Gogh.
They are copying your intellectual property and digitizing its knowledge. It’s a bit different as it’s PERMANENT. With humans knowledge can be lost, forgotten, or ignored. In these LLMs that’s not an option. Also the skill factor is a big issue imo. It’s very easy to setup an LLM to make AI imagery nowadays.
They are copying. These LLM are a product of their input, and solely a product of their input. It’s why they’ll often directly output their training data. Using more data to train reduces this effect, that’s why all these companies are stealing and getting aggressive in stopping others stealing their data.
Generative AI is incapable of contributing new material, because Generative AI does not sense the world through a unique perspective. So the comparison to creators that incorporate prior artists work is a false comparison. Artists are allowed to incorporate other artists work in the same way that scientists cite other’s work without it being plagiarism.
In art, in science, we stand on the shoulders of giants. AI models do not stand on the shoulders of giants. AI models just replicate the giants. Society has been fooled to think otherwise.
Generative AI is a tool. It is neither a creator nor an artist, any more than paintbrushes or cameras are. The problem arises not with the tool itself but with how it is used. The creativity must come from the user, just like the way Procreate or GIMP or even photography works.
The skill factor is certainly lower than other forms of artistic expression, but that is true of photography vs painting as well.
I am not trying to say all uses of generative AI are art, anymore than every photograph is art. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be a tool to create art, part of the workflow as utilized by someone with a vision willing to take the time to get the end product they want.
Generative AI doesn’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but neither does a camera.
I actually had some thoughts about this and posted this in a similar thread:
First, that artist will only learn from a few handful of artists instead of every artist’s entire field of work all at the same time. They will also eventually develop their own unique style and voice–the art they make will reflect their own views in some fashion, instead of being a poor facsimile of someone else’s work.
Second, mimicking the style of other artists is a generally poor way of learning how to draw. Just leaping straight into mimicry doesn’t really teach you any of the fundamentals like perspective, color theory, shading, anatomy, etc. Mimicking an artist that draws lots of side profiles of animals in neutral lighting might teach you how to draw a side profile of a rabbit, but you’ll be fucked the instant you try to draw that same rabbit from the front, or if you want to draw a rabbit at sunset. There’s a reason why artists do so many drawings of random shit like cones casting a shadow, or a mannequin doll doing a ballet pose, and it ain’t because they find the subject interesting.
Third, an artist spends anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hours practicing. Even if someone sets out expressly to mimic someone else’s style, teaches themselves the fundamentals, it’s still months and years of hard work and practice, and a constant cycle of self-improvement, critique, and study. This applies to every artist, regardless of how naturally talented or gifted they are.
Fourth, there’s a sort of natural bottleneck in how much art that artist can produce. The quality of a given piece of art scales roughly linearly with the time the artist spends on it, and even artists that specialize in speed painting can only produce maybe a dozen pieces of art a day, and that kind of pace is simply not sustainable for any length of time. So even in the least charitable scenario, where a hypothetical person explicitly sets out to mimic a popular artist’s style in order to leech off their success, it’s extremely difficult for the mimic to produce enough output to truly threaten their victim’s livelihood. In comparison, an AI can churn out dozens or hundreds of images in a day, easily drowning out the artist’s output.
And one last, very important point: artists who trace other people’s artwork and upload the traced art as their own are almost universally reviled in the art community. Getting caught tracing art is an almost guaranteed way to get yourself blacklisted from every art community and banned from every major art website I know of, especially if you’re claiming it’s your own original work. The only way it’s even mildly acceptable is if the tracer explicitly says “this is traced artwork for practice, here’s a link to the original piece, the artist gave full permission for me to post this.” Every other creative community writing and music takes a similarly dim views of plagiarism, though it’s much harder to prove outright than with art. Given this, why should the art community treat someone differently just because they laundered their plagiarism with some vector multiplication?
tl;dr: copyright law has always been nonsense designed to protect corporations and fuck over artists+consumers
but now corpo daddy and corpo mommy are fighting, and we need to take sides.
and it’s revealing that copyright law never existed to protect artists, and will continue to not do that, but MUCH more obviously, and all the cucks who whined about free culture violating laws are reaping what they fucking sowed.
- Because it’s not human. We distinguish ourselves in everything, that’s why we think we’re special. The same applies to inventions, e.g. why monkeys can’t have a patent.
- Time. New “products” whether that be art, engineering, science, all take time for humans. So value is created with time, because it creates scarcity and demand.
- Talent. Due to the time factor, talent and practice are desired traits of a human. You mention that a talented human can do something in just a few days that might take someone else years, but it might only take them a few days because they spent years learning.
- Perfection. Striving for perfection is a human experience. A robot doing something perfect isn’t impressive, a human doing something perfect is amazing. Even the most amateur creator can strive for perfection.
Think about paintings vs prints. Paintings are much more valuable because they aren’t created as quickly as the prints are. Even the most amateur artwork is more valuable as a physical creation rather than a copy, like a child’s crayon drawing.
This even applies to digital art because the first instance of something is the most difficult thing to create, everything after that is then just a copy, and yes this does apply to some current Gen AI tech, but very soon that will no longer be the case.
This change from humans asking for something and having other humans create it to humans asking for something and having computers create it is a loss of our humanity, what makes us human.
There’s a simple argument: when a human studies Van Gogh and develops their own style based on it, it’s only a single person with very limited output (they can only paint so much in a single day).
With AI you can train a model on Van Gogh and similar paintings, and infinitely replicate this knowledge. The output is almost unlimited.
This means that the skills of every single human artist are suddenly worth less, and the possessions of the rich are suddenly worth more. Wealth concentration is poison for a society, especially when we are still reliant on jobs for survival.
AI is problematic as long as it shifts power and wealth away from workers.
Just as an interesting “what if” scenario - a human making the effort to stylize Van Gogh is okay, and the problem with the AI model is that it can spit out endless results from endless sources.
What if I made a robot and put the Van Gogh painting AI in it, never releasing in elsewhere. The robot can visualize countless iterations of the piece it wants to make but its only way share it is to actually paint it - much in the same way a human must do the same process.
Does this scenario devalue human effort? Is it an acceptable use of AI? If so does that mean that the underlying issue with AI isn’t that it exists in the first place but that its distribution is what makes it devalue humanity?
*This isn’t a “gotcha”, I just want a little discussion!
It’s an interesting question! From my point of view, “devaluing human effort” (from an artistic perspective) doesn’t really matter - humans will still be creating new and interesting art. I’m solely concerned about the shift in economic power/leverage, as this is what materially affects artists.
This means that if your robot creates paintings with an output rate comparable to a human artist, I don’t really see anything wrong with it. The issue arises once you’re surpassing the limits of the individual, as this is where the power starts to shift.
As an aside, I’m still incredibly fascinated by the capabilities and development of current AI systems. We’ve created almost universal approximators that exhibit complex behavior which was pretty much unthinkable 15-20 years ago (in the sense that it was expected to take much longer to achieve current results). Sadly, like any other invention, this incredible technology is being abused by capitalists and populists for profit and gain at the expense of everyone else.
So, before the invention of the camera, the most valuable and most popular creative skill was replicating people on canvas as realistically as possible. Yes, we remember famous exceptions like Picasso, but by sheer number of paintings the most common were portraits of rich people.
After the cameras took that job away, prevailing art changed to become more abstract and “creative”. But that still pissed off a lot of people that had spent a very long time honing a skill that was now no longer in demand.
What we’re seeing is a similar shift. I think future generations of artists will value color theory, composition, etc. over specific brush stroke techniques. AI will make art much more accessible once enough time has passed for AI assisted art to be considered art. Make no mistake: it will always be people that actually create the art - AI will just reduce/remove the grunt work so they can focus more on creativity.
Now, whether billion dollar corporations deserve to exploit the labor of millions of people is a whole separate conversation, but tl;dr: they don’t, but they’re going to anyway because there is little to stop them in correct economic/governance models.
If you’re looking for a universally-applicable moral framework, join the thousands of years of philosophers striving for the same.
If you’re just looking for an explanation that allows you to put one foot in front of the other…
Laws exist for us to spell out the kind of society we’d like to live in. Generally, we prefer that individuals be able to participate in cultural conversations and offer their own viewpoint. And generally, we prefer that groups of people don’t accumulate massive amounts of power over other groups of people.
Dedicating your life to copying another artist’s style is participating in a cultural conversation, and you won’t be able to help yourself from infusing your own lived experience into your work of copying the artist. If only by the details that you focus on getting exactly right, the slight mistakes that repeat themselves or morph over the course of your career, the pieces you prioritize replicating over and over again. It says something about who you are, and that’s worth appreciating.
Now, if you’re trying to pass those off as originals and not your own tributes, then you’re deceiving people and that’s a problem because you’re damaging the cultural conversation by lying about the elements you’re putting into it. Even so, sometimes that’s an interesting artistic enterprise in itself. Such as when artists pretend to be someone else. Warhol was a fan of this. His whole career revolved around messing with concepts of authenticity in art.
As for power, you don’t gain that much leverage over another artist by simply copying their work. And if you riff on it to upstage them, you’re just inviting them to do the same to you in turn.
But if you can do that mechanically, quickly, so that any creative twist they put out there to undermine your attempts to upstage them, you have an instant response at little cost to yourself, now you’re in a position of great power. The more the original artist produces, the stronger your advantage over them becomes. The more they try, the harder it is for them to win.
We don’t generally like when someone has accumulated tons of power, especially when they subsequently use that power to prevent others from being able to compete.
Edit: I’d also caution against trying to make an objective test for whether a particular act of copying is “okay”. This invites two things:
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Artists can’t help but question what’s acceptable and play around with it. They will deliberately transgress in order to make a point, and you’ll be forced to admit that your objective test is worthless.
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Tech companies are relentlessly horny for this kind of objective legal framework, because they want to be able to algorithmically approach the line and fill its border to fractal levels of granularity without technically crossing the line. RealPage, DoorDash, Uber, Amazon, OpenAI all want “illegal” to be as precisely and quantitatively defined as possible, so that they can optimize for “barely legal”.
So try doing Disney style animation and similar character and similar style story line. And start profiting from it. Lets see if the “Disney” the “corporation” will remain silent or sue you to oblivion.
I don’t hate him. Its just that when corporation steals individual idea or data its for research and stuff. If its other way around, us as individual will have to face lawsuit.
So i hope they sue nvidia and other big corporations who are harvesting our data for AI.
I am guessing the closest opposite argument would be how close it is to outright copying the original work?
I’m more trying to figure out why it’s generally acceptable when a human does it vs when a machine does it.
I don’t know for sure, but I think they would be able to adjust settings so that it looks nothing like any original work, but still have the same style, as I’ve seen people do.
I’m still waiting for somebody to give me a symmetry breaker between AI training on existing media and humans creating media from what they’ve seen, such that one is theft and the other is not.
I agree with you in the though that humans have been doing this stuff for the longest. We’re sophisticated algorithms that look at the work of other people, attempt to discern what has merit, and if the stars align we might write the screenplay to the Notebook, publish Twilight, or doodle Deadpool on a napkin.
But the theft in my opinion is that a minority control this nascent tech, based on existing capital, and most of that ‘venture capital bro’ money funding this was made off of platforms that became wildly profitable for them from humans that were doing this. But now this is going to displace them and create no more need for them.
There’ll come a day when Youtube and Tik Tok design their own ‘content creators’ and at that point they’ll start cutting ad revenue to the people that put them in this position in the first place. Betrayal. It’s like Spez calling mods entitled crybabies, once this is in full gear everyone who helped get it rolling will be cast aside like chaff and a couple dozen people will get billions of dollars out of it
But the theft in my opinion is that a minority control this nascent tech, based on existing capital, and most of that ‘venture capital bro’ money funding this was made off of platforms that became wildly profitable for them from humans that were doing this. But now this is going to displace them and create no more need for them.
So the problem is capitalism, not AI.
At the moment AI is less creative and more derivative, but it could be in par or better in the future.
The bigger issue is that we’re living in a world that has a lot of artificial scarcity and people still have to work to survive, and AI is taking away many of the only jobs that make life worth living while doing it worse but also a lot cheaper.
No, AI does not create new derivative transformative works. Copyright law is very clear that the thing that is copyrightable is that modicum of creativity, reduced to a tangible medium of expression, that society must encourage and protect.
Derivative works need even more creativity to be protectable than original works because it has to be so newly creative as to be a different work, transformative, even though the original may still be very recognizable.
An AI system does not have creativity. At best, it could mimic someone who is creative, but it could never have creativity on its own. It is generative, not creative.
It’s like that monkey that took a nice picture, but the picture was not copyrightable because the person seeking to enforce the copyright didn’t create the work. It’s creativity that the Constitution seeks to encourage by the copyright clause.
it has to be so newly creative as to be a different work, even though the original may still be recognizable
Your definition implies Andy Warhol wasn’t creative.
You can make new derivative work without being creative. Just look at all the YouTubers copying each other.
