Show transcript
Screenshot of a tumblr post by hbmmaster:
the framing of generative ai as “theft” in popular discourse has really set us back so far like not only should we not consider copyright infringement theft we shouldn’t even consider generative ai copyright infringement
who do you think benefits from redefining “theft” to include “making something indirectly derivative of something created by someone else”? because I can assure you it’s not artists
okay I’m going to mute this post, I’ll just say,
if your gut reaction to this is that you think this is a pro-ai post, that you think “not theft” means “not bad”, I want you to think very carefully about what exactly “theft” is to you and what it is about ai that you consider “stealing”.
do you also consider other derivative works to be “stealing”? (fanfiction, youtube poops, gifsets) if not, why not? what’s the difference? because if the difference is actually just “well it’s fine when a person does it” then you really should try to find a better way to articulate the problems you have with ai than just saying it’s “stealing from artists”.
I dislike ai too, I’m probably on your side. I just want people to stop shooting themselves in the foot by making anti-ai arguments that have broader anti-art implications. I believe in you. you can come up with a better argument than just calling it “theft”.
Yeah, I don’t agree. Unfortunately I’m not articulate enough to explain why I feel this way. I feel like they are glossing over things. How would you describe corporations willfully taking art/data/content form others without any permission, attribution, or payment and creating a tool with said information for the end goal of making profits by leveraging the work of others into a derivative work that completes with the original?(Holy run on sentence) If there is a better word or term than theft for what generative ai does then they should use it instead.
I guess what feels off to me is that the generative AI itself does nothing of the sort; the corporations creating the product AI models do. There are already attempts to make generative AI models that are trained exclusively on data that was licensed for it. I imagine some people would still like to push regulation against companies producing those models, though I am not one of them. I’d like to decouple the arguments of “this use of technology is bad, because it (devalues human works / takes away jobs / …)” from “the corporations train their generative AI models in an unethical manner”.
i get what you mean, but at the same time, i feel like there’s not much you can do with AI that you can’t do without it (at least, in terms of art), it just takes more time and you’d most likely need to pay someone to do it. so in this case AI would take work opportunities away from people, that’s bad, but that’s not copyright infringement nor theft.
and i’m worried that by propagating the idea that training an AI model is theft, that it could lead to even more regulation on copyright that would just end up hurting smaller artists in the end. like, most people agree that making AI art in the style of Studio Ghibli movies is scummy, but would an indie artist making art in that style be wrong too? you may think not, but if it becomes a crime to emulate an art style using AI, it takes very little extrapolation to make it a crime to emulate an art style without AI. and do i need to say why being able to copyright an art style would be awful?