cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/36952817
The general consensus here is that if you generate AI art at all, regardless of whether you use it commercially or not, you are engaging in art theft and are in fact an asshole.
So why doesn’t that logic get applied to straight up turning someone’s digital art and/or photos into memes and having millions of people repost it with zero attribution? I’m not talking about things like wojaks or rage comic characters where the creator intended for it to be a meme and knew for a fact that other people will copy it, nor am I talking about screenshots of popular media franchises, but the random art and photos people post that just happens to resonate with the internet in a way the creator never foresaw, becoming memes without the creator even initially knowing. Think the original advice animal meme templates like Scumbag Steve or Bad Luck Brian where it’s literally just a random photo of someone, probably taken off their personal social media. Or the two serious and one goofy dragon drawing and others that were very clearly posts on art sharing sites that got reposted with new context. I’ve even seen some meme templates go out of their way to crop out names and signatures that the original creator put there so they are credited when their work is reposted. And no one slamming AI art seemingly has a problem with any of it. In fact, if you as the creator of an image tried to get the internet to stop using your personal work as a meme with no attribution, you’d be ignored at best and targeted for doxxing and harassment at worst for spoiling their fun, probably by some of the same people condemning the use of AI.
If you go on art sharing sites, the consensus among the artists themselves is that you’re not supposed to repost their work at all unless given a CC license or otherwise explicit permission. Whether it’s for commercial use or just as a random internet post doesn’t seem to change their stance in the slightest. This implicitly includes not just AI but memes as well, as in both cases you are taking someone else’s work and redistributing it without permission or attribution. So why is this okay if AI art is not? It’s even more blatant than AI because it’s not just stealing tons of people’s work, blending them all in a neural network, and spitting out a “new” work that still has fragments of the stolen work, it straight up IS just stealing a specific person’s specific work, full stop. I feel like the reason is circular, it’s okay because it’s been happening since forever and that’s what makes it okay. And AI art is not okay because it’s new and doesn’t already have a history of everyone doing it.
The majority of people condemning AI art are not themselves artists but cite things like “respect for artists” as a reason for condemning it. But most artists aren’t just against AI but against their art being reposted by anyone for any purpose, profit or otherwise. Even if they were never going to make money from that piece, they are still against reposts on principle while most of the non-artists seem to only talk about AI separating artists from revenue. So if we’re actually to respect artists, wouldn’t we adopt that stance for everything and not just commercial use or AI?
And if this is okay, what about AI art makes it different enough to not be okay?
Finally, it’s not like people never make money off memes so a binary “AI is for profit while memes aren’t” doesn’t work.
Not trying to defend AI art, but trying to go further with the discussion that has appeared around it and genuinely trying to tease out some consistency and fundamental values in subjects everyone ostensibly feel extremely strongly about and are not willing to budge.
because OpenMeme isn’t making $100,000,000,000 a year selling ChatMeme subscriptions?
it’s commercial reproduction that’s the issue.
I’m NOT okay with people using other peoples’ artwork without credit. Period.
Huge rambling ai post about how people are too mean at AI…
Followed without the hit of self awareness with:
Not trying to defend AI
The post isn’t saying people are too mean to AI, if anything it’s saying people aren’t mean enough to memes. OP’s pointing out a logical inconsistency that’s probably most relevant here (very anti-AI and pro-memes space), not defending anything (let alone AI).
This isn’t the full story, but profiting from other people’s work is a common complaint found with AI that can also be compared to the content creation sphere. For instance, reposting many tiktok videos on discord without credit will not raise as many eyebrows as doing reaction content of compilations of tiktok videos on youtube (see, sssniperwolf vs jjjacksfilms), where the motive is “i found these funny and want my friends to see it” vs “i want to actively make money off these videos”.
“We” is a very strong word here.
You’ll find a lot of folks online pointing out that missing attribution is not okay and artist intent should be respected. Cropped artist watermarks/added reposter watermarks are shitty, and acknowledged as such.
My own personal feelings are that expression should be free (with attribution), but I also acknowledge we live under a system where taking an individual’s art can take food off their table, which is not ethically conscionable. Unfortunately AI takes food off artists’ tables en masse then turns around and sells it for profit.
Sharing AI output, even for free, and claiming it as your own work or not putting a disclaimer that it’s AI can be argued as a form of fraud for those reasons. People will look for a source and not providing one (if you know of it) creates an environment of distrust, which often is systemically exploited by bad actors at the upper echelons of society, AI or not.
I don’t think AI generated images are art at all, hence I find it entirely justified to treat them differently.
In case you wonder why, try answering yourself this question:
You want to buy art. How much would you be willing pay for
- A painting
- A very ivolved, framed photography
- An original meme
- A nice but generic photo taken with a smartphone
- An AI generated image
and why?
For me, this is in deceding order, from ‘quite a bit’ to ‘next to nothing’.
So art is art because money? Money is certainly involved, but that seems a bit reductionist.
I think the idea is that value reflects skill, effort, and work: how much would you (according to your evaluation criteria) be willing to pay?
Because people are hypocrites & don’t actually care about the rationalizations they toss together: simple as that. And if you probe into that to elicit the slightest self-examination, they respond with hostility instead of try to outgrow their immature, petulant mentality like bags of stupid emotions.
So many meme formats are using public domain stock images. Others, such as original comic panels and drawings, may have permission from the author to be shared. A lot of people are not cool with cropping out the original artist’s name from them, tho. Give credit where credit is due.
But AI imagery is not theft. Piracy is not theft. And AI imagery is not art. It is a soulless amalgam of pixels, mathematically arranged so a human is (almost) able to make sense of what it is seeing.
AI art isn’t theft, so the rest of your question falls apart.
In regards to sharing art, it’s trying to fight technological progress and it’s bound to lose. Copyright is dead and that’s a good thing. We shouldn’t simp for legal systems pushed by and that benefit large corporations over creators.
Copyright can be dead for all I care AFTER you implement UBI.
100%, I’m hoping that AI will result in capitalism eating itself up entirely
AI art isn’t theft, so the rest of your question falls apart.
While I don’t disagree, I think that OP can make a valid point in that a number of users here do very loudly object to AI-generated art but don’t object in the same way to posting copyrighted content itself.
Good point. Neither prong of the dichotomy bothers me because I think AI is neat and copyright laws are dumb and so reject it entirely. It does create an uncomfortable tension if you dislike AI and like copyright though.
My producer, Neigsendoig, and I use AI generated stuff, and we do disclose when we do it. As long as it’s disclosed properly, you should be fine in our opinion.
