Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash

Anyway I don't really think they deserve a lot of the hate they get, but I do hope this encourages development of viable alternatives to their products. Photoshop is still pretty much peerless. Illustrator has a ton of competitors catching up. After Effects and Premiere for video editing are getting overtaken by Davinci Resolve -- though for motion graphics it is still hard to beat After Effects. Though I do love that Adobe simply uses JavaScript for its expression and scripting language.

Much better than the transparently vapid marketing-speak

Adobe is cannibalizing their paid C-Suite artists by pumping out image generators to their enterprise customers. How is that ethical? They are double dipping and screwing over their longtime paying artists

AI tech and tools aren’t just going to go away, and people aren’t going to just not make a tool you don’t like, so sticking your head in the sand and pretending like it will stop if you scream loud enough is not going to help, you should instead be encouraging efforts like Adobe’s to make these tools ethically.

The dark lesson here is that you avoid hate and bad PR by cutting artists out of the loop entirely and just shipping whatever slop the AI puts out. Maybe you lose 20% of the quality but you don't have to deal with the screaming and dogpiles.

Without that, it's only as good as a human artist in the way a picture of a work of art is.

Actual AI art would first require an ai that wants to express something, and then it would have be trying to express something about the the life of an ai, which could really only be understood by another ai.

The most we could get out of it is maybe by chance it might be appealing like a flower or a rock. That is, an actual flower not an artists depiction of a flower or even an actual flower that someone pointed out to you.

An actual flower, that wasn't presented but you just found growing, might be pretty but it isn't a message and has no meaning or intent and isn't art. We like them as irrelevant bystanders observing something going on between plants and pollenators. Any meaning we percieve is actually only our own meanings we apply to something that was not created for that purpose.

And I don't think you get to say the hate is misdirected. What an amazing statement. These are the paying users saying what they don't like directly. They are the final authority on that.

I pay for photoshop along with the rest of the adobe suite myself, so you cannot write off my comment either while saying the rest of the paying users are “the final authority” when I am in fact a paying user.

My point is simply that with or without everyone’s consent and moral feel-goods these tools are going to exist and sticking your head in the sand pretending like that isn’t true is silly. So you may as well pick the lesser evil and back the company who at least seems to give the slightest bit of a damn of the morals involved, I certainly will.

Many would argue, myself included, that the most ethical approach towards AI is to not use it. Procreate is a popular digital art program that is loudly taking that position: https://procreate.com/ai

My own position is that "art" can only be created by a human. AI can produce text, images, and sounds, and perhaps someday soon they can even create content that is practically indistinguishable from Picasso or Mozart, but they would still fail to be "art."

So sure, an AI can create assets to pad out commercials for trucks or sugary cereal, and they will more than suffice. Commercials and other similar content can be made more cheaply. Maybe that's good?

But I would never willingly spend my time or money engaging with AI "art." By that, I mean I would never attend a concert, watch a film, visit a museum, read a book, or even scroll through an Instagram profile if what I'm viewing is largely the output of AI. What would the point be?

I'll admit that there is some middle ground, where a large project may have some smaller pieces touched by AI (say, art assets in the background of a movie scene, or certain pieces of code in a video game). I personally err on the side of avoiding that when it is known, but I currently don't have as strong of an opinion on that.

I hate Adobe's subscription model as much as the next guy and that's a good reason to get annoyed at them. Adobe building AI features is not.

If I saw news of a huge purge of stolen content on their stock image service with continued periodic purges afterwards (and subsequent retraining of their models to exclude said content), I might take the claim more seriously.

At least Meta gives their models to the public.

Care to elaborate?

Also, saying artists only concern themselves with the legality of art used in AI because of distaste when there are legal cases where their art has been appropriated seems like a bold position to take.

It’s a practice founded on scooping everything up without care for origin or attribution and it’s not like it’s a transparent process. There are people that literally go out of their way to let artists know they’re training on their art and taunt them about it online. Is it unusual they would assume bad faith from those purporting to train their AI legally when participation up till now has either been involuntary or opt out? Rolling out AI features when your customers are artists is tone deaf at best and trolling at worst.

It isn't, but it doesn't stop people from trying and hoping for a miracle. That's pretty much all there is to the arguments of image models, as well as LLMs, being trained in violation of copyright - it's distaste and greed[0], with a slice of basic legalese on top to confuse people into believing the law says what it doesn't (at least yet) on top.

> If Adobe properly licenses all their training data artists don't have a right to say "well i think this is bad for creativity and puts my job at risk, ban it!!!" Or more precisely, they have a right to say that, but no moral justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it.

I'd say they have plenty of moral / ethical justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it, they just don't have much of a legal one at this point. But that's why they should be trying[1] - they have a legitimate argument that this is an unexpected, undeserved, unfair calamity for them, threatening to derail their lives, and lives of their dependents, across the entire sector - and therefore that laws should be changed to shield them, or compensate them for the loss. After all, that's what laws are for.

(Let's not forget that the entire legal edifice around recognizing and protecting "intellectual property" is an entirely artificial construct that goes against the nature of information and knowledge, forcing information to behave like physical goods, so it's not unfair to the creators in an economy that's built around trading physical goods. IP laws were built on moral arguments, so it's only fair to change them on moral grounds too.)

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[0] - Greed is more visible in the LLM theatre of this conflict, because with textual content there's vastly more people who believe that they're entitled to compensation just because some comments they wrote on the Internet may have been part of the training dataset, and are appalled to see LLM providers get paid for the service while they are not. This Dog in the Manger mentality is distinct from that of people whose output was used in training a model that now directly competes with them for their job; the latter have legitimate ethical reasons to complain.

[1] - Even though myself I am for treating training datasets to generative AI as exempt from copyright. I think it'll be better for society in general - but I recognize it's easy for me to say it, because I'm not the one being rugpulled out of a career path by GenAI, watching it going from 0 to being half of the way towards automating away visual arts, in just ~5 years.

It's fine as a way of making shitposts, but I don't know if it's a professional-grade graphics editor - but I'm not a professional myself, so what do I know.

Law is agreeable hate, in a way. Things that gets enough hate will get regulated out, sooner or later.

I agree with the sentiment, however..

Good luck to all of us at holding to that philosophy as AI & Non-AI become indistinguishable. You can tell now. I don't think you'll be able to tell much longer. If for no other reason than the improvements in the last 3 years alone. You'll literally have to research the production process of a painting before you can decide if you should feel bad for liking it.

Also, realistically, most people want entertainment, not art (by your definition). They want to consume experiences that are very minor variations of on experiences they've already had, using familiar and unsurprising tropes/characters/imagery/twists/etc.

The idea that only humans can make that kind of work has already been disproven. I know a number of authors who are doing very well mass-producing various kinds of trashy genre fiction. Their readers not only don't care, they love the books.

I suspect future generations of AI will be better at creating compelling original art because the AI will have a more complete model of our emotional triggers - including novelty and surprise triggers - than we do ourselves.

So the work will be experienced as more emotional, soulful, insightful, deep, and so on than even the best human creators.

This may or may not be a good thing, but it seems as inevitable as machine superiority in chess and basic arithmetic.

  > AI tech and tools aren’t just going to go away, and people aren’t going to just not make a tool you don’t like  

Showing the model an picture doesn't create a copy of that picture in it's "brain". It moves a bunch of vectors around that captures an "essence" of what the image is. The next image shown from a totally different artist with a totally different style may well move around many of those same vectors again. But suffice to say, there is no copy of the picture anywhere inside of it.

This also why these models hallucinate so much, they are not drawing from a bank of copies, they are working off of a fuzzy memory.

Not only that, they also assume or pretend that this is obviously violating copyright, when in fact this is a) not clear, and b) pending determination by courts and legislators around the world.

FWIW, I agree with your perspective on training, but I also accept that artists have legitimate moral grounds to complain and try to fight it - so I don't really like to argue about this with them; my pet peeve is on the LLM side of things, where the loudest arguments come from people who are envious and feel entitled, even though they have no personal stake in this.

As for the model, it’s still creating deterministic, derivative works based off its inputs and the only thing that makes it random is the seed so it being a database of vectors is irrelevant.

Uh huh, so much worse than the people that assume or pretend that it’s obviously not infringing and legal. Fortunately I don’t need to wait for a lawyer to form an opinion and neither do those in favor of AI as you might’ve noticed.

You see any of them backing down and waiting for answer from a higher authority?

The flip-side to that is the truly "original" images where no overt references are present all look kinda similar. If you run vague enough prompts to get something new that won't land you in hot water, you end up with a sort of stock-photo adjacent looking image where the lighting doesn't make sense and is completely unmotivated, the framing is strange, and everything has this over-smoothed, over-tuned "magazine copy editor doesn't understand the concept of restraint" look.

People hate bad AI images, because they hate bad images, period. They don't hate good AI images, and when they see great AI images, they don't even realize they are made by AI.

It's true, there's a deluge of bad art now, and it's almost entirely AI art. But it's not because AI models exist or how they're trained - it's because marketers[0] don't give a fuck about how people feel. AI art is cheap and takes little effort to get - it's so cheap and low-effort, that on the lower end of quality scale, there is no human competition. It makes no economic sense to commission human labor to make art this bad. But with AI, you can get it for free - and marketing loves this, because, again, they don't care about people or the commons[1], they just see an ability to get ahead by trading away quality for greater volume at lower costs.

In short: don't blame bad AI art on AI, blame it on people who spam us with it.

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[0] - I don't mean here just marketing agencies and people with marketing-related job titles, but also generally people engaging in excessive promotion of their services, content, or themselves.

[1] - Such as population-level aesthetic sensibilities, or sanity.

Their sales went crazy because everyone was relentlessly pirating their software.

"hostage"

They annually harass me with licensing checks and questionnaires because they really hate you if you run Photoshop inside a VM (my daily driver is Linux), although it is explicitly allowed. Luckily, I don't need the Adobe software that often. But they hold a lot of important old company documents hostage in their proprietary file formats. So I can't cancel the subscription, no matter how much I'd like to.

Should they? That's generally not how things work in most places. Normally, if something isn't clearly illegal, especially when it's something too new and different for laws to clearly cover, you're free to go ahead and try it; you're not expected to first seek a go-ahead from a court.

Is the implication of this statement that using AI for image editing and creation is inherently unethical?

Is that really how people feel?

Quite an assertion. Why exactly would this be true?

Legislation always takes time to catch up with tech, that's not new.

The question I'm see being put forth from those with legal and IP backgrounds is about inputs vs. outputs, as in "if you didn't have access to X (which has some form of legal IP protection) as an input, would you be able to get the output of a working model?" The comparison here is with manufacturing where you have assembly of parts made by others into some final product and you would be buying those inputs to create your product output.

The cost of purchasing the required inputs is not being done for AI, which pretty solidly puts AI trained on copyrighted materials in hot water. The fact that it's an imperfect analogy and doesn't really capture the way software development works is irrelevant if the courts end up agreeing with something they can understand as a comparison.

All that being said I don't think the legality is under consideration for any companies building a model - the profit margins are too high to care for now, and catching them at it is potentially difficult.

There's also a tendency for AI advocates to try and say that AI/LLM's are "special" in some way, and to compare their development process to someone "learning" the style of art (or whatever input) that they then internalize and develop into their own style. Personally I think that argument gives a lot of assumed agency to these models that they don't actually have, and weakens the overall legal case.

It's sad that it's funny that you think Adobe is motivated by ethical consideration.

So while I think we're all pretty aware of both sides of the image gen discussion and may have differing opinions about that - I think we can all agree that the genie can't be put back in the bottle. This will naturally lead for those that do take advantage of the technology to outpace those which do not.

Also I applaud Adobe's approach to building their models "ethically", yes they are inferior to many competitors, but they work well enough to save significant time and money. They have been very good at honing in what AI is genuinely useful for instead of bolting on a chatbot onto every app like clock radios in the 1980s.

If you ask a human artist for an image of "an archeologist who wears a hat and uses a whip" you're also going to get something extremely similar to Indiana Jones unless you explicitly ask for something else. Let's imagine we go to deviantart and ask some folks to draw us some drawing from these prompts:

A blond haired fighter from a fantasy world that wears a green tunic and green pointy cap and used a sword and shield.

A foreboding space villain with all black armor, a cape and full face breathing apparatus that uses a laser sword.

A pudgy plumber in blue overalls and a red cap of Italian descent

I don't know about you but I would expect with nothing more than that, most of the time you're going to get something very close to Link, Darth Vader and Mario. Link might be the one with the best chance to get something different just because the number of publicly known images of "fantasy world heroes" is much more diverse than the set of "black armored space samurai" and "Italian plumbers"

> Disintegrating IP into trillions of pieces and then responding to an instruction to create it with something so close to the IP as to barely be distinguishable is still infringement.

But it's the person that causes the creation of the infringing material that is responsible for the infringement, not the machine or device itself. A xerox machine is a machine that disintegrates IP into trillions of pieces and then responds to instructions to duplicate that IP almost exactly (or to the best of its abilities). And when that functionality was challenged, the courts rightfully found that a xerox machine in and of itself, regardless of its capability to be used for infringement is not in and of itself infringing.

I don't know for sure about the common usage, but personally my use of AI in Photoshop are things like replacing a telephone pole with a tree, or extending a photo outside of frame, which is much different than just generating entire images. It is unfortunate that this usage of generative AI is lumped in with everything else.

Let's normalize it.

Lots of people have had their lives disrupted by technological and economic changes before - entire careers which existed a century ago are now gone. Given society provided little or no compensation for prior such cases of disruption, what’s the argument for doing differently here?

So there’s no reason why “distaste” about AI abuse of human artists’ work shouldn’t be a valid reason to regulate or ban it. If society values the creation of new art and inventions, then it will create artificial barriers to encourage their creation.

They have burned so much of goodwill that the community is not willing to engage even with positive things now.

This broadly is happening to tech as well.

Even if you believe everything they say, they are lying by omission. For example, for their text to image technology, they never specify what their text language model is trained on - it’s almost certainly CLIP or T5, which is trained on plenty of not-expressly-licensed data. If they trained such a model from scratch - they don’t have enough image bureau data to make their own CLIP, even at 400m images, CLIP only performs well at the 4-7b image-caption pair scale - where’s the paper? It’s smoke and mirrors dude.

There’s a certain personality type that is getting co-opted on social media like Hacker News to “mook” for Adobe. Something on the intersection of a certain obsessive personality and Dunning Kruger.

Also, the model isn’t a human brain. Nobody has invented a human brain.

And the model might not infringe if its inputs are licensed but that doesn’t seem to be the case for most and it’s not clearly transparent they don’t. If the inputs are bad, the intent of the user is meaningless. I can ask for a generic super hero and not mean to get superman but if I do I can’t blame that on myself, I had no role in it, heck even the model doesn’t know what it’s doing, it’s just a function. If I Xerox Superman my intent is clear.

It's because nobody actually wants that.

Artists don't like AI image generators because they have to compete with them, not because of how they were trained. How they were trained is just the the most plausible claim they can make against them if they want to sue OpenAI et al over it, or to make a moral argument that some kind of misappropriation is occurring.

From the perspective of an artist, a corporation training an AI image generator in a way that isn't susceptible to moral or legal assault is worse, because then it exists and they have to compete with it and there is no visible path for them to make it go away.

Wouldn’t a better alternative be to work on improving social safety nets for everybody, as opposed to providing a bespoke one for a single industry?

Ethics (as opposed to morals) is about codified rules.

The law is a set of codified rules.

So are these really that different (beyond how the law is a hodge-podge and usually a minimum requirement rather than an ideal to reach for)?

I would hope we put up with it because "copyright" is only useful to us insofar as it advances good things that we want in our society. I certainly don't want to live in a world where if we could forcibly remove copyrighted information from human brains as soon as the "license" expired that we would do so. That seems like a dystopian hell worse than even the worst possible predictions of AI's detractors.

> I can ask for a generic super hero and not mean to get superman but if I do I can’t blame that on myself, I had no role in it, heck even the model doesn’t know what it’s doing, it’s just a function.

And if you turn around and discard that output and ask for something else, then no harm has been caused. Just like when artists trace other artists work for practice, no harm is caused and while it might be copyright infringement in a "literal meaning of the words" it's also not something that as a society we consider meaningfully infringing. If on the other hand, said budding artist started selling copies of those traces, or making video games using assets scanned from those traces, then we do consider it infringement worth worrying about.

> If I Xerox Superman my intent is clear.

Is it? If you have a broken xerox machine and you think you have it fixed, grab the nearest papers you can find and as a result of testing the machine xerox Superman, what is your intent? I don't think it was to commit copyright infringement, even if again in the "literal meaning of the words" sense you absolutely did.

I watch this all quite closely, and It’s chronically online, anime / fursona profile picture, artists.

Exact same thing happened when that ‘open’ trust and safety platform was announced a few months ago, which used “AI” in its marketing material. This exact same group of people—not even remotely the target audience for this B2B T&S product—absolutely lost it on Bluesky. “We don’t want AI everywhere!” “You’re taking the humanity out of everything!” “This is so unethical!” When you tell them that machine learning has been used in content moderation for decades, they won’t have a bar of it. Nor when you explain that T&S AI isn’t generative and almost certainly isn’t using “stolen” data. I had countless people legitimately say that having humans have to sift through gore and CSAM is a Good Thing because it gives them jobs, which AI is taking away.

It’s all the same sort of online presence. Anime profile picture, Ko-fi in bio, “minors dni”, talking about not getting “commissions” anymore. It genuinely feels like a psy-op / false flag operation or something.

Link even a single example of someone explicitly saying this and I would be astounded

That's going to be hard for you to justify in the long run, I think. Virtually everybody who ever lost a job to technology ended up better off for it.

That gives them too much credit. "Outlaws" are folk heroes. Robin Hood was an outlaw, Bonnie and Clyde were outlaws. Luigi is an outlaw.

Nobody's going to be telling fables about the exploits of Sam Altman.

If I were an artist, and I made a painting and published it to a site which was then used to train an LLM, I would feel as though the AI company treated me disingenuously, regardless of competition or not. Intellectual property laws aside, I think there is a social contract being broken when a publicly shared work is then used without the artist's direct, explicit permission.

In Photoshop, likely because it's been used by pros for decades, little conveniences are all over the place, like the ability to press 'd' for 'Don't Save' in a save dialog box.

That said, the past few versions of Photoshop, which moved away from fully-native apps to some sort of web UI engine... they are getting worse and worse. On one of my Macs, every few weeks it gets stuck on the 'Hand' tool, no matter what (even surviving a preferences nuke + restart), until I reboot the entire computer.

It has nothing to do with you. You are free not to have the same priorities as them, but that's all that difference indicates, is that your priorities are different.

The "what is art?" stuff is saying why I think that "get as good as a human artist" is a fundamentally invalid concept.

Not that humans are the mostest bestest blessed by god chosen whatever. Just that it's a fundamentally meaningless sequence of words.

In that case only large companies that can afford to license training data will be dominant.

this feels like a much stronger claim than is typically made about the benefits of technological progress

I disagree. There are many laws on the books codifying social distastes. They keep your local vice squad busy.

I believe it is completely reasonable for an artist to want to share their work publicly on the Internet without fear of it being appropriated, and I wish there was a pragmatic way they could achieve this.

The rights artists have over their work are economic rights. The most important fair use factor is how the use affects the market for the original work. If Disney is lobbying for copyright term extensions and you want to make art showing Mickey Mouse in a cage with the CEO of Disney as the jailer, that's allowed even though you're not allowed to open a movie theater and show Fantasia without paying for it, and even though (even because!) Disney would not approve of you using Mickey to oppose their lobbying position. And once the copyright expires you can do as you like.

So the ethical argument against AI training is that the AI is going to compete with them and make it harder for them to make a living. But substantially the same thing happens if the AI is trained on some other artist's work instead. Whose work it was has minimal impact on the economic consequences for artists in general. And being one of the artists who got a pittance for the training data is little consolation either.

The real ethical question is whether it's okay to put artists out of business by providing AI-generated images at negligible cost. If the answer is no, it doesn't really matter which artists were in the training data. If the answer is yes, it doesn't really matter which artists were in the training data.

Performance is obviously going to take a hit though. Depending on the machines in question one would probably get better results from a current gen x86 box running that same Windows version of CS1/CS2/CS3 running through WINE (or of course Windows 11, but then you’re stuck with Windows 11).

Gimp can't handle them?

I was actually contacted by someone at Adobe for a chat about disability representation and sensitivity in Japan because they were doing research to gauge the atmosphere here and ensure that people with disabilities were represented, and how those representations would be appropriate for Japanese culture. It really blew my mind.

We obviously can never unscramble that egg, which is sad because it probably means there will never be a way to make such people feel OK about AI.

You could take that further and say that "substantially the same thing" happens if the AI is trained on music instead. It's just another kind of artwork, right? Somebody who was going to have an illustration by [illustrator with distinctive style] might choose to have music instead, so the music is in competition, so all that illustrator's art might as well be in the training data, and that doesn't matter because the artist would get competed with either way. Says you.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...

These tools are optional whether people like to hear it or not. I’m not even against them ideologically, I just don’t think they’re being integrated into society in anything resembling a well thought out way.

https://www.adobe.com/fireflyapproach/

(I work for Adobe)

Further making a variant of a famous art piece under copyright might very well be a derivative. There are court cases here just some years for the AI boom were a format shift from photo to painting was deemed to be a derivative. The picture generated with "Painting of a archeologist with a whip" will almost certainly be deemed a derivative if it would go through the same court.

There is always an actual human who has actual human experience in the loop, the AI doesn't need to have it. AI doesn't intend to draw anything on its own, and can't enjoy the process, there has to be a human to make it work on either intent (input) or value (output) side.

Also, I'm curious, when they start censoring exports from their software. They already do that for money scans.

I'm not worry about image generators. They'll never generate art by definition. AI tools are same as camera back then - a new tool that still require human skills and purpose to create specific tasks.

Why not? The output of AI is usually produced at the request of a human. So if the human will then alter the request such that the result suits whatever the human's goal is, why would there be no point?

This, to me, sound like the debate of whether just pressing a button on a box to produce a photograph is actually art, compared to a painting. I wonder whether painters felt "threatened" when cameras became commonplace. AI seems just like a new, different way of producing images. Sure, it's based on prior forms of art, just like photography is heavily inspired by painting.

And just because most images are weird or soulless or whatever doesn't disqualify the whole approach. Are most photographs works of art? I don't think so. Ditto for paintings.

To your point about Instagram profiles, I actually do follow some dude who creates "AI art" and I find the images do have "soul" and I very much enjoy looking at them.

You cannot find any group, where "all" is true in such context. There's always an element of outlier.

That said, you're not really an artist if you direct someone else to paint. Imagine a scenario where you sit back, and ask someone to paint an oil painting for you. During the event, you sit in an easy chair, watch them with easel and brush, and provide direction "I want clouds", "I want a dark background". The person does so.

You're not the artist.

All this AI blather is the same. At best, you're a fashion designer. Arranging things in a pleasant way.

0 - https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/225143-wha...

Photographers do manipulate cameras, and rework afterwise the images to develop.

Digital artists do manipulate digital tools.

Their output is a large function of their informed input, experience, taste, knowledge, practice and intention, using their own specific tools in their own way.

Same with developers: the result is a function of their input (architecture, code, etc.). Garbage in, garbage out.

With AI prompters, the output is part function of the (very small) prompt, part function of the (huuuuuuuge) training set, part randomness.

If you're the director of a movie, or of a photo shoot, you're the director. Not the photographer, not the set painter, not the carpenter, not the light, etc.

If you're the producer, you're not the artist (unless you _also_ act as an artist in the production).

Do you feel the difference?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4mdMMu-3fc

Pro AI people need to stop behaving like it’s a foregone conclusion that anything they do is right and protected from criticism because, as was pointed out, the legality of what is being done with unlicensed inputs, which is the majority of inputs, is still up for debate.

I’m just calling attention to the double standard being applied in who is allowed to have an opinion on what the legal outcome should be prior to that verdict. Temporal said people shouldn’t “pretend or assume” that lots of AI infringes on other people’s work because the law hasn’t caught up but the same argument applies equally to them (AI proponents) and they have already made up their mind, independent of any legal authority, that using unlicensed inputs is legal.

The difference in our opinions is that if I’m wrong, no harm done, if they’re wrong, lots of harm has already been done.

I’m trying to have a nuanced conversation but this has devolved into some pro/anti AI, all or nothing thing. If you still think I want to ban AI after this wall of text I don’t know what to tell you dude. If I’ve been unclear it’s not for lack of trying.

Adobe AI tools are pretty shit though if you want to use them to do something creative. Shockingly bad really.

They are probably good if you want to add a few elements to an instagram photo but terrible for actual digital art.

The presence of “natural” vs. “artificial” argument is a placeholder for nonexistent substantiation. There is never a case when it does anything else but add a disguise of objectivity to some wild opinion.

Artificial as opposed to what? Do you consider what humans do is “unnatural” because humans are somehow not part of nature?

If some humans (in case of big tech abusing copyright, vast majority, once the realization reaches the masses) want something and other humans don’t, what exactly makes one natural and another unnatural other than your own belonging to one group or the other?

> that goes against the nature of information and knowledge

What is that nature of information and knowledge that you speak about?

> forcing information to behave like physical goods, so it's not unfair to the creators in an economy that's built around trading physical goods

Its point has been to encourage innovation, creativity, and open information sharing—exactly those things that gave us ML and LLMs. We would have none of these in that rosy land of IP communism where no idea or original work belongs to its author that you envision.

Recognition of intellectual ownership of original work (coming in many shapes, including control over how it is distributed, ability to monetize it, and just being able to say you have done it) is the primary incentive for people to do truly original work. You know, the work that gave us GNU Linux et al., true innovation that tends to come when people are not giving their work to their employer in return for paycheck.

> IP laws were built on moral arguments, so it's only fair to change them on moral grounds too.

That is, perhaps, the exact point of people who argue that copyright law should be changed or at least clarified as new technology appears.

But we decided to drop Adobe after some of their recent shenanigans and moved to a set of tools that didn't have this ability and, frankly, we didn't really miss it that much. Certainly not enough to ever give Adobe another cent.

That's plain wrong, and quite obviously so. You're demonstrating here a very common misunderstanding of the arguments people affected by (or worried about) automation taking their jobs make. In a very concise form:

- It's true that society and humanity so far always benefited from eliminating jobs through technology, in the long term.

- It's not true that society and humanity benefited in the immediate term, due to the economic and social disruption. And, most importantly:

- It's not true that people who lost jobs to technology were better off for it - those people, those specific individuals, as well as their families and local communities, were all screwed over by progress, having their lives permanently disrupted, and in many cases being thrown into poverty for generations.

(Hint: yes, there may be new jobs to replace old ones, but those jobs are there for the next generation of people, not for those who just lost theirs.)

Understanding that distinction - society vs. individual victims - will help make sense of e.g. why Luddites destroyed the new mechanized looms and weaving frames. It was not about technology, it was about capital owners pulling the rug from under them, and leaving them and their children to starve.

Okay, so if the inputs to the model are my artwork to replicate my style, is the output copyrightable by you? You just said deterministic works aren’t derivative, they’re considered the same as the original. That’s not anything I’ve heard AI proponents claim and the outputs are more original than a 1 to 1 photocopy but I assume like the case you linked to that the answer will be, no, you can’t copyright.

"Nothing was stolen from the artists but instead used without their permission"

Yes and no. Sure, the artist didn't loose anything physical, but neither did music or movie producers when people downloaded and shared MP3s and videos. They still won in court based on the profits they determined the "theft" cost them, and the settlements were absurdly high. How is this different? An artist's work is essentially their resume. AI companies use their work without permission to create programs specifically intended to generate similar work in seconds, this substantially impacts an artist's ability to profit from their work. You seem to be suggesting that artists have no right to control the profits their work can generate - an argument I can't imagine you would extend to corporations.

"The thing being used is an idea"

This is profoundly absurd. AI companies aren't taking ideas directly from artist's heads... yet. They're not training their models on ideas. They're training them on the actual images artists create with skills honed over decades of work.

"not anything the artist loses access to when someone else has it"

Again, see point #1. The courts have long established that what's lost in IP theft is the potential for future profits, not something directly physical. By your reasoning here, there should be no such things as patents. I should be able to take anyone or any corporation's "ideas" and use them to produce my own products to sell. And this is a perfect analogy - why would any corporation invest millions or billions of dollars developing a product if anyone could just take the "ideas" they came up with and immediately undercut the corporation with clones or variants of their products? Exactly similar, why would an artist invest years or decades of time honing the skills needed to create imagery if massive corporations can just take that work, feed it into their programs and generate similar work in seconds for pennies?

"What is there to complain about"

The loss of income potential, which is precisely what courts have agreed with when corporations are on the receiving end of IP theft.

"Why should others listen to the complaints"

Because what's happening is objectively wrong. You are exactly the kind of person the corporatocracy wants - someone who just say "Ehhh, I wasn't personally impacted, so I don't care". And not only don't you care, you actively argue in favor of the corporations. Is it any wonder society is what it is today?

Or consider the youtube video "Fan.tasia"[1]. That is a collection of unlicensed video clips, combined with another individual's work which itself is a collection of unlicensed audio clips mashed together into a amalgamation of sight and sound to produce something new and I would argue original, but very clearly also full of copyright infringement and facilitated by a bunch of technologies that enable doing infringement at scale. It is (IMO) far more obviously copyright infringement than anything an AI model is. Yet I would argue a world in which that media and the technologies that enable it were made illegal, or heavily restricted to only the people that could afford to license all of the things that went into it from the people who created all the original works, would be a worse world for us all. The ability to easily commit copyright infringement at scale enabled the production of new and interesting art that would not have existed otherwise, and almost certainly built skills (like editing and mixing) for the people involved. That, to me, is more valuable to society than ensuring that all the artists and studios whose work went into that media got whatever fractions of a penny they lost from having their works infringed.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-6xk4W6N20&pp=ygUJZmFuLnRhc...

To be completely honest, I can't always tell, but when I come across images that give me inexplicable gastric discomfort that I can't explain why, and then it was revealed that it had been AI generated, that explains it all(doesn't remove the discomfort, just explains it).

I don't have reasons to believe that I have above-average eyes on art among HNers, but it'll be funny and painful if so. I mean, I'm no Hayao "I sense insult to life itself" Miyazaki...

"Get artists to use it" is the free square :)

With photographers, the output is part function of the (very small) orientation of the camera and pressing the button, part function of the (huuuuuuuge) technical marvel that are modern cameras, part randomness.

Let's be realistic here. Without the manufactured cameras, 99.9% of photographers wouldn't be photographers, only the 10 people who'd want it enough to build their own cameras, and they wouldn't have much appeal beyond a curiosity because their cameras would suck.

If you want to ingest unlicensed input and produce copyright infringing stuff for no profit, just for the love of the source material, well that’s complicated. I’m not saying no good ever came of it, and the tolerance for infringement comes from it happening on a relatively small scale. If I take an artists work with a very unique style and feed it into a machine then mass produce art for people based on that style and the artist is someone who makes a living off commissions I’m obviously doing harm to their business model. Fanfics/fanart of Nintendo characters probably not hurting Nintendo. It’s not black or white. It’s about striking a balance, which is hard to do. I can’t just give it a pass because large corporations will weather it fine.

That Fantasia video was good. You ever see Pogo’s Disney remixes? Incredible musical creativity but also infringing. I don’t doubt the time and effort needed to produce these works, they couldn’t just write a prompt and hit a button. I respect that. At the same time, this stuff is special partly because there aren’t a lot of things like it. If you made a AI to spit out stuff like this it would be just another video on the internet. Stepping outside copyright, I would prefer not to see a flood of low effort work drown out everything that feels unique, whimsical, and personal but I can understand those who would prefer the opposite. Disney hasn’t taken it down in the last 17 years and god I’m old. https://youtu.be/pAwR6w2TgxY?si=K8vN2epX4CyDsC96

The training of unlicensed inputs is the ultimate issue and we can just agree to disagree on how that should be handled. I think

and unfortunately for adobe: these people are its customers

That's simply not good enough. This is not merely a machine that can be misused if desired by a bad actor, this is a machine that specializes in infringement. It's a machine which is internally biased, by the nature of how it works, towards infringement, because it is inherently "copying:" It is copying the weighted averages of millions perhaps billions of training images, many of which depict similar things. No, it doesn't explicitly copy one Indiana Jones image or another: It copies a shit ton of Indiana Jones images, mushed together into a "new" image from a technical perspective, but will inherit all the most prominent features from all of those images, and thus: it remains a copy.

And if you want to disagree with this point, it'd be most persuasive then to explain why, if this is not the case, AI images regularly end up infringing on various aspects of various popular artworks, like characters, styles, intellectual properties, when those things are not being requested by the prompt.

> If you ask a human artist for an image of "an archeologist who wears a hat and uses a whip" you're also going to get something extremely similar to Indiana Jones unless you explicitly ask for something else.

No, you aren't, because an artist is a person that doesn't want to suffer legal consequences for drawing something owned by someone else. Unless you specifically commission "Indiana Jones fanart" I in fact, highly doubt you'll get something like him because an artist will want to use this work to promote their work to others, and unless you are driven to exist in the copyright gray area of fan created works, which is inherently legally dicey, you wouldn't do that.

You still get images in a particular style by specifying the name of the style instead of the name of the artist. Do you really think this is no different than being able to produce only music when you want an image?

The US doesn't really have moral rights and it's not clear they're even constitutional in the US, since the copyright clause explicitly requires "promote the progress" and "limited times" and many aspects of "moral rights" would be violations of the First Amendment. Whether they exist in some other country doesn't really help you when it's US companies doing it in the US.

> Further making a variant of a famous art piece under copyright might very well be a derivative.

Well of course it is. That's what derivative works are. You can also produce derivative works with Photoshop or MS Paint, but that doesn't mean the purpose of MS Paint is to produce derivative works or that it's Microsoft rather than the user purposely creating a derivative work who should be responsible for that.

The ones using the name of the artist/studio (e.g. Ghiblification) also seem more common than they are because they're the ones that garner negative attention. Then the media attention a) causes people perceive it as being more common than it is and b) causes people do it more for a short period of time, making it temporarily more common even though the long-term economic relevance is still negligible.

From what I've seen from artists, they hate Adobe for both reasons, and the AI thing is often more of a dogmatic, uncompromising hate (and is not based on any of the various rationalizations used to persuade others to act in accord with it) and less of the kind of hate that is nevertheless willing to accept products for utility.

Reducing this to "orientation of the camera" is such a dismissive take on the eye and focus of the person that decides to take a picture, where/when he/she is; this is really revealing you do not practice it.

And... before cameras were even electronic, back in the early 2000, there were already thousands and more of extremely gifted photographers.

Yes, cameras are marvellous tools. But they are _static_. They don't dynamically, randomly change the input.

Generative AI are not _static_. They require training sets to be anywhere near useful.

Cameras _do not_ feed on all the previous photographies taken by others.

I believe that is the conclusion the US copyright office came to as well https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ (i didnt actually read their report, but i think that's what it says)

Copyright is full of grey areas and disagreement over its rules happen all the time. AI is not particularly special in that regard, except perhaps in scale.

Generally the way stuff moves forward is somebody tries something, gets sued and either they win or lose and we move forward from that point.

Ultimately "harm" and "legality" are very different things. Something could be legal and harmful - many things are. In this debate i think different groups are harmed depending on which side that "wins".

If you want to have a nuanced debate, the relavent issue is not if the input works are licensed - they obviously are not, but on the following principles:

- de minimis - is the amount of each individual copyrighted work too small to matter.

- is the AI just extracting "factual" information from the works separate from their presentation. After all each individual work only adjusts the model by a couple bytes. Is it less like copying the work or more like writing a book about the artwork that someone could later use to make a similar work (which would not be copyright infringement if a human did it)

- fair use - complicated, but generally the more "transformative" a work is, the more fair use it would be, and AI is extremely transformative. On the other hand it potentially competes commercially with the original work, which usually means less likely to be fair use (and maybe you could have a mixed outcome here, where the AI generators are fine, but using them to sell competing artwork is not, but other uses are ok).

[Ianal]

What's more important: the person behind the camera or the camera? Show me the photos taken without the camera and then look at all the great photos taken by amateurs.

> They require training sets to be anywhere near useful.

And the camera needs assembly and R&D. But when either arrives at your door, it's "ready to go".

> Cameras _do not_ feed on all the previous photographies taken by others.

Cameras do feed on all the research of previous cameras though. The photos don't matter to the Camera. The Camera manufacturers are geniuses, the photographers are users.

It's really not far off from AI, especially when the cameras do so much, and then there's the software-tools afterwards etc etc.

Yeah, yeah, everybody wants to feel special and artsy and all that and looks down on the new people who aren't even real artists. But most people really shouldn't.

There's a decent size group of people who have a knee-jerk negative response toward AI regardless of quality. They'd see that image, like it, and then when told it's AI, turn on it and decide it was obviously flawed from the beginning. Is there a version of "sour grapes" where the fox did eat the grapes, they were delicious, but he declared they were sour after the fact to claim moral superiority?

He was saying that in response to a computer-animated zombie that dragged itself along in a grotesque manner. It wasn't that it was animated by a computer, it was that he found it offensive in that it felt like it was making light of the struggles of people with disabilities. You definitely would also find it disgusting.

Basically any given PSD will certainly load correctly in photoshop, but you're rolling the dice if you want to load it into anything else. More so if you are using more modern features.

I don't think y'all really want to go down this road; it leads straight back to the nineties republicans holding senate hearings on what's acceptable content for a music album.

I think bad AI makes bad output and so a few people are worried it will replace good human art with bad AI art. Realistically, the stuff it's replacing now is bad human art: stock photos and clipart stuff that weren't really creative expression to start with. As it improves, we'll be increasingly able to go do a targeted inpaint to create images that more closely match our creative vision. There's a path here that lowers the barriers for someone getting his ideas into a visual form and that's an unambiguous good, unless you're one of the "craftsmen" who invested time to learn the old way.

It's almost exactly the same as AI development. As an experienced dev who knows the ins and outs really well I look at AI code and say, "wow, that's garbage." But people are using it to make unimportant webshit frontends, not do "serious work". Once it can do "serious work" that will decrease the number of jobs in the field but be good for software development as a whole.

However good or not is the camera, it’s not the camera that dictates the inner qualities of a photograph, there is _something else_ that evades the technicalities of the tools and comes from the context and the choice of the photograph (and of accident, too, because it’s the nature of photography: capturing an accident of light).

The same camera in the hands of two persons will give two totally different sets of pictures, if only because, their sight, their looking at the world is different; and because one knows how to use the tools, and the other, not in the same way, or not at all.

It’s not a matter of « feeling artsy » or special, it’s a matter of « doing art ».

Everyone is an artist, if they want to: it’s a matter of practicing and intent, not a matter of outputting.

Art is in the process (of making, and of receiving), not in the output (which is the artefact of art and which has its own set of controversial and confusing economics and markets).

Generative AI on the contrary of tools that stay in their specific place, steals the insight from previous artists (from the training set) and strips the prompter from their own insights and personality and imprint (because it is not employed, but only through a limited text prompt at an interface).

Generative AI enthousiasts may be so. They have every right to be. But not by ignoring and denying the fundamental steal that injecting training sets without approval is, and the fundamental difference there is between _doing art_ and asking a computer to produce art.

Ignoring those two is a red flag of people having no idea what art, and practice is.

Oh, the irony...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_obscenity_law

Personally I'm inclined to liken ML tools to backhoes. I don't want the law to force ditches to be dug by hand. I'm not a fan of busywork.

To people who are on board with the "AI" hype train, there is no ethical problem to be solved wrt. "AI".

Neither side cares.

The person you replied to derailed the conversation by misconstruing an analogy.

> what's happening is objectively wrong.

Doesn't seem like a defensible claim to me. Clearly plenty of people don't feel that way, myself included.

Aside, you appear to be banned. Just in case you aren't aware.

That's quite a bold assumption. Betting that logic and reasoning ability plateaus prior to "full stack developer" seems like a very risky gamble.

My counter-argument is "no". Ideally I'd elaborate on that. So ummm ... no, that's not the way things are. Is it?

For but a few examples consider laws regarding gambling, many aspects of zoning, or deceptive marketing.

What's the purpose of the law if not providing stability? Why should social issues be exempted from that?

But if I see something that I think is cool and interesting, and then I discover that it was mostly the result of a few AI prompts, then I just don't care about it anymore. I don't "feel bad" that I thought it interesting, rather, I just completely lose interest.

I do fear that it will be increasingly difficult to tell what is generated by AI and what is created by humans. Just examining myself, I think that would mean I would retreat from mainstream pop-culture stuff, and it would be with sadness. It's a bleak future to imagine. It seems reminiscent of the "versificator" in George Orwell's 1984.

"The idea that only humans can make that kind of work has already been disproven." That I disagree with, and it ultimately is a matter of "what is art." I won't pretend to offer a full, complete definition of what is art, but at least one aspect of defining what is and is not art is, in my opinion, whether is was created by a human or not. There is at least some legal precedent that in order for a copyright to be granted, the work has to be created by a human being: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

"I suspect future generations of AI will be better at creating compelling original art because the AI will have a more complete model of our emotional triggers - including novelty and surprise triggers - than we do ourselves."

Again, by my definition at least, AI cannot create "original art." But I'll concede that it is conceivable that AI will generate entertainment that is more popular and arousing than the entertainment of today. That is a rather bleak future to imagine, though, isn't it? It seems reminiscent of the "versificator" of 1984.

They can also make a legal argument that the training set will fully reproduce copyrighted work. Which is just an actual crime as well as being completely amoral.

> because then it exists and they have to compete with it

The entire point of copyright law is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Individual artists should not have to "compete" against a billion dollar corporation which freely engages in copyright violations that these same artists have to abide by.

> They still won in court based on the profits they determined the "theft" cost them, and the settlements were absurdly high.

Such court determinations are wrong. At least hopefully you can see how perhaps there is not so much wrong with the reasoning, even if you ultimately disagree.

> They're training them on the actual images artists create with skills honed over decades of work.

This is very similar to a human studying different artists and practicing; it’s pretty inarguable that art generated by such humans is not the product of copyright infringement, unless the image copies an artist’s style. Studio Ghibli-style AI images come to mind, to be fair, which should be a liability to whoever is running the AI because they’re distributing the image after producing it.

If one doesn’t think that it’s wrong for, e.g., Meta to torrent everything they can, as I do not, then it is not inconsistent to think their ML training and LLM deployment is simply something that happened and changed market conditions.

Curious why you say this. They seem to have made the copyright infringement analogous to theft and I addressed that directly in the comment.

It’s a philosophical concept not a trap card.

Yes, but:

1) It's not really an exclusive choice; different people can pursue different angles, including all of them - one can both seek immediate support/compensation for the specific case they're the victim of and seek longer-term solution for everyone who'd face the same problem in the future.

2) A bespoke solution is much more likely to be achievable than a general one.

3) I don't believe it would be good for society for artists to succeed in curtailing generative AI! But, should they succeed, I imagine the consequences will encourage people to seek the more general solution that mitigates occupational damage of GenAI while preserving its availability, instead of having to deal with a series of bespoke stopgaps that also kills GenAI entirely.

4) Not that banning GenAI has any chance of succeeding - the most we'd get is it being unavailable in some countries, who'd then be at a disadvantage in competition with countries that embraced it.

Again, I'm not in favor of banning GenAI - on the contrary, I'm in favor of giving a blanket exception from copyright laws for purposes of training generative models. However, I recognize the plight of artists and other people who are feeling the negative economic impact on their jobs right now (and hell, my own line of work - software development - is still one of the most at risk in the near to mid-term, too); I wish for a solution that will help them (and others about to be in this situation), but in the meantime, I don't begrudge them for trying to fight it - I think they have full right to. I only have problems with people who oppose AI because they feel that Big AI is depriving them of opportunity to seek rent from society for the value AI models are creating.

https://adobe.design/stories/leading-design/reducing-biased-...

(I work for Adobe)

Fair Use 4th Factor: This factor considers whether the use could harm the copyright holders market for the original work.

If the use is research it’s fine. If the use is providing a public non-commercial model then it is somewhat harmful as their work is devalued. If the goal is to compete with them it is very harmful. Therefore, since we’re talking about the last two use cases, I argue fair use does not apply. Others maintain it does as maybe you do.

If it’s not fair use then it would be infringing on that particular copyright holder.

As you know, anime art is a spectrum with “How to Draw Manga for Kids” at the bottom and studio quality at the top. People pick and choose the art to train on not just because of the style but also the quality and consistency of their work. That’s why you might choose a specific artist to base a model on even though their style is just “anime”.

So is a xerox machine. It's whole purpose is to make copies of things whatever you put into it with no regard to whether you have a license to make that copy. Likewise with the record capability on your VCR. Sure you could hook it up to a cam corder and transfer your home movie from a Super-8 to a VHS with your VCR (or like one I used to own, it might even have a camera accessory and port that you could hook a camera up to directly) and yet, I would wager most recordings on most VCRs were to commit copyright infringement. Bit-torrent specializes in facilitating copyright infringement, no matter how many Linux ISOs you download with it. CD ripping software and DeCSS is explicitly about copyright infringement. And let's be real, while MAME is a phenomenal piece of software that has done an amazing job of documenting legacy hardware and its quirks, the entire emulation scene as a whole is built on copyright infringement, and I would wager to a rounding error none of the folks that write MAME emulators have a license to copy the ROMs that they use to do that.

But in all of these cases, the fact that it can (and even usually is) used for copyright infringement is not in and of itself a reason to restrict or ban the technology.

> And if you want to disagree with this point, it'd be most persuasive then to explain why, if this is not the case, AI images regularly end up infringing on various aspects of various popular artworks, like characters, styles, intellectual properties, when those things are not being requested by the prompt.

Well for starters, I'd like to clarify to axioms:

1) "characters" as a subset of "intellectual properties"

2) "style" is not something you can copyright or infringe under US law. It can be part of a trademark or a design patent, and certainly you can commit fraud if you represent something in someone else's style as being a genuine item from that person, but style itself is not protected and I don't think it should be.

So then to answer the question, I would argue that AI images don't "regularly end up infringing on ... intellectual properties, when those things are not being requested by the prompt". I've generated quite a few AI images myself in exploring the various products out there and not a one of them has generated an infringing work, because none of my prompts have asked it to generate an infringing work. It is certainly possible that a given model with a sufficiently limited training set for a given set of words might be likely to generate an infringing image on a prompt, and that's because with a limited set of options to draw from, the prompt is inherently asking for an infringing image no matter how much you try to scrape the serial numbers off. That is, if I ask for an image of "two Italian plumbers who are brothers and battle turtles", everyone knows what that prompt is asking for. There's not a lot of reference options for that particular set of requirements and so it is more likely to generate an infringing image. It's also partly a function of the current goals of the models. As it stands, for the most part we want a model that takes a vague description and gives us something that matches our imagined output. Give that description to most people and they're going to envision the Mario Brothers, so a "good" image generation model is one that will generate a "Mario Brothers" inspired (or infringing) image.

As the technology improves and we get better about producing models that can take new paths without also generating body horror results, and as the users start wanting models that are more creative, we'll begin to see models that can respond to even that limited training set and generate something more unique and less likely to be infringing.

> No, you aren't, because an artist is a person that doesn't want to suffer legal consequences for drawing something owned by someone else.

Sorry, I think you're wrong. If you commission it for money from someone with enough potential visibility, you might encounter people who go out of their way to avoid anything that could be construed as Indiana Jones, but I bet even then you'd get more "Indiana Jones with the serial numbers filed off" images than not.

But if you just asked random artists to draw that prompt, you're going to get an artists rendition of Indiana Jones. It's clear thats what you want from the prompt and that's the single and sole cultural creative reference for that prompt. Though I suppose you and I are going to have to agree to disagree on what people will do unless you're feeling like actually asking a bunch of artist on Fiver to draw the prompt for you.

And realistically what do you expect them to draw when you make that request? When that article showed up with the headline, EVERYONE reading the headline knew the article was talking about an AI generating Indiana Jones. Why did everyone know that? Because of the limited reference for that prompt that exists. "Archeologist that wears a hat and uses a whip" describes very uniquely a single character to almost every single person.

There's a reason no one is writing articles about AIs ripping off Studio Ghibli by showing the output from the prompt "raccoon with giant testicles." No one writes articles talking about how the AI spontaneously generated Garfield knockoffs when prompted to draw an "orange stripped cat". There's no articles about AIs churning out truckloads of Superman images when someone asks for "super hero". And those articles don't exist because there's enough variations on those themes out there, enough different combinations of those words to describe enough different combinations of images and things that those words don't instantly conjure the same image and character for everyone. And so it goes for the AI too. Those prompts don't ask specifically for infringing art so they don't generally generate infringing art.

  > and then when told it's AI, turn on it and decide it was obviously flawed from the beginning. 

The discussion is about whether or not ignoring something that is of little consequence to you diminishes a later case you might bring when something substantially similar causes you noticeable problems. The question at hand had nothing to do with damages due to piracy (direct, perceived, hypothetical, legal fiction, or otherwise).

It's confusing because the basis for the legal claim is damages due to piracy and the size of that claim probably hasn't shifted all that much. But the motivating interest is not the damages. It is the impact of the thing on their employment. That impact was not present before so no one was inclined to pursue a protracted uphill battle.

That comparison would be fair if the generative AI you use is trained exclusively on your own (rightfully acquired) data and work.

Existing generative AIs are feeding on the work of millions of people who did not consent.

That’s a violation of their work and of their rights.

And that should also alert those that expect to use/benefit of their own production out of these generators: why would it be 1/ protectable, 2/ protected at all.

It is no coincidence that these generators makers’ philosophy aligns with an autocrat political project, and some inhuman « masculinity » promoters. It’s all about power and nothing about playing by the rules of a society.

I am not even speaking of « do the users feel what it is ». Here it is:

If some people are so enthusiastic and ruthless defenders of AI generators that were trained/fed from the work of millions on unconsenting artists…

1/ what do they expect will happen to their own generated production?

2/ what do they expect will happen to their own consent, in that particular matter, or in others matters (as this will have been an additional precedent, a de facto)?

Again, said it elsewhere, there is a power play behind this, that is very related to the brolicharchy pushing for some kind of twisted, « red pilled » (lol) masculinity, and that is related to rape as a culture, not only in sexual matter but in all of them.

That's ignoring the fact that an AI image generator trained without infringing on existing works would have way worse quality, because of the reduced amount and quality of the training set.

> Existing generative AIs are feeding on the work of millions of people who did not consent.

There are LLMs that are trained on non-copyright work, but apparently that's irrelevant according to the comment I replied to.

The other objections, in the economic range (replacing/displacing artists work for financial gain, from the producers point of view) are totally valid too, but don't rely on the same argument.

And my point above is not really an objection, it's a reminder: of what are AI generators, and what they are not (and that AI generators promoters pretend they are, without any piece of evidence or real argument).

Of what their output is (a rough, industrial barely specified and mastered product), and what it is not (art).

Which is equally illegal.

> disregarding copyright law because that is circular reasoning

This is not circular, copyright is non-negotiable.

A machine, software, hardware, whatever, as much as a corporation, _is not a human person_.

And this is why I've stopped arguing with people from this crowd. Beyond the classic gatekeeping of what art is, I'm sick of the constant moving of the goalposts. Even if a company provides proof, I'm sure you'd find another issue with them

Underlying all of it is a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI tools are used for art, and a subtle implication that it's really the amount of effort that defines what "art" really is.

Because every piece of generative AI looks identical, right? I mean, if the prompt had an impact, and two people using some ML-model would create different results based on what they choose to input, it sounds suspiciously like your "the same camera in two different hands", doesn't it?

> the fundamental difference there is between _doing art_ and asking a computer to produce art.

You mean doing art by asking a computer do produce a dump of sensor-data by pressing a button?

You appear to be completely blind to the similarities and just retreat towards "I draw the lines around art, and this is inside, and that's outside of it" without being able to explain how the AI-tool is fundamentally different from the camera-tool, but obviously one negates all possibility to create art, while the other totally is art, because that's what people say!

Needless to say that the people making those distinctions can't even tell apart a photo from an AI-generated picture.

And what crowd? I am stating my viewpoint, from an education in humanities AND tech, and from 25 years of career in software tech, and 30 years of musician and painter practice.

Sorry but who is moving the goalpost here? Who is coming with their tech saying « hi, but we don’t care about how your laws make sense and we don’t care that we don’t know what art is because we never studied about it, neither do we have any artistic practice, we just want to have what you guys do by pressing a button. Oh and all of your stuff is free for us to forage thru, don’t care about what you say about your own work. »

Typical entitled behavior. Don’t act surprised that this is met with counter arguments and reality.

What would be gatekeeping is if someone prevented you to pick a pencil, paper, a guitar, a brush, to make something out of your own.

You’re the only one gatekeeping yourself here.

Looks like it’s the same pattern as with blockchains, and NFTs and Web3 stuff and the move fast/break things mantra: you cannot argue for and demonstrate for what your « solutions » actually solve, so you need brute force to break things and impose them.

Artistic expression is people in motion, alone or in groups.

You’re talking about the economics of performances and artefacts, which are _something else_ out of artistic expression.

EDIT to clarify/reinforce:

Elvis without Elvis isn’t Elvis. Discs, movies, books are captures of Elvis. Not the same thing.

Miyazaki without Miyazaki isn’t Miyazaki. It may look like it, but it is not it.

Artistic expression is someone’s expression, practice (yours, mine, theirs). It’s the definition of the originality of it (who it comes from, who it is actually made by).

A machine, a software may produce (raw) materials for artistic expression, whatever it is, but it is not artistic expression by itself.

Bowie using the Verbasizer is using a tool for artistic expression. The Verbasizer output isn’t art by itself. Bowie made Bowie stuff.

The casual dismissal of artists' fundamental rights to control their work and how they are used is a part of a larger cultural problem, where might would rule over law, power would rule over justice, lies over truth.

That may seem a charged argument, and it is, because it hits right and it is particularly uncomfortable to acknowledge.

The same tech leaders that push for this move over IP law are the tech leaders that fund(ed) the current dismantling of US democracy and that have chosen their political team because it aligns precisely (up to the man that got the presidential seat, the man that has (had?) quite problematic issues towards women) with their values.

This is too obvious to be an accident.

And this is also a stern warning. Because the ideology behind power does not stop at anything. It goes on until it eats itself.

I feel there's something interesting to discuss here but I'm still not convinced: a camera captures light from the physical reality. AI generators "capture" something from a model trained on existing artworks from other people (most likely not consenting). There's a superficial similarity in the push of the button, but that's it. Each does not operate the same way, on the same domain.

> You appear to be completely blind to the similarities [...] without being able to explain how the AI-tool is fundamentally different from the camera-tool, but obviously one negates all possibility to create art, while the other totally is art, because that's what people say!

There's a vocabulary issue here. Art is a practice, not a thing, not a product. You can create a picture, however you like it.

What makes a picture cool to look at is how it looks. And that is very subjective and contextual. No issue with that. What makes it _interesting_ and catchy is not so much what it _is_ but what it says, what it means, what it triggers, from the intent of the artist (if one gets to have the info about it), to its techniques[1] all the way to the inspiration it creates in the onlookers (which is also a function of a lot of things).

Anything machine-produced can be cool/beautiful/whatever.

Machines also reproduce/reprint original works. And while there are common qualities, it is not the same to look at a copy, at a reproduction of a thing, and to look at the original thing, that was made by the original artist. If you haven't experienced that, please try to (going to a museum for instance, or a gallery, anywhere).

[1] and there, using AI stuff as anything else as a _tool_ to practice/make art? of course. But to say that what this tool makes _is_ art or a work of art? Basic no for me.

> Needless to say that the people making those distinctions can't even tell apart a photo from an AI-generated picture.

1/ It does get better and better, but it still looks like AI-generated (as of April 2025).

2/ Human-wise/feeling-wise/intellectual-wise, anything that I know has been generated by AI will be a. interesting perhaps, for ideas, for randomness, b. but soulless. And that is connection, relief, soul (mine, and those of others) I am looking for in art (as a practice, an artefact or a performance); I'm pretty sure that's what connects us humans.

3/ Market-wise, I predict that any renowned artwork will lose of its value as soon as its origin being AI-made will be known; for the very reason 2/ above.

I always wonder why people make statements like this. Anyone that knows more than one artist knows that artists uses these tools for a variety of reasons and aren't nearly as scared as random internet concern trolls make them out to be.

Agreed, the ones I know in real life are excited by these tools and have been using them.

(/s)

* not only this contextually misleading quote, and I've also parotted things

Art as nice things, vs. art as a peacock's tail where the effort is the point.

Fast fashion vs. Ned Ludd.

Queen Elizabeth I saying to William Lee, "Thou aimest high, Master Lee. Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars."

2/ it has been discussed for like, decades, in academic and social contexts, how attitudes in some domain reflects and reinforces them in others.

3/ Your « actual » makes an assumption about my experience that you have no basis for.

Point remains that non-consensual use of artists’ work reflects the same fundamental disregard for autonomy that characterizes other consent violations.