Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash

I'd say that is a bit of an ungenerous characterization. Is it possible that it could be both? That while artists maybe do feel under attack in terms of competition, that there is a genuine ethical dilemma at hand?

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.

Artists do not want to get paid micropennies for use-of-training-data licenses for something that destroys the market for new art. And that's the only claim Adobe Firefly makes for being ethical. Adobe used a EULA Roofie to make all their Adobe Stock contributors consent to getting monthly payments for images trained on in Firefly.

Indeed, and I agree that Adobe is in the wrong here. For an agreement between Adobe and an artist to be truly permissive, the artist should have the ability to not give their consent. Ethically, I think Adobe is in the same position as the other AI companies – if the artist doesn't directly (EULAs are not direct, in my opinion) agree to the terms, and if they don't have the option to decline, then it isn't an agreement, it is an method of coercion. If an artist, like you said, doesn't want to be paid micropennies, they shouldn't have to agree.

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.

I've never seen anyone make the complaint about image classifiers or image segmentation. It's only for generative models and only once they got good enough to be useful.

> Is it possible that it could be both? That while artists maybe do feel under attack in terms of competition, that there is a genuine ethical dilemma at hand?

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.

Adobe only trains its AI on properly licensed images that the artists have explicitly signed a contract with Adobe to train on.

> But substantially the same thing happens if the AI is trained on some other artist's work instead.

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.

It crushes the orphans very quickly, and on command, and allows anyone to crush orphans from the comfort of their own home. Most people are low-taste enough that they don't really care about the difference between hand-crushed orphans and artisanal hand-crushed orphans.

Actually moral rights is what allow you to say no to AI. It is also a big part of copyright and more important in places were fair use does not exist in the extent it does in the US.

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.

I'm not entirely convinced by the artists' argument, but this argument is also unconvincing to me. If someone steals from you, but it's a negligible amount, or you don't even notice it, does that make it not stealing? If the thief then starts selling the things they stole from you, directly competing with you, are your grievances less valid now since you didn't complain about the theft before?

Nothing was stolen from the artists but instead used without their permission. The thing being used is an idea, not anything the artist loses access to when someone else has it. What is there to complain about? Why should others listen to the complaints (disregarding copyright law because that is circular reasoning)?

So many problems with your reasoning.

"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?

If you type "street art" as part of an image generation prompt, the results are quite similar to typing "in the style of Banksy". They're direct substitutes for each other, neither of them is actually going to produce Banksy-quality output and it's not even obvious which one will produce better results for a given prompt.

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?

> Actually moral rights is what allow you to say no to AI.

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.

Well one could argue that this ought to be a discussion of morality and social acceptability rather than legality. After all the former can eventually lead to the latter. However if you make that argument you immediately run into the issue that there clearly isn't broad consensus on this topic.

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.

It's piracy, not theft. Those aren't the same thing but they are both against the law and the court will assess damages for both.

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.

This hinges on denying that artists have distinctive personal styles. Instead your theory seems to be that styles are genres, and that the AI only needs to be trained on the genre, not the specific artist's output, in order to produce that artist's style. Which under this theory is equivalent to the generic style.

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

You know "puréed orphan extract" is just salt, right? You can extract it from seawater in an expensive process that, nonetheless, is way cheaper than crushing orphans (not to mention the ethical implications). Sure, you have to live near the ocean, but plenty of people do, and we already have distribution networks to transport the resulting salt to your local market. Just one fist-sized container is the equivalent of, like, three or four dozen orphans; and you can get that without needing a fancy press or an expensive meat-sink.

I dunno, man. Re-read your comment but change one assumption:

> 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.

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

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 was an analogy, ie a comparison of the differences between pairs. The relevant bit then is the damages suffered by the party stolen from. If you fail to pursue when the damages are small or nonexistent (image classifiers, employee stealing a single apple, individual reproduction for personal use) why should that undermine a case you bring when the damages become noticeable (generative models, employee stealing 500 lbs of apples, bulk reproduction for commercial sale)?

The argument here isn't so much that individual artists don't have their specific styles, but rather whether AI actually tracks that, or whether using "in the style of ..." is effectively a substitute for identifying the more general style category to which this artist belongs.

This is precisely where the analogy breaks down. The victim suffers damages in any theft, independent of any value the perpetrator gains. Damages due to copyright infringement don't work this way. Copyright exists to motivate the creation of valuable works; damages for copyright are an invented thing meant to support this.

That would only be a relevant distinction if the discussion were specifically about realized damages. It is not.

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.

Oh, I agree with all that, I had sort of ignored the middle post in this chain.

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

Which is equally illegal.

> disregarding copyright law because that is circular reasoning

This is not circular, copyright is non-negotiable.

> This is very similar to a human...

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