[MattRix]

There are many reasons, but two of the biggest are that AI art can’t be copyrighted, and that using AI art is immoral. You may disagree with the second point but the fact is that it’s a very common viewpoint.

To me it’s especially clear that using AI to make art is immoral when you use it for a purpose that you would have previously hired a human artist for. Harvesting work from artists without permission and then using that to replace them is pretty scummy.

[kneebonian]

I agree and quite frankly it's a travesty and a moral failing of society with all the horseshoers that are now in the unemployment line because those damn automobiles and Mr. Ford.

[chickenchicken]

Let’s see the art then when it’s not trained on the artists work.

[yieldcrv]

Adobe’s AI image model uses their own licensed photo set and Adobe Stock

Same with Getty’s

is that the approved use then?

[MattRix]

So I agree those are at least somewhat better from a moral point of view, but people still can’t use those as justification to keep using other models like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion.

Now back to the morality of the Getty and Adobe models: did those artists know their work was going to be used for training AI art models? From what I understand there are many artists who licensed their art to Adobe Stock who are upset that their work is being used for this purpose.

Keep in mind this is a usage of the art that literally didn’t exist when the artists licensed their art to Adobe. I would argue it’s a fundamentally different use case.

[yieldcrv]

so the goalpost would be for artists and photographers to license their work specifically for being part of a training set?

and once that’s done all arguments disintegrate as people stop going to artists and photographers anymore either way?

[MattRix]

Yeah that’s exactly it. Then they’re making money from their work still, and maybe even have an incentive to create new work for AIs to train on.

[MattRix]

This is a bit more like if Mr. Ford had stolen all their horseshoes and melted them down to create the metal for his cars.

[drumhead]

I've never heard the argument that AI art is immoral. I know it scares of lot of people because it's going leave them with less work. But that's just what technology does, kills some industries and gives birth to new ones. It's not immoral, it's just economies work.

[MattRix]

Being “inevitable” does not preclude something from being immoral. Technologies and economies can be immoral too. The idea that all technological progress is inherently good is bizarre.

As for AI art specifically, the problem isn’t really that artists are being replaced. The problem that their own work is being used to replace them, and yet they are not getting credited or compensated by midjourney (etc).

[swores]

I can appreciate arguments for and against AI art being immoral, however:

> It's not immoral, it's just [how] economies work.

Do you believe that every aspect of "economies" (or, to simplify the question, let's say just current day capitalism to exclude things like communism and historic economies from the equation) must automatically be moral, or perhaps amoral since you only said "not immoral"?

Seems to me like either a badly thought out claim, or a bad faith argument to justify your main claim about AI art, rather than an actual justification for believing AI art is not immoral.

(Side note - from the POV of my comment anyway, though I suppose technically my comment is the side-note and this is back on the main topic: if you genuinely haven't noticed any debate over the morality or not or AI art, you've not been following AI coverage in mainstream & tech news publications, nor reading the huge number of HN threads where people disagree over whether or not AI image generators training on human art without compensating the human creators should be considered immoral IP theft or should be considered the same as a human studying great artists while working on improving their own art).

[yieldcrv]

Adobe’s AI image model uses their own licensed photo set and Adobe Stock

Same with Getty’s

is that the approved use then? or does the goal post move

[swores]

I'm not the best person to ask, you may have noticed from my comment that I didn't argue that any type of AI art is or isn't immoral, I just pointed out that many people have been arguing on both sides. Among other reasons, because I don't have a fully formed opinion either in general or in specific cases.

But thanks for assuming that I'm arguing in bad faith despite not making an argument for either side!

[yieldcrv]

I didn’t assume that, I asked two questions.

Thanks for your contributions

[swores]

Apologies for misunderstanding your comment, then

[mensetmanusman]

AI Art is just information photography in a digital space. Prompting is setting up the camera and pushing 'click'

[MattRix]

If you take a photograph of someone else’s copyrighted work, that doesn’t make it a new piece. For example, look at how Valve is rejecting games that use AI generated art: https://twitter.com/simoncarless/status/1674285134374404096

[mensetmanusman]

That's true, which is why the photography analogy holds.

It makes sense you can't clone exact types of art, but mixing and mashing two or more to make something totally new and derivative is fine.

[MattRix]

Ok but how mixed and mashed does it need to be before it’s not considered derivative? And how do you know that the thing the AI generated isn’t a clone?