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by boppo1 944 days ago
Artist here. It's totally reasonable for artists to be mad about models being trained on their work without informed prior consent.

Anger about using AI is less justifiied.

2 comments

I'm more of an artist than a hacker, and

> mad about models being trained on their work without informed prior consent

This is the "your mind has been poisoned by a corporate view of intellectual property" take. The idea that copyright should extend this far is horrifying, it is another step toward stifling and controlling creative expression. The problem is capital being rewarded way more by IP law than labor, something that isn't going to be fixed by giving people more and broader ways to own things.|

You'll be surprised how recent the idea of owning ideas is.

Well I should be more clear. I don't mean by informed consent "they put it in the TOS and it's software I have to use so I'm boned". I mean more like "I use Blender, Krita, and Procreate and none of them do that bullshit. As long as there's a notification on software that scans my work so I can avoid it, I'm happy. If I want to opt-in to contributing to a model at some point, that might be cool."

I guess I should worry a bit that important software without worthwhile alternatives might start to do this, but I don't think the blender foundation will as long as Ton is alive, and I bet the same for Krita. Procreate I'm a little less confident about, but only a little, as they know who their main userbase* is and they know how those people feel about AI.

*Arguably there are more people with Procreate that barely know how to draw than people who do. BUT part of Procreate's appeal is that it's software that 'the pros' prefer to use. If the talented artists start publicly dumping on Procreate, the people who can't draw will slowly but surely follow those artists to whatever their preferred software becomes.

Would you object to somebody looking at your images and imitating the style? How is AI different?
Have you ever actually looked into people who do that? They put in a lot of effort into understanding the original creator, their intent, process, materials etc. The copies are still very much art as they are expressions of the imitator's feelings towards the work. Performing studies of popular art by trying to replicate it is a powerful tool for learning precisely because it allows you, as an artist, to understand how the original artist thought, helping you learn to think like an artist and leading you to develop your own ideas and means of expression.

AI is none of that.

> AI is none of that.

How do we know? We can do art Turing Test - have 3 real artists and an text/image generation AI train on somebody's art. Have it generate the images and answer questions about the art.

If you can't tell which one of them is AI - would you conceed they are "all of that"?

>Would you object to somebody looking at your images and imitating the style?

Yes. It's quite difficult to do so, however. The people capable usually have better things to do with their skills.

The claim that people don't copy art styles or even that it's rare is ridiculous. Opwm tumblr and you will immediately be presented with a counterexample.
I mean if you're talking about throwaway 4chan/twitter-anime, that's a different tier of art. I'm talking artists more like Jeremy Lipking or Jose Lopez Vegara.