AI will snatch up the partial code of a game that's shared on reddit and let somebody else beat that person to release in a game. This has already been demonstrated, already happened! That is not the kind of thing a thief can do just by referencing or even copy pasting said chunks of code, but with AI, it's achievable. AI will take the exact style of an artist and reproduce his work, taking away immediate and long-term commissions. If they're feeling really ballsy they might start to pass it off as their own and sell it, but maybe they just keep it to have a style matched copy of their own oc without paying the artist. AI will shmooze in to art, writing, and game-making competitions, undisclosed, and snatch up places from creators. Way muddier to detect than old forms of plagiarism. As a side effect, the difficulty in detection also trickles down to make participation and judgment more annoying for everyone involved in those contests. My point in these examples was that even if it was not a form of thievery (and it is), it is godsent for thieves. You cannot even begin to say that the ability to iterate on somebody else's work by reference (even tracing! even straight up copy paste plagiarism!) allows thievery on this same scale. AI is a tool built on thievery that enables and promotes further thievery on a broad scale. It makes thievery fast, sometimes completely automated, and it sanitizes it with a veneer of automatic iteration. If anyone wants to come at me and say "it still takes time and effort!" sure, but look at the amount of AI covers out there! I think the proof is in the pudding. If my take is too bleeding-heart artist for you, look instead at how the court is treating cases regarding copyright violations for non iterative work. Protected libraries being scraped routinely. Similarly, AI art is not eligible for copyright. Legal battles are being won on the basis that this is thievery... because it is! It's using protected works. It's been that way from the start and there is no putting the genie back in the bottle. And if anyone thinks there is an ethical way to maintain and use AI tools, remember the time that AI Kaneko trained wholly on a dataset of Kaneko's own art produced Frozen characters. It's all theft soup! That should be enough reason not to use it, without accounting for the countless other reasons emerging every day (unsustainable economic bubble diverting resources that's being built up around it, environmental impacts, etc.) I keep quiet about it a lot, but it's depressing, the AI images adorning our UI, our stories, etc. It is actively driving away a lot of great writers (including one of my favorite game writers) and making it embarrassing to say this is my writing site of choice to any outside creatives. People on another writing site my friend's on call this "the ai art site" and avoid it on that basis. I know it's not everyone using it and I applaud everyone who's keeping it out of your work as you continue making stories-- I want to be a part of that number, too. Anyway, tl;dr or not, I will feel a little less hypocritical for being silent about it.
Illegal. Clear violation of intellectual property. But no one objects that AI can be used to infringe copyrights. Tool that is good for creating content will be good for creating illegal content Absolutely legal. Style is not copyrightable and never was. "My style" is simply not intellectual property, not something the author has any right to forbid to mimic. Only individual works are protected by copyright. Anyone can start drawing in "Disney style" tomorrow and face no wrath of the mouse. Changing it and making it illegal... this seems absurd to me. Luckily, real copyright laws are not that stupid. I wouldn't want to live in a world where something like "Anime" style belongs to one freaking company. It is also impossible to create your own unique style. At best, you will have a substyle with some 'unique' part with most elements borrowed from the mother style or other styles, aka mostly stolen by this very logic. Edit: One important caveat: if someone tunes model\trains a LORA on a narrow set of a specific artist's works, then the model will not merely mimic style, it will mimic content. Model will happily output copyrightable elements. Image-generating models don't truly understand what style is. Cheating is bad, sure. The same problem exists in online chess. It doesn't mean that cheating in tournaments is the only use for chess engines and that chess engines are something evil. Again, tool that is good for creating content will be good for creating illegal content. The claim I oppose is that every use of AI is theft. AI can be used for theft. And it is a very convenient tool for it. No. It is not built on thievery. Unless you are willing to label any analysis of anything copyrighted thievery. Illegally obtaining copies for training is piracy and some AI companies were punished for just that but no court in existence has determined that training itself is copyright infringement Untrue. Google - "A Single Piece of American Cheese" for the most known example of copyrihgted AI work. AI works are very much eligible for copyright if certain conditions are met. Or rather works that are a mix of software output and human creative decisions are copyrightable. Pure software output is, indeed, not copyrightable. Won't comment on other stuff because it is not directly related to the claim - using AI is theft. Claim that is what I oppose because it is a plain lie. It bullies people into not using a tool that can be a multiplier of their creativity. There are many wrong ways to use AI, some infringe on copyrights, some are ugly tasteless slop, and many have audacious "I made X" when all that was done is a single prompt that wasn't even creative... But mythology about how copyright actually works annoys me a lot.
I only use photorealistic images of fake people. To me that actually feels more ethical than taking pictures of real models/celebrities/adult actors or whoever and inserting them into my smut stories without their permission or knowledge. It also looks better in terms of fitting the story. Since most of us aren't artists or rich enough to keep commissioning them to support writing we aren't earning anything from I suppose the practical alternative would be just to effectively not have art on here at all, but that would seem a shame when many enjoy it.
You see, what is ethical and what is not ethical is... a matter of opinion. There are many people who sincerely believe that every story written on this site is unethical and immoral. Having an opinion on what is unethical is fine, bullying people because they do what YOU consider unethical IS NOT. And in my books, calling someone a thief is bullying.
I get why this is such an emotive subject for people but I think it is important to keep cool heads and a sense of perspective here. If the argument being made is that AI is a godsend for thieves so therefore anyone using it, however innocent their intent is, is supporting theft then that is extremely reductive. The internet was a godsend for child pornographers when that came along, email a godsend for scammers, social media a godsend for racist bullies. Much like those AI can and does have so many more purposes and it is not going away whether people like it or not. If the environment is a concern then we should also not be driving and only using public transport. I referenced DeviantArt earlier where I've seen the impact on actual digital artists who are now seeing the space they operate and in many cases rely on for income in swamped with text generated art and where they now risk having their work stolen whenever they upload it. It must be devastating and shouldn't be allowed to happen. That said, tarring anyone who uses any form of AI art in any context with the same brush is unfair and the finger wagging will inevitably rile some people up. Nobody expects to be called a thief for asking ChatGPT to make a cover image that goes with a story they have written for free for other people to enjoy. And I also have to mention that the thievery argument is particularly interesting when it often comes from authors who write about characters and worlds from intellectual properties that are not their own. I have no issues with fan fiction at all, since it is being created purely for entertainment and is not being monetised, but it is a slightly iffy position to be throwing stones from. The people using AI art in their stories on here have the exact same motivation. I don't blame people for getting upset about this, but let's try not to take those frustrations out on each other.
This is a debate about ethics. You can't just sidestep it by observing that people disagree about ethics. Like, yeah, obviously. Otherwise it wouldn't be a debate. However, when issues of ethics were raised, you defaulted to what was legal, which is itself an ethical position. So what is it? That there can be no agreement on what's ethical, or that what's legal (in your jurisdiction) is what's ethical? I have another angle on why I find AI art (especially porn) bad, and I believe I already mentioned it, which is the fact the models are disproportionately trained on images of "barely legal" women, generating images that honestly resemble on an unavoidable level, dead girls. I can think of things that would turn me off more, but dead girls is already beyond my limit so I'd rather not have to.
