To use AI art/photos or not?

[MidbossMan]

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.

 

[Hvast]

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!)

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.

AI is a tool built on thievery that enables and promotes further thievery on a broad scale.

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

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 are being enforced an protected libraries being scraped. Similarly, AI art is not eligible for copyright.

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.

 

[Tonyrolo]

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.

 

[Hvast]

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.

 

[Tonyrolo]

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.

 

[DeviantChalice]

You see, what is ethical and what is not ethical is... a matter of opinion.

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.

 

[Hvast]

No. In my case, it is a debate if using AI is theft or not. I oppose the lie that people who use AI in any way are thieves. My message was about that. I reacted to the blanket labeling of people who use AI as thieves. Accusing someone of theft is not just debating opinion on ethics. It is libel. It is bullying. It is a lie.

Theft is already a very loaded term and dishonest. Copyright infringement is not theft. It fails to meet the definition of theft.

But even if we speak of copyright infringement, people who claim with 100% certainty what constitutes copyright infringement usually know jackshit about how copyright works and interpret it like "the author can forbid anything related to his or her art, especially if it benefits other people."

I can't be sure what the final verdict of the court system on whether training AI violates copyright will be, but one thing is clear - it is not obvious. If it was - we would have clear verdicts years ago and Disney, Warner Brothers, Nintendo, Hasbro and friends would own all AI companies after their huge fines. And yet, with no legal consensus whatsoever, accusations of using a "product of theft" are thrown left and right.

And claim that a person who writes "Draw me a cat." violates the copyrights of authors of all those copyrighted images of cats in training data is bonkers. It is both extremely transformative and de minimis use even if AI model is a fragment-gluing machine (it isn't). Even funnier, a person who drew a cat by hand and then modifies it using the AI - will be accused of theft.

Hey, me using Grammarly to write this very message is also theft!

 

[TheLowKing]

Friends, I was only making a joke.

 

[Tonyrolo]

Oh, I realise that. It was another somewhat holier than thou post that irked me. As someone who uses photorealistic AI art in my stories that rip off nobody and use women that look neither underage nor dead, mainly to avoid using real people who might not wish to be inserted into smut stories, I felt I needed to speak up in my own defence. Especially as the person making the thievery claims apparently thinks it is fine to take characters from My Hero Academia, Danganronpa, Metroid, Helltaker, Yu-Gi-Oh etc and put them into their porn stories regardless of whether the people who actually created those characters wanted it or not, because in the rules they made in their own head that the rest of us apparently need to abide by they have given themselves a pass on that while calling out other people for thievery.

Anyway, that's me done on this I think.

 

[Hvast]

Friends, I was only making a joke.

I wasn't reacting to your comment specifically, more on a combination of Jwtss's post and your response. I find nothing amusing in taking someone's work and removing their watermark. Watermarks are a direct statement. "I don't want to have results of my work used without attribution".
"AI is not copyrightable, so it is OK" is not a great excuse not only because it is a simplification that is not 100% true, but also because a lack of creative work or lack of originality doesn't mean a lack of work.

Simple example - if someone took an existing character, then found an image and traced a human silhouette, then used a simple gradient as the background - % of authorship there is abysmal, but still, effort and time were spent to draw it.


Still, I reacted only with two short statements, not elaborating, not arguing, just pointing my opinion on 'theft'


Then we got MidbossMan's rather long, preachy reaction to my two short statements......

 

[DeviantChalice]

Well that's just like, your opinion, man...

 

[JWtts]

My general point is, generate all the images that you want because getting into the weeds of the AI "art" debate is a much longer discussion that involves nuance that is not really conducive to an online thread exchange between strangers.

But let me be clear, I would never take someone's actual, original created work (even fan work) and remove a watermark and try to pass it off as my own. This is also different from fan art, fan edits, or tracing (in my opinion), as it's your own hand recreating an image or tweaking it, possibly in your own style or just to show your love of the character(s), fandom, artist, or art. Though I would still attribute the original piece and artist, and not add some random watermark like some sort of Mad Max "Witness me!" type of thing.

The problem I have is people generating AI images and then adding a watermark to those images as if that generated image should be attributed to the prompter, similar to a copyright or artist's signature. So, yes, it does get into the weeds of copyright and trademark, and added percentages of "work", no matter how big or small doesn't change that. Obviously, if it's become a transformative work, that changes things, but that transformative work should be work and not an AI prompt.

To me, slapping your own watermark on your AI generated content is like me going to McDonalds, ordering a burger, coming home, unwrapping it, wrapping that burger in my own packaging, and then showing it off to the world as if it's something people should attribute to me, my efforts, my "culinary" skills, and my brand. And the same goes for even minor tweaks or a % of work like editing out extra fingers, wonky eyes... or in the burger example, adding some non-McDonald's sauce from home to "make it my own" or spending time doing "work" in Photoshop to design my own McJWtts wrapper. Because the fact remains, I DID NOT MAKE THAT BURGER (and no, I'm not shouting at you or anyone else here. So, please, don't make it a thing).

But... it's not my meat, not my bun, not my plastic American cheese, and not even my hands in the McDonald's kitchen putting the burger together with items someone else manufactured. I just spoke my order (prompt) into the box in the drive-thru, and minutes later, voilà! Burger! I don't get to take credit for that, even if that burger is unique to me with extra pickles, no onions, etc. or if I decided to spend time and money designing and printing out a McJWtts wrapper. I get to take credit for the wrapper and maybe within the confines of my home I can call my unique McDonald's burger the JWtts Special, but that's it.

To get back to art, I would say the same goes for even tweaking an image (generated or not). I would never take a Jim Lee image of Batman, change Batman's outfit to purple, and then slap a JWtts watermark on it. And if I did do some sort of image edit for a fanart piece or if I was doing it for a story here (where there's no monetization in regards to copyright infringement or potential incentive based on engagement, follower count, etc.), I would make it clear that the edited image is my fan edit of Jim Lee's original art. That way, the edited image is not falsely attributed to him (as he may hate purple Batman and/or be offended if anyone ever thought he drew purple Batman) AND it's not falsely attributed to me as an original drawing. Because the fact remains, my purple Batman doesn't exist if Jim Lee and his art never existed. Can I be inspired by him or his art style? Yes. But then I take that inspiration and create something new and forge my own style.

So, yes, it's very much a copyright issue thing along with a possible discussion as it relates to the public domain. And to me, AI generated images, stories, music, and other media are way more public domain than copyrighted or attribution required material. Is it public domain? Not really. Because AI models are trained off scraped, mostly copyrighted works and art styles, but it feels very hypocritical to use the billionaire's stolen content machine to generate something without attribution and then demand people respect your generated content with a watermark because you had the idea to have a machine generate Purple Batman. And doing any sort of extra "work" on it doesn't change that.

 

[Hvast]

The usual combination... Ordering a burger/pizza analogy. AI images are made only by writing a prompt and getting output in minutes (I always wonder if it is a deliberate snowman or a genuine misunderstanding of the width of options in AI image creation tools)... Image-to-image with slight modification is presented as a typical use and main use. Style is something artists own. AIs are content-stealing machines.

__________________
Sarcasm mode on:

The US Copyright Office gives copyright to AI-generated image? Who cares, there are no authorship! It is just like ordering a pizza. They must be wrong or corrupt or something.

Existing court verdicts lean towards training generally being fair use means nothing, because what constitutes theft should be determined not by legal formalities but by vibes, feelings and crowd's opinion.

The very simple fact that artists own only copyrightable elements of their works is ignored. My style means I OWN it. It is what word "my" means after all.

If created work contains elements created by other people, then the derivative work is not your work at all. Because, you se it wouldn't exist without the original work!!! (Sarcasm off: Actually, if I have permission to make a modified version of Jim Lee's work and make a purple version of Batman, then I absolutely can claim authorship and get a copyright. A modicum of creativity is enough. Minimal modification is never a problem for getting a copyright\right to be called an author; - not getting permission is. What is usually even funnier - you still may get legal protection for your part in a derivative work if you are ruled infringing.)

___________

My participation in this thread is likely over unless I get something more interesting and fresh, not a retelling of anti-AI TikTok and Twitter hits.

But you know what, guys? You are right. It is OK to call everyone who uses AI a thief. It is OK to disrespect time, effort, skill, and creativity they spent. It is just typing words in a prompt box, after all. That's All There Is To It

 

[lady-lux]

I find nothing amusing in taking someone's work and removing their watermark. Watermarks are a direct statement. "I don't want to have results of my work used without attribution".

Isn't this the exact problem, though? Artists didn't consent to their work being used for AI training. They didn't even know it was something they needed to worry about. Then one day they wake up to the news that it's already happened, and it can't be undone. Many have made a direct statement since that they don't want their work used that way, but it's too late. They get no say, no attribution, and now they find themselves under pressure to prove every work they produce isn't AI, because AI can imitate their style so well.

 

[Hvast]

Isn't this the exact problem, though? Artists didn't consent to their work being used for AI training

Well, it is a direct, simple, honest question. No, it isn't exactly the problem. Yes, they didn't give consent. Who said that their consent matters?

People developed laws that forbid certain uses of creative works without the permission of copyright holders. Not all of them. Artists should start by proving that they have\had any right to forbid training on their works. They simply assert this right as a fact. "I don't like it." is not sufficient. And "It should be a right" is merely an opinion until it is legislated.

There are good reasons why copyright laws have limitations. Why fair use exists. Why de minimus use exists. Why the "sweat of the brow" copyright doctrine was abandoned. Why styles, techniques and genres are not copyrightable. Why ideas are not copyrightable.



Artists are not the only people with rights. Art and culture are the shared heritage of humanity. Draconic copyright laws that would forbid stuff like analyzing copyrighted works of art would violate this.

 

[JWtts]

Yes, they didn't give consent. Who said that their consent matters?

YIKES.

Art and culture are the shared heritage of humanity.

True, but shared heritage doesn't mean appropriation and claiming something that's not yours. That's some colonial bullshit. There are lots of cultures, customs, and things that I enjoy that are not mine, part of my heritage, or identity, but I know where I stand. I am a spectator and can delight when people of those areas share their art with me because it's sharing a piece of who they are and where they came from.

So, again, spend time and whatever amount of creative energy in prompting something for the computer to make for you. Make your tweaks and edits in Photoshop. But those things do not make the end product art nor the prompter/editor an artist. And that's the fundamental issue that you miss in the above statement. The human element. Sure, you had a creative idea for a prompt. You may have even spent time tweaking and re-tweaking the prompt to generate that near perfect image of what you saw in your head, but what makes art beautiful and meaningful for sharing is the humanity behind it, flaws and all. But having the machine take bits of other people's human effort and remix it is honestly robbing YOU of sharing who you are with the rest of us.

Then again, if consent doesn't matter to you... Maybe it's best you let other people's remixed art do the talking for you instead.

Alright, off to go do something more useful with my time, like... actually creating something or watching paint dry.