this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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The first image is your artwork.
It represents your slow but steady progress in your hobby. It may not be what you want yet, but it is still a stepping stone on your journey.
The second image is a compilation of your artwork and the stolen efforts of millions of unpaid artists, their works unceremoniously ripped away from them and sold as a tech company's product without any compensation to them for aiding building such a machine. It isn't art.
Keep at it, yo. Art is a frustrating hobby at times, but enjoy the learning.
Don't say, "stolen". It's the wrong word. "Copied" is closer but really, "trained an AI model with images freely available on the Internet" is more accurate but doesn't sound sinister.
When you steal something, the original owner doesn't have it anymore. AIs aren't stealing anything. They're sort of copying things but again, not really. At the heart of every AI LLM or image model is a random number generator. They aren't really capable of copying things exactly unless the source material somehow gets a ridiculously high "score" when training. Such as a really popular book that gets quoted in a million places on the Internet and in other literature (and news articles, magazines, etc... anything that was used to train the AI).
Someone figured out that there's so much Harry Potter quotes and copies in OpenAI's training set that you could trick it into outputting something like 70% of the first book, one very long and specific prompt at a time (thousand of times). That's because of how the scoring works, not because of any sort of malicious intent to violate copyright on the part of OpenAI.
Nobody's stuff is being stolen.
An artist's work is copied without asking or compensating them and then sold as a product.
It's like piracy, except instead of individuals pirating a corporation's content (which they can't actually buy anymore) for their private use, it's corporations pirating an individual's content to sell it for profit and drive the individual artist out of the market.
So I'd disagree. The images themselves aren't stolen, but the money that can be made off of them is.
What about self hosted AI image generators or companies who pay royalties to artists for units sold?
I think you have created complicated rules for "piracy I enjoy/condone is good. Copying that I don't like is bad."
I don't see there being a lot of room for to ever defend piracy and also hate AI influenced art
This is all of life. Yes, good things are good, and bad things are bad.
It is not curious or interesting that I dislike murder but support Ukraine fighting back Russia.
I hope that some point all models that are pay to use are like this. I might be on board with free to use models falling under Creative Commons but like, anything business or to be sold as a service based needs compensation no ifs, ands or buts.
Not all models are trained in the same way. Adobe Firefly was trained only with images from Adobe Stock, for instance.
I'd like to interject with my opinion on "piracy" vs "scraping". In piracy, billion dollar companies are screwed. In scraping, ordinary people are screwed.
I side with the ordinary people.
I also use ai for stuff.
I think I'm cooked, as the young people say.
Personally I think the same argument pirates use with content can be used here. Usage of the art generators != a sale for the artist. I don't agree with artists not being compensated either piracy is piracy regardless if its a big company or an artist.
However, It was already a stretch to claim that pirating a digital media that is 1:1 is equal to losing a sale, but it's even even bigger stretch to claim that an image that is generated by a generator using training data of a bunch of artists and images pushed together would equal a sale. In most cases you wouldn't even be able to identify the artist in the first place(or even know they existed).
As for driving the artists out of the market, I personally don't believe it ever will manage that, because of how it works. It needs something to train off of, when artists decide to leave the market nothing new will be able to be trained, which will eventually kill off the ability to train them further, which will leave them either to use stale training data, or use existing models to train themselves, which have been pretty spotty in quality in general.
Plus, at the end of the day, art is a profession for many and a personal hobby for even more. I don't think it's going anywhere any time soon, regardless of tools available, I think I would say the same with LLM story-wrights as well, for any new field breaking genres or concepts, a humans touch is needed or else it will just piece together what it already knows.
Being said, hopefully some point the fields start actually paying for the content they are using, I expect it will eventually happen, its just legal frameworks are slow. (ignoring the few models out there that do pay for content like others have said such as Adobe)
Honestly my biggest concern is going to be what happens when those AI companies purchase data off of media websites who claim ownership of all data submitted. Usually they operate off a shared copyright where by submitting the content you allow them to use it how they see fit but you as the artist keep ownership. For example Deviantart while claiming they have no ownership also has this in their policy.
Which grants royalty free permission to redistribute how they please.
If you've ever read through the terms of service/use for most websites that artists like to show off their work on (Instagram, Facebook, DeviantArt, ArtStation, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) you would realize that the work was indeed not stolen.
It was given away freely by artists due to fine print buried in the terms of service with royalty free licenses. Just lookup any Terms of Service and search for the word "royalty".
If artists should be going after anyone, it's the companies that either freely gave the artwork away by "sharing it with their partners" or by making a profit off of their work by selling it to any of these companies for training these image generating models.
The root of the problem here is the lack of ownership of our own data when it comes to any sort of online service. Part of that problem is just the nature of posting something in the first place.
DeviantArt
One artist raised the alarm back in 2016 about the licensing at the time: https://www.deviantart.com/dsc-the-artist/journal/DeviantArt-CAN-USE-your-ART-WITHOUT-PERMISSION-616830749ArtStation
They do allow you to tag your projects now to prohibit them from being sold for use with Generative AI programs, but this option obviously did not exist some years ago.::: spoiler Instagram
Etc...
How is that functionally different from a human training on freely available Internet artwork and selling the stuff they created by using said training?
They're using other artists' work without crediting them.
It's that part, right there.
You don't see it because of the social nihilism you've been accumulating.
Idk man maybe try making something yourself and youll instsntly feel the difference
I have, and I personally don't think AI training is functionally different from the publicly available copyrighted works I used for references to develop the necessary skills to create.
AI is just able to do it much faster than me.
Piracy is considered stealing, duplicating without permission is stealing?
Woah! Piracy is not considered stealing. The MPAA and RIAA made that argument over and over and over again in the 90s and early 2000s and they lost. Thank the gods!
You would download a car!
If piracy was stealing, we'd all be waiting for our chance to watch TV shows in a queue of thousands.
Copyright violations are not theft. They never were and they never will be. Because no one is deprived of anything when something is copied. In theory, there could've been a lost sale as a result but study after study has shown that piracy actually improves sales of copyrighted works.
When an AI is trained on images that YOU—the artist—posted to the public Internet for the world to see it will either increment or decrement a floating point value by like 0.01. That's it! That's all it does.
How can that be considered "stealing"‽ It's absurd.
It's stealing
Unless you think people painting replicas to pass off as their own aren't stealing.
You bring up a great point! When someone does that: Painting a replica and passing it off as their own, what law have they violated? They have committed fraud. That's a counterfeit.
Is making a counterfeit stealing? No! It's counterfeitting. That is it's own category of law.
It's also a violation of the owner's copyright but let's talk about that too: If I pay an artist to copy someone's work, who is the copyright violator? Me, or the artist that painted it? Neither! It's a trick question, because copyright law only comes into force when something is distributed. As long as those works never get distributed/viewed to/by the public, it's neither here nor there.
The way AI works is the same as if you took a book you purchased, threw it in a blender, then started pasting chunks of words out of it in a ransom note.
You need to stop pretending like there's an excusable way to take something someone else made and pass it off as yours.
But if someone directs the generation of an image, and represents it as an image generated by a tool trained on basically all public images ever, they aren't really passing off the result as theirs, are they?
It's hard to understand the resulting image as being made by particular people and stolen from them. None of those people have ever seen it or know it exists, for example; are they genuine co-author?
If you think of it as made by all artists, somehow, can one properly steal something that's of an essentially publicly-owned or common-heritage nature?
If it couldn't be made without using their unwilling contributions then that is theft sorry
So the people training the models are stealing art by using it for training over the objections of the artists, right?
The products of the models couldn't be made without everything that went into the models. But why is (making? using?) those products "theft", and also thereby bad, versus something like stealing spray paint and doing graffiti on the side of the hardware store? Or shoplifting a bunch of figure drawing reference books and cutting them up into a collage?
The fascist project to transfigure the entire history of art into capital they can rent out is obviously wrong. But surely when you steal a thousand works of art and sum them together to make something else, you're making the very definition of a transformative work, right? What about all those human artists where appropriating stuff was an important part of the art?