Ask Lemmy

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

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.

DeviantArt does not claim ownership rights in Your Content. For the sole purpose of enabling us to make your Content available through the Service, you grant DeviantArt a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, distribute, re-format, store, prepare derivative works based on, and publicly display and perform Your Content

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.

::: spoiler Instagram

When you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). ::

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.