this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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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?