planish

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?

That seems to be a common opinion among artists, I guess because you can see all the flaws in the thing you made and where you wish it were better. Those feelings are real, but they're not true. Your art was fine before; it didn't need any improving, enhancing, or upscaling to be art or to be valuable.

One theory of the true nature of art is that it isn't at all to do with what's on the canvas or what shape the sculpture comes out being, but that art is fundamentally about who is making it, and how they do it, and why they do it that way.

You're asking if what you end up with is "slop", but no one can answer that for you because slop isn't a natural kind. If you want your art process to be a process where you do some sketching and then run it through a graphics card along with all of art history and a short poem, you can absolutely be the artist who does that process, and what comes out will be genuinely your art.

But it sounds like right now you are an artist who does some sketching, doesn't really like the result, and taps something they don't really believe in, instrumentally, for the sake of a more marketable end product. And who then turns to the Internet because actually they feel bad about that process and don't really stand behind it, looking for some kind of approval or permission they can't give themselves.

Develop a process consistent with your values, steal as much or as little as you like (as all great artists do), ignore the opinions of people on the Internet, and whatever you end up with will be art. Act against the compass of your own soul, chasing the approval of others, and the result can only be slop.

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?

This is just https://xkcd.com/2347/ but the person in Nebraska has been replaced with a new one and neither uses capital letters.

Januray is the superhero who ensures a prosperous new year by blasting things with her laser eyes.

I feel like it would be kind of silly to reenact, like, the 1980s. Or, even though it was hugely historical, the Vietnam War. It was terrible and people who had to deal with it are still alive; what would be the point of trying to show people what it was like? Do people really have trouble imagining what life was like in the 1980s? Wasn't it basically like now, unlike, say, the 1890s?

Ads can't be permitted to pay for things, though. One has a moral obligation to make sure that that strategy does not work, because it degrades both whatever the advertisements are inserted around (which becomes optimized to get attention at the expense of anything actually useful, like entertaining or conveying information) and the people who perceive it (because it creates capital inside their minds, in the form of brands, artificially alters their culture, and deliberately creates fear, mistrust of loved ones, and feelings of inadequacy).

Perceiving advertisements is unethical. Good job!

It would definitely reduce the attack surface. And even though Windows has "security" issues patched all the time, rarely are they ones so severe that you can just roll up to a machine and send it a weird HTTP reply and get admin access. Usually it's stuff like if you have a shortcut file on disk it gets to run code when you look in the folder, or something. Not great for working with downloads, but hard to exploit unless at least one other thing happens (like visiting a malicious page, which then starts a download that the browser accepts).

But the browser calls out to the OS to do a lot of stuff (render images, render fonts, play sounds, etc.). It mostly assumes the OS can do those things without popping open a remote shell because too many emojis were rendered in a row or something. That is not always true, and when it isn't you want an OS patch to fix it before you go on a site where someone can post the Magic Emoji That Hacks You.

But you are right that you can browse around trustworthy websites on an unpatched system behind a decent firewall for quite a while before you notice something bad happening. But also, a lot of bad things can have been happening for quite a while before you notice.