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In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
I'd argue not from a different point of view. The overwhelming majority of AI aren't trained to mimic one specific person or style. Users can still guide the AI towards doing that, but that's exactly the same as what @[email protected] said. Most artists using AI assisted tools do not try to intentionally use AI for that, they try to guide it towards new creative expression, as it should be.
So yes, technically there is a clear difference. The people as described by @[email protected] are edging far more closely to intentional copyright infringement than AI is. But still well within the lines of fair and ethical use. Usage of AI is well within those borders as well if used correctly.
The amount of people that have drunk the Anti-AI Kool-Aid is staggering, honestly. I don't know about you, but I couldn't pay thousands of dollars to an artist, or multiple artists, to say, illustrate a tabletop game while I do all the systems design and playtesting myself. AI can make weird stuff too. it can make artifacts that would be really difficult to make with conventional tools. AI isn't autonomous; it's a tool. People should be empowered to use tools to make things to express themselves and provoke the hearts and minds of others.
Now we have people arguing that making a drawing in someone else's "style" is copyright infringement. You all complain about artists losing their jobs while getting your clothes and chocolate made by slaves in exploited third-world countries because you can't afford to live ethically under capitalism. It's absolute lunacy. You're either privileged enough to be part of the problem or you're shooting yourself in the foot by protesting something that might actually benefit creative people at or below your economic class.
No, people are saying that if you mass scrape art from the internet that you don't hold the copyright to in order to create an image generator that you then turn around and try to sell access to, you're violating the copyright of those artists (on top of being an incredibly unethical douchebag).
If the artwork they're using to train the algorithm wasn't valuable then they wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail in court to be allowed to do whatever they want with it. They'd just shrug, say okay, and use whatever copyright free stuff they had at hand. If they didn't need it then they wouldn't do it, and if they need it then the people whose labor its very existence depends on should get a slice of the pie.
I'm not a fan of copyright in general, but I'm not sold on there being any ethical issue with scraping images to produce training data. People can cry "Copyright infringement!" if someone is using a machine learning model to produce something that's recognizably derivative of specific work present in the training data. However, I don't think it's appropriate in most cases, as the output is often transformative. Also, if you want to go down the intellectual property rabbit hole, a lot of art websites put in the ToS that works could be sold as training data by the controlling entity of the website (at least until people got up in arms about it in late 2022/early 2023).
TL;DR: In my opinion, the output is too far removed from the input to warrant people from getting a slice of the pie, and most people didn't have any basis for a legal argument until about two years ago.