this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (6 children)

AI generated content isn't stealing. That being said, Facebook is literally only reposts, there is practically zero original content. The AI generated stuff is amongst the few things that isn't technically stolen.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

AI generated content isn’t stealing.

You might want to read the article.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

The AI generated content is the only part that isn't plagiarism in these examples.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I dunno dude, taking an image-to-image generation with 90% strength to just change a few details to make it look like your work sure sounds like stealing to me

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That may be forgery or a copyright violation, but it still isn’t stealing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sure it is. If you make minor AI alterations and claim the new version as yours, you're stealing credit for someone else's work.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It may sound pendantic but that person is correct: It's not stealing. Stealing involves taking a physical thing away from its owner. Once the thing is stolen the owner doesn't have it anymore.

If you reproduce someone's art exactly without permission that's a copyright violation, not stealing. If you distribute a derivative work (like using img2img with Stable Diffusion) without permission that also is a (lesser) form of copyright violation. Again, not stealing/theft.

TL;DR: If you're making copies (or close facsimiles) of something (without permission) that's not stealing it's violating copyright.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

You may want to read through what I actually wrote again.

Someone takes an image, runs it through image-to-image AI with 90% strength (meaning 'make minor changes at most'), and then claims it as their own.

That last part there is what makes it stealing. It's not the theft of the picture. It's the theft of credit and of social media impressions. The latter sounds stupid at first, until you realise that it is an important, even essential part of marketing for many businesses, including small ones.

Now sure, technically someone who likes and comments under the fake can also do the same underneath the real one but in reality, first exposure benefits are important here: the content will have its most impact, and therefore push viewers to engage in some way, including at a business level, the first time they see it. When something incredibly similar pops up, they're far more likely to go "I've already seen this. Next.".

Human attention is very much a finite thing. If someone is using your content to divert people away from your brand, be it personal or professional, it has a very real cost associated with it. It is theft of opportunity, pure and simple.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It's still not stealing. It's plagiarism or fraud or any number of other terms, but stealing necessarily requires the deprivation of a limited, rivalrous thing, like money or property. You can't steal fame or exposure or credit, except poetically. And by that point, the word becomes so watered down that it's meaningless. You might as well say I'm stealing your life seconds at a time by writing this extra sentence.

The purpose of using the term stealing here is only to borrow the negative moral connotations of the term, but it doesn't communicate clearly what exactly is happening.

It's perfectly valid to say you consider it morally equivalent with theft, but it's not stealing.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (3 children)

It's stealing. Training is theft. It is NOT like "a person looking at art in a museum and gaining inspiration". AI has no inspiration or creativity. It's an image autocomplete algorithm using millions of other people's images as bases to combine and smooth out. That's all it does. If I took a bunch of Monet paintings and creates some brushes in Photoshop and used it to create a new work, those brushes would still be theft. At best, it'd be a collage art piece I'd have to credit Monet for.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

You should read this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. The EFF is a digital rights group that recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

jesusfuckingchrist. Regurgitate much?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago

What is they’re AI? Hence the regurgitation.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

AI generated content is always stealing, just because I steal an entire museum full of art and then cram a ton of art pieces together until it's indistinguishable from anything that was in the museum beforehand doesn't change the fact that I stole the entire museum to do it.

Doesn't matter if it's text, art, etc. The current models of generative AI is always stealing. For some reason because it's done in mass and automated, people think that it isn't stealing now.