Even_Adder, 5 months ago

I’m actually fine with generative AI that uses only public domain and creative commons content. I’m not threatened by AI as a creative, because AI can only iterate on its own training data. Only humans can create something genuinely new and original.

I don’t like this kind of thought because it tries to minimize the role of the person at the controls. There is no reason why a person using a model trained on 1400s art, African art, anime, photography, cubism, sculpture, cullinary art, impressionism, nature, and ancient Greco-Roman etc. wouldn’t be able to come up with novel concepts, executions, and styles, since it’s very much a combination of styles that gives rise to new types of art in all other mediums. And that’s before you even start fine-tuning on your own stuff.

My objection is solely on the basis of theft. If we agree that everybody has the basic right to control their own data and content, than that logically has to extend to artists: they must have the right to control their own work, and consenting to humans viewing it isn’t the same as consenting to having it fed into an AI.

It isn’t like a human viewing it, but it is very like other protected uses of data. To quote the article:

Fair use protects reverse engineering, indexing for search engines, and other forms of analysis that create new knowledge about works or bodies of works. Here, the fact that the model is used to create new works weighs in favor of fair use as does the fact that the model consists of original analysis of the training images in comparison with one another.

This is just a way to analyze and reverse engineer concepts in images so you can make your own original works. Reverse engineering has been fair use since Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc in 1992, and then affirmed in Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation.

In the US, fair use balances the interests of copyright holders with the public’s right to access and use information. There are rights people can maintain over their work, and the rights they do not maintain have always been to the benefit of self-expression and discussion. There are just some things you can’t stop people from doing with things you’ve shared with them, and we shouldn’t be trying to change that.

Calling this stealing is self-serving, manipulative rhetoric that unjustly vilifies people and misrepresents the reality of how these models work and how creative the people who use them can be.