Nevertrumper posted at 12:10 AM Mon, 14 October 2024 - #4490311

quote:
"This part has been repeated so often that nearly everyone believes it. First off, that is like saying you have stolen every bit of art you have ever seen. Even if your memory were perfect and you could reproduce every image you have ever seen with perfect fidelity, would you say that merely looking at something constitutes theft?"
Heard this so many times.
No, it is not the same.
Any human goes through individual personal experiences mixed with even genetic character traits, which is also part of the _inspiration_ .
I don't want a collection by software.
To put a human name as an artist under something, that a machine has spit out is dishonest.
AI "art" is not YOUR art, because legally you* don't own rights to what ever the software created. 
So I might steal this AI inspiration for my own pictures and take credits for them.

* Well, _you_ is not meant as a YOU- you, but for as a general unnamed addressing of users. ;-)

It's not like people press a generate button then print the first image they get and hang it in a gallery. They will generate dozens of images while noting the influence of words in the prompt over the end result. They'll change the order of words in the prompt, the strength or weight of terms and LORAs. They'll use different models. Ultimately they will select the images that best capture what they were trying to create initially. I don't see this as being too dissimilar to what a photographer does.
A photographer doesn't own the right to everything they may photograph. They don't own the likeness of a model or human subject. They don't own the likeness of the vehicles or buildings in the image. And of course any logos or trademarks in the image are already registered to someone else. Despite neither making nor owning any rights to the likenesses of the things they may choose to photograph the resulting image can still be copyrighted because of its unique composition and the arbitrary choices the photographer made from exposure to process. I feel AI generated works should be viewed in a similar light.
Maybe I've become too cynical but I have a hard time believing that the anti-AI tub-thumping, training prohibitions, and copyright exclusions specific to generative work are truly intended to protect individual artists and/or their works. Rather I feel, as I've stated, that it is the stock image libraries and multinationals in the IP business who are most threatened by the democratization of image and video generation. 
A gun that has been used to kill someone is a murder weapon. A similar gun that hasn't been isn't. I simply do not believe theft occurs at training, or even at generation. I believe theft occurs when an individual infringes on another's work with intent to deceive a client or infringe on the rights of a specific artist. And even then feel exceptions should remain for personal use, parody/satire, etc., just as they already do for non-generative works.