Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski’s style...
You didn’t drop his art on to a screenprinter, smash someone else’s art on top, then try to sell t-shirts.
Trying to compare any of this to how one, individual, human learns is such a wildly inaccurate way to justify stealing a someone’s else’s work product.
The fact that folks can identify the source of various parts of the output, and that intact watermarks have shown up, shows that it doesn’t work like you think it does.
Yes copies were made. The files were downloaded, one way or another (even as a hash, or whatever digital asset they claim to translate them into) then fed to their machines.
If I go into a Ford plant, take pictures of their equipment, then use those to make my own machines, it’s still IP theft, even if I didn’t walk out with the machine.
Make all the excuses you want, you’re supporting the theft of other people’s life’s work then trying to claim it’s ethical.
Yes, because “imitate” and “copy” are different things when stealing from someone.
I do understand how it works, the “overfitting” was just laying clear what it does. It copies but tries to sample things in a way that won’t look like clear copies. It had no creativity, it is trying to find new ways of making copies.
If any of this was ethical, the companies doing it would have just asked for permission. That they didn’t says a everything you need to know.
I don’t usually have these kinds discussions anymore, I got tired of conversations like this back in 2016, when it became clear that people will go to the ends of the earth to justify unethical behavior as long as the people being hurt by it are people they don’t care about.
You keep comparing what one person, given MONTHS or YEARS of their life could do with one artists work to a machine doing NOT THE SAME THING can do with thousands of artists work.
The machine is not learning their style, it’s taking pieces of the work and dropping it in with other people’s work then trying to blend it into a cohesive whole.
The analogy fails all over the place.
And I don’t care about copyright, I’m not an artist or an IP lawyer, or whatever. I can just look at a company stealing the labor of an entire industry and see it as bad.
And that’s where we have a fundamental difference of opinion.
A company hiring an engineer to design a machine that makes hammers, then hiring one (or more) people to make the machine to then make hammers is the company benefiting from the work product of people they hired. While this may impact the blacksmith they did not steal from the blacksmith.
A company taking someone else’s work product to then build their product, without compensation or consent, is theft of labor.
Because that is what they’re doing, just with extra steps.
The company pulled down his work, fed it to their AI, then sold the AI as their product.
Their AI wouldn’t work, at all, without the art they “clicked on”.
So there is a difference between me viewing an image in my browser and me turning their work into something for resell under my name. Adding extra steps doesn’t change that.
I’m not a fan of our copyright system. IMO, it’s far to long and should also include clauses that place anything not available for (easy) access in the public domain.
Also, I’m not talking about what laws say, should say or anything like that.
I’ve just been sharing my opinion that it’s unethical and I’ve not seen any good explanation for how stealing someone else’s labor is “good”.
No, I’m not using it incorrectly, I’m just not concerned with the legal definition as I’m not a lawyer or anyone tied up in this mess.
If you do a thing, and it takes time and skill to do it, then someone copies it, they stole your labor.
Saying they “copied his style”, the style he spent a lifetime crafting, then trying to say they didn’t benefit, at no cost, to the labor he put into crafting that style because “well actually, the law says…” is a bad argument as it tries to minimize what they did.
If their product could not exist without his labor, and they did not pay him for that labor, they stole his labor.
For, like, the fourth time in this thread: were this ethical, they would have asked for permission, they didn’t.
They put his art in, only when called out did they remove it.
Once removed, they did nothing to prevent it being added back.
As for them selling the product, or not, at this point, they still used the output of his labor to build their product.
That’s the thing, everyone trying to justify why it’s okay for these companies to do it keep leaning on semantics, legal definitions or “well, back during the industrial revolution…” to try and get around the fact that what these companies are doing is unethical. They’re taking someone else’s labor, without compensation or consent.
You’re trying to say that, because this one law doesn’t say it’s bad it must therefore be good (or at least okay).
I’m simply saying that if you profit from someone else’s labor, without compensating them (or at least getting their consent), you’ve stolen the output of that labor.
I’m happy to be done with this, I didn’t expect my first Lemmy comment to get any attention, but no, I’m not going to suddenly be okay with this just because the legal definition of “stealing labor” is to narrow to fit this scenario.
I think my initial reply to you was meant to go somewhere else but Connect keeps dropping me to the bottom of the thread instead of where the reply I’m trying to get to is.
I’m going to leave it (for consistency sake) but I don’t think it makes much sense as a reply to your post.
Greg Rutkowski Was Removed From Stable Diffusion, But AI Artists Brought Him Back - Decrypt (decrypt.co)
Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski’s style...