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.

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.

I don’t see those as equitable situations.

Because this thread was about the companies taking art feeding it into their machine a D claiming not to have stolen it.

Then you compared that to clicking a link.

The machine didn’t take the blacksmiths work product and flood the market with copies.

The machine wasn’t fed 10,000 blacksmith made hammers then told to, sorta, copy those.

Justify this all you want, throw all the bad analogies at it you want, it’s still bad.

Again, if this wasn’t bad, the companies would have asked for permission. They didn’t.

Just because you’ve redefined theft in a way that makes you feel okay about it doesn’t change what they did.

They took someone else’s work product, fed it into their machine then used that to make money.

They stole someone’s labor.

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.

“other people were bad so I should be bad to.”

Cool.

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.

By that logic I can sell anything I download from the web while also claiming credit for it, right?

Downloading to view != downloading to fuel my business.

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.

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.

No, you used it to inform your 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.

Yes, it was.

One human artist can, over a life time, learn from a few artists to inform their style.

These AI setups are telling ALL the art from ALL the artists and using them as part of a for profit business.

There is no ethical stance for letting billion dollar tech firms hoover up all the art ever created to the try and remix it for profit.