Hey there, sometimes I see people say that AI art is stealing real artists’ work, but I also saw someone say that AI doesn’t steal anything, does anyone know for sure? Also here’s a twitter thread by Marxist twitter user ‘Professional hog groomer’ talking about AI art: https://x.com/bidetmarxman/status/1905354832774324356
My take on it is that: when big corporations are doing it for (direct or inderect) profit it’s stealing. It was trained on the work of artists after all and that’s the only reason they can make good images. If they can make a model that doesn’t require using images from others it would solve that issue but at least under capitalism that is too expensive to happen now so it won’t happen.
Personal use can be fine I guess and can even allow for more creativity, like if people are using image generation to make new images/art/assets based on their own work/photos. An indie game/movie/etc where the person uses AI to expand what they can do in size is a great use of AI I’d say, giving someone the ability to do something bigger/better than they could do by themselves is what a tool should be like and gen AI should be such a tool for artists too.
There are more cases but they might be harder to come to a conclusion on, specially as they exist in a capitalist setting.
Incidentally, there’s a similar case of corporate freeloading when it comes to open source. Corporations use projects developed by volunteers and save billions of dollars in the process, but rarely contribute anything back or help fund the projects they depend on.