The general consensus here is that if you generate AI art at all, regardless of whether you use it commercially or not, you are engaging in art theft and are in fact an asshole.
So why doesn’t that logic get applied to straight up turning someone’s digital art and/or photos into memes and having millions of people repost it with zero attribution? I’m not talking about things like wojaks or rage comic characters where the creator intended for it to be a meme and knew for a fact that other people will copy it, nor am I talking about screenshots of popular media franchises, but the random art and photos people post that just happens to resonate with the internet in a way the creator never foresaw, becoming memes without the creator even initially knowing. Think the original advice animal meme templates like Scumbag Steve or Bad Luck Brian where it’s literally just a random photo of someone, probably taken off their personal social media. Or the two serious and one goofy dragon drawing and others that were very clearly posts on art sharing sites that got reposted with new context. I’ve even seen some meme templates go out of their way to crop out names and signatures that the original creator put there so they are credited when their work is reposted. And no one slamming AI art seemingly has a problem with any of it. In fact, if you as the creator of an image tried to get the internet to stop using your personal work as a meme with no attribution, you’d be ignored at best and targeted for doxxing and harassment at worst for spoiling their fun, probably by some of the same people condemning the use of AI.
If you go on art sharing sites, the consensus among the artists themselves is that you’re not supposed to repost their work at all unless given a CC license or otherwise explicit permission. Whether it’s for commercial use or just as a random internet post doesn’t seem to change their stance in the slightest. This implicitly includes not just AI but memes as well, as in both cases you are taking someone else’s work and redistributing it without permission or attribution. So why is this okay if AI art is not? It’s even more blatant than AI because it’s not just stealing tons of people’s work, blending them all in a neural network, and spitting out a “new” work that still has fragments of the stolen work, it straight up IS just stealing a specific person’s specific work, full stop. I feel like the reason is circular, it’s okay because it’s been happening since forever and that’s what makes it okay. And AI art is not okay because it’s new and doesn’t already have a history of everyone doing it.
The majority of people condemning AI art are not themselves artists but cite things like “respect for artists” as a reason for condemning it. But most artists aren’t just against AI but against their art being reposted by anyone for any purpose, profit or otherwise. Even if they were never going to make money from that piece, they are still against reposts on principle while most of the non-artists seem to only talk about AI separating artists from revenue. So if we’re actually to respect artists, wouldn’t we adopt that stance for everything and not just commercial use or AI?
And if this is okay, what about AI art makes it different enough to not be okay?
Finally, it’s not like people never make money off memes so a binary “AI is for profit while memes aren’t” doesn’t work.
Not trying to defend AI art, but trying to go further with the discussion that has appeared around it and genuinely trying to tease out some consistency and fundamental values in subjects everyone ostensibly feel extremely strongly about and are not willing to budge.
well, for one thing, using ai image generation is supporting a business model that’s whole thing is ripping off artists, even if you personally aren’t turning a profit. and for another, if an image is used in a meme, it is not that hard to do a reverse image search to find the original, if it was posted online, whereas the blended chicken nugget ooze that is the output of image generators specifically defies attribution.
also, there’s the fact that artists often like it when people like their art, even if it would be better to provide attribution. i don’t think i’ve ever seen anyone argue that slapping some text on an image for a meme hurts the original artists ability to make a living, but tons of artists have noted such an effect from ai slop extruders.
Generally speaking, memes aren’t being used to make money…whereas AI is almost exclusively being used to profit off of someone else’s content.
Imo the main difference would be that genAI models have been trained on a whole lot of art without consent, and the few privileged companies who are able to do this are making a ton of money (mainly by investors, not sure how much from paying users). Which is very extractive and centralised. Using others’ art to do memes at least is distributed and not that remunerative
Putting AI aside, if we see art used in a meme of a random shitposter, it feels different than a political party or a big corporation using that art to do meme propaganda/advertisement.
Another interesting field for this is YouTube poops. They use tons of copyrighted materials, from big movies to local youtubers to advertisement. I would consider that fair, but if instead a big television network had a program showing youtubers’ content without permission that’s another story
Another example: Undertale’s soundtrack being made with Earthbound’s sound effects and samples. If it weren’t an indie, especially if it was a big publisher using an indie’s sounds, it wouldn’t have been well received.
So back to AI, when it comes to a person using it for their own projects, the issue to me isn’t really using stolen art, but using a tool that was made with an extractive theft of art by a big corporation, rather than seeking collaboration with artists, using existing CreativeCommons stuff, etc.
We also have to keep the context in mind: copyright laws mainly serve big publishers, hardly ever it protects smaller creators from such big publishers, in any field. The genAI training race is based on a complete lack of interest in applying or at least discussing the law.
I’m glad to see tho that thanks to this phenomenon more and more people are seeing how IP doesn’t make any sense to begin with. Just keep in mind copyright and attribution are two different things.
I don’t think AI art is theft. Copyright should be abolished.
The whole argumentation fails apart if you ask yourself a simple question, is the meme transformative to the art that it is using. As you already stated, “in a way the creator never foresaw” highly implies a transformative nature.
But isn’t ai art transformative? Oh it might be. But well, the company making the ai, stole art to create the model. There is no transformative step between the art piece and the version of the art piece that they use to train the ai. It is stolen art but not because the model steals, but because the model is built on stolen art. Everything that an ai model can produce is based in stolen art. So any similarities are not a little reference to some other art piece but stolen art. As the whole model is based on similarities, it produces exclusively content that has similarities to that stolen art. And if everything is a reference to stolen art, the ai art become effectively stolen art.
But what about people and their faces? Yeah i don’t think you should use/make those memes, unless the people are public figures. But not because it is stolen art, as the memes tend to be transformative, but because everyone has a right to privacy.
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while AI systems suck up every piece of art they can access in all of existence and make copies of it.
While also destroying the planet and contributing to the class war
There is no theft period. There is perhaps copyright infringement for commercial entities. This is a civil legal matter and has almost no bearing on anything you are discussing.
You must also consider all art is iterative. This means all art is based off art that came before it. You cannot create art in a vacuum and every artist borrows heavily from our culture
We are not here to judge what is or isn’t art either. This is a treacherous road where people can deny art like a collage because it doesn’t fit their definition of art. Everyone is actually an artist by definition unless they have literally never spoken, written, sang, or drawn.
There is definitely a worthy discussion around AI art. Right now we don’t really have AI so it is not really creating anything. It is more of fill in the blank taking the best guesses based on prior work.
I believe, as other posters have stated, that Intellectual Property is actually anti-art, anti-science, and anti-technology. The problems we face with AI pale in comparison to a broken system beset by capitalists hell bent on controlling our culture and extracting as much money as they can through doing so.
I don’t give a shit either way, fuck copyrights.
IP is helping strangle this world.
“You”, the user of the AI model isn’t engaging in copyright infingement directly.
However, whoever made the model that you used did. Most using copyright protected works.
Some people are paying for these models. This is what’s the problem: financially benefitting off others’ work without permission (or royalties).
It’s like the age-old piracy dilemma: the person using direct downloads or streaming can’t be fined in most jurisdictions - it’s the duplication and sharing that’s forbidden.
This exact analogue exists with AI models: training a model and giving it to others to use is distributing access to copyrighted material. Using an AI model is not.
To adress the mems side of the question: Memes aren’t a large portion of the original work. Often times they’re screenshots of video material, so the “portion taken from the original” is minute. Some meme formats, however, are digital art pieces in and of themselves. (Note the word format - the “background” of the meme, for example the “If I did one pushup” comic)
But even with that consideration, a meme doesn’t bring harm to the original - it’s basically free advertising. And as the memes are usually low quality abd not monetized, it can be passed off as fair use or free speech in some jurisdictions, while others merely turn a blind eye. And why shouldn’t they?
As I said, memes have a multitude of points going against them being copyright infringement. They’re low-effort, short-form media, usually with a short “lifetime” (most memes don’t get reposted for years). Most often they’re a screengrab of a video (so a ‘negligible portion of the original’) and almost never bring harm to the original, but only serve as free advertising. Again, usually. This means most meme formats’ involuntary creators have no reason to go after memes. You could probably get a court to strike a meme, but probably on defamation grounds - and even then, the meme will most likely die (not the format!) beforehand, so such suits are usually dismissed as moot.
Compare this to an AI model (not an AI “artpiece”): It’s usually trained on the entire work, and they’re proven to be able to recreate the work in large part - you just need to be lucky enough with the seeds and prompts. This means the original is “in there somewhere”, and parts of it can be yanked out. Remeber, even non-identical copying (so takig too much inspiration or in academic speak, “plagiarism”) is copyright infringement.
And to top it all off, all the big AI models have a paid tier, meaning they profit off the work.
If you were to compare memes to individual AI “artworks”, then it is the same thing as memes. Except if the generation is a near-verbatim reproduction, but even then, the guilt lies with the one who knowingly commited infringement by choosing what to put into the model’s training data, and not on some unlucky soul who happened to step on a landmine and generated the work.
AI companies are consuming all the electricity, and will destroy the economy when their bubble bursts, in their quest to eliminate millions of jobs and control the lives of everyone, to profit the global tech elite.
Memes are not-for-profit cultural detritus. They are not the same.
so your actual problem is with capitalism as opposed to the tech itself
“Not trying to defend AI art” The fuck you’re not. Just be honest about it.
My actual answer to this wall of strawmen and thready arguments is that LLMs and generative AI were trained on incomprehensibly large pools of human produced content, much of which is copyrighted, without paying anything for it; Conversely, when people make memes they are manually altering or adding to the original content and it’s an exception when there’s misappropriation becasue it’s socially enforced. AI simply merges data, there is nothing new conceptually or materially being added, just recombination. I’m not saying all memes are good, and I’m also not saying meme people who make that their life aren’t assholes sometimes either.
All of this exercise you’ve taken upon yourself is a poorly executed attempt to distract from the scale of theft AI NEEDS in order to exist, and that’s something Sam Altman, Zuckerberg, and other industry heads have openly acknowledged. If not for copyright violations it simply could not be feasible as a product, and even when there are instances of people stealing memes without attribution, that’s not the standard or a necessity for the practice. This is on top of the other peripheral issues like IMMENSE resource consumption, and destruction of human livelihoods. Even if we grant your false equivalencies with single user offenses regarding meme theft, and I personally do not, these things are not comparable, and the later certainly doesn’t justify or excuse the former.
If you can’t see the difference between people doing something and hostile metahuman entities doing it, I don’t know what to tell you.
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Memes only have because they reference an original work. AI strips the connection between the original work and the final product deliberately.
The law mostly disagrees with the memes = theft. A lot of it is covered through freedom of speech and fair use. If you have taken a bit of content, changed it a bit, recontextualized, and reposted it, you are most likely in the clear. Especially if the original content was publicly posted. This gets less clear if you are using the likeness of a private person but this will also depend on context. Where in the world you are, if this content was captured in a public space or from something published - the list goes on, like some stuff can be trademarked as well, and I’m no lawyer. A lot of these things run under the legal doctrine of “no plaintiff, no judge.” I feel artists in general have accepted that anything they post online is just potentially gone. And if no one steals their content to make money off it, they’re not going to hire a lawyer, whom they cannot afford.
And I’m not saying any of this is great but that’s an established status quo.
The reason why so-called AI generated art gets decried is twofold. It’s new and we don’t like new things. And in order for it to be created, the models have to suck in all the training data they can. And they don’t tend to pay for it. So that’s where some people see theft happening. But that’s not settled law yet because it’s fairly new, there are plaintiffs but not enough judges have passed judgement yet. Do they have to pay for stuff that’s publicly available? Where is the line, if any? Is imitation of a style okay if there is more to the work than just copying something from Studio Ghibli or Disney? These questions are going to keep a lot of legal professionals in bacon for a long time still.
This shit is hard. It’s more gray than black and white.
I’ve been trying to think of a way to have a nuanced discussion about art and AI, but hesitant to do so since people online can get incredibly vitriolic about it if they suspect that I’m in favor of AI. For the record I dislike AI being shoved in my face, from the uncanny-valley line art to the shovelware game apps that I keep seeing ads for.
To get to the point, I’m struggling to understand the moral difference between an AI model scraping art to use as training data, or an aspiring artist studying it to learn how to make it themselves. In both cases, the original artist has posted their work to a public website fully knowing that people will look at it. What’s the difference between an AI model vs a human learning from it? And how is it theft when the product is demonstrably different from the original?
I want to be clear that I just want to understand the logical underpinning of the arguments, and not arguing for one side or the other.
I know a few artists and get their complaints against AI, but I feel they’ve been way too overblown.
I look at AI as what it is - a new technology. Everthing was one at some point.
For example - cameras. Do you think artists who learned painting were happy when cameras started displacing them?
Of course there was outrage. It’s natural to protect your interests. However, technology has to be allowed to progress and people’s rights have to be respected. Developments in technology such as photography or AI are a disruption of the existing legal framework, and the two sides’ rights (those of the users and if those displaced) must be balanced.
However, unlike photography, there’s a clear legal basis and precedent analogous to AI art - in most places recieving copyrighted material without permission isn’t punishable while distributing it to others is.
An AI model is in essence a retrieval system in the sense of the US DMCA. Most other places have substantially similar laws in spirit, and most places draw the distinction between distribution and “fair” uses of infinging material. A good rule of thumb is that selling access is a big no-no, distributing is a big risk, and merely using a much smaller one. All technically illegal (as are memes).
There are at least two discussions going on here simultaneously. Is the process of a beefed up spell checker sucking up all the data the same as an artist looking at what had come before, before either of them churn out new art? I’m inclined to agree with you; the process does seem similar enough. The difference remains that one is a statistical model and the other is a human being. So even if the process appears similar enough, they are two different types of player and I can also agree that we should not treat them the same. One is able to throw constant massive amounts of spaghetti at the wall as long as there are chips and power and the other is limited by their health and more limited processing power. So where the compromise lands in this discussion simply isn’t clear yet. And while you and I can discuss this, I can say for myself at least I’m not smart enough to see where this goes eventually.
The other discussion is how all of it collides with existing copyright/trademark law, which is essentially different in every country. Constitutional rights, like freedoms of expression and the arts, are given to real people, not computers. But at least one supreme court in this planet has made corporate money a form of free speech. So eff knows where LLMs end up.
This is new territory we’re in. And I fear that’s why it will take another decade until we get a legal landmark decision or a political compromise that will be similar enough all around the world.
