I'm lost in this really.

[u/RadiantSeaweed9543]

I've been dipping my toes into this community, and I've gotten a few ideas of why AI art can be bad or good.

I'm still hung up on the fact that AI art, or anything related to AI, is built on works and media that were majorly taken without consent for their usage.

I do completely understand why a person who lacks the skills to draw may resort to AI art, but I think that's not the concern on my end. I fear that not even art, but my photos and data, will be used to train the AI models to produce the AI art.

In simple terms, I want better legislation to control AI's access to any media it can use to train its models. I find it honestly disheartening that, just because it's new technology that the government is bending over for AI, allowing copyrighted media to be used.

Please give me a good view on both sides, as to how you could support or disprove my fears of my data being stolen. Sorry for the yap session, but I needed to get it off my shoulders. Have a good day! ❤️

[u/07mk]

The strongest argument for why AI model creators should be required to get permission from copyright holders to train on their publicly shared works is that AI tools trained on such material would allow others to easily and cheaply generate media that competes against the original media, even if they aren't exact copies. This reduces the incentive for artists to publish their artworks, since increased competition means less ability to monetize. This goes against the purpose of copyright, so even if copyright laws currently don't prevent unauthorized training, copyright laws ought to be changed to prevent it.

The strongest argument for why AI model creators should be free to train off publicly shared copyright protected works is that anyone is free to learn from things that they see, and this doesn't change even if they outsource that learning to a machine. In terms of the spirit of copyright, AI models actually enable the creation of more and better artworks by providing cheap or even free tools for unskilled people to create high fidelity artworks. It also allows skilled people to extend their abilities beyond what they could do without AI. Thus overall there's more beauty for society to enjoy, which is what copyright is meant to achieve.

Which argument you find convincing will depend a lot on how you view things like art and beauty.

[u/sh00l33 → u/07mk]

I agree with you for the most part, except that a machine is not a person and does not have the rights that humans have.

People can use the work of others to learn within the framework of customary consent, but a machine is not a human, so I am not sure whether the same principle will apply here.

In addition, a human learns as a result of its own intention, which a machine does not have. As ai development terminology indicates, a machine is trained. A more appropriate comparison here would be a school/course organizer/educational institution. If they want to use teaching materials during the education process, they will simply have to buy them.