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 against his wishes using a LoRA model. While some argue this is unethical, others justify it since Rutkowski’s art has already been widely used in Stable Diffusion 1.5. The debate highlights the blurry line between innovation and infringement in the emerging field of AI art.
You just contradicted yourself in two sentences. Copyright and theft are not the same thing. They are unrelated to each other. When you violate copyright you are not “stealing” anything. This art is not “stolen”, full stop.
The “nothing of value was lost when you pirate” argument. I’m a game developer who fully encourages people to pirate my games (or email me if they can’t afford my games and want a free Steam key) but I can tell you value is lost when people pirate content. Even if that’s simply a positive Steam review which in turn will put you higher up on placements on Steam’s algorithm which will gain you more sales. Something of value is lost when you pirate. It’s on the artist to determine if that value is acceptable to be lost. If they made their art for the sake of humanity or if they made art for the sake of survival in our shitty capitalistic society.
So sorry, yes, something is lost and it’s because of capitalism. I’d argue otherwise if it didn’t mean someone didn’t get to eat or pay rent. I pirated a lot of media back in my day when I couldn’t afford that media. I used to tell myself I wouldn’t have likely bought those things anyways. That I wasn’t taking from someone. In reality, I would have waited for a sale and gotten that media for 5 dollars. 5 dollars is still a lot of money when selling something though. If I just gave you 5 dollars you could do something small but nice for yourself. You could go buy a lot of things with that sale money. Just because you aren’t spending 60 dollars on it doesn’t mean you would never buy it. The fact that you want to play it says you’d probably buy it. Maybe you’d refund it. Maybe you wouldn’t. Your time is worth something to you though. Thus when you pirate something you are committing something of value from yourself to search, download and ingest that media.
So how does this deal with copyright theft? Stealing something and using it devalues the original product. You’ve seen it a dozen times for better or worse. Minecraft is a great example of how it got devalued for a while there when everyone made Minecraft clones. My kid told me the other day that he got Minecraft on his tablet for free. It was some terrible knockoff he had been playing. I explained this and asked if he wanted the real thing. He said yes and I went and bought Minecraft. That in itself is proof that value is being lost by even legally taking an idea and copying it. A kid’s parent who didn’t know better would have just been like “Hmm, that’s great, have fun.” The best point I can make is that if there was one video game ever, to play a video game you would have to buy that one game. That one game would have more sales than any single game out there today. Clearly, something of value is being created by the exclusivity of copyright.
There is, of course, a balance. What is copyrightable? What stifles creativity and innovation? I would say if these AI artists were able to recreate the style from prompts and only train the AI on images that it has the authority to distribute (public domain images, CC0, etc.) then it’s fair game. Training AI on copyrighted materials and then distributing derived works is copyright theft and should be deemed as such.
Copying art for personal, non-commercial use is not theft, but copying someone’s art and then profiting (using their image without permission to enrich yourself) is theft.
No.
That’s your opinion. The contrary opinion would be that copyright infringement is the theft of intellectual property, which many people view as of equal substantiality to physical property.
You can disagree with the concept of intellectual property but clearly there’s an alternative to your point of view that you can’t just dismiss by declaration.
Take your opinion to a court of law and see how far it gets. They actually pay close attention to what words mean there. If copyright violation was theft why do they have two different sets of laws to deal with them?
I’m sure you’re aware that the manner in which legal bureaucracies define terms is a form of jargon that differentiates legal language from actual language.
They have separate categories of laws to deal with them because physical property is different than intellectual property. The same reason they use a different category of law to deal with identity theft.
“Is copyright infringement theft” is something that had been debated for as long as mp3s were a thing. This is an old argument with lots of material on both sides scattered across the web. I clearly fall on the side of copyright infringement is theft and theft is stealing.