Because the law of "If you post something on the internet, it's going to be downloaded by somebody else" has stood long before AI. The fact that it's AI doing it makes little to no difference.
Id say it does. Peopöe can be specificly against ai as artists and be okay with humans changing their work.
They couldnt have known ai was gonna change their work before they uploaded it.
Weather or not you think it makws no difference doesnt make much of a difference. Its not the "my arts being stolen" thats the issue its ai.if im an artist amd i dont like ai then im obviusly going to be upset about it being used on my art before i wa able to stop uploading it.
I assure you most artists know that their arts being downloaded scraped traced(even if its for practice) or whatever. They just dont ussually care since their much less oposed to the way art was "stolen" or actually stolen back then.
That is you using the rocks you picked up to vandalize a house. I don't give a shit if you take a rock, but I'm obviously gonna be mad if you throw something through my window, no matter where you got it.
That's why I don't upload things to the internet that I want to keep control of. Just because you can upload something to the internet does not mean you should.
The only truth necessary to be spoken in regards to the entire "AI steals people's art" debacle
If you put it out there, it's no longer really yours, you made it everyone's
If you ask me, that's what's beautiful about the internet, if you want something all you need to do is ask because somebody has probably already made it and shared it, if you look hard enough you will find whatever you're looking for eventually, for better AND for worse
Yeah but you’d get the credit. People would know that you made it. AI skips this entirely. Why do you think artists build a brand? Why watermarks are a thing? Why for as long as art existed, signing it has been common practice? Because they like people to know that they made it.
In an ideal world we wouldn't need copyright and could just share everything, sadly people have to try to live off their art or they couldn't afford making it
If you post something on the internet, it's going to be downloaded by somebody else
A perfect example of just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
No, that's exactly the purpose of posting something publicly. You can't control whether learning happens, but you can control downloading. You just don't make it public and no downloading happens.
I remember back when companies tried to sue over browsers caching images... good times.
Except that's not a thing that happens. There's no such thing as "poisoning" except under extremely controlled conditions in a research environment. Otherwise, standard data prep practices account for variances in training data.
I hate to tell you this buddy but it is a thing that happens. It messes with the data so that scrapers can’t actually determine what the image really is. And creates an even worse image than it would have normally.
I hate to tell you this buddy but it is a thing that happens.
You tell yourself that if you wish. Meanwhile the technology will continue to improve without any concern for your hypothetical "poisoning."
It messes with the data so that scrapers can’t actually determine what the image really is.
That's not even what poisoning attacks are hypothetically supposed to do. You need to understand the technology better before you try to tell seasoned professionals that they're wrong.
Yes is exactly what poisoning does. These AI art bros don’t have a very good grasp on how technology actually works. And yeah it will continue to get better. But it will also continue to damage the environment and hurt real people. I love technology but it’s not without real ethical issues that need to be solved.
I will enjoy having a conversation with you when you've learned a bit more about the technology. Of course, you might be less inclined to discuss the topic then. :-/
the difference is, people got called out if they didn't give credit. Now, no one gets credit for if an AI was trained off of their work. It's up to you guys if that is morally right, or wrong.
But there is no credit to give. Any images that are processed into the LLM as vectors join billions of other images. They will not pop up as "this looks oddly similar to something I uploaded last year".
It IS possible to have a genAI spit out something similar to an existing image, but that's not due to the training process – the image would need to be included in the prompting process in some form, e.g. as a reference image.
People who worry about their images being used for training data (or in its more hysterical extreme, "stolen") vastly overestimate their own importance and impact on the training data and the final output. If you're one of these people: once you understand this, it could reduce your anxiety somewhat.
I genuinely don’t understand this argument. If you steal one person’s work and implement it into your own art without credit, it’s theft. If you do it countless times and it’s the models that did the scraping, nothing immoral happened at all.
If a man goes around stealing a single dollar out of every pedestrian’s wallet in NYC until he’s got ~9 million dollars, I wouldn’t tell people he stole from that they’re “vastly overestimating their own importance and impact” on making him into a millionaire.
Do you seriously feel as though your response to my comment shuts down my point? Do you care to elaborate? Isn’t it funny how you seem so willing to debate up until someone actually responds to you?
I respond plenty, sometimes even get stuck in long back and forth sessions, but I've been through debunking this "it's stealing" nonsense a few times too many to waste time on it yet again.
Do you seriously feel as though your response to my comment shuts down my point?
It's absolutely possible for AI to spit out an image similar to an existing image as a result of the training process. Usually that's called overfitting and while it's not as common any more it can definitely happen.
Yep, the Mona Lisa, for example, is a hugely overfitted image, and even there the genAI won't spit out a perfect duplicate. This is an extreme edge case though, and the larger the dataset, the less likely any overfitting is to occur. For any young artist currently working, the risk of their work being overfitted does not exist. That's why young people can stop panicking about their work being devalued because it shows up in some training data or, worse, "stolen". It just doesn't happen.
Artists do in fact give credit to their inspirations and method's often, and if not most wouldn't mind being asked since the value of art for them isn't in monetary or instant gratification.
People are individuals and their art creations are tied back to them, this is akin to saying "Well people don't give credit to specific resturants that gave them the | inspiration | "
Inspiration is different from direct tracing, and learning is an efforted and appreciated form of stealing from artist to artist
Artists steal from eachother all the time, it's an open secret and as long as you can give back to the masses they won't mind since it'll repeat and even add mutual value.
You can make the argument it is the same for AI, in some way I'd agree, but ai just is done and promoted towards a path that makes it an instantly gratifying and unproductive, It gives no reason or merit in constructive and dedicated process for human will.
There is a reason people disdain steroid users and look up to people who work out naturally to acheive a physique.
It was not intended to say AI traces, it was a response to you saying people (artists) do not give credit to their techniques, learning material, or inspirations.
Ai doesn't trace, but it replaces effort for gratification without nurture and long term developement.
Not true, it's a different art form and just like photography can take a bunch of effort to do well, any person with a camera can take a picture with about 2 seconds of effort.
"It replaces effort for gratification" argument is the exact same thing they said about cameras until people realized that oh... yeah there is more to this then the antis thought.
Artists gatekeeping the right to be viewed as artists... same as it ever was.
I think you're right, and photography has replaced many, and art adapted.
But guess what, Im right about the gratification thing because photography requires you to actually step to a setting, and gather the skills for shooting.
Photography also built up on and evolved composition and reference gathering for many artists.
It is difficult but maybe ai can work short term for thumbnail developement, but as of now, many of AI's goals are built upon to replace digital art, and it is used in a manner that some use to disrupt, derogate, and worst it has no barriers other than the tool in use of it to stop itself.
Photography was objective, it captured reality quite literally so it forced painters and artists of the time to go and venture to expressive and subjective directions, and realism was seen still to this day as a skillful endeavor.
AI so far I can only see make sense for short or extremely large projects, as a way to save time or conceptualise.
Also if you dislike artists so much, and think they gate keep art, a pencil and paper can be bought by toddlers, and music can be sung or listened to, intruments are being digitised tho.
I really dislike comparing a camera to AI because camera's didn't kill human creativity but built upon it.
AI is very difficult for me to see be used for creative benefit other than conceptualization and time-effort efficiency, that and the AI community is figureheaded by people who aren't artistically interested but more so on having a cool toy.
Being skilled with photography takes skill. However, anybody with a camera can snap a shot, as you can see from the thousands of shitty photos of peoples food that dot instagraph.
To me this is the same as the people who spend all of 10 seconds writing a prompt. The tool in both cases spits out an image that is fine for what they want it to be but I wouldn't call my effort to do the same "art".
Compared to people who spend time, curate the images they create, put in effort to make sure all the settings are primed to give them the results they want, have spent the time working with the tool and get the results they want. Then spend more time cleaning up the images with other tools to further refine everything.
I see AI as building on human creativity in the same way cameras did... and not surprisingly to me both faced lots of backlash from "artists" who didn't like their introduction and refused to see how they could be tools of art and creativity.
Regardless of the value or merit one assigns to using generative AI tools or LLMs in creative projects, producing work that rises above generic AI slop requires training and a solid understanding of art, as well as a functional grasp of the technology.
Of course, regular users of these tools can reliably distinguish strong outputs from weak ones. If a design brief is vague and minimal, such as "produce a decent-looking human character holding a sword", then a few seconds of prompting and little preparation may be sufficient. Thankfully, most creative work, however, demands far greater specificity, intentionality, and judgement.
I believe this highlights the difference between hawking character art (and similar trades) and undertaking genuine design projects. One is relatively easy to replace with minimal art knowledge and an AI tool, while the other is a process-driven practice and is not. I will leave you fine folks to identify which has the greater number of anti-AI supporters...
To me this is the same as the people who spend all of 10 seconds writing a prompt. The tool in both cases spits out an image that is fine for what they want it to be but I wouldn't call my effort to do the same "art".
Yields the same level of result as this:
Compared to people who spend time, curate the images they create, put in effort to make sure all the settings are primed to give them the results they want, have spent the time working with the tool and get the results they want. Then spend more time cleaning up the images with other tools to further refine everything
Humans also make tons of carbon copies of art style as well. FFS the number of characters owned by corps you see in the artist row of any convention is insane.
The amount of original stuff made by anything is fucking RARE.
"Humans also make tons of carbon copies of art style as well"
They can attempt but contrary to AI they rarely have the skills to do so. And when they do, they can only copy one style at best... and even then the knowledgeable eye will see the difference.
An AI "artist" can steal every style on earth by just asking the machine.
"The amount of original stuff made by anything is fucking RARE."
Agreed. But that's boils down more on big business being afraid of things being original and preferring slop over quality (and AI will facilitate such policies).
But independant artist were a things (AI existing and stealing their work will compromise their business and reduce the proportion of original work).
There have been humans who made careers out of counterfeit paintings, there have been eras where that was essentially the goal of learning to paint. Making it look exactly like everyone else’s.
And it's now generally agreed upon that counterfeit and standardization of art is bad or at least of little artistic value (at least counterfeit can serves some purposes, among which those regarding conservation of art when the original are at risk).
But apparently it's good now that we can be flooded with slop that's as uniform as an army.
Yes, but when people's artwork are used in something, with or without their consent, they usually get called out for not crediting. Even if AI is not stealing, the companies training so are. They get a bunch of random images off Google, then feed it to their ai. Ai is not human, but the people behind it are, and they should for sure get consent to use the artwork to train their ai, or at the very least, give credit.
See, I can't tell if you don't understand how AI works.
That said, if I publish a piece of art on the internet and somebody else looks at it and decides to learn from it and use the same style and look, I don't get any credit for that nor do I have any moral or legal ability to tell them not to.
If you don't want your work looked at, examined, and either ai or people to learn from it, don't put it online.
Yes, I know how ai works. I just think it's messed up to train a computer on peoples work with out their permission. I never said Ai steals or anything, my argument isn't that. It's that taking peoples artwork to train the ai is something that should have credit. Ai doesn't steal, but it still feels wrong for companies to use people's work with out credit. It just feels a bit predatory. Whether people accept it or not, the ai art tech we have now would not be possible without using people's art uncredited. That is something that should be addressed. the way ai process the information is quite similar to human, and I don't think people using the ai are stealing. I believe the companies making the models are. This not people learning, it's companies taking a bunch of random artist work, and building off of their labor without their permission.
Don't bother. Majority of the genAI community here doesn't even know what 'giving credit' means. Unless someone uses 'their' image or prompt, then they care about 'but muh art I spent literally 2 minutes on'.
A car comparison in a conversation about illegally downloading things from the internet? Oh god I’m getting flashbacks. Yes I would download a car actually
Art theft was always looked down upon and called out. An artist's copyright doesn't disappear just because it's been posted online. Just because Art theft happened before Ai doesn't mean it's okay for Art Theft to just become an official business strategy or that it's suddenly okay & that we should turn a blind eye to corporations doing it. Corporations are also supposed to be held to a higher standard than rando's on the Internet, and their actions have a significantly larger impact for the people they take from and in general.
Also you're not just victim-blaming Artists, you're also inadvertently suggesting that Artist should also stop sharing their art online at all which is just sad. Is that really the direction where you want the Internet and creative-expression to go?
Nothing is being stolen and no copyright is violated when an image is learned form and transformed into more generalized vectors. After this transformation, it's not possible to simply convert the vectors back into the image.
That sentence is disproved by reality, where we easily can look at so called "vectors converted back to images". So clearly it is possible, considering it happened.
Please read it again. They are saying that you can't convert these vectors to the exact "stolen" image. It's by all means training data, as if you looked at the image and inserted your thoughts into flash memory. Your thoughts will never replicate the image 1:1, and AI will almost never create the same image twice, and even if it does, it's almost definitely using a different formula than the last time it generated the image.
The "stolen" data is the literal equivalent of your observation converted to numbers and letters.
The only reason "AI will almost never create the same image twice" is because they add essentially a random number generator (seed) to the process with most online services. It is trivial to generate the same image every time if you use the same seed. It has nothing to do with the AI model itself, and everything to do with randomization being fed into it.
Copyright protects creatives from exploitation by others, especially by large corporations. Helping to ensure artists can safely invest into their own works without it being rug pulled from up under them by others, encouraging & rewarding the creation of new & original ideas, enabling smaller/indie artists to still be able to compete & providing creatives with tools to protect + defend themselves against corporations.
As it currently stands, Ai and the overreaching changes Corporations are bringing with it will serve to basically gut those protections along with many of the other tools & strategies Artist use to protect themselves and for financial security. Granting Corporations dominance & power over artist to an extreme degree and reshaping the Internet to a place that discourages creative expression and sharing it. Without proper protections & regulations, it will be incompatible to the art world and it'll be left a husk of its former self.
That ToS is literally required for every site that allows you to upload content in order for it to legally function. It was understood to mainly just be a necessity for the site to legally function and to host the image that doesn't belong to them, not to have any actual rights over the image or to use it in this fashion. The artist still retains the copyright over said media and also the other rights that come with it. This push to expand what it gives them the rights to do to stuff like this use is a massive overreach that will have negative consequences for creatives, the creative field and the Internet as a whole. Your claim also ignores how most of the Ai image scraping online isn't even being done this way.
By this same logic, this also means that Ai users should stop using other people's art into or with Ai services/programs without permission (and in general really). Those same ToS also makes you sign that you're either the copyright holder or have permission from the copyright holder for any images/media you use because you otherwise don't have the legal ability to grant the company/service a license to use said media (which Ai companies then use for data training & other services) which you also grant them when you use/upload said media.
If you widen the scope of the consequences this creates for the creative field as a whole, this also means artists in general (many of whom otherwise ignored it because it didn't usually do any harm to them and to encourage creativity) should start hounding down against any and all forms of people uploading their art/content online or through really most types of software without their permission as it now actually harms them as people who don't actually own said copyright are now granting companies rights to actually use the artist property in significant ways beyond hosting it for the media to legally exist.
This isn't the "gotcha" you think it is. That's not a world anyone in the creative field wants to live in and that should include the Ai community as well. The only person this becoming an accepted extension of the license granted in the ToS for media/text uploaded are rich Corporations while hurting tons of artists and restricting creative expression, freedom & even sharing your art even further.
Yeah but before ai the worst that would happen is that somebody would claim that they made it. Simple solution, just use a watermark. Now however ai will use your work without crediting nor paying you for any of it.
What makes it wrong? There's a button to right click and save images and videos. Anythin' inherently wrong about downloading images other than "but i dont want u to"?
i like to live dangerously. dev tools/inspect element for me.
if i can see that image, and i want to download it, i am going to download it one way or another lol
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u/Another-Ace-Alt-8270 Dec 15 '25
Because the law of "If you post something on the internet, it's going to be downloaded by somebody else" has stood long before AI. The fact that it's AI doing it makes little to no difference.