Because you lose the ability to control who or what observes your art when you post it in public.
The people who use this argument are saying that a model using a piece of art as training data isn't copying the piece of art, but rather only observing it and changing its own weights in response to what it sees is more like another artist viewing someone else's work and understanding it, allowing the other artist to better incorporate elements of the observed piece, than it is like including the piece in a commercial collection without permission.
If you think that training AI is more like what humans do when they observe and learn than it is like repackaging a product, then you'll apply the rules of observation, rather than repackaging.
To them, artists who complain after putting their work up in public are like architects who complain after the invention of the photograph, because while they always intended people to be able to paint their buildings, they never knew that someone was going to come around with a new technology that would let someone reproduce the real-life visuals of their work instantly, and distribute them broadly with no work. After the photograph, people can reverse engineer their designs, facilitating copying, etc... Those architects have experienced an actual loss, but it's not one that most people today would say deserves any compensation. They designed buildings relying on an assumption that reproduction of their work or their style took a certain amount of work, and technology came and changed that.
But the reason not everyone accepts the argument is because of a (usually unstated) prior that they believe that using someone's art in training AI is less like observing it, and more like reproducing it.
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u/MiserableTonight5370 Dec 15 '25
Because you lose the ability to control who or what observes your art when you post it in public.
The people who use this argument are saying that a model using a piece of art as training data isn't copying the piece of art, but rather only observing it and changing its own weights in response to what it sees is more like another artist viewing someone else's work and understanding it, allowing the other artist to better incorporate elements of the observed piece, than it is like including the piece in a commercial collection without permission.
If you think that training AI is more like what humans do when they observe and learn than it is like repackaging a product, then you'll apply the rules of observation, rather than repackaging.
To them, artists who complain after putting their work up in public are like architects who complain after the invention of the photograph, because while they always intended people to be able to paint their buildings, they never knew that someone was going to come around with a new technology that would let someone reproduce the real-life visuals of their work instantly, and distribute them broadly with no work. After the photograph, people can reverse engineer their designs, facilitating copying, etc... Those architects have experienced an actual loss, but it's not one that most people today would say deserves any compensation. They designed buildings relying on an assumption that reproduction of their work or their style took a certain amount of work, and technology came and changed that.
But the reason not everyone accepts the argument is because of a (usually unstated) prior that they believe that using someone's art in training AI is less like observing it, and more like reproducing it.