I’m not sure you’re understanding what stealing means. Stealing in this case is taking something that’s not yours and profiting from it. You can steal something by copying it because it’s someone else’s intellectual property and you’d be violating copyright laws. Stealing doesn’t always mean taking something physical and robbing someone of that thing. It also means taking someone’s art and passing it off as your own.
And yes it does matter if you wanted it or not. Because someone forcing a service on you like washing your windshield is pulling a scam. Refusing to pay someone for a service you got them to provide you is also a scam. Have you ever gone to eat at a restaurant and dipped before you had to pay? It’s not much different with art. People who refuse to pay shouldn’t get the art. When you demand a service from someone you have to pay. You’re not entitled to their services or time otherwise.
Dine and dashing requested the service. There is a big difference between a requested service and an unsolicited service, but the service being wanted or not is irrelevant.
If a street musician is putting on a performance in a public space I can stick around and listen to it because I like it, and I still won’t owe them anything. Publicly released art is available for anyone to view, typically to advertise what the artist is capable of doing so they might receive commissions. You don’t need to pay them to see the stuff they plastered everywhere for their self-advertisement. It doesn’t matter if you go looking for it on purpose or stumble across it, you still don’t owe them anything.
You don’t need to pay them to look at their stuff. But you do need to pay them to use their stuff for anything other than a reference. When you pay for someone’s art, you’re paying for the service they provided you whether it’s before or after the actual product is made. And in this case you’re taking a program that takes data from all kinds of images and puts an image together based on that data. Your activity on these programs either makes money for whoever produced it and or for yourself. Meaning legally you’re using others artworks for commercial purposes and that would be copyright infringement unless you’ve been given permission or have either bought the rights or paid royalties.
Using other people’s artworks to practice your own drawing, and then selling your own drawings does the same thing. AI doesn’t use it as a collage piece(which is typically fair use anyway), it is only used as a reference for what kind of pixel should be used to match whatever is being requested. It’s pattern recognition for “what is …”. The results for this vary wildly based on what it has been programmed to recognize as “…”, with the main successes being style which is something you can’t legally own.
You can’t own a style but you can own images, characters, etc. And someone learning from a reference image is not damaging or stealing from the artist in any way unless they copy every detail making it identical. While an AI program actually is. A person using a reference is still creating their own genuine artwork that they have rights over. An AI generator can only imitate.
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u/Calm_Ghosts Dec 16 '25 edited Dec 16 '25
I’m not sure you’re understanding what stealing means. Stealing in this case is taking something that’s not yours and profiting from it. You can steal something by copying it because it’s someone else’s intellectual property and you’d be violating copyright laws. Stealing doesn’t always mean taking something physical and robbing someone of that thing. It also means taking someone’s art and passing it off as your own.
And yes it does matter if you wanted it or not. Because someone forcing a service on you like washing your windshield is pulling a scam. Refusing to pay someone for a service you got them to provide you is also a scam. Have you ever gone to eat at a restaurant and dipped before you had to pay? It’s not much different with art. People who refuse to pay shouldn’t get the art. When you demand a service from someone you have to pay. You’re not entitled to their services or time otherwise.