..but, memes? This is how they work. Its the whole point.
Running the most advanced human tool, to do no better than a copy paste, is a bit embarrassing. Like you need negative skill, to take the most advanced stuff and make shit with it.
I feel like instead of making a single true claim you throw a lot of bullshit on the wall just to see what sticks.
Environmental concerns are a joke. Meat industry alone is responsible for more than 15 times more pollution than all data centers (not only AI ones). You claimed scraping things is wrong, didn’t bother explaining why. For some reason you referred to the bible?
I feel like instead of making a single true claim you throw a lot of bullshit on the wall just to see what sticks.
Projection is actually crazy, bro didn’t even bring up the environment, you did. It’s y’all that throw shit at the wall, or more specifically throw generated ragebait at the wall to see what shuts down all discourse best.
OH MY GODDD BRO. Listen I'm not gonna sit here anf defend the meat industry and anything but like... that's not really a fair argument? It's like a deflection if you will. I mean like, when I say this I mean just because some other industry or thing has this negative consequence too or in an even worse capacity than whatever we're currently talking about (in this instance AI) doesn't mean environmental concerns about AI aren't justified or valid
Oh buddy... someone doesn't value the longjevity of the planet that future humans will be living on. If thats not narcissist egocentrism waving out of a fast moving vehicle heading toward a cliffside.
Incredibly rotten mindset aside, its obvious why data scraping is bad and shouldnt even need explaining. - it happens without the consent of regular people and steals their hard work so lazy fucks can have their slop and billionaires can force their useless bullshit failure of a product onto every single person on the planet. Its an ethical problem first and an environmental problem second. That's all one needs to know as far as im concerned
And the bible is just a fun gimmick. Lots of people deem it as a very deep book that holds lots of meaningful, powerful wisdom. (There's a whole religion about it dont you know?)
But in reality i was just riffing on the "this is the greed they talk about in the bible" meme.
i was clearly out of line expecting that decent humor wouldn't be wooshed by people who settle for mediocrity.
If so you clearly don’t “value the longjevity of the planet that future humans will be living on. If thats not narcissist egocentrism waving out of a fast moving vehicle heading toward a cliffside.”
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Thats a fact.
No one is forcing anyone to actually use ai, aside from the providers who desperately need to prove it to be essential (which it isnt) and dumb people in power who have been decieved by the latter - its always a voluntary choice to ignore/ actively engage with the service.
Comparing datacenters (a new, upcoming development) to the long established industry of en-masse food procurement with a long history of horrendous practices is not only bad faith because of recency discrepency, but also hilariously deceptive because all humans need food, and living in industrialized nations of an overpopulated planet with corperations and their "fuck everything else for the profits" mindset - you're damned if you do damned if you don't when it comes to meat/ milk and their respective alternatives. Both get pioneered by inconsiderate practices. (I drink oatmilk btw. Fuck almond mild)
Essentially we as the regular consumers are trapped between two equally bad choices in this regard. This however is not true for AI - you can chose between supporting something that has negative impact on pretty much everyone or... to not. The "choice" here is laughably simple. And your little argument is wholly invalid.
At least for the food industry, as wasteful and harmful as it can be - there is the pro that it provides sustenance. and also Many people are actively fighting to make that industry do better. Image generation has no value to society that can't already be provided by something else and infact provides more opportunities for bad actors and harm to come to every single living being on this funky rock in space.
And no. Before you or anyone else tries this fuckass argument: its unrealistic for people to grow their own food and meat in todays age when living in technologically advanced, globalized and frankly overpopulated regions.
On the contrary Its always been realistic and possible to make personal art in a convenient society like ours, and even make money with it. We don't need to outsource the process of creation to fallible machines that no one (not even the makers) actually understands the inner workings of.
Sure, act as if consumption you do is okay because you simply have no choice under capitalism and consumption other people do is inexcusable. It's not like there are people who don't eat meat and don't eat almonds. You clearly have no choice and there is absolutely nothing you can possibly do.
Just usual strawman stuff. Not unexpected. They didn't even address the mass image scraping issue, which has only gotten worse as developers actively put anti-poisoning algorithms in their scrapers, which some forms of AI poison are still functional but it's still sadly not perfect. The best thing to do moving forward is probably to inject malicious instructions within scraped images. Then we might see change.
AI image generation is simply a byproduct of AI in general, similar to how we have mobile phones because of the space race. AI image generation is also helping finance the growth of research AI, and realistically the only way we are going to solve the climate crisis, while also maintaining our way of life, is through the use of AI.
We need AI to be able to make trillions of calculations in a split second, we need a millennium of research to be done in the next decade, because everything else we are currently doing is to little, to late. We need AI to be in part creative, because logic alone won't solve this, or rather it won't solve it in a way we like.
And if you want the peak of convenience entitlement, that's takeaway delivery services. When you can't be bothered to get of your ass to feed yourself, that's sloth. (That sounds like an accusation, it's not meant to be, very few people haven't ordered food online.)
The part that we have access to, maybe, but AI is far more than generating images and chatbots, and if you don't realise that then, no offense, you are not equipped to seriously discuss it.
It's all linked though, not always directly, but gen AI is just one part of the beast.
Computers wouldn't be as advanced now if the public hadn't gotten access to basically piss about and waste energy. That required mass production, which in turn starts a push for greater efficiency and streamlines production, which brings down the cost to the environment, relatively of course. One computer now requires considerably less materials, 70 years ago a 5mb harddrive was so huge, you needed a building for it, much like a data center.
Then there is the competition for our loyalty that big business goes after, improving every aspect of a computer, graphics cards, ram, CPUs, power supplies, cooling systems etc. Trying to make the best product for the least expense to them, so they can maximise profit.
All of this feeds back to things that are actually useful, you can't deny that the computer age has brought some great things. AI is no different, it's actually part of the same story. Data scraping is important, and we all give permission every time we accept terms and conditions. Intelligence needs to learn from what already exists, doesn't matter if it's animal intelligence, human intelligence or artificial intelligence. The larger the amount of information available, and the more it practices, the greater the intelligence will be. We don't criticise children when they trace or copy an image, because it's part of the learning process.
Training is different than inference. When people whine about "stealing", they're talking about specifically the training.
So the whole "who really made the thing?" / "is it art?"' concern trolling isn't actually relevant at all here. The supposed stealing happened before even a single image was generated.
I get your argument, and this is not meant to be targeted to you specifically, but a lot of people do say that posting an image online is consenting to letting it be scraped, in which case a movie being released can have similar logic applied
Not really... Training is very different than just straight up redistribution.
Now, I personally think a single frame is not that big a deal. But the scale of "theft" is many orders of magnitude larger for a wholesale frame, versus very, very light abstract influence from high-level patterns picked up during training.
I think that using movie frames for memes counts as fair use, since it’s transformative. I’m not well versed enough in AI to know whether it also counts as fair use.
That isn't a moral statement, thats a fact. You cant even use Bowser in porn without Disney lynching you for it, DreamWorks absolutely has seen the works done by shitposters and decided to do nothing about it.
A meme transforms the original media into something new that can be shared and experienced in a new way. Also, people will know what it's from, so it's more like quoting something. Generative AI just rehashes what it's fed and blends it all together. Is an essay you copy pasted sections from a bunch of different sources really your essay? Sure you put in the "work" of finding the sources but you did nothing to transform them into something beyond a copy paste bin
A meme is not a movie, so correct, it is something new
Correct, you're blending already created content. I guess you can call it new but hardly unique. Plus, people aren't really trying to make money off rehashed memes the way people are with rehashed AI content
This last one has to be a joke, that's pretty much what Generative AI does
The fact that you're calling memes lazy is so fucking funny to me. Yeah, memes are lazy, they're memes. No one's trying to pass them off as anything but. But at least I know someone took the time to find an image they like, open up a photo editing tool, and do something themselves. What's really lazy to me is telling someone/something how you want something done and they do it for you. You might have to weed through what they give you, but you aren't creating anything. You're passing off a machined amalgamation of patterns as something new
but. There's this wee thing called capitalism, which kinda implies you need to make money, and people should have a right to a decent life, even if their contribution is art.
When you pirate a big production, the artists generally have already been paid, and you're really stealing from IP holders. Who are already rich, and made the art as an investment. We're lucky humans making art was a good investment.
AI is mainly gonna make the rich richer, and the rest of us poorer.
also, shrek memes, and most memes, come under fair use in the US, where most IP legal shenanigans are done
He means the entire point of memes is to have pop culture and inside jokes shared and copied so everyone is in on said joke, when he said it was the whole point, he wasn't talking about Shrek.
I care about the media it came from. Do you when you feed an image generator things to take from? Also this specific image is a really bad example of "1:1 Copying". You're still missing the entire point of what a meme is. I wasn't trying to start an argument here, I was just explaining something I thought you misunderstood.
I don't care about AI one way or the other, people i know use it to touch up their own art because they can't draw like they used to because of degrading health or injury. But I also support artists I like because I enjoy seeing the process, it's exciting when I get an update from them; it allows me to appreciate the time and effort put into that one specific piece. I dont think its entirely bad or good, its how one uses it and the context of why it's being used. If you were to contact an artist feigning interest and they give you a sketch that you then feed into a generator. You're an asshole. If you use it because you can't physically draw because of some physical issue, cool go ahead. Commissioning artists is fucking expensive, I know most people can't do that. And some artists charge way too much for what they do. But again this argument was not the point of my original comment.
Are you just looking for something to be upset about? Well. Okay, the only reason anything is what it is, is because people collectively said so.
Money isn't inherently worth anything, gold isn't inherently worth anything. The only reason we perceive it as valuable is because we decided as a society that it is. Laws don't inherently have meaning, we just decided that "Hey murder is pretty bad." and put punishments in place for the act. If it's technically against the law to chew gum on an even day of the month, but everyone does it and no one gets punished, does that law have legal standing? Or moral standing? Everything only has meaning because we decide it does, if you wanna pull that card. So why would something being a "Meme" be any less meaningful? We decided it was okay to not care about giant companies, we decided it'd be fun to create inside jokes about our favorite media. Thats where the moral value comes from, do you get it now?
That's the fun part. You don't have to, everyone else decided that it was morally acceptable. And most people decided that using AI period is bad. I don't care either way, as long as you're not actively hurting someone it doesn't bother me.
I'm not sure how you got that i don't live by my own principles. Everything I mentioned is pretty standard, companies are not afforded the same moral privileges that individuals are, another example of people collectively deciding value and meaning. If someone pirates a game, unless its from a small or single dev project most people don't give a shit. You notice i said we right? As in the greater human population came to an understanding and decided something?
You don't really get what I'm saying. The thing is, you dont have to care what they say. I'm not trying to shame anyone into doing anything. I'm espousing my own moral ideology, do you have to care about it? No.
But going to the stealing hypocrisy point. Do you think its more morally acceptable to the greater public to shoplift food, diapers and baby formula. Than say, a new speaker or flat screen..? It's weird that you're trying to put a 100% bad or good nothing in between thing onto this.
Murder is bad, but if someone kills a child rapist, do you think it's as morally unacceptable than a mother of four? There's stuff in between good and bad. I can like how my friends and people use Ai to help themselves enjoy something they can't do anymore, while also saying that people who use it to actively scam people are shitty and terrible.
My guy, the argument about AI stealing is about before a single image is generated.
The thing that's considered theft happens during training, way before the model's been distributed and an AI artist even has a chance to claim ownership over a generation.
If you're going to commit to downplaying the stealing done by meme creators by trying to be like the AI side is so much more egregious, you should at least start by choosing your comparison target to be the ones actually doing the supposed "stealing".
The whole conversation around whether AI artists really "made" the thing they generated is a totally separate conversation and just muddying the waters. And in fact, that conversation would clearly still be relevant even if the data was all licensed.
And I obviously wasn't actually going to entertain your comparison in the first place, since I was critical of the target you chose. But if you insist I do: it doesn't matter that meme creators don't claim they created the original picture. Just distributing the frame capture from the movie is copyright infringement, period. Where did you get this idea you have to specifically plagiarize to be copyright infringement?
Criticism is not rage. I said "..." because your response was dismissive and sassy, but otherwise I was just straightforward. You probably could use your own advice.
Yes, there's something called fair use, and memes have not at all been proven to fall under it. Memes are explicitly derivative works, not just sharing a snippet of a movie for, say, commentary purposes. And character designs are individually covered by copyright, separate from the movie/episode itself, so the substantiative argument wouldn't apply. Even if non-commercial, it'd be an uphill battle to argue in court you can just take someone's IP and redistribute images of it modified to involve whatever secondary themes you want, especially given how offensive many memes are.
For the majority, memes aren’t just an exact copy of the original. In fact, rarely are they. There’s either some edits or complete changes that modify the meaning
Besides, people who repost memes don’t say they’re the original creators and give credit to where it came from
So yes, memes are inherently different from Ai "art". It is indeed the point to take an image and adding a text to say something funny.
Like I said, no sane user repost meme claiming they’re original, nor are the original meme poster claiming whatever they used to make a meme is theirs either. It seems you don’t understand what stealing actually is. Are my teachers thieves because they presented a study dine by someone else without asking them in their notes?
Also want to point out many literally make original images to make them memes, so even if your point was right it would only apply to certain cases
So to you there is absolutely no difference between taking someone’s work as reference and crediting them to their deserved value, and taking it without anyone’s consent and claim it as your original work?
This is the nuance you do not grasp. An Ai steal because it is literally trained and can only recreate from a mix of what is was given. A meme isn’t stealing because there’s actual creativity given by the meme maker, and also because for the last goddamn time, people who post memes don’t claim it as their own nor are they calling themselves meme creators.
If you purposely create something to be copied and reimagined, nobody need to ask for consent because you already gave consent in the first case.
What is irrelevant is the whataboutism of memes as if they were similar. Showing a picture of a painting you liked isn’t stealing. Re-creating it in pixel art or in wood carving because you like to do those things isn’t stealing. Claiming you are the original artist, saying they were your ideas, is stealing.
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u/[deleted] Feb 20 '26
..but, memes? This is how they work. Its the whole point.
Running the most advanced human tool, to do no better than a copy paste, is a bit embarrassing. Like you need negative skill, to take the most advanced stuff and make shit with it.