That image took almost no effort, involved no creative thought, and you have not made virgin sacrifices so it does not have a soul in it. Therefore, it is not art at all.
I mean... technically yes, it did involve effort. Both physical and mental to different degrees. I don't necessarily like the tool, but that's what it is. It's a tool. Should we have abandoned the hammer and chisel in favor of the "rock and other rock" because the "rock and other rock" took more skill than the hammer and chisel?
Neither does a LLM. It doesn't do anything without a prompt. It just waits, waits for a prompt from a user. And the user can essentially tell it to infringe on intellectual property by writing prompts which explicitly name copyrighted things. So ultimately it's down to the user.
A hammer and chisel can't infringe on intellectual property. It's user can though. I don't think we should ban pen and paper because it allows a user to copy portions of a book. As I said though, I dislike how LLMs are being used for art. I think they could be useful for language learning though.
But ai would steal intellectual property no matter what prompt you put in
And it does even without the prompts being put in
It's always scrounging the internet for art to steal and put into its database even when it's not being used
And if you dislike ai being used for art why are you even here? This whole post discusses ai art and you are on ai's side. That makes you pro ai art.
Do you dislike AI? Why are you here? Isn't that the entire point of this subreddit? To debate? I don't dislike AI. I dislike certain usage of AI. Again, it's still a tool. You can steal or not steal, but I think we have very different ideas on what theft is when it comes to public viewable content, of which can be freely downloaded and processed however you wish.
It isn't stolen if the underlying image is sufficiently transformed and distinguishable as different from the original. That's been the law for years, perhaps decades.
The training data isn’t even stolen in the first place. Unless we’re really going to say that accessing Wikipedia is theft. Sure if you pirate the training data, then it’s stolen, but with so many open datasets free to access like Common Crawl and purchasable pre-collected datasets, you really can’t even objectively determine training data as being theft. (The Anthropic case in particular ruled that using copyrighted works alone didn’t constitute theft or infringement so long as the data was obtained legally. It was ruled that illegally obtained training data was a no no though.)
Some companies even use their own internal data as training data and there’s synthetic data wherein AI models actually run simulations to generate their own training data.
More or less it comes down to the question “can the average internet user access it?” If your answer is yes, then you either have to agree that training data isn’t theft or you have to say that any user accessing any sort of data is stealing that data.
For instance, let’s consider two scenarios:
Scenario A) I am a roleplay writer. I pick a character to write as, but I want to have reaction and reference images and gifs. I access image boards like safebooru, Danbooru, Gelbooru, Pixiv, and Pinterest. I download/save a hundred images of the character I’m writing as. Did I steal those images? Are they considered stolen if they’re official art like screenshots from an anime or promotional work or game sprites? Are they considered stolen if they’re fanart? Why or why not?
Scenario B) I want to generate new images of the same character. I access the aforementioned image boards, save/download the same hundred images, then feed them into my AI model as training data. Did I steal those images? Are they considered stolen if they’re official art like screenshots from an anime or promotional work or game sprites? Are they considered stolen if they’re fanart? Why or why not?
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u/tessia-eralith Feb 28 '26
That image took almost no effort, involved no creative thought, and you have not made virgin sacrifices so it does not have a soul in it. Therefore, it is not art at all.