Quote:
Originally Posted by Stabbsworth
most of my concern as an artist, though, comes from people making datasets out of stolen artwork. hence why most people are decrying the bloody thing. while my art isn't exactly known and thus stolen, i still don't want people chucking it into an ai generator because they can't be arsed to request something or commission me.
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(Just to be clear -- I'm using "you" in this post as a general non-specific person. I'm not referring to any specific person in any specific situation. So I'm absolutely not intending to step on any toes here!)
There are two different things to mention here.
First is the idea of stolen artwork. Downloading art that's being freely offered to view online isn't stealing -- it's the only way to view the art in the first place. You can't see it if you can't download it. It's only stealing if you then reupload it so that people don't have to get the artwork from the original creator. That's why the large, big-name models aren't stealing even though they've collected millions (if not billions) of images: It's no different than a human artist learning by browsing art galleries. The skills the model learns from this aren't a reproduction of any of the original pieces, but rather a built-up understanding of the way art is created. But a small home-trained model won't be able to learn enough to do anything but copy what it was trained on.
Second is the issue of commissions... That's one of the things I was thinking of as something that's valid to be worried about. Personally, my concern isn't that AI art generators are going to replace commissioning artists for their particular styles. Yeah, obviously that's an issue, but you can already try to commission someone to draw in someone else's style. (Whether or not they're good at it is another matter entirely, but it's not illegal, and it's not unethical as long as you aren't trying to pass it off as being from the original artist.) I think the bigger issue is the double-edged sword that these tools provide: it makes it to where anyone can create artwork with reasonably good rendering quality, for free. That's a great thing for most people! But it makes it harder to make money as an artist, because you have to provide something that makes the customer feel like it's worth the expense. And that
definitely sucks... but it also feels like something I don't know if anyone can do anything about. The genie is out of the bottle already. The best solution might be for artists to get good at using the AI-powered tools to improve their own workflows. Fight fire with fire, as it were.
As a related side note: One thing I learned since I wrote that previous message? The most egregious AI-art ripoffs are the result of someone using an image-to-image generator (instead of purely a text-to-image generator) and feeding it a single image of someone's artwork to ask the AI to redraw it. This is the AI equivalent of tracing someone's art and calling it your own.