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Screenshot of a tumblr post by hbmmaster:
the framing of generative ai as “theft” in popular discourse has really set us back so far like not only should we not consider copyright infringement theft we shouldn’t even consider generative ai copyright infringement
who do you think benefits from redefining “theft” to include “making something indirectly derivative of something created by someone else”? because I can assure you it’s not artists
okay I’m going to mute this post, I’ll just say,
if your gut reaction to this is that you think this is a pro-ai post, that you think “not theft” means “not bad”, I want you to think very carefully about what exactly “theft” is to you and what it is about ai that you consider “stealing”.
do you also consider other derivative works to be “stealing”? (fanfiction, youtube poops, gifsets) if not, why not? what’s the difference? because if the difference is actually just “well it’s fine when a person does it” then you really should try to find a better way to articulate the problems you have with ai than just saying it’s “stealing from artists”.
I dislike ai too, I’m probably on your side. I just want people to stop shooting themselves in the foot by making anti-ai arguments that have broader anti-art implications. I believe in you. you can come up with a better argument than just calling it “theft”.
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The premise here is wrong.
The theft isn’t “ai made a derivative work”. The theft is “human ai bros scraped all the stuff I made, without permission or compensation, and used it as training data”.
The problem is that art is being used for purposes the artist explicitly disagrees with. Imagine your artwork as a backdrop for company that steals candy from babies to feed elephant poachers. In a normal world, you can at least sue that company to take it down.
But when OpenAI uses your artwork to pump thousands of tons of CO2 into the air, you can’t do shit, and according to OP, you shouldn’t even complain about your work being taken.
Isn’t OP’s whole point that you should complain, just not call it theft?
“I believe in you. You can come up with a better argument than just theft.”
Nah, fuck that shit. It OOP feels so strongly that it’s not theft and they wanna change how the population at large is referring to something, then it’s on them to provide an alternative and convince others. This weird ass attempt to shame people into doing things their way, especially when they haven’t really defined what they consider their way, is absolute horse shit.
This whole post is full of this. The OOP tries to completely remove intent and method from the analysis of whether something is art theft. Those things absolutely factor into it and they’re only discounting them in order to push their weird narrative.
AI scrapping tons of work belonging to artists and then regurgitating that as original work is fucking gross, no matter what you call it. Theft seems fine to me, but I am open to calling it something else. Unfortunately OOP won’t be the I’ve to convince me since they neither provide reasoning for why calling it theft is bad or what we should call it instead and why.
