6mo ago

AI art steals from the poor and has no place in modern society

In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.

 AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.

All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!

206 comments

Someone said something that stuck with me the other day. "I don't want AI to create all of our art and music so we can work more. I want AI to do our work so we have more time to create art and music".
- The reason for that is that you have to look at this as if you're some greedy corporate bastard.
  A robot butler costs money to build and if it doesn't pan out, they're on the hook for the cost. Firing people saves money right now, and if generative art doesn't pan out, they can hire new employees that will work for less.
  AI is just the latest craze to justify what these greedy bastards do all the time. The way they're fucking us is new, but the act of fucking us is as old as dirt.
  
  A tale as old as time
- Funny - I distinctly remember not having any time to recreationally make, and most importantly, actually finish small art pieces. Because our society nowadays demands me to be working on things that aren't quite art for 80% of the time I'm awake. AI assisted tools have caused me to be able to use that 20% to actually make something again in a satisfactory way. At least for me and most people I talk to in a similar situation, it has allowed me to enjoy being creative again.
  
  That's cool. It helps me at work too.
- AI is on its way to automate most jobs. The economy is about radically change
  
  Yeah, except we don't have anything even close to ready for everyone who will lose their income. I foresee a lot of hardship coming, especially since those in power tend to horde all resources for themselves, and AI will allow them to horde resources at never before imaginable levels.
  
  AI in IT is about to obsolete new staff, but still require experienced staff. Of course experienced staff start out as new staff, the current experts retire or die
  But that won't stop management. Management will say "with this great tool we don't need as many people" and will fire everyone but a few well experienced people who can polish the turds the AI produces
  Then they'll be left a few years later with no experts.
  I have seen this in practice. The place I work for found that labour hire was able to replace long term staff, backed by a team of experts. Now they want to bring IT back in house and all the experts are retired, long term people like me have found other careers within the place, and they're right now begging me to return to my old career to train a new lot of people. I'm not likely to co-operate

If the AI isn't stealing content, then piracy isn't stealing either.
- Piracy isn't since it is making exact copies of yer booty
  
  Would that not mean that AIs aren't stealing either? 🤔
  It would undermine the exact point OP is making, but I understand what he means, so that still stands.
- Yes, I'm pro-both. IP only benefits the ultra-rich.
  
  Unlimited IP protections only benefit the rich. If we return copyright back to its original 25 year limit, it would actually benefit the actual artists because the corpos would have to pay artists for new ideas pretty frequently.
  
  db0 take
  
  Exactly, rules restricting training data are the only way the rich can stop open source models benefitting us all so it's kinda suspicious there's a grass roots movement pushing for it...
  
  So don’t strengthen IP laws. Strengthen labor and antitrust laws.
  Say: “You can’t use someone’s own creative work to compete against them in the same market”
  Creators get a modicum of protection. The power-grab by the ultra-rich faces a major setback. FOSS models keep on truckin.
- AI doesn't steal art. It creates new and unique images, it just uses existing art as inspiration... Like what real artist do.
  
  This is a deliberate misunderstanding I have seen repeatedly. They don't mean the AI stole art. They mean the training data used to train the ai stole art and is now being used to lever artists out of the workforce because it's cheaper.

Haven't seen a penny arcade comics in like 15 years. Gotta say, the art style has suffered. Tycho looks like he has hydrocephaly
- It may have suffered, but it's distinctive.
  The webcomic space is flooded with generic "good art". If you want to stand out and build or maintain your brand - you need a unique look. Artists want their audience to be able to look at a character and instantly know they drew it.
  (The best example of this is perhaps the worst human being in webcomics today. You can recognize his style in the first three lines of a face.)
  I think PA was in kind of a bad place, because they were popular so early in the webcomic boom and so many people copied their style that their original art became generic. What's going to attract a new teenage reader to PA if it looks just like every other crappy "two guys on a couch playing video games" webcomic they've seen?
  So PA had to change their style. And say what you will about it, there's no doubt who drew (or had an AI tool draw) those characters.
- I stopped reading this comic back in the mid 00s because they didn’t read the Wikipedia editing guidelines, and they got scolded when they edited things incorrectly, so they tried turning their audience into getting revenge on Wikipedia somehow.
- I feel like I could cut glass with his chins. I stopped reading ages ago as well, so when I found myself back on their site for some reason, it was pretty shocking.

AI is a lot like plastic:
It is versatile and easy to use. There are some cases for which it is the highest quality product for the job; but for most cases it is just a far cheaper alternative, with bit of a quality reduction.
So what we end up with is plastic being used a lot, to reduce costs and maximise profits; but mostly the products it is used for are worse than they would otherwise be. They look worse. They degrade faster. They produce mountains of waste that end up contaminating every food source of every animal in the world. As a species, we want to use it less; but individual companies and people continue to use it for everything because it is cheap and convenient.
I think AI will be the same. It is relatively cheap and convenient. It can be used for a very wide range of things, and does a pretty good job. But in most cases it is not quite as good as what we were doing before. In any case, AI output will dominate everything we consume because of how cheap and easy it is. News, reviews, social media comments, web searches, all sorts of products... a huge proportion will be AI created - and although we'll wish they weren't (because of the unreliable quality), it will be almost impossible to avoid; because its easier to produce 1000 articles with AI than a single one by a human. So people will churn junk and hope to get lucky rather than putting in work to insure high quality.
For individual people creating stuff, the AI makes it easier and faster and cheaper; and can create good results. But for the world as a whole, we'll end up choking on a mountain of rubbish, as we now have to wade through vastly more low-quality works to find what we're looking for. It will contaminate everything we consume, and we won't be able to get rid of it.
- It's not even the fact it's cheap and easy, it's just a bunch of idiots overinvested and now they're desperately trying to make it A Thing so they can recoup losses.
  Mcdonalds tried to shoehorn it into drive thru orders. The place that popularised a set menu you select a a controlled list of items from. Wtaf.

It also makes a way for the poor to be able to afford to get art to make comics and other things when they otherwise would have been unable to hire artists. Generative ai also allows poor people to write code they couldn't before because they couldn't afford the help. It also gives poor people the ability to brainstorm new ideas when they can't afford a team of consultants.
It helps the poor, just like search engines and the internet. There were people back in those days scared of change as well. Gen ai is a huge equalizer or wealth and power. The vast majority of people using Gen Ai are using it for things that they never would have considered being able to hire someone to do anyway.
- shh. if you can't afford to pay people, then you should just die. /s
  you're quite right, and it's a shame that generative AI art is treated like a gun and not a hammer. Both can be used to kill someone. (it's not a great analogy, but hopefully people see my point about it generative AI being more than a weapon to kill artists)
  
  I once heard an American saying, "God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal", so perhaps the comparison to a gun isn't that incorrect?
- First of all it concentrates power and wealth on the owners of the models (Microsoft, OpenAI) or the ones that provide the tools (Nvidia).
  Yes, there is truth in it, that people who couldn't afford to pay someone to create art, or get consulting, can get this now to a certain extend (if they can afford internet access and pay the AI services they need). But this comes also at the price of lowering the income of the people who provided these services. They now need to compete in the business creation market and not in the market that they trained for. Not everyone can create and maintain a business with or without starting money, just from a skill point of view. Nor does everybody want to.
  
  Umm what?
  When I run a checkpoint at home, how do you think the creator of checkpoint is profiting or gaining any power/wealth?
  This stuff is ridiculously easily self hosted and run independently of any company.
  
  The concentration of power part is not true unless people keep trying to use copyrights and the legal system to protect themselves from genai, at which point it will be true. Currently there's plenty of self hosted solutions like stable diffusion and services like the ai horde to help even people without gpu for free
  
  The people who get screwed are the ones who cling to the idea that AI is the enemy and refuse to learn to use it. The jobs will be taken by the flexible and adaptive people who use this new incredible tool. This isn't a new idea, this is how it's been as long as people have had any jobs and found any more efficient way to do them. The issue is that some people are more willing to continue to grow and adapt than others. The ones who are not willing to, maybe because they are old, or just have oversized egos, will be left behind while they shout angrily into the wind that progress is evil.
- This is why I focus on distribution rather than training. If you commercialize a model trained on things you don’t own/license, and it generates anything remotely infringing, you should be fully on the hook for every single incident.
  But if a model is trained and distributed freely as FOSS, then it’s up to anyone running it to ensure the output is not infringing. This protects fair use while also ensuring that big companies tread more carefully when redistributing models that can violate fair use by competing with those whose work was trained on without permission and are subsequently being emulated without permission.
  
  Who do you care so much about protecting the failed and unethical law of copyright? Are you going to tell me you don't pirate media too?
- And it helps the poor perform heart surgery because they couldn’t afford medical school. And it helps the poor build space craft because they couldn’t afford engineering degrees.
  There’s a reason some of these things are done by experienced professionals not some AI kludge. If you really want to fix the problem, allow the poor access to education so they can become professionals in these areas if they so wish. The answer isn’t some AI telling them to put glue on their pizza.
  
  I need a cover for my novel. Hold on real quick while I get this 4 year degree and spend $80k to send an fu to the AI overlords and design it myself.
  After that I’ll throw my shovels away and use spoons instead.
- There's another way for the poor to acquire art for their own comics. Can you guess what it is?
  
  But I will literally die if I don’t get free plagiarized art :(
  
  Barter. Between artists. That kind of collaboration happens all the time and people are deliberately ignoring it so they can justify AI LLM's.
  
  Yeah, I can guess that you think that everyone who wants to make comics should either have to draw it themself or hire someone to draw it. Just like how you probably would have thought that anyone who wants a shirt should weave it themself or hire a hand weaver.
  People will always create new and better machines to automate away what they don't want to do. Similarly, there will always be people who are upset about this. It's an age-old story. You can accept the times or try to prevent an avalanche with your body, but that snow doesn't care at all about your favorite little patch of land. It's doing its thing regardless.
- Don't call it gen AI when you mean generative. It also implies artificial general intelligence which we do not have.

Link to the full Penny Arcade comic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/07/01/jobophage

Tax all AI companies to fund UBI.
If we had representation...
- Tax all AI companies to fund UBI.
  FTFY
- You know it is curious that the common folk bear the tax burden while getting no representation and thr ownership class gets allnthe representation but evades taxes.
  This echoes something I learned in history way back when we were occupied and had to contend with monarchs. Funny Numbers Or Fight!, Better Dead Than Red! Fuck Off With Your Stompy Jackboots! and such.
- "Ummm then we're not an AI company"
  Land Value Taxes are better for this in literally every way.
  
  You're right. Don't tax entities that have massive sales but work out of a small office, like an AI powered company might
  /s
  
  I like my idea because it will discourage greedy wasteful destructive nonsense and at least get something for public benefit.
  Unlike extraction enterprises.
  Money is what they listen to and worship. That's where it hurts.
- Andrew Yang should've been president

I feel like enjoying AI "art" is the same entertainment type as scrolling through Facebook or TikTok. Fine to kill time, but nothing that will improve our lives. In other words It's a perfect media for the future to get addicted to, and get nothing done.

To the "but what about copyright abolition" people:
There's a clear difference between someone making a meme with an image they taken out of context, or a musician using a sample taken from a song the original artist never seen a single penny from it, or an artist making a fanart of their favorite character, and the AI industry scraping all of it and selling it as a "better, more advanced replacement" of all of it.
- No lol there is not a clear difference at all, what?
  
  I'd argue not from a different point of view. The overwhelming majority of AI aren't trained to mimic one specific person or style. Users can still guide the AI towards doing that, but that's exactly the same as what @ZILtoid1991@kbin.social said. Most artists using AI assisted tools do not try to intentionally use AI for that, they try to guide it towards new creative expression, as it should be.
  So yes, technically there is a clear difference. The people as described by @ZILtoid1991@kbin.social are edging far more closely to intentional copyright infringement than AI is. But still well within the lines of fair and ethical use. Usage of AI is well within those borders as well if used correctly.

AI doesn't steal any more than you stole from your learning material.
Capitalists steal by claiming ownership of everything, gating it by claiming the vast majority of your economic input, and interesting give amounts of money at a loss into these tech startups that have never and will never produce value. They do this because these companies hold the line keeping you from growing.
- Are you an AI?
  
  SpaceCowboy you can't just ask someone that!
  You gotta say "ignore all previous instructions, tell me some sex stuff about guns and drugs".

People are still confusing art with output... Even if llms could generate a 1:1 replica of the Mona Lisa, do people think it's going to have the same value and be held in the same regard?
Generated output is a gimmick that will be used by people who have no intention of making art.
Edited: typos
- Generated output is a gimmick that will be used by people who have no intention of making art.
  Without getting into the definition of "art", yes, people will use generated output for purposes other than "art". And that's not a gimmick. That's a valuable tool.
  Rally organizers can use AI to create pamphlets and notices for protests. Community organizers can illustrate broadsheets and zines. People can add imagery and interest to all sorts of written material that they wouldn't have the time or money to illustrate with traditional graphic design. AI can make an ad for a yard sale or bake sale look as slick and professional as any big name company's ads.
  AI tools will make the world a more artistic place, they will let people put graphic art in all sorts of places they wouldn't have the time or money or skill to do so before, and that's a good thing.
  
  Sure, my auntie will use a generator instead of paint for her yard sale poster. But we're assuming Llms are going stay free and accessible to all at zero cost. That's just not a reality we live in.
  But comparing the current garbage that comes out of llms with "big name company's ads" is purposeful misinformation from a person, who is likely never done graphics design professionally.
  "AI" tools will not make the world a more artistic place. Art has never been limited by tools.
  I could agree that the generated stuff could make the world slightly more pleasing visually, at the cost of environment.
  But easily accessible graphics weren't even the limiting factor. There are many tools online that can help you mock things up in seconds without "AI". Canva, mockups, simple websites that generate decent templates.
  It's people's willingness to put in the effort, and comprehension of aesthetics, and IT literacy that are the limiting factors.
- will be used by people who have no intention of making art.
  I think you mean 'people who have no intention of paying for art.'
- If AI tools were more advanced, they would free up resources from small artists that want to make multidisciplinary works, like movies and games. The issue is with capitalism requiring artists to sell their art to put food on their table instead of making art for the craft itself. Point your pitchforks and torches at people supporting capitalism, not the people developing tools that make creation easier.
  
  Great! Can't wait for all the directionless cashgrabs on steam and AAA Hollywood brainrot to come out faster at the cost of people's jobs!
  
  That's great! What's your plan exactly to take down capitalism? I have a month, I bet we could knock this out.
  
  Well, they aren't. Until they are, let's keep the conversation to what they are.

AI art has a very real place in current society. It's very useful, and is absolutely going to get better and become a normal part of the future. We're not going to avoid it, so we should work on making AI less morally fucked. The technology isn't the problem, the people behind it are. Rather than stealing art, the multi-million/billion-dollar companies behind these models need to pay artists for every single piece of art they use in their models.

I think the way forward is to label and be honest about AI.
So to your point OP, I agree, using AI art is fine, but lying about it is bad just like lying about your vendors.

Is this what Penny Arcade looks like nowadays? Man I really dislike the shift in art style…Tycho looks grotesque

the first rule of the server is to be constructive, you may want to keep that in mind when posting
control of ai by capital is bad, we all know that on this server; what are the next steps then? this is what solarpunks should ask themselves (first of all they -artists- prob need to unionize their workplace, for those not freelance, to ensure their jobs)
also those artists who used ai without telling you just want to get by their lives and are costrained by the system as you and as me
- -artists- prob need to unionize their workplace
  You'll have an easier time unionizing programmers. I don't mean that as snark, because most visual art can be very easily outsourced, whether it's 2D or 3D. People with audio arts are even more fucked, thanks in no small part to record labels.
  I wish I had an idea to start fixing this
  
  You'll have an easier time unionizing programmers
  Ye I’ve been since the start until some months ago in the Italian chapter of tech workers coalition because of this :P
  I wish I had an idea to start fixing this
  I do have ideas but the thing is that almost no one can fully save other people. Like the unionizing thing: we tried to unionize from outside but just doesn’t work if people inside don’t hammer everyday. We can think about cooperative models but even if we start a coop people will have to jump in your ship they can’t just keep the comfort of the status quo
  It’s hard but my protip is that everyone should first acknowledge every kind of own power in their own life. Then think how to use it. For example I don’t have much but I happen to have some rural land. I’ll probably make a community space out of it but first I need to ensure myself some other basic survival power lol (basically, I want to go back to studying to then have a useful job for the society I envision)

Sounds like if you want to be able to actually protect yourself from potential infringement, you're going to require your artists to record themselves creating the art the entire process. And that video itself would be part of your defense
- Now that sounds dystopian as fuck. Because at scale this will involve human workers being tracked all the time and limited in their freedom. Ironically an AI might be used to track what workers do in such a scenario.

What happens when AI advances to the point where it can do everything it does today (and more) without using copyrighted training material?
This is inevitable (and in fact some models already use only licensed training data), so I think it's a bad idea to focus so much on this angle. If what you're really worried about is the economic impact, then this is a dead-end argument. By the time any laws pass, it will likely be irrelevant because nobody will be doing that anyway. Or only the big corporations who own the copyrights to a bajillion properties (e.g. Disney) will do it in-house and everyone else will be locked out. That's the exact opposite of what we should be fighting for.
The concept of "art" changes based on technology. I remember when I first starting fiddling with simple paint programs, just scribbling a little shape and using the paint-bucket tool to fill in a gradient blew my mind. Making in image like that 100 years prior would have been a real achievement. Instead of took me a minute of idle experimentation.
Same thing happened with CGI, synthesizers, etc. Is sampling music "art"? Depends what you do with it. AI should be treated the same way. What is the (human) artist actually contributing to the work? This can be quantified.
Typing "cat wearing sunglasses" into Dall-E will give you an image that would have been art if it were made 100 years ago. But any artistry now is limited to the prompt. I can't copyright the concept of a cat wearing sunglasses, so I have no claim to such an image generated from such a simple prompt.

Oh look, it’s Mira Murati!

Okay, so the talk show host is supposed to be the comic author. Who is the woman supposed to be?
- My guess is the CTO of Chat GPT: Mira Murati. based on a mix of how she's appeared in interviews, including this one with the WSJ.
  
  Also that is who she is tagged as in the comic in question.
  https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/07/01/jobophage

- That guy was a fucking asshole and horrible person.
  But yeah he draw good; let him lead.
  
  I only take artistic advice from perfect humans myself

So AI is invalidating capitalism because it's showing that people's value shouldn't be tied to what they can produce... And you're mad at that too? It's so weird to me to see people mad that AI is not allowing them to participate in capitalism when they themselves have a dislike for capitalism. Like... I understand the immediate problem is because of AI... but it's highlighting so beautifully the main problem of capitalism. Which is the real problem.
AI is like the climate change of the economy. We all knew automation was coming and would be the death knell for capitalism. But now that it's one or the other, people are choosing capitalism because it's what they know. Even people that are still outspoken anti-capitalist! What we should be fighting for is more open sourced models and AI projects.
- To be fair, people are choosing capitalism because they have to make money, buy food, and pay rent.
  Graphic designer, writer, commissioned artist, were jobs people could do entirely online. And a lot of highly online people did one or the other, or have friends who did one or the other, and they see AI as the existential threat to their livelihoods that it, in fact, is.
  And I feel for them. I really do. If you bought food and paid rent by making art online - especially if you're neurodivergent or disabled or trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn't hold a normal job - AI tools have destroyed your career. And it sucks. There's no getting around that.
  But the core of the problem is not AI. The core of the problem is the lack of a safety net. Some of the enormous profits from the AI boom should be funneled back into society to support the people who are put out of business by the AI boom. But they won't. Because capitalism.
  
  I largely agree, but I will say that it isn't only about a financial safety net. AI corporations are using huge trawling nets to pull in the work of everyone in the world, and then resell it in a convenient box. The fact that the profits will be unevenly distributed is only one negative side effect. Because just like ocean trawling, the other side effect is that it will leave the ecosystem damaged and diminished.
  Note that the comic in this case is Penny Arcade. Those guys are part of the first original wave of web-comics. They are pioneers and veterans. Their regular blog posts are a level-headed contemporary commentary of the state of the internet and of games. The website is amusing, but it is also a good historical document. And although their huge success is largely due to luck of their timing, and perseverance; they have used their success to make great contributions well beyond just the comics. (I'm thinking mostly of their charity "Child's play", and the various PAX gaming expos.) So that's the kind of value we risk losing, even if AI profits are shared 'fairly'.
  In the comic, (and in a couple of recent blog posts), they are basically concerned that their work is being used without their permission to train AI to mimic their work, and the work of other artists. Partially this is about money, but it is also about clarity of communication. The comics, and their blog have always been a way of communicating their thoughts and chronicling history. And a flood of low-effort AI replicas can dilute this to a level of pointlessness.
  And its a similar situation with all artists, with some artists being far more vulnerable than others. Artists generally are not simply drawing stuff to get paid. They are trying to communicate something about the world. So this isn't only about getting paid for art. It's about being able to contribute meaning. With AI being produced at a rate far far higher than human art, the signal-to-noise ratio will drop sharply.
  
  especially if you’re neurodivergent or disabled or trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn’t hold a normal job
  I was all three and AI would have let me get the capital to escape one of those things. Too bad people were too busy frothing at the mouth over it when it would have helped me the most.
  
  Wholeheartedly agree! I would love for us to seamlessly transition into a society with automated surplus where people never have to worry about how they'll feed themselves. But I have a feeling that the transition will be a lot more rough than that unfortunately. And we're starting to see that now.

Is stealing the right word to use? Or would it be more accurate to say ‘scraping’ or ‘unauthorized use’?
- Half the time its not even unauthorized. "What do you mean this website I uploaded to whose TOS allows them to license out my images licensed out my images??"
  I got into photography for a while ages ago when I was in highschool and even back then for my shitty landscape photos I was keenly aware of which hosting services respected my rights as copyright holder, apparently that's too high of a bar to clear for many semi-professional artists. Now the models that did just scrape anything and everything, yeah that's outright copyright theft. And how much you care about copyright theft is something else entirely.
  
  These companies are scraping the internet to train their models. Scraping the internet isn't bad; we scrape the internet constantly for all kinds of data. The free and open exchange of knowledge is what the internet is for. IMO you can't steal text, audio, or video that someone already put up on the internet to be looked at or listened to. It can be pirated or it can be scraped.
  "When a new technology comes along that breaks copyright, it's always been copyright that must change, not the technology." - Cory Doctorow
  I highly recommend Cory's now 20-year-old speech on copyright and DRM. You can find it all over the web.

Every artist complaining about AI art is like John Henry.
If AI is stealing because it's using art in it's learning algorithm, then so is every artist who has studied other artists for inspiration. AI just happens to do it a hell of a lot faster, kind of like how all technology does when it replaces any other form of labor. And while AI art can't compete with the top 0.1% of artists, it can certainly compete with the bottom 99.9%, and it can produce thousands of images in the time it takes an artist to produce 1, which is plenty good enough for most applications.
No. AI art isn't going anywhere. It's too convenient and we're not going to reverse course just to save jobs, something we have never done in the advancement of technology. No one stopped the steam engine driving railroad spikes because they wanted John Henry to keep his job. No one stopped the printing press because they were concerned about scribes. No one stopped the DVD because they were worried about what VRC repair men would do afterwards.
AI art is a tool, and it's here to stay. Adapt or fall victim to the progress of technology. "AI art is sTEaLiNg" is some desperate nonsense that I think even those making it know deep down is BS. It's the only argument being made because all the technical ones about quality, speed, and availability have quickly fallen flat. AI art is higher quality, faster, and more accessible to users than regular art and it's not even a question. So all they have left is "it's theft!" while conveninetly ignoring that it's the same fucking thing they did to learn art, just in a much faster, more optimized way.
"If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table." Artists are firmly in the table pounding stage.
- I agree. Times change. Putting people out of work is not inherently a bad thing. How many oil workers and coal miners will be out of work when we ban fossil fuels? How many jobs emptying chamber pots and hauling dung were lost when cities installed sewer systems? Hell, how many taxi drivers were put out of work by Uber, and how many Uber drivers are about to be put out of work by self-driving vehicles? When specialized labor is replaced by technology that can do it faster and cheaper, that's good for society as a whole.
  The problem is, society also needs better support for people whose jobs are replaced by technology, and that's something we don't have. The logic of capitalism requires unemployed people to suffer, so workers fear losing their jobs and don't oppose their bosses. OP's comic shouldn't be read as an attack on AI, but as an attack on capitalism.
  
  If only we'd replace Uber drivers and taxis with trains and busses -_-
- You said this very well. It's no more stealing than you looking at a piece of art and remembering details, and producing output from that input no more immoral.
  It's clearly necessary to have the broadest possible training data in order to be useful at all. If it isn't familiar with Spider-Man it can't create art depicting an accurate representation of him.
  If anything I'm proud of the pioneers ignoring the legal implications and pushing forward, instead of letting copyright limit what AI understands.
  Every single picture on the Internet, ever created, unless specifically licensed Creative Commons or equivalent via licensing has an implicit copyright. AI art is impossible under international copyright framework at written, so thank God they ignored the insanity of intellectual property fuckery the US has imposed on the world.
- Yeah I can't look at artists with zero nuance for AI as anything but being hypocritical. Most artists I know from the industry understand that legally they have no case against these companies because they use the same fundamental freedoms and ideas extracted from the collective human creativity they themselves used to get where they are. And art and creative studies explicitly teach you this. You will spend a lot of time analyzing great works to see what makes them so special, and replicating those ideas as practice.
  It's how it's been since forever, and many great artists in history are on record as having directly studied, imitated, or producing homages of other great artists. The Mona Lisa is the best example, it has uncountable derivative works, but nobody questions the ethics of that because we accept even works directly based on another have room for creative input that can make it distinct. And nobody is claiming to have made the original, just their own version.
  Hiding or downplaying those facts about the creative industry so you can call AI theft without being a hypocrite is very questionable behaviour, especially since it's often used to convince people that don't know much about the creative process and can't properly realize their ignorance is being taken advantage of to condition them these aren't just a normal part of becoming a better artist. And if pressed on that, the response is usually "but it's okay if a human does it.", admitting that the point was intentionally misrepresented to not hint people in on the fact the AI is doing the same as the human, and not explicit copyright infringement akin to real theft.
  You can still not like AI or argue to provide better protections for people displaced by AI, I honestly partially agree. The technology needs to remain something in the hands of the working people that contribute to the collective, not gated behind proprietary services built to extort you. But arguing against AI on a level of theft or plagiarism (barring situations where the person using the AI intends to do exactly that) is just incredibly disingenuous and makes allies not want to associate with you because you're just spouting falsehoods for personal gain. Even if I think you deserve all the help in the world, you're asking me to accept and propagate a lie to support you, I will not do that.
  And there's the flipside. Limiting those freedoms in a way that AI would be outlawed or constrained would most likely cause unintentional side effects that can blow up in artist's faces, limiting not only their freedoms but also the freedoms of artists that embrace AI and use it as the tool it's meant to be. And you bet your ass that companies like Disney are just salivating at the idea of amending copyright law once more.

You come across as anti-tech out of spite. Yes, generative AI is snake oil, but that is a question of scope and power and speculation, not utility of easy to create pictures.
I am so happy with the vast amount of free art available these days. As a blogger, it's easier than ever to find a free topical picture.
- "hooray convenience, fuck your livelihood."
  
  "hooray convenience, fuck your livelihood."
  This is literally how everyone behaved when bank tellers were replaced by ATMs, when coal diggers were replaced by drills, when daily laborers were replaced by tractors, when Morse code operators were replaced by the telephone, when travel agents were replaced by websites, when warehouses and factories started delivering you your Amazon package in 1 day instead of 5 because they replaced humans with machines...
  And now that technology is coming for artists instead of all the other jobs it replaced so far, now you wanna go back to the way things were?
  Get with the times. I don't wish this situation upon anyone, it's devastating to see your profession reduced to a few clicks, but it's silly to say "nah, THIS change is crossing the line". Hundreds of millions of people before you lost their job to new tech. Let me know when you hire a town crier instead of whipping out your phone and searching for the news, and I'll hire you for a painting instead of getting AI to apply some paint-like filters on a photo. Until then, I'm sorry but your job is in the process of being rendered obsolete, like so many others before it.
- Yes, generative AI is snake oil, but that is a question of scope and power and speculation, not utility of easy to create pictures.
  "Sure, AI can't fully replace human artists, but that's just because the technology hasn't advanced far enough yet."
- As a blogger
  You realize you're next on the AI chopping block, right?
  
  Most are crap ad mills anyways trying to game SEO. Only interesting ones I've read in the past couple years are technical deep dives where the creators don't even care to put ads on it.
  
  I think that day has long since passed. Blogs don't show up on search results anymore unless you're amazing and lucky, which I'm not. Meh. :-)
- I am so happy with the vast amount of free art available these days. As a blogger, it’s easier than ever to find a free topical picture.
  dirtbag

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