comment: >
  
  If you need to use an asset, some data that someone else generated and they require payment for it and you don't pay to use it in a way that they permit, then that is theft.
context: It's simpler than that. Mixing an image with data from hundreds of thousands of others is sufficient alteration to get around any sane copyright law, and the provision of a text prompt and refinement of the image through onboard tools and image editing software qualifies as a form of authorship. >
  
  Very interesting, if that’s true then art theft would be difficult to prove in these cases. May I ask where you found this is to be true by providing a source? >
  
  Of course art theft will be impossible to prove as long as the output is sufficiently different from any originals. >
  
  Yep you might be right. I guess the exception to this is when prompting an AI to generate art in a certain artist’s style, e.g., Van Gogh >
  
  Still not art theft. It has never been theft to draw/paint in someone else's style. >
  
  Correct, by itself it may not be theft. A problem may arise when you try to pass AI-generated “Van Gogh style” art as Van Gogh’s actual artworks, for example. An untrained eye may likely be fooled into thinking the AI-generated artwork is actually Van Gogh’s if images do not record where they came from (e.g., an image says whether it was created by AI art generation software in its file metadata), and whether that is the human’s fault may be debatable. It is an issue of authenticity. >
  
  I think that the theft accusation mainly comes from AI learning algorithms. Like companies feed copyrighted art to the algorithm for it to be able to create AI generated image, without asking artists for permission, or paying artists for using their work to teach algorithm.  Also, algorithms are able to create works that are dangerously close to real artist's works. Imagine that company needs to create a promotional image. They ask a programmer to create this image using AI. AI was trained on actual artist's works, without him knowing about it, or getting payed for his works being used. AI creates an image, that is 98% similar to artists work. This way, company gets their image, without paying anything to the artist, but getting same quality work. This is what happened to DeviantArt. They just stealthily automatically opted in to train their AI algorithm on everything that any user ever posted on their site without informing users that their artwork is being used. Using artwork without artist's permission is theft. >
  
  
  Also, algorithms are able to create works that are dangerously close to real artist's works. Imagine that company needs to create a promotional image.  
  Imagine that company needs to create a promotional image. They ask a programmer to create this image using AI. AI was trained on actual artist's works, without him knowing about it, or getting payed for his works being used. AI creates an image, that is 98% similar to artists work.
  
  Humans are already able to create copyright-infringing art and we can decide to criminalize it for that, not for the method that was used to create it.
  They can do it by hand, or by opening a picture up in photoshop and only slightly editing it, not enough to count as Fair Use.
  Hell, you can draw a brand new, visually interesting and unique picture of Spiderman, and distributing it commercially is still copyright infringement just because of the character it contains.
  But in all these cases, being able to look at it and see that it's a direct or at least indirect copy of something specific, is the necessary requirement to calling it theft.
  By arguing against AI art on that principle, but also generally on the basis of it being trained on other images, you are creating a much stricter standard than previously.
  Yeah, if an AI creates an image that is 98% the copy of another specific image, that's copyright infringement. But what if it doesn't? If it scans hundreds of thousands of artworks, and then it creates a new one, that doesn't directly resemble any of the existing ones, then how is that theft? If just scanning people's artworks and adding the tiniest bit of detail based on each of them to how you draw your own pictures is theft, then OP is right, and humans doing the same would already be theft too. >
  
  
  Hell, you can draw a brand new, visually interesting and unique picture of Spiderman, and distributing it commercially is still copyright infringement just because of the character it contains.
  
  nope, that's a trademark violation, not copyright infringement.
  
  but also generally on the basis of it being trained on other images, you are creating a much stricter standard than previously.
  
  its a bit of a different standard.
  But, distributing or deploying software that contains a model derived from copyrighted images isn't entirely different than distributing software that statically linked to a library.  In software, if someone's distributed or deployed binary is derived from my code, those distributing or deploying have some obligation to comply with my copyright.
  the line between data and code is a bit fuzzy.  Under current interpretation of copyright, distributing a binary that is in part derived from data used without permission is fine, where a binary derived in part from code used without permission is not. I think the resemblance is there. >
  
  
  But, distributing or deploying software that contains a model derived from copyrighted images isn’t entirely different than distributing software that statically linked to a library.
  
  those are completely different, what an absurd notion >
  
  use my code in your binary you distribute or deploy, you need my permission.
  use my art in your binary you distribute or deploy, you don't need my permission.
  the only difference is just what is considered fair use. >
  
  the art used for the training set isn’t deployed with the model, it’s not at all comparable to using a library or binary that literally must ship with the code in order to function >
  
  a trained model contains data derived from the art it was trained on.
  just as a static library doesn't contain the code but does contain data derived from the code.
  if you don't ship the data derived from the art (the model) your program won't function.
  the only difference is what is considered fair use.  a static library is considered to have too much of the content from the code.  a trained model is considered to have sufficiently little information for the picture to be considered fair use to distribute. >
  
  
  derived from the art it was trained on
  
  also known as: not the art >
  
  a static library isn't the code, either.
  if I write a c++ library, and someone else compiles it into a static library that they statically link to for a binary they distribute, there's no c++ code in the resulting executable.  The executable just contains the binary output of the compiler, not the source code.
  but, someone distributing that executable still has to comply with the license terms of my c++ library. >
  
  what do you mean? it’s exactly derived from your code, translated in a perfectly reproducible way to be packed efficiently and processed efficiently by a machine, it’s not at all comparable to training data >
  
  Humans also inject their own experience into the work. The AI does not have any other experiences. This is a fundamental difference >
  
  Sure it does, it's been trained on billions of images, and millions of iterations. That's more experience than a human could have in a lifetime. >
  
  I think you're missing the point - 
  
  it's been trained on billions of images, and millions of iterations
  
  billions of stolen images. It does not insert anything into the "art" that is not based on the work of another person. >
  
  None of those images are stolen. >
  
  That is what we're debating here, yes.
  Point is: there is a major difference between a human's life experiences flowing into art or an AI using other art to create art. >
  
  At what point were the images stolen? 
  When a computer loaded the publically open web pages that they are on, and downloaded them into it's cache? (the way you would watch any copyrighted picture on the internet)? 
  When it saved them into a computer's permanent folder? (the equivalent of a human hitting right-click save on a picture)?
  When the algorithm constructed a 2 Gb model out of 240 Tb of images, containing less than a pixel's worth of data from each image?
  When I typed in "big boobs anime waifu, very big boobs, massive boobs, by Greg Rutkowski, giant boobs", and the program created a new image based on that model's statistical understanding of what those words mean, (again, with the model containnig less than one pixel's worth of data from each specific image at the time)? >
  
  
  At what point were the images stolen? 
  
  That is the entire topic of this thread - if you want an answer, read the thread or make your own.
  My point doesn't depend on whether the images are "stolen" or not. My point is that AI does not have "experience" - it has "data". All of their work is essentially remixes of already known data, by definition. >
  
  
  AI does not have "experience" - it has "data"
  
  Experience is Data. >
  
  But "Data" is not "Experience". >
  
  
  But "Data" is not "Experience".
  
  There's not any meaningful difference, there's only a difference in the complexity of data processing between humans and AI. >
  
  
  This form of accountability allows AI to be an easy target for “art theft”, but other human artists are not given the same treatment unless they obviously copy others’ artwork. Should humans be accused in the same way?
  
  It's also about the closeness of AI-generated art to the existing art that it has been trained on. 
  Some non-negligible percentage of all generated images is going to be close enough to the original art that it should be considered a derivative work, especially if people intentionally use specific prompts to achieve this. E.g. you can tell an AI to create a scene with specific Disney characters, and you will get it. Just because there might be additional elements from millions of other images that also inspired it partially, does not mean that Disney won't have a valid copyright claim on the result. >
  
  
  you can tell an AI to create a scene with specific Disney characters, and you will get it.
  
  You can also tell that to a human artist, and that will be copyright infringement too. 
  This doesn't make the creation process or the tool itself inherently more or less derivative than the way human art works. >
  
  Sure, but the claim was that "AI-generated art does not commit art theft" because it's just using inspiration. 
  If the level of inspiration is high enough, it will infringe. >
  
  Great explanation! Perhaps we should only address AI-generated art when copyright is likely infringed, i.e., on a case-by-case basis rather than boycotting AI-generated art altogether as some people have expressed. This may be mirror how it is handled in the case of human-created art. Would you agree? >
  
  Sure, I'm not calling for anything to be boycotted. 
  And so do you agree now that it can be "art theft", contrary to your initial view that it's not? >
  
  I’d say that’s somewhat reasonable, yup, as long as “art theft” occurs when copyright infringement occurs. Thanks for the discussion! I low key want to make a new post with this new view, and see how people would react to it.
  !delta >
  
  Well, the thing is that feeding other people's data into your commercial software without asking their permission is a copyright violation. And it should not be legal.
  
  Should humans be accused in the same way?
  
  If someone has a perfect memory, should they be removed from a movie theater for recording a movie? >
  
  
  Well, the thing is that feeding other people's data into your commercial software without asking their permission is a copyright violation. And it should not be legal.
  
  I disagree on this point.  A copyright only gives the right to prevent creation of new copies of a work, it does not allow the copyright owner to restrict how the work is used.  The work is used to train the parameters of the ML network.  It is not copied in whole or in part.
  Only patents allow an IP right owner to regulate how the patent is used.  Copyrights do not. >
  
  Your art is your intellectual property. You can decide to make your picture publically available, but forbid commercial use of your picture.
  Feeding a picture into commercial software as a data set is commercial use of your image. >
  
  What you are describing is a license that permits a person to copy a work for non-commercial purposes but not for commercial purposes.  Similarly a license to copy a work may not grant the right to create derivative works.
  However, the the copyright laws do not allow a copyright owner to control how someone who acquires the work uses it.
  In the case of training an AI the work is used (in combination with millions of other images) to adjust parameters of a network so that the network can map from a latent space vector to an image.
  This is similar to how a person who sees a work adjusts the structure of their brain to be able to potentially produce works that use techniques that were used in the work they saw.
  The fact that someone sees an image does not make their brain a derivative work of the copyrighted work.  Neither does using a work for AI training make the network a derivative work of the training set data >
  
  Violation doesn't happen at the point where they train their neural network, violation happens at the point where they put a non-commercial picture for commercial use without paying me royalty >
  
  A copyright is the right to be the exclusive person who may create copies of a copyrighted work(It does not give you the right to control how copies of a work are used).
  I want to clarify what your opinion on what the law is:
  In your opinion where is the copying occurring when someone either
  1) Collects data for training a neural network,
  2) Trains the neural network, or
  3) Creates images using the neural network >
  
  
  In your opinion where is the copying occurring when someone either
  
  When my picture is downloaded and put into commercial closed-sourced software, no matter AI or not. If I say 'not for commercial use', it's not for commercial use >
  
  The final product (the neural network) does not contain any of the images that are used in the training data set.
  It is quite difficult to explain how a generator neural network works but here is my try.  What the network tries to do is to map from a list of numbers that I will call the input data to an image.  The input data is believed to contain instructions (that are only comprehensible to the neural network model) on what the user wants the image to contain.   the Neural network a group of hundreds of thousands of non-linear functions (each of the functions being a neuron) that map from the input data to the image.  A separate neural network is used to map from the text prompt to the input data.
  In either case, The neural network does not contain any images whatsoever.  It is a group of hundreds of thousands of non-linear functions that are linked together. >
  
  
  The final product (the neural network) does not contain any of the images that are used in the training data set.
  
  I know. But their company still used my data for commercial use, where's my money? >
  
  I am glad that we have narrowed down the scope of the issues.
  Your objection is to fact that the AI's creator Collects sample copyrighted images for training a neural network and in doing so copies them from the internet to their servers and training data caches.
  I suspect that the copying of a work to private unpublished training sets   would be protected by fair use for two main reasons.
  1) This is clearly transformative.  An individual image is a completely different product from a neural network, so this would be transformative. (This is fair use factor 1)
  2) The Neural network is in a completely different market compared to an image.  And does not directly compete with the work.  Some one who is looking to license an image is not would not see a neural network as a reasonable alternative.  e.g.: no not would substitute a painting of a sunflower with a couple billion mathematical expressions (which is what the neural network is.) GRANTED the images generated by the network may compete with the work, but the neural network its self does not.  (This is fair use factor 4)
  Doing a full fair use analysis would be complicated and require reading up on a number of precedents.  Ones I found to be most on point were GOOGLE LLC v. ORACLE AMERICA, INC. (scotus 2021) and Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. (second circuit 2015) >
  
  A good artist will mainly be inspired by their sensory experiences and only to a small extent by existing art.
  Therefore I dispute your claim that AI-generated art replicates how an artist creates art.
  AI generated art is completely derivative. It's not theft, but I wouldn't call it inspiration either. >
  
  Thanks heaps for sharing! May I ask you to clarify what kinds of sensory experiences may be included? I’m not an artist myself so I’d like to find out more about that perspective. >
  
  For example, yesterday I experienced a really beautiful sunset. It illuminated the sky and a mountain rage behind a lake  in really intense orange. In front of this there were bare trees silhouetted in black against the orange sky. Beyond the trees I could make out a town on the other side of the lake.
  If I was an artist (sadly, I'm not), this might have inspired me to create a beautiful painting.  As an artist, I would get my inspiration from something like this rather than looking at existing paintings and recombining them in different ways, which is what AI does. >
  
  Great example, thanks heaps for the clarification! However, these sensory experiences (specifically the sense of sight/vision) may be modeled by randomly incorporating unexpected images. For example, if a user prompts to generate a picture of a Golden Retriever, but a picture of a sunset (like the one you discussed) might be thrown in to incorporate some of the colors from that image into the final image, even if Golden Retrievers don’t traditionally display such colors. Doing so may be a method of modeling “personal touch” to an artwork, which may be argued as a key discriminator between AI- generated art and human-created art.
  At that point, do you think an AI is replicating an artist? Or do you think there are still significant princes of the puzzle missing? For example, the entire visible sunset you experienced may likely not be captured in a single image. >
  
  Good question. I think a sufficiently powerful AI, fed with raw sensor data, could fully replicate the artistic process. But today's AI image generators are not there yet: For a start, they are only fed with material that has already undergone some sort of artistic treatment by a person. Even if I fed an AI with a photograph I took of yesterday's sunset, it would include some artistic choices I already made. And the photograph would not capture everything that was part of my experience: Was I thinking of the damp, fertile soil of the orchard I was standing next to? Was I hopeful for a better 2023 as I was watching the last sunset of 2022, or was I thinking of all the soldiers and civilians that will be killed in Ukraine in 2023? Or was I just cold because the sun was gone? >
  
  Art is designed to convey an emotional message, and that's largely the point of it. Obviously AIs don't have emotions, so they aren't doing the "same thing" as human artists, whose personality is always a large part of their art. 
  Instead, this is much more like someone making a mixtape that just copies bits of copyrighted music. Yes, you might say that's Fair Use, but that's an affirmative defense that has to be decided in court, not just some blanket permission to use stuff. It's a case-by-case basis, always.
  And the biggest part of the test for Fair Use is whether the use has a negative commercial impact on the art being copied. There's a pretty decent argument that AI art has a massive negative impact on commercial production of art. >
  
  Good point, what you discussed is the element of sentience - emotional processing in decision making. It may be true that there is no explicit emotion processing systems in current AI algorithms.
  However, it may likely be possible to model such parts of the brain into an algorithm to emulate emotion. At that point, would the AI be considered to have emotions, and thus create art using emotions? If not, how do you find out for humans? The only proof we have of emotions’ existence in humans are the results of those emotions (e.g., yelling if you’re angry). >
  
  Why are you wading into “modeling emotional parts of the brain” when your CMV is about the straightforward issue of theft, where AI not having feelings is simply 100% irrelevant? >
  
  Because some people are defining AI art as theft due to a potential lack of emotional communication, which can be said to be a key aspect of the purpose of art. It is that discrimination that may disallow it. However, if AI can perform the same processing as humans, what difference would it have from humans? >
  
  But this is a distinction they’re entirely pulling out of their ass. There’s no such “emotional communication” factor in intellectual property as applies to art. It has nothing to do with anything that applies to “theft”. Maybe to the subjective value of the artwork, but not to whether it’s “theft” or not. >
  
  The real issue is that many, if not most, of these artists whose work was used to train the AI did not consent to the use of their work for this purpose. Before the advent of AI having work in the public domain meant that your work could be freely circulated but it ultimately could be traced back to the artist. But creating art that uses the style of the artist without that artist's explicit consent is very problematic. They might spend a considerable portion of their lives refining their work only to have it drowned out by a legion of AI facsimiles, and that is precisely the kind of thing that pertinent laws like copyright are designed to prevent. >
  
  Inspiration isn't a thing that AI can do. That is humans. They just use algorithms to go through so many different things with the artstyle until you find the one thing that looks decent. >
  
  Thanks for the reply! May I ask what in your opinion is the difference between what these AI art generation algorithms do and how human inspiration works? As I see it inspiration is just another form of processing performed by the human brain - in this case it is taking elements of other existing works to potentially create something new. Doesn’t the AI do exactly this? >
  
  If the AI is sentient, then yes, the ai does exactly that and i have no problem with it. However, todays ai art (which is a guy presses a button until he gets a pretty image using other peoples art) is not inspiration. There is no emotion in the art thats generated, and thats my problem with people who support ai art. It seems like so many people think that the only purpose of art is to look nice, when its actually to communicate ideas and emotions.
  Ai art algorithms arent inspired by other peoples art, because when youre inspired by something, you use the thing + your own experience to make something new. Ai art algorithms are made entirely by feeding other peoples art into it. For it to be inspiration, the bot would have to add its own feelings, but then that would be sentience and then its fine. There is no inspiration, its a bot that takes others' art and spits out a pretty image, no feelings, no emotions. Thats the main problem with ai art. Just to reiterate, all these problems go away when the bot has sentience, the problem is that the art is soulless without a concience behind it >
  
  Great points, thanks heaps! True, the AI art generators of today are likely problematic for those reasons. However I’d like to outline another possibility.
  Perhaps your own experience may be modeled in some way that does not require true sentience. What if we were to model personal experience as random artefacts or post-processing in the generated images (e.g., turning some pixels in the generated image into random colours)? That adds an element that is likely not derivative of the images used in the training dataset, and thus the resulting generated images are no longer 100% derivative.
  This would be much simpler to implement than true sentience, and so at that point would AI generated art also no longer be theft?
  As for the point of communicating ideas and emotions, AI-generated art may likely not be void of that purpose. After all, people can still refine AI-generated art with their own personal touches before publishing it. >
  
  It's not the AI violating any non-commercial use restrictions that exist on web art... AI's aren't people. 
  It's the people using it to train the AI that are violating those licenses. 
  Imagine, if you will, someone deciding to start up a for-profit art college. 
  Instead of licensing art properly for use in their classes, or using public-domain art for which the copyright is expired, they just steal it off the web and use it for the commercial purpose of running their art college. 
  Now: if they are careful to pick only art that is licensed for any use, including commercial use, then obviously they are doing nothing wrong. 
  If they just scrape everything and use it to teach their students... no bueno. 
  In this case, training the AI is the art college, obviously. >
  
  
  Instead of licensing art properly for use in their classes, or using public-domain art for which the copyright is expired, they just steal it off the web and use it for the commercial purpose of running their art college.
  
  You can't "steal" an image that is available for viewing, just by viewing it.
  Licensing can restrict commercial reproduction, but it can't gatekeep who is allowed to look at the picture, or keep a copy on their computer (which is what online viewing does anyways) as long as they are then not distributing unlicensed duplicates of it.
  If your image is on Deviantart, you can't just say that students of for profit colleges are not allowed to open your link to it if then they will indirectly "profit" just from having looked at it. Well, you can say it, but that doesn't mean them looking at it is copyiright infringement.
  If you upload your song to youtube for everyone to listen to it, you can't just say they accountants are not allowed to listen to it in a "commercial" way (for example opening youtube it at their workstation to get into a good vibe and be more productive at accounting). >
  
  Until the invention of moveable type, there wasn't much in the way of copyright law.
  But you don't technically need a printing press to copy someone's book, you could do it by hand. The ability to do it quickly, and perfectly and at great scale and ridiculously lower cost per unit created a sea change that required a special protection for creators to be in control of profiting from their hard work.
  Just like one could copy a book before the printing press, one can study and "copy" a style (although copying a style of a working artist in order to directly compete with them is already considered a dick move).
  AI may be somewhat like an artist learning by studying another artist's work, but the scale, speed, fidelity and trivially low cost and effort are a game changer, just the way the printing press was a gamechanger in the idea of intellectual property.
  Now that style can be copied in an automatic, high fidelity and traceable way, and artists can be undercut by people using their own work and basically no effort with the push of a button, it's reasonable to begin considering the development of style as IP in need of protection. >
  
  
  But you don't technically need a printing press to copy someone's book, you could do it by hand. The ability to do it quickly, and perfectly and at great scale and ridiculously lower cost per unit created a sea change that required a special protection for creators to be in control of profiting from their hard work.
  
  Yeah, but by now, copying a book by hand is also illegal anyways.
  The new laws didn't just say "codex-copying is illegal when a machine doing it because they are too good at it", but created an entirely new field of government control for who gets to write and publish what.
  Following that analogy, if an AI imitating a style should become illegal now, should we also criminalize human artists being inspired by each other's style at the same time?
  Even if we were all okay with that, and decided that from now on someone creating a new "disney cartoon style" drawing by hand, without the company's permission should be illegal (You know, to protect artists...), that wouldn't solve the problem.
  The vast majority of the financial threat that artists claim to be under, is that by scanning billions of pictures, many of which were copyrighted, AI models have learned the ability to create generic pencil sketches, or anime character designs, or ink drawings, or comic book panel style art, that looks good enough, and that if it had fewer pictures to train, it wouldn't be this good.
  Imitating the specific quirks of Greg Rutkowski's linework for massive profit, is a relatively trivial issue compared to me being able to create a picture like this in seconds.
  Who did I steal that style from? I didn't use any names in the prompt, and it doesn't seem to be directly imitating anyone famous, it is a fairly general digitally edited imitation of ink drawing.
  If someone can show me a picture that is 99% identical to it I guess they can call dibs on monetizing it, although that's unlikely, it's really not how AI generation works.
  So, if a human made the exact same picture would it be okay, but it is theft from someone, just because an AI did it, even if we can't even point at who is it theft from? >
  
  
  Yeah, but by now, copying a book by hand is also illegal anyways.
  
  The new laws didn't just say "codex-copying is illegal when a machine doing it because they are too good at it", but created an entirely new field of government control for who gets to write and publish what.
  Yes, the point here is that new technology, because of the massive shift in possibility it creates, REQUIRES a whole new way of looking at creator rights.
  ​
  
  Following that analogy, if an AI imitating a style should become illegal now, should we also criminalize human artists being inspired by each other's style at the same time?
  
  I'm not here to argue on exactly what the law should be. I expect it will be difficult and complex to draw lines. I'm more interested in at this point establishing that a line has been crossed that meaningfully differentiates AI learning from artists from the way artists have learned from each others' work in the past.
  But briefly, I think if we were to have laws, a ban on automated, directly and explicitly copying style could be part of the discussion. There's no need for new laws to be exactly analogous to copyright. Criminalizing inspiration would be technically impossible and detrimental to normal art processes. There's no good reason to insist on symmetry there. 
  In the rest of your post, you concentrate on non style specific generation. I don't think it matters whether that's a bigger economic threat in the long run. People right now are selling apps that specifically have drop down menus for selecting individual artists' styles to emulate. Untangling the ownership of blended styles is a very complex issue. But it's not so fuzzy to say that the software as it currently stands allows users to specifically take a single artist's style. We can say there are moral problems with that without it being the bulk of generated content or the bulk of financial issue. >
  
  
  I'm more interested in at this point establishing that a line has been crossed that meaningfully differentiates AI learning from artists from the way artists have learned from each others' work in the past.
  
  Yeah, but you haven't really engaged with OPs points regarding theft and originality, just pointed out that the AI works faster. 
  Sure, we can just ban AI training for being AI. We might as well just ban AI art altogether. 
  But there isn't really any underlying consistency in that regarding originality and copying and theft, it's just about protecting the economic status quo. 
  Even if OPs points would be extremely true in the most literal sense, if AI art would be made by a sapient digital being with a perfect simulation of an artistic brain's creative process, then everything that you said would still also be true about the AI working faster than humans. 
  An assymetrical legal response has to mean looking at a sequence of newly made pictures that seem to be equally original and equally derivative to our sight, and saying that some of them are acts of theft, and others are their own copyright-worthy intellectual properties of the artists that made them, purely because of how quickly they were made. >
  
  Notice I never make an argument for banning AI art. You seem to be arguing with a strawman. It's really tiresome. >
  
  Actually it's a steelman.
  I conceded the point that you made, that it is possible to update the law  asymmetrically to ban specifically the AI referencing of personal art styles, by conceding the even broader point that we might as well ban a lot more than that.
  Sure, there are no impossibilities in law. We can ban al AI art, or all AI training on copyrighted images, or the usage of artist names as prompts, or the usage of just some highly unique artists' names as prompts, or whatever, we can get as specific with it as we feel like.
  The issue is that you are not engaging with the original claim of the thread.
  Saying that we can control certain AI usage, doesn't actually explain that the thing is more theft-life and less original than if a human would be doing it. >
  
  Any point you're making about banning AI art has nothing to do with what I wrote. I wrote nothing about banning AI art.
  How can it be steelmanning my point when I wasn't talking about it at all?
  I'm beginning to think you don't know words. >
  
  AI-generated art is a thing, and things cannot steal. People, however, can steal, and whenever people use someone else's art to teach their algorithm how to create new art, they are stealing that art. 
  So, your view has a fallacy in how it's written, it's a straw man argument. >
  
  
  whenever people use someone else's art to teach their algorithm how to create new art, they are stealing that art.
  
  How so?
  The original image is still there, so of course it is not stolen in a literal sense.
  But it doesn't get redistributed within the model, so it's not theft in the sense of copyright infringement either.
  In what other sense is it theft to create an AI model using someone's art, if that art doesn't get placed into it? >
  
  Your assumption is that the art does not get placed into it. But it does. That's the whole basis of my argument. You are putting a copy of their work into your AI program. 
  IF YOU DID NOT PUT THEIR WORK INTO THE PROGRAM, YOU WOULD NOT HAVE GOTTEN THE SAME RESULT. 
  YOU ARE CHOOSING TO PUT A COPY OF THEIR ART INTO YOUR PROGRAM. 
  That is copyright theft. >
  
  
  Your assumption is that the art does not get placed into it. But it does. That's the whole basis of my argument.
  
  And that's why your argument fails.
  You don't have to understand everything about AI, but you can test it for yourself:
  You can download Stable Diffusion right now, with it's 2Gb model containing no image files, and start to generate images from an offline computer, even though the database of images that it was trained on, was 240 Tb, a hundred thousand times bigger. (x100,000)
  That's not even compression, that's each picture that it was trained on factoring in as less than one pixel's worth of data in the model.
  The images are simply not in there.
  ​
  
  IF YOU DID NOT PUT THEIR WORK INTO THE PROGRAM, YOU WOULD NOT HAVE GOTTEN THE SAME RESULT.
  
  A lot of art relies on predecessors. If George Lucas never watched Kurosawa, we wouldn't have Star Wars as it exists today. But this doesn't have to mean that George Lucas's brain had a perfect digital copy of Kurosawa's works inside of it, or that copy got got imbued into the outut of Star Wars. >
  
  Okay you want to talk about actual use of samples? Then look at the music industry. You're absolutely allowed to use samples of music in your music, you can use not just samples of someone else's music but just samples of sounds that people have recorded if you want to have a car horn in your piece of music then you don't have to record the car horn yourself, right? 
  And let's say you obtain an audio sample of a car horn and you manipulate it. You distorted it and you reverse it and you squeeze it and you blah blah blah it and so on to the point that it's irrecognizable to the original sample. (This is an analogy to your 'it's just one pixel' argument)
  THAT DOESNT MATTER. If you use the audio sample you still have to pay for it if the person who recorded the audio included it in a paid sample pack. That is how music production works! Someone else created the asset, you have to pay to use it. If it's copyrighted, then you don't have the right to use it in any way!!!
  But you think that these rules don't apply to you just because your technology works a little bit differently. 
  The thing is, I know you guys don't actually care about rational arguments about any of this. It is so blatantly clear from talking to any of you AI junkies that you believe that you have the right to use things that other people have created without their permission simply because you believe that you are superior to them. People like you disgust me more than bigots. >
  
  
  the point that it's irrecognizable to the original sample. (This is an analogy to your 'it's just one pixel' argument)
  
  Then it's a perfect analogy actually, because I specifically didn't say "just one pixel", I said "less than one pixel". That is to say, zero pixels.
  The AI model doesn't have sampled pixels in it.
  Even if you could make the absurd claim that opening up 262,144 images in photoshop to sample the color of one pixel from each, and put together a brand new figure out of 512x512 pixels that were each colored based on another artwork, is "art theft",  we are talking about is even more indirect than that.
  Hence OP's point.
  It's funny that you talk about "your technology works a little bit differently", because there is no coherent way to maintain the excesses of "using any indirect trait of existing art is theft", without eventually going down the route of "looking at pictures of 100 spaceships with your eyeballs and then drawing a 101th one is theft even if you didn't lift a single pixel from them, as long as your brain lifted any immeasurably abstract quality.
  You can say that brains are a special case because their copying process work mysteriously, but by that point you have to either defend images that are clearly and orders of magnitudes more derivative, than the average AI art, or utterly eliminate the concept of Fair Use and indeed, even the concept of mere inspiration or reference.