Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Is AI Art Theft?”.
What we will also not tolerate is AI art generators blatantly ripping off the source material on which they were trained. That’S right. I called this. There is already a two major copyright lawsuits against AI art generators.
Getty Images claims that stability, AI scraped, the Getty Images site using it as a database to train its own AI art generator um. These claims are corroborated by an independent study that found that stable diffusion was trained on hundreds of thousands of images sourced from stock image sites, notably stable diffusion has a funny habit of recreating the Getty Images watermark in the images that it produces, and this is uh Figure two down below this actually is hilarious. That’S really funny um whoops! This is a super weird image.
Is this supposed to be like a baseball catcher? It’S like baseball mixed with football. It really does. I do have to wonder what the prompt was uh.
Also, I kind of have to wonder what kind of roids this guy’s going got going on here, though, if you take steroids uh, that is your own life choice, don’t be upset, not insulting the audience. I like it yeah. I actually just don’t care like.
If that’s, what you want to do to your testicles, then, like mine, are bigger. Okay, I break my rules, sometimes might be short, but he’s got them big ones. Um. A study from the University of Maryland found that stable diffusion can sometimes end up closely replicating images from its training database.
These aren’t Pixel Perfect copies, but the derivation is pretty blatant. That is figure one over here where um yup. I don’t think it takes a genius to uh to see the the there’s a relationship here. Yeah I mean you can’t even you can’t even move the Wolves around a little bit. Where’S the moon, give me three wolves and a moon. You know give me something to work with here: give make it defensible um. The second major lawsuit is a class action against stability, AI, a deviantART and mid-journey, claiming that their art generators are simply remixing. The copyrighted works of millions of artists. The lawsuit’s website calls such AI generators, 21st century collage tools and it’s an interesting thing because, like the like the bloodborne one, for instance, if the lower image – which I believe is the AI generated image, I think I actually don’t know.
I actually don’t know um, but I I kind of doesn’t matter because they’re similar enough to each other that it’s irrelevant and that’s sort of the point. So yeah say the AI generated image is used for uh. Let’S say a mobile game right. If, if it was called um white blood cell birth – and it was on the Apple Store, they would probably be gone after, because they’re bloodborne would say that’s too close to our logo, because you just clearly ripped off our logo right yeah. So it’s the same thing and like I uh I I’ve been caught in this argument a little bit because I went anti-ai art and I went pro AI large language model and people didn’t like that.
I was kind of on each side of the fence, but this is kind of the example and I don’t know 100 really where it ends up being okay, because it’s still 100 true that the large language model is trained off of other people’s stuff. It’S not not true that that is a thing, but it’s a lot less apparent. It’S way less apparent, you don’t have it do this. You can get chat GPT to spit out things that other people have written. It’S happened, but it’s not as egregious doesn’t seem as common stuff like that. It seems like it’s done better, but it also seems like it was easier to do it better, because it’s a large language model and the way that works is easier. But when it comes to Art we’re seeing a lot of this, I had the example that I gave in the previous way and showing these three examples are just as blatant. I mean here’s. The thing, though, are people they’re, okay, I’m I’m gon na. Ask I’m gon na ask a spicy question: does it matter what the law is if the overall social benefit outweighs the drawback to to those few who are affected by it and to be clear, I’m not taking the position that you know the ends justify the means Here I’m just asking: if we all collectively kind of decide, this is okay, because it has to be okay, because this is really convenient for our lives.
That we can, you know, create a children’s book from scratch in a weekend without needing an illustrator, because we never learned to draw um. Is this ultimately going to fizzle out and are these lawsuits going to just eventually go away? I don’t think that’s the average stance, though, so I don’t think it would well, it’s not the average stance now, but most people have not used an AI image generator. Yet once people get used to the convenience of an AI image generator, will they be willing to? Let it go yeah. My pessimism would say: no .