Post #3368093

2026-06-21 21:52 UTC

Let’s not just exchange blunt claims, but reason a little. Copyright critics have long made the somewhat compelling argument that copying isn’t stealing because the original digital item does not become scarcer in the process. So how can AI taking artists’ work be considered theft if it, too, just uses copies of the original work and maybe transforms them into a new work (which would, under U.S. law, fall under the “fair use”)? We might argue that, well, fair use does not apply because most AI companies try to monetise the models derived from other people’s work. Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?

Replies (4)

@TribblesBestFriend@startrek.website 2026-06-21 22:01

Because AI companies are making a huge profit (and wrecking the environment) on stolen art. There’s a huge difference between someone that torrent 1T of books over his/her life and a company that torrent every books in history to make a machine that will try to destroy art as we know it for the profit of the 1% few.

Open ##3368145
@Little_mouse@lemmy.ca 2026-06-21 22:09

As bad as copyright laws are, they are made even worse when they are applied to everyday people via life-altering fines, and often ignored completely when applied to giant corporations.

Open ##3368186
@monovergent@lemmy.ml 2026-06-21 22:15

Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial? For sure. I couldn’t tell you where inspired, but new, work ends and theft begins, or how model training would be funded without commercial incentive. But I would be more comfortable knowing that companies have not ripped profit straight from every artist the model had been trained on. And I like this kind of discussion. What’s bothered me before have been the jabs at the mere presence of AI without deeper discussion as to what qualifies as theft. I haven’t found myself buying art even before such AI models. I wouldn’t buy or sell images that I know are AI generated. And I pay the electric bill as if I were doing any other novelty activity like gaming on my PC. I’m curious, what would you think of local models that can be acquired for free?

Open ##3368197
@TootSweet@lemmy.world 2026-06-22 00:54

I’m probably the most anti-AI person I know, but I agree discourse around how “AI is theft” is a bit shallow. However. Copyright is often erroneously conflated with plagiarism. While the two do sometimes coincide, they’re very different concerns. I, myself, believe copyright is so broken we’d be better off throwing it away. (The only thing I believe I’d miss about copyright if I woke up tomorrow and it didn’t exist would be copyleft.) But I do deeply believe in a right to attribution. I don’t think AI is theft. I think it’s plagiarism. And I do believe that listing the names of all those whose works were involved in training data for a model would still be a great disservice to the artists. Meanwhile, asking an LLM or image generating model which training data was involved in generating the particular output it produced is similarly futile to asking which rep at the gym allowed a stage strongman to lift a car. And if someone objected that giving what I would consider “sufficient credit” to artists/authors/whoever would make AI models completely infeasible, then my response would be “that’s exactly my point.” Finally, one more point I want to make is that if AI didn’t make billionaires a huge amount of money, the legal system would have put a stop to the mass scraping of training data and made a very visible example of whoever undertook to do so first long ago. (coughAaron Swartzcough) As terrible as it is having to deal with the shitty IP laws we have, the greater injustice is that the laws only apply when billionaires want them to.

Open ##3368761