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I'm not an artist. If I sketch something, and have an ai upscale it for me, is it still slop, vs just asking it to do everything? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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I am genuinely trying to get better at art. I'm not there yet (likely never will be), the lying machine is still better than me.

The context:

This is my sketch.

And this is what the ai output.

I like to think I poured my heart and soul into it. I know there are people who will tell me that I'm terrible for using ai at all. I'm also sorry if this is the wrong community to ask this question (ask reddit would delete my post instantly if I tried to post there).

Again, is this slop? I am not an artist. I drive a forklift real good, that's my skillset. So if I were to use the ai upscaled version for my book, well, I'm asking for opinions.

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[–] -2 points 10 months ago (10 children)

Don't say, "stolen". It's the wrong word. "Copied" is closer but really, "trained an AI model with images freely available on the Internet" is more accurate but doesn't sound sinister.

When you steal something, the original owner doesn't have it anymore. AIs aren't stealing anything. They're sort of copying things but again, not really. At the heart of every AI LLM or image model is a random number generator. They aren't really capable of copying things exactly unless the source material somehow gets a ridiculously high "score" when training. Such as a really popular book that gets quoted in a million places on the Internet and in other literature (and news articles, magazines, etc... anything that was used to train the AI).

Someone figured out that there's so much Harry Potter quotes and copies in OpenAI's training set that you could trick it into outputting something like 70% of the first book, one very long and specific prompt at a time (thousand of times). That's because of how the scoring works, not because of any sort of malicious intent to violate copyright on the part of OpenAI.

Nobody's stuff is being stolen.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    It's stealing

    Unless you think people painting replicas to pass off as their own aren't stealing.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (4 children)

    You bring up a great point! When someone does that: Painting a replica and passing it off as their own, what law have they violated? They have committed fraud. That's a counterfeit.

    Is making a counterfeit stealing? No! It's counterfeitting. That is it's own category of law.

    It's also a violation of the owner's copyright but let's talk about that too: If I pay an artist to copy someone's work, who is the copyright violator? Me, or the artist that painted it? Neither! It's a trick question, because copyright law only comes into force when something is distributed. As long as those works never get distributed/viewed to/by the public, it's neither here nor there.

    The way AI works is the same as if you took a book you purchased, threw it in a blender, then started pasting chunks of words out of it in a ransom note.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (3 children)

    You need to stop pretending like there's an excusable way to take something someone else made and pass it off as yours.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (2 children)

    But if someone directs the generation of an image, and represents it as an image generated by a tool trained on basically all public images ever, they aren't really passing off the result as theirs, are they?

    It's hard to understand the resulting image as being made by particular people and stolen from them. None of those people have ever seen it or know it exists, for example; are they genuine co-author?

    If you think of it as made by all artists, somehow, can one properly steal something that's of an essentially publicly-owned or common-heritage nature?

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    If it couldn't be made without using their unwilling contributions then that is theft sorry

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    So the people training the models are stealing art by using it for training over the objections of the artists, right?

    The products of the models couldn't be made without everything that went into the models. But why is (making? using?) those products "theft", and also thereby bad, versus something like stealing spray paint and doing graffiti on the side of the hardware store? Or shoplifting a bunch of figure drawing reference books and cutting them up into a collage?

    The fascist project to transfigure the entire history of art into capital they can rent out is obviously wrong. But surely when you steal a thousand works of art and sum them together to make something else, you're making the very definition of a transformative work, right? What about all those human artists where appropriating stuff was an important part of the art?

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Piracy is considered stealing, duplicating without permission is stealing?

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Woah! Piracy is not considered stealing. The MPAA and RIAA made that argument over and over and over again in the 90s and early 2000s and they lost. Thank the gods!

    You would download a car!

    If piracy was stealing, we'd all be waiting for our chance to watch TV shows in a queue of thousands.

    Copyright violations are not theft. They never were and they never will be. Because no one is deprived of anything when something is copied. In theory, there could've been a lost sale as a result but study after study has shown that piracy actually improves sales of copyrighted works.

    When an AI is trained on images that YOU—the artist—posted to the public Internet for the world to see it will either increment or decrement a floating point value by like 0.01. That's it! That's all it does.

    How can that be considered "stealing"‽ It's absurd.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Well to say no one is deprived of anything is not necessarily correct, even though the specific "things" are not lost, out can have revenue impact, especially if it's just completely accepted.

    For example if a company wanted some distinct visual element, they might have commissioned it to be done. Now they just prompt their way to the soulless crap.

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