The general consensus here is that if you generate AI art at all, regardless of whether you use it commercially or not, you are engaging in art theft and are in fact an asshole.
So why doesn’t that logic get applied to straight up turning someone’s digital art and/or photos into memes and having millions of people repost it with zero attribution? I’m not talking about things like wojaks or rage comic characters where the creator intended for it to be a meme and knew for a fact that other people will copy it, nor am I talking about screenshots of popular media franchises, but the random art and photos people post that just happens to resonate with the internet in a way the creator never foresaw, becoming memes without the creator even initially knowing. Think the original advice animal meme templates like Scumbag Steve or Bad Luck Brian where it’s literally just a random photo of someone, probably taken off their personal social media. Or the two serious and one goofy dragon drawing and others that were very clearly posts on art sharing sites that got reposted with new context. I’ve even seen some meme templates go out of their way to crop out names and signatures that the original creator put there so they are credited when their work is reposted. And no one slamming AI art seemingly has a problem with any of it. In fact, if you as the creator of an image tried to get the internet to stop using your personal work as a meme with no attribution, you’d be ignored at best and targeted for doxxing and harassment at worst for spoiling their fun, probably by some of the same people condemning the use of AI.
If you go on art sharing sites, the consensus among the artists themselves is that you’re not supposed to repost their work at all unless given a CC license or otherwise explicit permission. Whether it’s for commercial use or just as a random internet post doesn’t seem to change their stance in the slightest. This implicitly includes not just AI but memes as well, as in both cases you are taking someone else’s work and redistributing it without permission or attribution. So why is this okay if AI art is not? It’s even more blatant than AI because it’s not just stealing tons of people’s work, blending them all in a neural network, and spitting out a “new” work that still has fragments of the stolen work, it straight up IS just stealing a specific person’s specific work, full stop. I feel like the reason is circular, it’s okay because it’s been happening since forever and that’s what makes it okay. And AI art is not okay because it’s new and doesn’t already have a history of everyone doing it.
The majority of people condemning AI art are not themselves artists but cite things like “respect for artists” as a reason for condemning it. But most artists aren’t just against AI but against their art being reposted by anyone for any purpose, profit or otherwise. Even if they were never going to make money from that piece, they are still against reposts on principle while most of the non-artists seem to only talk about AI separating artists from revenue. So if we’re actually to respect artists, wouldn’t we adopt that stance for everything and not just commercial use or AI?
And if this is okay, what about AI art makes it different enough to not be okay?
Finally, it’s not like people never make money off memes so a binary “AI is for profit while memes aren’t” doesn’t work.
Not trying to defend AI art, but trying to go further with the discussion that has appeared around it and genuinely trying to tease out some consistency and fundamental values in subjects everyone ostensibly feel extremely strongly about and are not willing to budge.
I don’t give a shit either way, fuck copyrights.
IP is helping strangle this world.
Generally speaking, memes aren’t being used to make money…whereas AI is almost exclusively being used to profit off of someone else’s content.
There’s a funny thing about this: there is no profit in AI. Most AI companies write big losses.
Of course they try making profit, with AIaaS, but that just doesn’t work when I can go on huggingface or modelscope and download whatever I want for free and run it on my own computer.
“You”, the user of the AI model isn’t engaging in copyright infingement directly.
However, whoever made the model that you used did. Most using copyright protected works.
Some people are paying for these models. This is what’s the problem: financially benefitting off others’ work without permission (or royalties).
It’s like the age-old piracy dilemma: the person using direct downloads or streaming can’t be fined in most jurisdictions - it’s the duplication and sharing that’s forbidden.
This exact analogue exists with AI models: training a model and giving it to others to use is distributing access to copyrighted material. Using an AI model is not.
To adress the mems side of the question: Memes aren’t a large portion of the original work. Often times they’re screenshots of video material, so the “portion taken from the original” is minute. Some meme formats, however, are digital art pieces in and of themselves. (Note the word format - the “background” of the meme, for example the “If I did one pushup” comic)
But even with that consideration, a meme doesn’t bring harm to the original - it’s basically free advertising. And as the memes are usually low quality abd not monetized, it can be passed off as fair use or free speech in some jurisdictions, while others merely turn a blind eye. And why shouldn’t they?
As I said, memes have a multitude of points going against them being copyright infringement. They’re low-effort, short-form media, usually with a short “lifetime” (most memes don’t get reposted for years). Most often they’re a screengrab of a video (so a ‘negligible portion of the original’) and almost never bring harm to the original, but only serve as free advertising. Again, usually. This means most meme formats’ involuntary creators have no reason to go after memes. You could probably get a court to strike a meme, but probably on defamation grounds - and even then, the meme will most likely die (not the format!) beforehand, so such suits are usually dismissed as moot.
Compare this to an AI model (not an AI “artpiece”): It’s usually trained on the entire work, and they’re proven to be able to recreate the work in large part - you just need to be lucky enough with the seeds and prompts. This means the original is “in there somewhere”, and parts of it can be yanked out. Remeber, even non-identical copying (so takig too much inspiration or in academic speak, “plagiarism”) is copyright infringement.
And to top it all off, all the big AI models have a paid tier, meaning they profit off the work.
If you were to compare memes to individual AI “artworks”, then it is the same thing as memes. Except if the generation is a near-verbatim reproduction, but even then, the guilt lies with the one who knowingly commited infringement by choosing what to put into the model’s training data, and not on some unlucky soul who happened to step on a landmine and generated the work.
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while AI systems suck up every piece of art they can access in all of existence and make copies of it.
While also destroying the planet and contributing to the class war
I don’t think AI art is theft. Copyright should be abolished.
AI companies are consuming all the electricity, and will destroy the economy when their bubble bursts, in their quest to eliminate millions of jobs and control the lives of everyone, to profit the global tech elite.
Memes are not-for-profit cultural detritus. They are not the same.
so your actual problem is with capitalism as opposed to the tech itself
“Not trying to defend AI art” The fuck you’re not. Just be honest about it.
My actual answer to this wall of strawmen and thready arguments is that LLMs and generative AI were trained on incomprehensibly large pools of human produced content, much of which is copyrighted, without paying anything for it; Conversely, when people make memes they are manually altering or adding to the original content and it’s an exception when there’s misappropriation becasue it’s socially enforced. AI simply merges data, there is nothing new conceptually or materially being added, just recombination. I’m not saying all memes are good, and I’m also not saying meme people who make that their life aren’t assholes sometimes either.
All of this exercise you’ve taken upon yourself is a poorly executed attempt to distract from the scale of theft AI NEEDS in order to exist, and that’s something Sam Altman, Zuckerberg, and other industry heads have openly acknowledged. If not for copyright violations it simply could not be feasible as a product, and even when there are instances of people stealing memes without attribution, that’s not the standard or a necessity for the practice. This is on top of the other peripheral issues like IMMENSE resource consumption, and destruction of human livelihoods. Even if we grant your false equivalencies with single user offenses regarding meme theft, and I personally do not, these things are not comparable, and the later certainly doesn’t justify or excuse the former.
If you can’t see the difference between people doing something and hostile metahuman entities doing it, I don’t know what to tell you.
There is no theft period. There is perhaps copyright infringement for commercial entities. This is a civil legal matter and has almost no bearing on anything you are discussing.
You must also consider all art is iterative. This means all art is based off art that came before it. You cannot create art in a vacuum and every artist borrows heavily from our culture
We are not here to judge what is or isn’t art either. This is a treacherous road where people can deny art like a collage because it doesn’t fit their definition of art. Everyone is actually an artist by definition unless they have literally never spoken, written, sang, or drawn.
There is definitely a worthy discussion around AI art. Right now we don’t really have AI so it is not really creating anything. It is more of fill in the blank taking the best guesses based on prior work.
I believe, as other posters have stated, that Intellectual Property is actually anti-art, anti-science, and anti-technology. The problems we face with AI pale in comparison to a broken system beset by capitalists hell bent on controlling our culture and extracting as much money as they can through doing so.
And AI art is not okay because it’s new and doesn’t already have a history of everyone doing it.
This has to be it. The fear of the new.
Combined with the fear that humans aren’t special. That something, that was previously thought to be uniquely human, can be replicated in machines, or is found in animals too.
Same was about photography, computer graphics etc. I bet even clay tablets and sculptures were bashed at some point because they werent real art, unlike cave wall paintings.
Memes only have because they reference an original work. AI strips the connection between the original work and the final product deliberately.
I don’t believe information can be stolen, just copied. Copying it doesn’t remove it from the original person, so it’s not theft and not bad.
The copyright oppressors are the real thieves. disney imprisoned the peoples’ fairytales inside their paywalls.
If you’re a small family store that makes an amazing recipe and people love it, and you keep that recipe a secret. You’re honestly okay with a competitor stealing it? Not a competitor making a bad ripoff, but finding a way to get the recipe and using that to clone the meal for a profit.
Obviously with larger companies it’s easier to say fuck them but investing time in something and then having it taken is a hit even if its “information”, isn’t it?
That “small family store” uses intellectual property to gate and paywall that awesome recipe from the people. They’re bourgeois leeches.
You have a niece that’s a poor student but talented at art.
You clone her painting, sell for a profit, keep the money.
Same issue different specifics.
You’re still aggressively okay with this and would still use sophisticated language to slander the niece’s actions?
You are assuming we want a for profit system to exist. I am against copyright because i don’t believe for profit systems should exist cause i’m a marxist. Because it’s a tool of capital in an egalitarian society, communist society. copyright should not exist because it has no reason to cause it’s sole purpsoe would be to stifle creativity and cut off access of it for the people. The main purpose of copyright has always been to stiffle creativity and sharing something among people. As such it’s a capitalist system meant to protect profits.
For profit system!?
I’m pretty sure every time I’ve seen humans get together there’s someone trying to get more of something than the other people. Even in communes or communities without money like jails (and in the romanticised tribal past). Some parts of economic theory help predict these outcomes even in places that aim for these ideals.
Where are you seeing evidence of a system that’s close to what you’re describing that’s functional, stable over time, and more than a few isolated individuals?
You are a replying to a ask lemmy ml (marxist leninist) post and acting surpised peopel are marxists? Are you aware this is where you are cause this is confusing me. I can’t have evidence of a systme that doesn’t currently exist, because we haven’t reached a stage in society where it can exist as we need to progress through socialism to get peopel to the point hwere they are socialized ina way that system like that could exist. What does people trying ot get more of something that others have any relevance. You just deal with that as a society by punishing that person. Further more evne if the advanced economic anthropological and sociological theory that shows that such a society could function in theory was wrong It is not relevant. This is about what we believe not what is currently in practice. If i was an anarchist i can think authority is harmful to society even if significant anarchist experiments dno’t really exist. as It’s my moral beliefs.
Jails have money. Inmates get paid for working. Far under minimum wage, its horrible.
I think you need to prefix this with “some”. I’m not sure your point even holds for “most”
How am I supposed to “sell” a copy of someone’s painting? No one can “buy” that. Right click download is free. A copy of an unlimitedly copyable object has no worth.
Your example is set in liberal fantasy land.
Duplicates of famous art isn’t a thing? Street vendors selling print isn’t a thing?
You choose to right click download and then… assume the only use anyone wants is to store their art in ones and zeros?
In my opinion this is too large of an attempt at reasoning memes as equal to an artist made piece of art but it is full of fallacies. The same images from memes being used can be traced and attributed to its original author with ease, AI cannot. So I’d argue that AI stealing is even more blatant as it attempts to hide its origin. AI makes people think they actually did something and partook in creating the piece, which is like taking an image off the internet and saying you made it. You can edit it, but it is not the same as saying you are the creator. AI blurs the line of ownership by including an algorithm in between, but it is being used to try and heavily commercialise its output in a way that memes never had. You say in italics a fallacy on the style of “memes occasionally can be profitable, therefore it is equivalent to selling AI art”, but I think you know how different the reality of both forms is. It is exactly the intent behind the majority of AI image generation to industrialise art, while it is not the case of memes, and you see the same pushback if a company tries to use someone’s photo commercially/politically without their consent. In a meme, the image is not the main product, but the context in which it is being used, so the image can be actually replaced but not the same can be done with the text.
And true, I’d argue there’s also a component of inherent rejection of AI generated images because it is clear it “destroys art creation” in the sense that artists experience the world and create from said experience in connection with their own perception and ideas, while AI “remixes” said work without any understanding or self input and steals people’s expression that is currently being aimed explicitly for commercial purposes. Meme makers do something far better than AI. If all art would be made by AI there would be no art. The only way I’d be ok with it is if you give the neural network sensors to perceive reality and process ideas and thoughts, to then create its own interpretation and expression. I guess it would be interesting to see “art” without emotion.
You pull out of nowhere that most people against AI are not artists, but that kind of claim needs some support behind it. Similarly to how you claim that people against AI art have nothing against using other people’s work for memes without their consent. That kind of whataboutism does not contribute to the discussion, as it is just pointing to a “but they do that so I can do this” lame excuse. Sure, people should be more respectful about other people’s images, so what.
Even with all of this, I do agree that using people’s images for memes without their consent is bad. Doubt it can be stopped but I’d not be surprised if they are strongly affected by it. Empathy is scarce these days and makes me act a bit more bitter on the internet.
I’d argue memes that duplicate other peoples work are common but questionable on the ethical front.
Kind of like how alcohol consumption is common and got shoehorned in through our long history with it but newer drugs are more likely to have people question their cost to society (and demonise them usually for political gain, still many have some obvious costs).
Imo the main difference would be that genAI models have been trained on a whole lot of art without consent, and the few privileged companies who are able to do this are making a ton of money (mainly by investors, not sure how much from paying users). Which is very extractive and centralised. Using others’ art to do memes at least is distributed and not that remunerative
Putting AI aside, if we see art used in a meme of a random shitposter, it feels different than a political party or a big corporation using that art to do meme propaganda/advertisement.
Another interesting field for this is YouTube poops. They use tons of copyrighted materials, from big movies to local youtubers to advertisement. I would consider that fair, but if instead a big television network had a program showing youtubers’ content without permission that’s another story
Another example: Undertale’s soundtrack being made with Earthbound’s sound effects and samples. If it weren’t an indie, especially if it was a big publisher using an indie’s sounds, it wouldn’t have been well received.
So back to AI, when it comes to a person using it for their own projects, the issue to me isn’t really using stolen art, but using a tool that was made with an extractive theft of art by a big corporation, rather than seeking collaboration with artists, using existing CreativeCommons stuff, etc.
We also have to keep the context in mind: copyright laws mainly serve big publishers, hardly ever it protects smaller creators from such big publishers, in any field. The genAI training race is based on a complete lack of interest in applying or at least discussing the law.
I’m glad to see tho that thanks to this phenomenon more and more people are seeing how IP doesn’t make any sense to begin with. Just keep in mind copyright and attribution are two different things.
