I personally believe there could be a place in a person’s creative workflow for the use of AI as a tool to enhance their own creative work…with caveats…
As for the ethics of using AI to copy and art style? It’s theft. End of.
These models are trained on stolen data. The artists/musicians/writers/intellectuals, or their estates, never gave permission for their works to be used to train these models. They never receive royalties, or payment of any kind, for the use of their works. And as we’re finding out, at the very least, Meta took that data…those creative works… illegally. People’s lives have been destroyed by laws put in place to protect IP. I personally feel those laws are fucked and should be fully scrapped in favour of something that actually protects the people creating these works. That doesn’t change the fact that when Joe Shmoe shares a torrent he could be hit with fines and possibly jail. Fines alone could essentially make a person’s life literal hell for however long they have left. The companies who have trained these models are likely going to get a “cost of doing business” slap on the wrist.
It’s ethically ambiguous if you look at it from the standpoint of “IP law shouldn’t exist” while totally ignoring that even if these companies get away with it common people nearly never will.
A lot of people claim that this was done illegally, but artists really shouldn’t be using websites like Instagram where they grant a royalty-free license to Meta where they are allowed to sell your images to anyone they want.
when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings).
If this is something we actually want to fix, we’ll need to work with legislators to come up with a law that can’t be worked around by using some Terms of Service that everyone magically agrees to by visiting a site.
I personally believe there could be a place in a person’s creative workflow for the use of AI as a tool to enhance their own creative work…with caveats…
As for the ethics of using AI to copy and art style? It’s theft. End of.
These models are trained on stolen data. The artists/musicians/writers/intellectuals, or their estates, never gave permission for their works to be used to train these models. They never receive royalties, or payment of any kind, for the use of their works. And as we’re finding out, at the very least, Meta took that data…those creative works… illegally. People’s lives have been destroyed by laws put in place to protect IP. I personally feel those laws are fucked and should be fully scrapped in favour of something that actually protects the people creating these works. That doesn’t change the fact that when Joe Shmoe shares a torrent he could be hit with fines and possibly jail. Fines alone could essentially make a person’s life literal hell for however long they have left. The companies who have trained these models are likely going to get a “cost of doing business” slap on the wrist.
It’s ethically ambiguous if you look at it from the standpoint of “IP law shouldn’t exist” while totally ignoring that even if these companies get away with it common people nearly never will.
A lot of people claim that this was done illegally, but artists really shouldn’t be using websites like Instagram where they grant a royalty-free license to Meta where they are allowed to sell your images to anyone they want.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190101050325/https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870
Bad policies don’t make it OK, and blaming the victims also doesn’t make it OK.
If this is something we actually want to fix, we’ll need to work with legislators to come up with a law that can’t be worked around by using some Terms of Service that everyone magically agrees to by visiting a site.