Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski’s style against his wishes using a LoRA model. While some argue this is unethical, others justify it since Rutkowski’s art has already been widely used in Stable Diffusion 1.5. The debate highlights the blurry line between innovation and infringement in the emerging field of AI art.
I haven’t “redefined” it, I’m using the legal definition. People do sometimes sloppily equate copyright violation with theft in common parlance, but they’re in for a rude awakening if they intend to try translating that into legal action.
Using that term in an argument like this is merely trying to beg the question of whether it’s wrong, since most everyone agrees that stealing is wrong you’re trying to cast the action of training an AI as something everyone will by default agree is wrong. But it’s not stealing, no matter how much you want it to be, and I’m calling that rhetorical trick out here.
If you want to argue that it’s wrong you need to argue against the actual process that’s happening, not some magical scenario where the AI trainers are somehow literally robbing people.
Taking someone’s work product and converting it, without compensation and consent, into your profit is theft of labor.
Adding extra steps, like, say, training an AI, doesn’t absolve the theft of labor.
We’re it ethical, the companies doing it would have asked for permission and been given cinsent. They didn’t.
Taking someone’s work product and converting it, without compensation and consent, into your profit is theft of labor.
That’s not what’s going on here. The finished product contains only the style of the artist that the AI was trained on, and style is not copyrightable. Which is a damn good thing, as humans have been learning from each other’s “work products” and mimicking each others’ styles since time immemorial.
BTW, theft of labor means failing to pay wages or provide employee benefits owed to an employee by contract or law. You’re using that term incorrectly too, Greg Rutkowski wasn’t hired to do anything for the people who trained the AI off of his work.
No, I’m not using it incorrectly, I’m just not concerned with the legal definition as I’m not a lawyer or anyone tied up in this mess.
If you do a thing, and it takes time and skill to do it, then someone copies it, they stole your labor.
Saying they “copied his style”, the style he spent a lifetime crafting, then trying to say they didn’t benefit, at no cost, to the labor he put into crafting that style because “well actually, the law says…” is a bad argument as it tries to minimize what they did.
If their product could not exist without his labor, and they did not pay him for that labor, they stole his labor.
For, like, the fourth time in this thread: were this ethical, they would have asked for permission, they didn’t.
