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.
Here’s my argument: tough titties. Everything Greg Rutkowski has ever drawn or made has been inspired by other things he has seen and the experiences of his life, and this applies to all of us. Indeed, one cannot usually have experiences without the participation of others. Everyone wants to think they are special, and of course we are to someone, but to everyone no one is special. Since all of our work is based upon the work of everyone who came before us, then all of our work belongs to everyone. So tough fucking titties, welcome to the world of computer science, control c and control v is heavily encouraged.
In that Beatles documentary, Paul McCartney said he thought that once you uttered the words into the microphone, it belonged to everyone. Little did he know how right he actually was.
You think there is a line between innovation and infringement? Wrong, They are the same thing.
And for the record, I’m fine with anyone stealing my art. They can even sell it as their own. Attribution is for the vain.
A sad fact but undeniable truth. I work in the industry. It’s standard for us to do mood boards. I have a lot hate relationship with them because it can be helpful to hone the design to a client’s liking and get your bearings. But, the fact it’s essentially what AI is doing by “borrowing” existing art as a reference. It’s the exact same thing. And that’s why I hate doing it. Because I don’t want to take someone’s button or background pattern.
Regardless of how I feel, I still can’t recognize AI as being “stealing” but industry accepted practices that do the exact same thing aren’t?
I think people forget the reality when they take their supposedly brave and oh so altruistic stance of “there should be no copyright”.
When people already know they won’t even have a small chance of getting paid for the art they create, we will run out of artists.
Because most can not afford to learn and practice that craft without getting any form of payment. It will become a very rare hobby of a few decadent rich people who can afford to learn something like illustration in their free time.
Greg wants to get paid, remove the threat of poverty from the loss of control and its a nonissue.
But every human activity desirable to others deserve compensation. If you want someone to do something for you or make something for you or entertain you then it deserves compensation. The way ads on the internet have trained a lot of people to think that a lot of entertainment et cetera on the internet is free has been a negative for this. But at the same time that ad-supported model does make it more available to people that otherwise couldn’t afford the price of admission. It’s partly democratizing, but it’s also a scourge.
what I’m getting from all the AI stuff is the people in charge and the people that use it are scumbags
Pretty much. There are ways of using it that most artists would be okay with. Most of the people using it flat out refuse to use it like that though.
Edit: To expand on this:
Most artists would be okay with AI art being used as reference material, inspiration, assisting with fleshing out concepts (though you should use concept artists for that in a big production), rapid prototyping and whatnot. Most only care that the final product is at least mostly human-made.
Artists generally want you to actually put effort into what you’re making because, at the end of the day, typing a prompt into stable diffusion has more in common with receiving a free commission from an artist than it has with actually being an artist. If you’re going to claim that something AI had a hand in as being your art, then you need to have done the majority of the work on it yourself.
The most frustrating thing to me, however, is that there are places in art that AI could participate in which would send artists over the moon, but it’s not flashy so no one seems to be working on making AI in those areas.
Most of what I’m personally familiar with has to do with 3d modeling, and in that discipline, people would go nuts if you released an AI tool that could do the UV work for you. Messing with UVs can be very tedious and annoying, to the point where most artists will just use a tool using conventional algorithms to auto-unwrap and pack UVs, and then call it a day, even if they’re not great.
Another area is in rigging and weight painting. In order to animate a model, you have to rig it to a skeleton (unless you’re a masochist or trying to make a game accurate to late 90s-early 00s animation), paint the bone weights (which bones affect which polygons, and by how much), add constraints, etc. Most 3d modelers would leap at the prospect of having high-quality rigging and UVs done for them at the touch of a button. However, again, because it’s not flashy to the general public, no one’s put any effort into making an AI that can do that (afaik at least).
Finally, even if you do use an AI in ways that most artists would accept as valid, you’ll still have to prove it because there are so many people who put a prompt into stable diffusion, do some minor edits to fix hands (in older version), and then try to pass it off as their own work.
We will probably all have to get used to this soon because I can see the same happening to authors, journalists and designers. Perhaps soon programmers, lawyers and all kinds of other people as well.
It’s interesting how people on Lemmy pretend to be all against big corporations and capitalism and then they happily indulge in the process of making artists jobless becaus “Muh technology cool!”. I don’t know the English word to describe this situation. In German I would say “Tja…”
Well said. Copyright is whatever, but the disrespect shown here is remarkable.
Just as quickly as people disregard the human art enjoyer, who now has access to a powerful tool to create art undreamed of a year ago.
I have found over the years that forums that claim to be about various forms of art are almost always really about the artists that make that art, and have little to no regard for the people who are there just for the art itself. The AI art thing is just the latest and most prominent way of revealing this.
There’s a lot of disagreement here on what is theft, what is art, what is copyright… etc
The main issue people have with AI is fundamentally how is it going to be used? I know there isnt much we can do about it now, and its a shame because there it has so much potential good. Everyone defending AI is making a lot of valid points.
But at the end of the day it is a tool that is going to be misused by the rich and powerful to eliminate hundreds of millions of well paying careers, permanently. MOST well paying jobs in fact, not just artists. What the hell are people supposed to do? How is any of this a good thing?
What the hell are people supposed to do?
Eat the rich :)
More concretely, there are a number of smaller and larger sociopolitical changes that can be fought for. On the smaller side, there’s rethinking the way our society values people and pushing for some kind of UBI, on the larger side there’s shifting to postcapitalist economics and organisation to various degrees .)
The copyright argument is a bad argument against AI art. But there are also good arguments against it.
as a counterpoint, when the use-case for the tool is specifically “I want a picture that looks like it was painted by Greg Rutkowski, but I don’t want to pay Greg Rutkowski to paint it for me” that sounds like the sort of scenario that copyright was specifically envisioned to protect against – and if it doesn’t protect against that, it’s arguably an oversight in need of correction. It’s in AI makers and users’ interest to proactively self-regulate on this front, because if they don’t somebody like Disney is going to wade into this at some point with expensive lobbyists, and dictate the law to their own benefit.
That said, it’s working artists like Rutkowski, or friends of mine who scrape together a living off commissioned pieces, that I am most concerned for. Fantasy art like Greg makes, or personal character portraits of the sort you find on character sheets of long-running DnD games or as avatar images on forums like this one, make up the bread and butter of many small-time artists’ work, and those commissions are the ones most endangered by the current state of the art in generative AI. It’s great for would-be patrons that the cost of commissioning a mood piece for a campaign setting or a portrait of their fursona has suddenly dropped to basically zero, but it sucks for artists that their lunch is being eaten by an AI algorithm that was trained by slurping up all their work without compensation or even credit. For as long as artists need to get paid for their work in order to live, that’s inherently anti-worker.
I’m also an artist, for whatever that’s worth, 🤷🏻♀️
Copyright is artificial scarcity which is ultimately designed for publishers, not workers.
One of the many, many bugs in market capitalism is that it can’t handle when something is difficult to initially create but when copies are cheap. Like a song. It’s tricky to write it but once you have it you can copy it endlessly. Markets based on supply and demand can’t handle that so they cooked up copyright as kind of a brutal patch, originally for book publishers in an era where normal readers couldn’t easily copy books anyway, only other publishers could.
It’s a patch that doesn’t work very well since many artist still work super hard and still have to get by on scraps. Ultimately we need to re-think a lot of economics. Not only because digital threw everything on its ear and what could’ve been a cornucopia is now a tug of war for pennies, but also because of climate change (which is caused by fossil fuel transaction externalities being under-accounted for—if I sell you a can of gas, the full environmental impact of that is not going to be factored in properly. Sort of like how a memory leak works in a computer program).
I definitively sympathize with your artist friends and I’ve been speaking out against AI art, at least some aspects of it (including, but not limited to, the environmental impact of new models, and the increasing wealth&power concentration for big data capital).
This person has no idea what machine learning actually is. And they hate such a generic concept on a “gut feeling” and come up with the reasons later?
If you want good reasons to hate AI generated art you won’t find them in this shitty blogpost.
Apparently your comment really got to them, because the blogpost now contains a direct quote of you and a response.
Someone I don’t get along with very well wrote:
Hahaha yikes. Pretty cowardly to post their unhinged response on their blog where nobody can actually respond.
Also, why the hell would this person who hates the very general concept of machine learning (because of their gut lol) get a degree in a field that significantly utilizes machine learning? Computational linguistics is essentially driven by machine learning, so that’s uh… probably bullshit.
