How is an AI doing it any different?

Picasso once said “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” With the AI art debate raging the question I got the most on my previous video about the looming legal fight between copyright holders and AI companies was how is it any different if an AI finds inspiration in an artists work if human artists have worked this way for centuries.

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[KoongYe]

The problem is that people asking the question never drew anything in their life. And then they claim the process is same as AI doing it. It's quite insane.

[carlianarojas]

I wouldn’t have much of a problem with ai if it only was fed with public domain images. Like… they’re right there… for the public, they’re free to use! But even before AI came along there were people who took someone else’s art and tried to pass it off as theirs. Now ai makes it easier for them to be sleazier, with the justification that they “made” it themselves. I guess it could be used ethically to use it as a tool for unique and specific references, but there’s no guarantee that it will. Now people want products on the go, they have no patience for deadlines or respect for the people who make their art.

[iyadart]

Being an artist is more than just creating beautiful images, creativity transcends technical skill and cannot be replaced by AI. We should all take a step back and ask more profound questions about the nature of creativity. Time and time again, people conflate craftsmanship and artistry, failing to recognize the distinction between mere technical proficiency and the imaginative process of creating something truly unique and innovative.

[NotALotOfColonial_SpaghettiToG]

Something that angers me about AI image generators is that the people who use them tend to mistakenly believe that art is some talent you come out of the womb magically knowing, not a craft you put years of blood, sweat, and tears into. The problem with it for me comes with how it was built off stolen art and is quite obviously, intent on replacing us instead of solving the problems in the industry. No living wages, no more crunch time, no artists either.

[vinrylgrave]

" good artists borrow, great artists steal." it might sounds catchy and marketable but as an artist I never like that quote, it has an immediate negative insinuation, and glorifying stealing. the word steal means there is a victim someone or something out there are being harmed in any shapes of form for our gain. I prefer the word inspired. it shows gratification respect and love.

[Ilovemelonss]

One of the biggest things that makes me upset with the whole AI art thing is not the fact that our jobs will be replaced but rather how non artists will view us. Artists already have a lot of prejudice and stigma and how people think you start off talented and skilled at a young age and how "easy" art is. All they need is to press a few buttons and prompts and can say "I just did what you made but faster" as if Ai generation is in anyway as valuable as human effort. A human being copying another's style takes so much effort a lot of sketching, drawing, studying and even then, the styles will not be a 1 - 1 copy as the artist will develop new skills and ideas along the way.

Also my take on this as a beginning animator is that I can understand the usefulness of Ai generation to help smoothen and make the animation processes easier, but IMO that kind of takes away a lot of the beauty and value of animation. Even with just simple interpolation, the general audience are already praising and are impressed with the 60fps mushy animation that makes me nauseous. This may really be just my biased take with the "you kids have it better than we did" kind of situation but still. I'm sure it can help animators and make the animation production cheaper but that's also part of the problem. Digital art will be seen by the general public as cheaper or less valuable because of these auto generations, the market will be oversaturated and living as an artist will become even harder without forming a proper law around using AI art for profit. This holds strongly for the struggling and abused artists in the animation industry's corporate web. I still do think that artists won't go away as long as there is a group of people who love and support their art. But man, Does it leave a terrible taste in my mouth when I see people already devaluing artist, and the possible implications of people profiting and claiming themselves to be artists using AI.

[supergreta]

No matter how good AI gets, I will still continue working on my art and skills.

[untuxable]

My concern with AI is the same problem I have whenever a new tool is introduced: I'm not afraid of the product, I'm afraid of how people will use it. People that don't understand anything about art, design, or any creative field, and therefore can't and don't appreciate creative work. People that will think of and use the tool as a 1:1 replacement for an artist and do their best to convince others of that opinion, intentionally devaluing creativity for their own gain. My fundamental issue is still with the greed, the pride, and the lack of appreciation for others AI will be used to perpetuate.

Great video, I appreciate your input on the topic!

[ArtsySIDDD]

AI wouldn't exist without us Artists, without our work, without our style, without our inspirations.

I too have accepted that AI is here to stay.. but as u said that the way it's being used/developed today by stealing other artist's work without consent or compensation is purely unethical.. n it must be highly regulated by law.

[megantvenstrup]

The time argument is one of the reasons I'm so angry about AI. If another human is an artist, they are competition, yes, but fair competition. If your competition is AI, then it can churn out tons of art for a cheaper price and you cannot compete with that.

[xuanxh]

There are many ways one can think about this issue, but in my opinion it’s very simple. The difference between what we artists do and what the AI does comes down to this: consent.

There’s always been an unspoken rule between us artists. It’s okay to copy ourselves to improve, to practice, to learn skills. We shall not copy and post an existing piece of artwork without at least mentioning the original author, we shall not take credit for someone else’s work, and equally established and professional artists shouldn’t get on their high horses when beginner artist’s copy their work to practice. We avoid gate-keeping, we share our secrets and tips, we inspire and influence each other, the same way our teachers did, and their teachers did, and so on and so forth: that’s how our skills have been passed down generations after generations, each generation adding its own stone to an ever-growing edifice.
Practice makes perfect or, as we say in French, a blacksmith learns by blacksmithing (c’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron). We rest assured that our knowledge and skills will be passed down to future generations and that after we’re gone our style, in a way, will be adopted/copied/transformed by future artists that will share our love for the craft.

AI gets rid of all of that.
It’s simply the end of the line, it's being used to blow up our edifice.
It’s not copying to improve or to inspire, to create new generations of artists, nor to pass down our knowledge to future generations of artists: it’s a replacement.
It’s putting an end to us and what we’ve been doing for generations, and all of that without our consent while parading under the pretext of “making art available to anyone”. Here lies the gate-keeping in my opinion: once you replace artists and masters, once less and less people learn the tools of the trade, the knowledge is lost. Only a handful of people remain with those skills, while automation dumbs down everything else and it’s hard for artists to get noticed in sea of generated artwork. I’m the pessimistic type who sees a bleak future, where kids will be raised with smartphone that come with “Midjourney 5.0” and will look at us artists almost as if we were cave-men finger-painting on stone walls...

Also, if techbros keep insisting that AI is simply a tool that will make life easier to artists, why are they cheering at the same time at the thought of us being replaced?

[GaryKertopermono]

That's the thing with AI. Humans are never able to 100% replicate another person's style, it's why it's possible to find out if something is a forgery. Each artist has their own nuances, their own signature or fingerprint on their style that bleeds into other styles. It's how in animation there's off-model animation scenes as opposed to just off-model frames. Because animation is made in a team, each team member has their own little nuances of animating stuff, no matter how hard they try to keep on-model.

Computers don't have those nuances. Ask one computer running a model to generate a picture in one particular style, and another computer running that model will be able to generate the same style without any variants, without nuance, heck, if you use the same model, the same seed, the same prompt and the same variables, you'll 100% be able to replicate the image. Ask a human to draw a circle and ask that same human to draw that same circle, no way in hell they'll be able to 100% replicate that.

[KimberlyLetsGo]

I used to work in print advertising. I started by working in the department with copyrighters and content designers. There was literally nothing that came out of these agencies that wasn't stolen from another printed media. It's just tweaked and slightly redesigned and put out there.
Another industry that steals: fashion. Here's another one: beauty.

[Alarios]

The problem is that the AI needs that human input (in the form of "rapidly analysing thousands of" (stealing) current/past human made artwork) to "create" but doesn't add anything in itself. It's not just a moral and/or a philosophical problem, it's also a practical one. A human by creating a mood-board and "stealing" other art is invariably going to inject some of their own creative process into the mix. That process is what pushes the media forward.

The AI without that human input of countless actual creations made by humans will start to self-reference and continuously remix it's own output. That's accelerated Flanderization. In the same way that the movie creating process has been parasited by capital/greed and have started to flanderize itself ad-infinitum (remake, remake of the remake, etc...) but in a matter of months instead of decades.

"Well it's fine if we continue to feed the AI with human art right ?"

Yeah but the economic/time pressure of creating art from scratch will render said process rarer and rarer. Why going through the pains of creating art when anything slightly original is going to be re-hashed for financial gain almost instantly ? Right now we are just feeding it the totality of our present and past library of pictures so it looks good, but there is going to come a point when we literally have nothing left to give it except it's own product.

Hell it's already happening with AI generated images having that weird distinctly homogeneous look at midpoint between Sakimichan and Loish.


"Democratization of the means for creating video didn't lead to that for movies"

That's because a movie is magnitudes more complex than one picture. You can be sure if get to the point we create an AI that starts leeching every movie and outputting an infinity of remixed/re-hashed movies, it's also going to flanderize in a matter of months and everyone is going to be sick of it real fast.

"Digital art tools didn't lead to that"

It kinda did actually with scandals after scandals of people trying to be sneaky and recycling others art by bashing it into their own creation and not crediting. Again, digital toolsets made that flanderization process a bit faster but it's still order of magnitudes less invasive than what we are going to have now.

TL;DR : Think of it as this one artist that had a good idea 30 years ago and coasted on it way past it's expiration date. Except it's a robot now... and it does that times a bazillion.

[keith-knittel]

Pre-AI, the limits of copying someone elses work was your time. Researching, studying, practicing. Taking inspiration is often part of creating, but for me, the human interaction and putting your own spin on the work is what set influence apart from a copy with text prompts then pressing generate. Still not sure how I feel about AI, but it's not going anywhere and only going to get better from here. Great question and explaination!

[kkramlogan]

A complex and complicated topic. Issue: Ai is not a person, and I think you basically covered part of this but there are further implications (Ai can not originate an idea, it can only "generate" based on prior ideas, so they are emulative). Issue: the datasets the Ai was trained on includes copyrighted work that no permission was granted for - a civil case would probably be stronger as the legalities are not clear and with a few cases moving through the system; the question of copying anothers work is accepted in all art and one can argue Ai is transformative. Issue: Ai systems are not actually Intelligent, so when discussing them this should be pointed out, they are not autonamous, lack agency, awareness, nuance, etc. Issue: ownership. If everyone uses the exact prompts on the same system, who owns the image generated - is it the first person logged with that combination or is it no one? Would "prompts" then be the copyrighted property within a particular system? Issue: growth and progression - If there are less artists to train the Ai on, how does the Ai system improve (outside of improvements using a now static dataset), one can argue Public Domain works are ripe for using but, if every artist creating work includes a "may not be used to train an Ai system" attached, which I think is already happening, where would future iterations of the Ai draw its "inspiration" from? Issue: regression - If new artists rely on Ai systems, then what is the potential lost to humanity in terms of knowledge, skill, art, etc.?

Art is not a problem to be solved. However, in my view, new tools should be used ethically. Human agency will always trump Machine generated but, businesses may not want to pay someone with artistic skill, so are there jobs which may be eliminated? Probably; this is not a positive development. Art is already poorly compensated in the economic systems of many parts of the world, now a young artist may not even be able to get a job. I don't see Ai systems being able to replace certain types of art - as all of the systems have an artificial look at this point - but, within Product Advertising, Digital Illustration, Mobile Game Design, UI Design, I can see this really taking off.

There should probably be a descriptor: Human Generated Art vs Machine Generated Art - so the average viewer knows and eventually can learn the subtle differences, because they are there.

Of course, a trained artist who uses an Ai System will probably create better Ai Art than someone who is not trained because he/she will have a larger knowledge base and skills which can be transfered into this new area.

[ARTofTY-TV]

Judges should rule against the illegal scraping software. Copyright law currently states that the works are infringing if they act as a replacement for their original creator. Seems straight forward to me.

Also, consider the harm to the ecosystem of artists when machines are allowed to infringe. It's about jobs but more importantly it's about humanity.

[blindOni]

Thats the thing if its unethical to build a company on top of artists’ work, then why shouldn’t it be heavily regulated? If the judges have hindsight when making this ruling then they should be able to stop this, but then again judges are money hungry and easy to buy by these companies. I hope this doesnt come to be.

[ecvfzqj]

*FINALLY*
I brought this up in an Essay for a 300-level University English course, advising Artists about the weaknesses in their arguments against AI, (rather than defending AI outright.)
and *nobody* could actually bring up their own argument based of THIS point!

[RedGvi]

All this situation reminds me when the AI "Alpha Star" at the beginning playing Starcraft 2 vs humans. It was able to see the whole map, while a human only could see what was on screen. And they had to change the parameter to make the matches more fair.
And I think that's whats happening now, the AI have all the leverage to their side and it feels kinda like unfair competition. And that's why there are parameters that has to be established in order to make AI a tool at the service for creators and not the creators killer.