ParanoidObsessive posted...
The main problem there is where you draw the line for "stealing".
If I'm an artist, and I'm a fan of another artist's work, is it stealing if my own personal style is heavily influenced by theirs? Sure, if I'm directly tracing their work, there's a strong argument to be made... but if I'm producing functionalyl original work that simply looks like their work because I have
internalized
their work, most people wouldn't argue that I'm not being creative, or that my work is somehow completely invalidated on a fundamental level. Artists have been inspired, influenced, or outright homaged each others' work for decades.
If AI can analyze, store, and
synthesize
art from other people's work, how is that different from how a human draws? It lacks intention (that's what a human needs to provide), but the process itself is similar.
If an AI is just reproducing existing work almost exactly, then it's doing the exact same thing a human artist does by tracing or directly copying someone else's work (something known in comic book circles as "swiping" ). And that's already seen as being a problem when
humans
do it. In that sense, the problem isn't the AI, the problem is in how much you need to alter or synthesize an original work until it becomes a new, transformative performance.
In that sense it's similar to arguments about how "Fair Use" should apply to streamers and YouTubers when using clips from movies/shows/games to create their own works. At what point does their work cease to be "creation" and become "theft"?
Whether or not something is theft when done by a human is fairly well established in IP law. So it's not a hypothetical. It's actual, established law.
Being inspired by or studying others' art isn't theft. It's still filtered through your own individual life experience, and your literal hands and eyes. Furthermore, humans are capable of producing art with no training or reference. You can draw from memory. You can invent something entirely random and abstract with no prompt. You can even do so without sight. AI is not capable of any of that. It requires references to steal and specific instructions for what to produce and can only use the exact things that it has been fed to produce "new" material. It can never innovate or generate something unique based on perspective or experience.