TwilightVulpine

If AI companies lose, small artists may have the recourse of seeking compensation for the use and imitation of their art too. Just feeling for them is not enough if they are going to be left to the wolves.

There isn't a scenario here in which big media companies lose so talking of it like it's taking a stand against them doesn't make much sense. What are we fighting for here? That we get to generate pictures of Goofy? The small AI user's win here seems like such a silly novelty that I can't see how it justifies just taking for granted that artists will have it much rougher than they already have.

The reality here is that even if AI gets the free pass, large media and tech companies are still primed to profit from them far more than any small user. They will be the one making AI-assisted movies and integrating chat AI into their systems. They don't lose in either situation.

There are ways to train AI without relying on unauthorized copyrighted data. Even if OpenAI loses, it wouldn't be the death of the technology. It may be more efficient and effective to train them with that data, but why is "efficiency" enough to justify this overreach?

And is it even wise to be so callous about it? Because it's not going to stop with artists. This technology has the potential to replace large swaths of service industries. If we don't think of the human costs now, it will be even harder to make a case for everyone else.

It's not like all this data was randomly dumped at the AIs. For data sets to serve as good training materials they need contextual information so that the AI can discern patterns and replicate them when prompted.

We see this when you can literally prompt AIs with whose style you want it to emulate. Meaning that the data it was fed had such information.

Midjourney is facing extra backlash from artists after a spreadsheet was leaked containing a list of artist styles their AI was trained on. Meaning they can keep track of it and they trained the AI with those artists' works deliberately. They simply pretend this is impossible to figure out so that they might not be liable to seek permission and compensate the artists whose works were used.

OpenAI is definitely not the one arguing that they have stole data to train their AIs, and Disney will be fine whether AI requires owning the rights to training materials or not. Small artists, the ones protesting the most against it, will not. They are already seeing jobs and commission opportunities declining due to it.

Being publicly available in some form is not a permission to use and reproduce those works however you feel like. Only the real owner have the right to decide. We on the internet have always been a bit blasé about it, sometimes deservedly, but as we get to a point we are driving away the very same artists that we enjoy and get inspired by, maybe we should be a bit more understanding about their position.

Should we distinguish it though? Why shouldn't (and didn't) artists have a say if their art is used to train LLMs? Just like publicly displayed art doesn't provide a permission to copy it and use it in other unspecified purposes, it would be reasonable that the same would apply to AI training.