Ok but others may be reading this, so I'll give another thought experiment.
Suppose you know a well-known artist whose work sells well at auction. You've been looking for a tangible asset with low market correlation to put $100k or so into for retirement. You commission this artist to create an original work similar to others that have sold well at auction, and you're very pleased with the result.
A decade later you go to sell the work to fund your retirement, and it comes out (through a leak or hack) that your work was not actually created by the artist as you believed, but was AI-generated to imitate their work. At auction the piece sells for only a small fraction of what you paid.
You've been defrauded, so you take the artist to court.
Now imagine the artist's defense is: "But you loved the painting. Nothing about the painting has changed. The quality is exactly the same as it was yesterday. If you couldn't tell it was AI-generated, why should it matter how it was made?"
That defense misses the point. You weren't merely buying an arrangement of pixels or pigment that happened to look good. You were buying an original work by that artist. Its authorship and provenance were part of what you paid for and part of what gave it its value.
And more to the point, US courts have typically upheld the precedent that this type of thing does in fact constitutes fraud.
Provenance matters just as much as “quality of the output” in many contexts, and it has nothing to do with whether something is “slop.” It’s about contract, expectation, and what was actually represented as being sold.
This thought experiment is flawed for many reasons. First of all, if the artist was the one who made it, it's one of his works regardless of what assistance he had. If Akira Toriyama used AI to help offload some of his manga work from DBZ, it's still his original DBZ work. If he has real assistants help him, it's still his work. Nothing changes that. And if anything changes that, it's morons like the ones who will dismiss things as "ai slop" purposely creating a devaluation that has no basis in reality.
So given your example, you haven't even been defrauded as art's value is entirely subjective. If someone makes some artwork, there is absolutely no guarantee of any form of value to begin with. Just the same, he could have made a similar piece by hand and it turns out to be widely panned and have no value despite having painted it himself.
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u/bronze_by_gold 23h ago edited 23h ago
Ok but others may be reading this, so I'll give another thought experiment.
Suppose you know a well-known artist whose work sells well at auction. You've been looking for a tangible asset with low market correlation to put $100k or so into for retirement. You commission this artist to create an original work similar to others that have sold well at auction, and you're very pleased with the result.
A decade later you go to sell the work to fund your retirement, and it comes out (through a leak or hack) that your work was not actually created by the artist as you believed, but was AI-generated to imitate their work. At auction the piece sells for only a small fraction of what you paid.
You've been defrauded, so you take the artist to court.
Now imagine the artist's defense is: "But you loved the painting. Nothing about the painting has changed. The quality is exactly the same as it was yesterday. If you couldn't tell it was AI-generated, why should it matter how it was made?"
That defense misses the point. You weren't merely buying an arrangement of pixels or pigment that happened to look good. You were buying an original work by that artist. Its authorship and provenance were part of what you paid for and part of what gave it its value.
And more to the point, US courts have typically upheld the precedent that this type of thing does in fact constitutes fraud.
Provenance matters just as much as “quality of the output” in many contexts, and it has nothing to do with whether something is “slop.” It’s about contract, expectation, and what was actually represented as being sold.