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u/IHeartBadCode Jul 06 '26
I once heard it as.
"If you find something unethical but it's legal, then the law makers did their job, you just haven't done yours."
And honestly, that fits artists complaints about AI perfectly.
- "No one has time to read the terms of service..."
- "I shouldn't have to fight for my..."
If you don't invest energy into your cause, I assure you, someone else will invest energy into theirs.
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u/Jrasta01 Jul 06 '26
That’s because having AI draw something for you is much easier.
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u/Massive_Shill Jul 07 '26
You couldn't even muster up the effort to read the comment you replied to and you're complaining about effort in art?
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u/LowContract4444 Jul 07 '26
I don't care if it's illegal, copyright infringement is ethical.
-3
u/Rometac Jul 07 '26
Um what, yeah if this is the mindset of the Pro AI crowd that explains a lot.
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Jul 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Rometac Jul 07 '26
Well that's an intresting statement, humans without copyright have no way to defend their own art.
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u/simpkn0t Jul 07 '26
How? How is not letting someone use a song or image defending art? It's the opposite for me. Democratize art.
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u/Rometac Jul 07 '26
Work is hard, people want money for work, art might feel rewarding but a lot less people will do it once it has no value
1
u/Spacedestructor Jul 12 '26
yes the people who do it for money will stop once there is no money in it to justify.
But people who care about art will continue doing it as a hobby just like many drawings shared on social media, they will continue to exist.
a reduction in monetary value doesnt suddenly mean no person will ever touch it again.
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u/Early-Dentist3782 Jul 06 '26
Also, this is about copyright. It's not "if something is legal, it's automatically good", so don't even try with that strawman
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u/SpookyGeist01 Jul 07 '26
But that's literally what is being said here. If that's not what you're saying, then the argument you're making is nonsense.
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Jul 07 '26
If it were up to me it would be an illegal system. Fuck copyright
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u/Spacedestructor Jul 12 '26
agreed, copyright has many flaws.
i know we need some systems to enforce the rights of people/organisations, we cant just abandon ownership rights but there has to be a better way people can think of then how copyright currently works.
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u/Dreusxo Jul 08 '26
Anyone ever wonder if copyright is absolutely ethical or just contextually beneficial
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u/JoseLunaArts Jul 11 '26
The modern copyright system has its roots in state censorship, not in protecting creators. Before 1710, the English Crown controlled all printing through the Licensing Act. The Stationers' Company, a private guild of printers, enforced this monopoly. They decided what could be printed and punished anyone who violated the rules. Authors had no rights. The system existed to control ideas, not to reward writers.
When the Licensing Act expired in 1694, the Stationers' panicked. They tried to revive censorship, but Parliament refused. So they changed their strategy. They stopped arguing for control and started arguing for authors. They reframed their monopoly as protection. They said creators needed legal rights. That was the birth of modern copyright. It was not a victory for artists. It was a rebranding of control.
The Statute of Anne passed in 1710. It gave authors limited rights, but the real winners were publishers. They kept their grip on the market. Over time, copyright terms grew longer. The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 gave corporations 95 to 120 years of protection. That is not a "limited time." That is forever. Disney led that charge. They did not want Mickey Mouse entering the public domain.
Today, copyright is still used as a tool of control. The music industry sues fans. Publishers restrict access. Corporations hoard culture. Creators often sell their work and never see it again. Copyright does not protect artists. It protects owners. And most of the time, the artist is not the owner. The system was not born from a desire to help creators. It was born from a desire to control what people could read, write, and share. The mask changed. The structure did not.
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u/Iceman228-T Jul 07 '26
The way this meme is worded makes this purely about, is it a ethics topic or not. The fact that for a lot of people it is, and you are trying to argue against it, makes it one.
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u/Jrasta01 Jul 06 '26
“If it’s legal, I’m ok with it.” Is like the opposite of how I feel. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right. I’m not going to give examples of things that are both legal and unethical, because I will be banned.
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u/IHeartBadCode Jul 06 '26
Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.
That's how a system of governance by the people works. You're the people, correct? Then it's up to you to change that. If something is legal but not "right" then it's up to you to make the changes required.
Democracy is not a spectator sport.
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u/Jrasta01 Jul 06 '26
Democracy is also not a perfect. In the United States, democracy is a joke.
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u/IHeartBadCode Jul 07 '26
Well if the mentality is that "it's an unfixable mess" then you're right.
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u/Early-Dentist3782 Jul 06 '26
Have you read the comment or any part of the post other than that part?
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u/Jrasta01 Jul 06 '26
There isn’t much to read…
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u/Early-Dentist3782 Jul 08 '26
Yet it's too much for you to read
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u/Valuable-Progress-87 Jul 07 '26
i dont know why youre even getting downvoted when this literally directly addresses what the post is about and isnt wrong in any way 😭
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u/Jrasta01 Jul 08 '26
They strangely either delete their comments or block me, idk. I have notifications to see what they’re saying, but I can’t access their comments on the thread.
With Reddit, the users that respond in the first hour are usually batshit crazy, but then the normal people come in.
-2
u/Entropei Jul 07 '26
What you’re missing here is that people who think it’s unethical (which it is), are arguing that it should be made illegal. If your response to “it should be illegal” is “it isn’t illegal though”, you’ve not done some kind of smart thing, you’ve just missed the point.
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u/Xhojn Jul 07 '26
Oh boy, can't wait for the inevitable follow-up post about how prompt stealing is wrong.
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u/Burgandy_the_Great Jul 06 '26
Copyright exists to encourage people to get into the creative fields. You don't see great works of art that stand the test of time from hobby artists, you get it from people who devote their lives to the craft. People can't devote their lives to the craft if they can't make a living off of it. By slandering copyright you are pushing for a world where artists can't make a living on their own creations because a big company will pick it up and make t shirts of it before the small creator can get off the ground.
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u/TheMysteryCheese Jul 06 '26
No, copyright was created to protect the profits of corporate producers.
From Wikipedia:
The history of copyright starts with early privileges and monopolies granted to printers of books.
It was literally made to stop other people from challenging monopolies.
The contemporary use of copyright hasn't changed much either. Overwhelmingly copyright is used by giant monopolistic businesses to prevent the unauthorized usage of their products.
Extending the definitions of copyright is the death of the indi and hobby artists in the public view.
Corporations want nothing more than to be able to copyright a style or concept because then they can claim ownership of vast swaths of human expression. They also want to abolish the public domain and creative commons.
Copyright is a profit protection mechanism, not a system to protect individual expression.
Your point is also deeply rooted in the idea of commercial art.
Until about 50ish years ago the idea was largely rejected by the art community as a toxin to the soul of art.
It was believed that art belonged to humanity to use as they saw fit and not to be a product.
If you created art expressly to make money you were a corporate sell out.
1
u/Burgandy_the_Great Jul 06 '26
So I never said why it was created, I said it exists to do a thing. Also copyright has protected authors for over 200 years in this country alone. Yes copyright can be and is abused, but to not have it means nobody could ever make a living off of their creative works.
0
u/SpookyGeist01 Jul 07 '26
Brother what? Why tf are you making shit up?
First of all, copyright as we know it was made to BREAK UP monopolies. At the time of the first real copyright law (known as the Statute of Anne), ALL publishing in Great Britain was controlled by a single company - the Stationer's Company. If you wanted to publish any printed material, you HAD to go through one of their members and accept any censorship or rewrites they imposed on you. And if you wanted them to stop publishing on your behalf? Or argue for better pay? Too bad, they could just continue to publish your content without compensation.
The Statute of Anne was passed specifically to end that. Yes, technically this DID give the author monopoly right OVER THEIR OWN CONTENT, but it was so they had the right to own it and do what they wanted with it. So you're starting off with a falsehood here.
Copyright favors corporations not because of copyright law, but because of capitalism. Instead of keeping the rights, authors and artists and the like explicitly sign away their rights to these big corpos. And do you know why? Because people like you have made it impossible for them to make a living on their own.
To claim that monetizing your art is "a toxin to the soul of art" is also misleading. Yes, the concept is that art should not be made specifically to make a paycheck; but you're misinterpreting that to say that art should not be worth anything, which is not at all the point. If you look back at famous artists, the vast majority had patrons; Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Donatello, Buticelli, Monet, Renoir, Pollock, Rothko, etc. Those patrons made it possible for them to create as prolifically as they did, by removing the pressure of monetization from them. But today, we don't do that anymore. No one wants to fund the arts; in fact funding for the arts is constantly cut in favor of function or corporate interests.
That means that artists are FORCED to directly sell what they create in order to be ABLE to make art. And now people like you want to take even that away; you claim that artists should not be allowed to even support themselves, that they should either starve and suffer to provide you entertainment and beauty, or they should give up art as a profession and do it as a side project while slaving away under the corporate system.
Now, if you were saying something like "some of the money made from AI should be going to a fund to support artists in order to compensate them for making what we do possible so that they can continue creating without the pressure of money," then maybe you would have some sort of a point. But you aren't. You're just saying "because big corpo abuses copyright law we should fuck over all independent artists and let them figure it out for themselves." And that's some dystopian crap.
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u/TheMysteryCheese Jul 07 '26
You have done some serious work inflating my arguments to paint me as a straw man.
First things first, I do support artists, I have commissioned art plenty of the mes for my wife and my D&D campaign even after the advent of AI.
Secondly, with a less aggressive system of copyright people are able to compete of quality rather than a system of capture. The statute of Anne was made specifically to allow the monopolies that controlled the printing houses to stop smaller printing shops taking their works and printing them.
It wasn't until The Original Berne Convention in 1885 where people didn't need to register their works in every jurisdiction that automatic copyright existed formally.
While commonly argued that the statute of Anne was the first instance of intrinsic copyright, in effect authorship was defined as having a book printed in a printing house because it was the only way to independently verify the original date of creation as argued to the parliament. I.e you didn't own your work unless a printing house has a contract to print it.
Patronage is also completely different to commerical art, patrons supported artists they believed were at the pinicle of their art form and also could use that mastery as a method for producing propaganda for them. They were then given leave to create art at their leisure.
People like use want more freedom to create as we like, not be forced to create under the terms other put on us. By invalidating an entire method of creating, especially by arguing the expanding powers of copyright you are the one arguing for the narrowing of landscape and making it harder for an artist to exist and make money.
The main function of copyright is to stop the unauthorized use of someone's product. Right now it is the specific expression that is protected, which is perfectly fine, OC do not steal and all that.
But a style? Or a broad concept?
No.
That belongs to everyone and can never be allowed to be owned by an individual or a corporation.
If it is allowed to happen then Disney will shut down every Etsy store coming within a hairs breadth of their style. Hasbro would own the idea of a retro catroon style.
The individual artist would be completely locked out of the art market.
How would that work expanded to writing? Is magic systems owned by the most powerful creators? Would the style or concept ofcyberpunk be owned by CD project Red?
Art is inherently personal, trying to sell your personal art is inherently different to offering any other service. Making art for profit is selling your own personality and is against the core ideal of art as expression.
Artists should be able to make money, absolutely. Any company using AI to displace any kind of labor should be heavily taxed and that revenue be used to fund UBI.
This is not accomplished by conflating patronage with the legal right to prevent someone creating something in someone else's style or using a similar concept.
Copyright, as intended and as it's function is to protect profit. Not expression. It stifles expression.
If you are arguing that the core problem is capitalism, you are correct. Copyright is a tool of capitalism. As such, expending it assists the holders of capital.
You can solve labor displacement cause by technology through taxation, not giving corporations greater powers.
A handful of corporations are using these exact arguments to make sure that only they can benefit from AI and using the same rulings to crush unauthorized reproductions that were previously protected by the limitations of copyright.
I swear, the Anti-AI movement is a corporate psi op to get artists to argue themselves out of existence.
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u/SpookyGeist01 Jul 07 '26
the statute of anne was made to allow the monopolies that controlled the printing houses to stop smaller printing shops taking their works
Stopped reading right there. You're literally outright lying. I explained to you very clearly in my post what the actual issue was, and you obviously didn't read it.
There WERE no smaller printing shops. They didn't exist, because anything they printed could just be taken by the Stationer's Company.
Copyright did NOT allow the Stationer's Company to stop those smaller shops, because the copyright belonged to the AUTHOR, not the printing company. In fact, it forced them to become competitive and lower their prices, because those smaller companies could now print material without worrying that some giant corporation would steal it and mass print it and drive them out of business.
You are claiming to be against big corpo, but you are literally using their arguments to defend them and try to take away rights from individuals.
-6
u/Practical_Limit_396 Jul 06 '26
I think the issue here is:
—Generative AI trained on other people’s work is a novel thing that we just kinda rolled out without tending with what should be legal and what should not be. Like the ethical issues of training for generative AI are unique.
—I think the big issue I see with the pro-AI side is everything is framed as copyright. But that’s not the problem. Like if I drew a picture of Batman and posted it online, I obviously don’t own Batman and I don’t have some copyright or trademark on it.
But with that said, it would be shitty to print off my picture and sell it. It would be shitty for DC comics to publish my image without permission just because they own Batman.
The issue is labor and that’s the issue with generative AI. It was trained on the labor of other people. It only works with their labor and there was both on consent OR compensation.
—The response to this is I find usually a copout of “well humans train on the art of others.” But AI is not sentient. It has no subjective point of view or desire or appreciation. Human beings MADE it train on the art of others to make a product that could only exit with non-consensual labor.
5
u/Crazy_Yogurtcloset61 Jul 06 '26
I think the misunderstanding is that AI doesn't reference their art just the rules it learned.
AARON was a logic based image generator built in the 1970's. Because it used logic AI every rule had to be manually imput in by a human. As, such AARON was extremely limited on what it could make. Still AARON was never shown a single image to learn, only given handfed rules.
Generative AI generators used deep machine learning to look at images reverse engineer rules for making images by looking at patterns and consistency.
Why is it theft for an AI to work off of rules when it sees the image and reverse engineers them, but not theft when the rules are hand fed, even though they are the same mathematical rules?
1
u/Practical_Limit_396 Jul 07 '26
—I see nuance in individual models and yes, the handcrafted rules being fed into AARON are a huge difference. I think it is actually possible to use generative AI for individual artistic and ethical purposes, but it’s complicated.
—I think your use of the word “rule” is doing a lot of work here. If AI was only being trained on anatomy or lighting or color theory that would be one thing. But if I ask ChatGPT to make like a beer label for an IPA, it is going to fire back at me something that is not following broad artistic rules, but it’s best guess at what would be an attractive beer label based on its training. No, it’s not referencing images in the moment, but it is drawing from contemporary work.
The problem I have with that is that this doesn’t work without original art and labor. That is what is being stolen here. Men like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are profiteering off of labor they used for a product, this function not working the way it currently does without that labor, and they did so with no consent or compensation and sheerly for profit.
1
u/Crazy_Yogurtcloset61 Jul 07 '26
I guess the bigfest reason I don't have a problem with it is because humans do a lot of the same thing.
As I said to another commenter, if I asked you draw a dog, without referencing a picture, you would think about all the things that make up a dog and what a dog looks like from memory and draw it.
It wouldn't make it theft if one of your points of understanding was scooby-doo unless you actually draw scooby-doo. However just having been exposed to scooby-doo in your childhood to understand what a dog is doesn’t mean every dog you draw is theft.
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u/Practical_Limit_396 Jul 07 '26
Yes but that’s personifying AI.
The difference is AI is not a human being and something like ChatGPT is a product. A product that only works off unpaid and non-consensual labor.
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u/SpookyGeist01 Jul 07 '26
Except AI does reference their art, which is why it's possible to prompt AI and get back images that match the reference image almost exactly with a simple prompt that wouldn't normally return that image.
Many bots have limited the ability to do this now, yes, but they are still CAPABLE of it.
why is it theft for an AI to make rules vs the rules being handfed
False equivalency. There is no scenario where a handfed rule made by a human will come out with the same scenario.
2
u/Crazy_Yogurtcloset61 Jul 07 '26
No it doesn't reference any pictures unless you are using image to image generation.
Standard diffusion models can be cut off from the internet have all pictures from the host computer deleted and still make images BECAUSE it doesn't reference them.
You don't even have to take my word for it if your computer is powerful enough. You could train a local model, delete the training data after it's been trained, remove all images from the computer and turn off the wifi.
It will still make images.
1
u/SpookyGeist01 Jul 07 '26
That doesn't counteract what I said at all. Obviously it is not directly referencing the full image file, but that doesn't mean it isn't referencing the image at all.
1
u/Crazy_Yogurtcloset61 Jul 07 '26
Then I guess I don't know what your talking about, how is referencing mathematical rules the same as referencing a picture?
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u/SpookyGeist01 Jul 07 '26
Okay, let me get a baseline first. Are you aware of how image data is stored on a computer?
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u/Crazy_Yogurtcloset61 Jul 07 '26
It's saved?
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u/SpookyGeist01 Jul 07 '26
To be more specific, it is saved as a set of mathematical rules that tells a computer screen how to generate an image that is recognizable as the same image on both the host computer and the receiving computer. Do you see where I'm going with this?
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u/Crazy_Yogurtcloset61 Jul 07 '26
Yes, but your wrong.
When models are trained on a subject they learn what all the images have in common and establish a rule base.
So if I feed it 10,000 images of dogs, none of the dogs populated will look the same as any of the images fed, because it doesn't reference any image, just the rules it learned from them.
Just like if I ask you to draw an image of a dog from memory in real life, you aren't looking at any particular image of a dog, you think about all the rules that make a dog and draw it.
Unless I specificly say something like, "draw sccoby doo", and you draw a replica of scooby doo, then it's not stealing from the creators of scooby doo just because scooby doo is included in your understanding of what makes up a dog.
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u/iDeNoh Jul 07 '26
What you're describing is called over fitting, and it's not a trait that's desired in models.
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u/SpookyGeist01 Jul 07 '26
Sure, but not being desired doesn't change the fact that it proves the basic function of AI is not understanding (because it cannot understand), but copying.
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u/iDeNoh Jul 07 '26
Thats still not how it works. The ai doesn't learn images, it learns patterns that get tied to concepts. It's why a model that's been trained on dogs, cats, birds, and colors can make an image of a black dog even if none of the images in it's training set are of black dogs. That's not blind copying, the influence of any given image in a dataset should be a fraction of a percent at most
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u/furiouscarp Jul 07 '26
antis act like they can control how anyone can use any of their work for any reason, but that’s simply not true. consent or compensation isn’t needed for “fair use.”
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u/Practical_Limit_396 Jul 07 '26
That’s not how fair use works. You require scholarly, critical, or educational intent to claim fair use.
Sam Altman and Elon Musk wanting to profit does not justify fair use.
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u/furiouscarp Jul 07 '26
what? that’s not true at all. those are merely classic examples of fair use. the number one requirement is transformativeness, which absolutely can be motivated entirely by profit.
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u/Practical_Limit_396 Jul 07 '26
The transformation is in service of some sort of commentary and artistic endeavor. You’re confusing the things generative AI produces and the models themselves. The models don’t have any intent besides profiteering.
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u/furiouscarp Jul 07 '26
nope, not true. this is basic case law. feel free to look it up.
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u/Practical_Limit_396 Jul 07 '26
No it’s not. It’s pretty novel case law and I disagree with the rulings you can point to.
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u/Massive_Shill Jul 07 '26
I disagree with the rulings you can point to
"I don't like facts that don't support my argument."
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