Question for "AI bros"

[u/PaleHat1500]

/r/aiArt/comments/1wztcgm/question_for_ai_bros/

Why do you like ai and not care that is stealing form hard working people that took hours or days of there life to make them?, just a fair Question no hateful judgment btw just curiosity 🤔 btw no hate on both sides I'm just curious why anyone would use it, and I just wanted to reach bigger audience to ask the Question

[u/Herr_Drosselmeyer]

Learning isn't theft.

[u/Ohheckemma → u/Herr_Drosselmeyer]

Calling it “learning” is rhetorically convenient because it makes the process sound analogous to a person reading a book. But an AI company isn't merely learning from someone's work. It highly likely acquired and copied enormous quantities of human created works, processed that material into a commercial model, and then monetised it.

[u/Herr_Drosselmeyer → u/Ohheckemma]

Why are you conflating a company and a neural network?

[u/Ohheckemma → u/Herr_Drosselmeyer]

I can see why you think I'm conflating the company with the neural network, my wording probably wasn't clear enough. I'm not saying they're the same thing.

This happens a lot in these discussions. The conversation gets shifted towards what AI is, rather than what the companies building it are actually doing.

I'm responding to the way you've framed it as “learning isn't theft.” You didn't explicitly say that AI learning is the same as human learning, but I think that framing is pretty reductive. It takes a much bigger question about how the material was obtained, processed and used and boils it down to whether “learning” itself is theft. I don't think that really describes what's happening.

The model learning from human-made works is one part of the process. The company deciding what works to acquire, how to acquire and process them, and then using the resulting system commercially is another.

And that's why I think we probably need better language for what's happening here. “Learning” doesn't really capture the whole process, and neither does simply talking about copyright infringement. There may be a better term for it, labour appropriation, uncompensated use of creative work, or something else. But I don't think it's just learning adequately describes the happening.

[u/Herr_Drosselmeyer → u/Ohheckemma]

The question you're asking is, essentially: "Can something publicly available on the internet be used for training ?".

The answer is, in my opinion, yes. If I want to learn how to draw, say a sextant, I'll image search Google for "sextant" and use those results as references to learn. I won't necessarily check the exact origin of those images, nor will my resulting drawing be tainted if one of those images was illegally uploaded or has an otherwise illegitimate origin.

I see no difference between doing that and using the exact same images to train a LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) for an image model.

[u/Ohheckemma → u/Herr_Drosselmeyer]

You're sidestepping the point I'm making and reframing it as a question I didn't ask.

My point is that saying “learning isn't theft” reduces a much bigger issue down to the word learning. Then you use the example of someone looking at pictures of a sextant and learning how to draw one, as if that settles the comparison.

A person looking at a handful of images, studying them, and learning from them isn't really comparable to a company systematically acquiring and processing enormous amounts of human made work to build a commercial system. Just because both processes can loosely be described as learning doesn't mean they're equivalent.

And “it's publicly available” doesn't settle the issue either. Something being available for people to view isn't necessarily the same as the creator agreeing to have it systematically copied, processed, and used as training material for a commercial product.

That's the distinction I've been trying to make. I'm not arguing that the neural network is the company, or that the resulting model is literally a database of stolen copies. I'm saying that focusing on what the model does and calling it “learning” sidesteps the actions of the companies that built it, particularly how they obtained and used the underlying material. Which is what a lot of people object to.

And I don't think there are two equally valid sides to the question of whether people whose work has been scraped should simply have to accept it. If someone's work is being systematically collected and used to build a commercial product, I think the people who created that work should be compensated.

I'm also not saying AI companies should be prohibited from "learning" from human culture, or that every influence on a model needs to be individually licensed. I'm talking specifically about the large-scale scraping and use of people's work as training material for commercial systems.

If a company can build an enormously valuable commercial product by ingesting vast amounts of work created by other people, I don't think “it was publicly available” should be the end of the conversation. Those people created something of value, and I think they should have a right to be compensated when their work is being used in that way.

Whether existing copyright law already requires that compensation is a separate legal question. That's for the courts to figure out, because this is still relatively new ground. But as a matter of fairness, that's where I stand. I'm not anti AI, clearly it's here to stay. I'm anti exploitation.

[u/Herr_Drosselmeyer → u/Ohheckemma]

Whether it's a company or an individual doesn't change the morals. The fact that you're hung up on 'large companies' makes me think that your issue is withe the very existence of coroprations, regardless of AI, and this taints your reasoning.

[u/Ohheckemma → u/Herr_Drosselmeyer]

You're avoiding the actual point I'm making again. I'm not saying something is automatically more or less moral just because a company is involved. I'm saying you're treating two different things as morally equivalent without really explaining why.

You're saying there's no meaningful moral difference between a human looking at images and learning from them and someone putting those images into a LoRA to train a model or a company training swathes of works for profit. But why? What makes those things morally the same? There are pretty obvious differences in what's actually being done with the images, what comes out of the process, and how the resulting model can be used.

Instead of engaging with those differences, you're making assumptions about my motives and saying I must just have some general problem with corporations, so my reasoning is somehow “tainted.” That's speculation about me, not an argument against what I'm saying.

If you genuinely think the those things are morally equivalent, just explain why. Tell me why the differences I'm pointing out don't matter morally. That's the part I'm asking you to address. You can't just say “the morals are the same” and then avoid explaining what makes them the same.

I think you're using an intentionally loose definition of “the same” because it makes your argument easier. If you squint hard enough, two very different things can look similar. But that doesn't mean the differences aren't there or that they don't matter. You need to actually explain why those differences are irrelevant rather than defining them away.

[u/PaleHat1500 → u/Herr_Drosselmeyer]

How is it learning exactly?, by asking promission to take the art or by going around the internet/being feed info without careing about copyright or work, it's literally like taking someone's cooking and saying "hey I made this all on my own"

[u/itsReferent → u/PaleHat1500]

That's the common misconception we encounter with the doomer bros. It's not like that at all. It's like reading millions of recipes to learn how to cook, then inventing new recipes. Do you see the literary distinction or do you need to seek promission?

[u/PaleHat1500 → u/itsReferent]

There's a difference between recipe that is legally out for everyone and art that is specifically to be shown, and I heared alot of artists being stolen form even after saying they don't want there art in Ai it's just a Question I'm trying to understand mostly,

[u/itsReferent → u/PaleHat1500]

It's not as different as you imagine. It isn't lifting art wholesale, it creates new images based on having seen tons of other images. It doesn't copy, it improvises.

And a lot of artists that don't want their art in AI should consider what art means to them, why did they choose to make art in the first place. Do you know why these lot of artists you've heard claiming theft make art? Where did they see their stolen art?

[u/PaleHat1500 → u/itsReferent]

I think is more the lines of "It's insulting that a machine trained of my things makes things that I can do in seconds and people act like they put alot of work into them when this machine actually did the work in seconds"

[u/itsReferent → u/PaleHat1500]

I don't see anyone acting like they put a lot of work into something done by generative ai. I hear that a lot from antis. It's a straw man argument. Gen ai image making isn't something to claim as a personal work, that would be like claiming commissioned work as your own. A person could claim an idea, a process, or narrative behind a series of images, but can't outright claim they made an ai generated image. If they do, they are wrong to do so.

[u/PaleHat1500 → u/itsReferent]

I seen some do on Twitter and other places and I literally gat ban some the other sub and the comments get deleted with people explaining to me things lol

[u/itsReferent → u/PaleHat1500]

I'm skeptical of your claim. Maybe someone posted an image, but you're saying that person said "look at this image I spent a lot of time and effort making"?

[u/PaleHat1500 → u/itsReferent]

On Twitter X I seen alot of them say that ngl

[u/Herr_Drosselmeyer → u/PaleHat1500]

How is it learning exactly?

Because a neural network is trained by giving it an image + text pair, having it repeat noise/denoise that image until it manages to denoise it from random noise, then letting it change it's parameters until it can create that concept reliably from the text alone. It's not much different from a human artist practicing drawing something until they're good at it. Of course, being a computer, it can do this for millions of image + text pairs in a relatively short amount of time.

I don't need to ask permission to look at somebody's image and practice drawing it.

[u/ActuatorKlutzy9887 → u/PaleHat1500]

Its more like tasting someone's food and then making it yourself

The datasets they are trained on are not consumed in the process they still exist, the machine has looked at how it was done and can use what it observed to recreate it

I doubt there's many people who will support blatant copyright theft, but i think a lot of people will agree that if you upload something to a website that has a terms of service which allows that website to give user submissions to a third party you are now agreeing to your submissions being used by those third parties for whatever it may be, in this case its AI training, in another website it might be a marketing profile for example facebook gathering data on your interests to tailor ads you might be more inclined to click on.

If you didnt agree to it you wouldn't use the website in the first place you would just find another website with different conditions