I heard a bunch of explanations but most of them seem emotional and aggressive, and while I respect that this is an emotional subject, I can’t really understand opinions that boil down to “theft” and are aggressive about it.
while there are plenty of models that were trained on copyrighted material without consent (which is piracy, not theft but close enough when talking about small businesses or individuals) is there an argument against models that were legally trained? And if so, is it something past the saying that AI art is lifeless?
From an artists view, it basically makes them obsolete. Sucks. Also, legally trained AI has a lot less training data, therefore worse output and so illegal models will always be preferred.
From a tech view, AI does not create anything new. It remixes. If we remove artists, which will happen as AIs are simply cheaper, we won’t have anything new. From there on, you can imagine it like that: An artist creates images that are 99-100% of what the goal was, dictated by clients or digitally identified by tags, due to logic, reason, creativity and communication. And they only get better. With AIs, they have like 90% accuracy, due to technical limitations. And once a generated image, which only has 90% accuracy, is used as training data for new images, it only gets worse.
For example, if there are enough images with 6 fingers, created by AI, in training data, that will become the norm.
Basically, authors, artists etc. will be obsolete for a few years, until the AI bubble mostly collapses and quality is so bad that companies and individuals hire professionals again. Then AIs will be used for low-requirement things only again, eg. private memes or roleplay.
So artists are probably angry because they are replaced by much inferior things, that leeched off of themselves and will be gone in a few years anyway. AI just does not make sense, in most cases.
This response assumes an artist wants to be a professional artist, that wants to make a living from it. There are MANY artists, that have no interest of turning their source of joy, into a source of income, and all that comes with it.
Exactly. I have no intention of selling my art and I object strongly to it being used by some company for their own profit. That’s mine, wtf makes them think they can use it, regardless of its current monetisation status?