Is AI Art "Theft"?
Some Reddit admins are banning AI art. Why?
I caught this post on the Maryland Reddit recently:
New rule: No AI art
After a post gained interest here yesterday, someone reached out to us asking what our policy is on AI art and asked us to consider establishing rules on it, anything from disclosure to forbidding it.
So we talked amongst ourselves and here's what we came up with: AI art is art theft and it will not be allowed here.
Read more:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-ai-art-stealing-from-artists
https://www.engadget.com/dall-e-generative-ai-tracking-data-privacy-160034656.html
This isn't a rule we expect to go to often. This is literally the first time we've had to think about it on this sub. But we felt the need to draw a line.
As someone responded: This feels really random for a Maryland subreddit but alright
My opinion is that these bans are silly. I understand AI is threatening creative work; and it’s already impacted my ability to do freelance writing. But you can either roll with the times or stomp your feet.
The reality is, learning from existing images to create new images is what human beings do all the time, the AI is just doing this for us. And that is not theft.
Were Leonardo da Vinci alive today, could he sue me for a Scream-inspired Mona Lisa? Why? Does he own the idea of a black-haired woman sitting with her hands in her lap? Is the AI generated picture above not sufficiently different from the real thing?
Here are a few comments on the r/maryland post:
You cite sources about diffusion models trained on other people's work, which is fine, but the pic that prompted this was just a photo filter. People are quick nowadays to view any processed image as AI, even if it was just a photobash or rudimentary filter, so hopefully people will understand the difference.
The line is now blurred. I can take an image I created and manipulate it with AI. There’s AI generated and AI manipulated. And some images might contain components of both human and AI generated imagery.
I further agree with the following poster:
It’s no more theft than me painting a picture in the style of X.
If I submitted a painting that I made of a crab against a backdrop of the MD flag, but in the style of Salvador Dali, would that be rejected?
What if I have Stable Diffusion create an image for me, and then I recreated it myself with paint on canvas, or in photoshop (which has ai features) - would that be rejected?
What if I just don’t tell you that my submission was generated?
How about text posts? I could have had this post generated by an LLM.
Just curious because it seems an odd stance for r/maryland
What do you think? Share in the comments below:
Stephanie, I agree completely. They are idiots, all.