Part 2 of 4 in a series about AI and artistic creation.
No, but it’s much worse than theft lol.
That first line is my entire opinion on the matter. I will elaborate, of course – good luck catching me with nothing to say- but feel free to skip to part 3 if you want to move on to the really interesting bits.
The argument that AI content is theft more or less boils down to how LLM databases are trained. As such, I’m ignoring the actions of the individual using Generative AI in favor of decisions that corporation training LLMs make, for now.
The massive libraries pull from all over the internet, including a ridiculous amount of copyrighted material. There is an interesting discussion to be had about whether or not this method of LLM training is copyright infringement – and we’ll come back to that – but that’s mostly irrelevant when asking if it’s “theft.” You can read my first blog post to understand better, but copyright infringement and theft aren’t meaningfully related.
However, it is much worse than theft. I may do a full logistical breakdown of this, but in a series about art, this is a tangential point. That said, what’s really happening is that the rules of copyright (and privacy) are being explicitly broken for those with enough wealth and capital. The rules of what is and isn’t acceptable use under copyright are being redefined to allow companies like Google and Microsoft to pollute the copyright ecosystem to such an absurd degree that no one except the absolute wealthiest could ever hope to defend their IPs.
I was being facetious earlier, as I do have one more meaningful point to make about all this. I am so tired of this discussion. The condemnation of AI “artists,” as lazy thieves is so unbelievably uninteresting to me. It seems reasonably true that the average academic – in STEM anyways – has a fundamental misunderstanding of art, the creation process, and why people are so worked up about AI art. I will get there next blog post. I do care about that, believe me. But I don’t care to condemn them for it, because people aren’t going to be shamed out of their lack of understanding. They aren’t going to be shamed out of anti-intellectualism. They’re just going to respond negatively and go back to their circles that they enjoy. Anyways. On to more interesting things.