There's a pretty clear difference in the two. If piracy ended in a new digital good that removes the market for the original good while eliminating the jobs of those that made the original good, then it'd be close. Even then pretty much everyone agrees not all piracy is the same; you wouldn't pirate an indie game that hasn't sold well unless you're an absolute piece of subhuman shit.

[–] Stovetop 2 points 2 days ago

I really enjoyed the "Hobbit: Extended Edition" project which condensed the three films of the Hobbit trilogy down into a single film, and as an unofficial fan-made project, is only available online for free.

Under that proposed gradient, I'm not sure where that would fall, given that it is a transformative work which uses the work of others to make them redundant (in this case, the original trilogy and the studios which would have otherwise profited from those sales).

I feel like there's a better way to divide it, but it will be difficult to negotiate the exact line against the long-held contradictory ideas that art should both be divorced from its creator once released but also that the creator is entitled to full control and profit until the expiry of its copyright.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

well uh, idk how to break it to you but it kinda does.

Piracy doesn't equal a 1:1 sale, that argument is true, however that argument works with both AI and piracy plus it goes both ways.

The more people who do it via the free method, the less people who /may/ have bought it via the paid method. Meaning the less profit/earnings for the affected party.

However, since it goes both ways, obtaining the item via the free method does not mean that they would have purchased the paid good if the free good wasn't available.

Both versions the original market is still available, regardless of method used.

I highly disagree that piracy and AI are any different at least in the scenario you provided.

if anything AI would be a morally higher ground imo, as it isn't directly taking a product, it's making something else using other products.

Being said I believe that CC's should be paid for the training usage, but that's a whole different argument.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's not solely about pay, but also what your work is used for. It makes sense you don't understand this if you've never created anything, artwise or otherwise. If I draw a picture I control who displays that picture and for what purpose. If someone I don't like uses that picture without permission it reflects poorly on me, and destroys my rights.

The easy example is an art piece by a Holocaust survivor being used by a neonazi without permission.

Now imagine you steal tens of millions of artists work. You know for a fact you don't have the licenses needed to ensure their work is used to their liking.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

I don’t make art myself, the closest I come is software development, which is already heavily scraped and used for training AI models. So, I agree that I might not fully understand, especially since my field tends to embrace assistive tools.

That said, I think the idea that AI-generated art reflects poorly on the original artist is a bit of a misnomer/self inflicted. When someone looks at an AI-generated piece, they’re not going to think, "Oh, that was by Liyunxiao," because the end product isn’t a direct copy of any specific work. The models don’t store or reproduce the original source data, they learn patterns based off the source material, and then reapply them using what they have learned, often with a lot of randomization(as shown by it's sometimes blatant inability to show realistic looking outputs)

While I believe we agree with the statement that work should have the artists permission before usage in a training model, or at the very least be paid for their usage instead of it just being scraped, I think both are comparable. One makes a new piece of art using what its "learned" off traits the training set had, one copies an existing piece of art. Neither prevent anyone from using the original source(artist or game studio), and they both are done usually against the wishes of the original team.

Being said, the example provided I think works better when compared to piracy, as at least at that point it's a 1:1 clone instead of a creative works. As a art piece by a holocaust survivor being thrown into a training set on a diffusion model, wouldn't come out the same image on the other end. Only a generalization and styleset is saved. At the end of the day, nobody has the ability to know where the diffusion art's original sources came from nor is it able to produce a picture that is recognizable to an artists style, whereas with piracy you have a piece of work you can look up to see who owned it.

That's just my opinion on it all though.