An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model

edit: That's because she is a storybook illustrator! I should have checked the video too.

It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists.

Remember the naive rallying cry among those who thought everyone should have the right to all music, without any compensation for the artist?

"Information wants to be free!" (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/24/napster-music-...)

Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. ... It ceased operations in 2001 after losing a wave of lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.

Use of the output of systems like Copilot or Stable Diffusion becomes a violation of copyright.

The weight tensors are illegal to possess, just like it's illegal to possess leaked Intel source code. The weights are like distilled intellectual property. You're distributing an enormous body of other people's work, to enable derivative work without attribution? Huge harm to society, make it illegal.

If you use the art in your product, on your website, etc., you risk legal action. Just like if I publish your album on my website. Illegal.

The companies that train these systems can't distribute them without risking legal action. So they won't do it. It's expensive to train these models. When it's illegal, the criminals will have to pay for the GPU time.

It will always exist in the black-market underground, but the civilized world makes it illegal.

That's where this is going, I hope. Best case scenario.

Art is not digging holes. But some of it is and more of it will become it in the future.

So sure, we can empathize with someone feeling kind of off about the situation. But at the same time its kind of eh, that's how the world is.

I suspect the only acceptable answer here is to disallow AI training of copyrighted material, but this only delays the models supplanting the actual artists (because people will contribute to and build up a pool of copyright-free training material), it doesn't prevent the ultimate issue of people being replaced by AI.

We can trust that a human creator who apes the style of another human creator will do so with a preponderance of flaws such that their works are distinguishable. AI doesn’t operate like that and the case can’t be made that somehow both the AI and the person spontaneously landed on a certain style like it could with two human beings. As the commenters say in the article, the AI couldn’t generate anything without the original works.

Apropos of nothing, her art style really isn’t that original. Her style itself clearly apes illustration styles of the 40s and 50s. I guess copying never goes out of style.

See I don't understand this. Training an AI using this content is legal, but how is copying it in the first place to use not illegal? This is what I never understand about these AI cases. If I copy a Youtube video I'm breaking the law, but if I then use my illegal copy to train an AI it retroactively makes my copying legal?

Isn't this what a lot of these AI models use though? Pretty much anything trained on data from the internet is going to be largely copyrighted, no?

Artists have had less and less influence on anything beyond mindless consumption during our generation. So no surprise where the story goes. Without influence you can't control what the machine does.

To take that criticism further, the original artist took Disney art subjects and applied a nickelodeon animation style to it.

Hopefully the artist can appreciate the irony of claiming that it is _her_ style being ripped off when everything in the examples shown is clearly pop art, categorically defined by predominant social influences, and not something which came from her artistic perspective.

In an ecosystem we might say 'fit data is what makes it into the next generation no matter the species'. In a 20th century economy, we might say 'the creator should benefit from her work'. But we're not in either of those. We care more about the Hollie Mengerts of the world than their impact on the future evolution of art. Or more precisely, we care more about the right incentives being present for Hollie Mengert than how those incentives play out in this individual case. But that influence on future art is also undeniably part of the incentive structure for an artist today.

This seems like a classic wicked problem - does anyone know of a group engaging with it?

And another important point that's buried, is that most of the art used to train the model is actually owned by her clients such as Disney. So, she could not, even if she wanted to, give permission to use that content.

IOW, the person training the model was just fine with stealing the artwork.

While the artist seems to not be litigious, it'll be interesting to see if the major rights-holders like Disney start going after the AI model companies and/or the people that train the models, if they find that there is output of their properties.

This automated generation of code, text, art, etc., is really nothing more than sophisticated sampling/mashup, and when you use snippets in your work output, it should be credited and properly compensated. This is rapidly amounting to automated creation theft engines.

Worse yet, thinking ahead a bit, once they've all been trained on the available works, and all the writers, artists, & coders have been put out of work, progress will stagnate, because the "AI"s will generate nothing new, only continuously regurgitating bits and mashups of what is now old stuff.

As mentioned before "style" is not something subject to copyright and the model creates a model of that style. The process of finetuning a model generally means that one would not want to recreate the original images as that would overfit it and render it, essentially useless.

When it comes to code, there is a higher chance of getting a one-to-one clone of the input as the options used in creating an algorithm, or even a simple function are dramatically reduced imo.

1. Training an AI model on code (so far) makes it regurgitate code line-for-line (with comments!). This is like "learning to code" by just cut and pasting working code from other codebases, you have to follow the license. The AI doesn't "understand the algorithm" at all (or it hasn't been told "don't export the input you fool"). Obviously a bog-simple AI could make all licenses moot by dumping out what it input, and the courts wouldn't permit that.

2. Training an AI model on illustrations so far produces "style parodies" which may look similar to an untrained eye (the artist here is annoyed because she'd not art like that, even though to us it looks similar enough). Drawing a picture that looks like Mickey Mouse is a trademark violation, but tracing a picture of the Mouse is both a trademark and a copyright violation.

The first violates some pretty clear legal concepts; the second is closer to violating moral concepts but those are more flexible - if an artist spends years learning to paint in the style of Michelangelo is that immoral?

That’s one reason why it is probably better to have a derived world view than a contrived world view.

I think one of the differences is that people are seeing non-trivial amounts of copyrighted code being output by AI models.

If a 262,144 pixel image has a few 2x2 squares copied directly, you can't tell.

If a 300 line source file has 20 lines copied directly from a copyrighted source, well, that is more blatant.

> the original images themselves aren’t stored in the Stable Diffusion model, with over 100 terabytes of images used to create a tiny 4 GB model

Is jpeg compression transformative then? Should a compressed image of something not be copyrightable because “it doesn’t store” the “real image”? How about compressed video? Where do we draw the line?

Code generation models need to have special handling for checking if the generated code falls under copyright.

There's something quantitative in code that you don't get in drawings, drawings the unique quality is purely qualitative, so it is hard to demonstrate what exactly it was that was ripped off. When you find your exact words being returned by a code helper AI it's hard to pretend that it's not directly and plainly just copy pasting code snippets.

(See my other comment though, I am not sold on any of this being right).

From that view let the data be free.

Indeed it seems like code will be vastly more prone to this problem compared to art because changing a single pixel is merely a question of aesthetics whereas code is constrained tightly by the syntax of the language. With a much smaller space of correct results duplication is likely inevitable.

ps. I'm surprised music has not yet been yet leveled by AI, can't wait for "dimmu borgir christmas carols" prompts.

Well, maybe they were all just downvoted into invisibility. But up to your post, I have seen none.

IANAL, but to a first-order approximation: everything is "copyrighted" [1]. The copyright is owned by someone/something. The owner gets to set the terms of the licensing. The rare things not under copyright may have been put explicitly into the public domain (which actually takes some effort), or have had their copyright expire (which takes quite a while; thanks Disney).

So: this is really a question about fair use [2], and about when the terms of licensing kick in, and it should be understood and discussed as such. I don't think anyone who has really thought about this is claiming that the models can't be trained on (copyrighted) material; the consumption of the material is not the problem, is it? The problem is that the models: (1) sometimes recreate particular inputs or identifiable parts of them (like the Getty watermark), or recreate some essential characteristics of their inputs (like possibly trademark-able stylistic elements), AND ALSO, (2) have no way of attributing the output to the input.

Without being able to identify anything specific about the input, it is impossible know with certainty that the output falls within fair use (e.g. because it was sufficiently transformative), and it is impossible to know how to implement the terms of licensing for things that don't fall within fair use. There's just no getting around that with the current crop of models.

The legal minefield is not from (1) or (2), but from (1)+(2), at the moment of redistribution, monetized or not. Even if Copilot was only trained on non-reciprocal licenses (BSD, MIT), there are very likely still licensing terms of use, which may include identifying the original copyright owner. Reciprocal licenses like GPL have more involved licensing terms, but that is not the problem: the problem is failure to identify the original licensing terms. We should not use these models as an opportunity to make an issue about GPL or its authors, or about the business model of companies like Getty; both rest on copyright, and come to our attention because of licensing.

Sorry about the rant. As for your question: I think it may be as simple as: to what extent are readers here the producers of inputs to the ML models, versus consumers of outputs. It gets personal for coders when models violate licensing terms of FOSS code, but it feels fun/empowering to wield the models to make images that we'd otherwise be unable to access. From my rant above you can tell that whether its for code or images, I think the whole thing is an IP disaster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Copyleft is a license that weakens copyright (and thus inherently good :)), so using machine learning to weaken copyleft by allowing you to copyright "clones" of copyleft code is bad.

If I try to generalize here, the problem in both cases is only if you produce copyrighted works, especially if you trained on copyleft works. If instead both models would stipulate that all produced works are copyleft I would be much more fine with it (and I feel it would respect the license of the copyleft works it was trained on, even if that may be legally shaky).

The loudest voices complaining they were directly hurt by Copilot's training are open source maintainers. These are exactly the kind of people who we love to root for on here. They're the little guy involved in a labor of love, giving away their work for free (with terms).

On the other hand, the highest-profile victims of Stable Diffusion and DALL-E are Getty Images and company. They're in most respects the opposite of open source maintainers: big companies worth millions of dollars for doing comparatively little work (primarily distributing photos other people took).

Because in the case of images the victim is most prominently faceless corporations, I think our collective bias towards "information wants to be free" shows through more clearly when regarding DALL-E than it does with Copilot.

For art, train on contributed images whose authors agree to use them for that purpose. There could be some organization, perhaps a nonprofit, that would own the images and users of the model could credit that organization, and perhaps contribute back their own generated work. That way a legally clean commons could be built and could grow.

It is clear to anyone that understands this tech that it is not simply "memorizing" or "copying" the training data, even if they can be coaxed into doing this for certain inputs (in the current iteration of the tools).

Ultimately, I think the problem of reproducing certain popular works or code snippets will be solved. One interesting direction here are the tools of information theory and differential privacy. e.g) proving that certain training inputs cannot be recovered from the weights, or that there is a threshold of how much information can be gleaned from a single input.

It is easy to imagine (because its nearly there already) a future version of StableDiffusion (or CoPilot) which provably compresses all training data beyond any possibility of recovery, and yet still produces extremely convincing results which disrupt the creative professions of art and programming.

Until we get to that point, it feels like the only consistent and sensible place to apply regulations is with the model end user. When I use CoPilot, I accept the small (honestly overblown) risk that _maybe_ I won't have the license to use some small snippet of code it spits out. But I'm happy to wear that responsibility, because the boost to productivity is so great that I dread a return to pre-CoPilot world. That is, a world where everyone keeps reinventing the same solution to simple problems over and over and over again.

Stealing from idealist volunteers is worse than stealing from a random person.

Code is different, there isn't a style to it other than perhaps indention and variable naming conventions. Entire sections (that are protected by GPL) are copied. This by itself isn't the issue, it's contaminating your codebase that is the problem. If your work ends up with the same license as the code sources and those are properly documented per those license agreements you're fine. But if you end up violating the GPL and someone knows their code is in use, you are in a tough situation. Again, it'll end up in an expensive court room session where a judge is going to have to determine if enough code was copied to be construed as a license violation. That's the one scenario you would want to avoid in the first place because for a lot of businesses that kind of lawsuit is too expensive to fight.

That said, the application of copyright to text, vs, code, vs images, has salient differences. The concept of plagiarism in visual artwork exists by analogy, but it's hard to call it coherent.

Music is somewhere in the middle, people have sued successfully over melody and hooks.

There are things like characters in animation, it's not unheard of, but the balance is more on the side of "great artists steal".

Probably worth pointing out that GitHub has a license to the code on its site (read the fine print) that is independent of other licenses that the code may available under.

Whether that license applies to training ML models is legally uncharted waters.

Whether it’s right to train those models is another matter.

A person who can clone a style and crank out illustrations at human speed is a very different thing than an automated process that can do it immediately on request, in minutes or seconds. If nothing else, the latter is a huge efficiency gain for being able to self-serve, as it would allow an editor to trial different illustrative approaches without all the back and forth contracting out to a human would require.

Personally, I think what this will do most is convince artists not to put galleries of their work suitable for training online.

The Redditor identified in the article posted a new comic art model based on James Daly III (this is mentioned at the end of an article with a link). The Redditor's comment in that post implies Daly was chosen specifically because they had a gallery of easily consumable training images all in one place.

I have no idea what the minimum effort would be to make the images less useful for training, but I foresee a lot of obnoxious watermarks in our future as people try to do so.

Why do people seem to have a strong opinion against this? It's just stealing the most intimate thing humans create (art) so that we can create soulless algorithmic versions of it for our own uses because evil artists won't let us just do what we want with their works and won't let us profit on their work. Artists are jerks.

It's heated and less philosophical because many artists are worried about their livelihood while a multi-billion dollar company is working towards making them obsolete often using their own work.

I don't understand the confusion people have towards this issue.

I don't.

Stability.ai did the big training sets and it is coincidence that it remembers the names and categories accurately.

If you want to leverage this tool more fine tuned then you add these modules with more accurate naming.

I would be for some way to compensate artists, like if the use of a module gave them a royalty, but I don't think it is an ethical, legal, or social norm to enforce. If it happens in a uncircumventable way, I would be for it. If it doesn't, I'm for that too.

Conceptually, it's very similar to running lossy JPEG over a single copyrighted work versus a giant folder of works from different artists, then shipping that compressed collection to you customers so they cut and paste sections of those works in their collages. The output your customers create with this tool might be sufficiently original to warant copyright protection and fair use, but your algorithmic distribution of the original works (the model) is a clear copyright violation, it doesn't matter if it affects a single artist or thousands.

For me, just a regular person, the art is not something an soulless machine can generate or a monkey with a camera, the intent and mind is important. So a guy can ask an AI to create a malformed portrait of some subject with some artist style , the value of the art is in the subject,theme and not the style IMO. Like if you ask for a portrait of X steping on Y dead body, dressed in Z and with M,N,P the artistic value is in your idea behind this and not in the pixels.

I remember similar complaints when digital art started to get popular, that is not real art , that you just move pixels around

There is a chance that style will become copyright-able. Well, eventually common style banks will appear.

One could easily imagine the opposite scenario, where the artist objects to not being credited.

We are in a weird stage where the indexes into this style space are quite weird and ad-hoc; look at all the prompt engineering black magic. It’s worth noting though that this problem only showed up because there weren’t many examples of this style in the data set; when every frame of every Disney animation is in there, it won’t need you to refer to one artist’s name.

I do wonder if a PR and UI improvement would be to layer a language model on top to build the prompt, or perhaps even bake this into the model itself, so you can use more generic (and possibly iterative) style descriptions instead of having to refer to an artist by name. Basically use AI to solve the prompt engineering problem too.

I'm trying to understand what you are saying here. It sounds like you are saying that something that doesn't yet exist must already exist simply because a model has been created which can yield this non-existent thing as an output?

Your example uses properly licensed data as an input but seems to imply that creating a model that is capable of producing a particular output means that the output in effect already exists as a prior work before it has ever been created by virtue of the model's ability to create it on command.

I'm probably over-thinking all this.

Unfortunately the line of "fair use" is very blurry and only gets clarified in specific instances, with lawyers and humans debating if there was damage done.

It's extremely frustrating and these advances are going to pressure fair use for sure.

People will generate infringing work with AI and people will generate newly copyrightable work with AI. The danger is, as an artist, it's hard to trust if the model has given you something that is copyrighted as you have not necessarily seen it before. (You the human can cite your references, and it's possible you were subliminally influenced, but with SD, generic prompts may give you "copyrighted details" that you don't know.)

I posit with a few good NSFW scandals so the legislation can be dressed up as protecting the children, Disney will get the legislative intervention it wants re: copyright and stable diffusion.

I realize that seems pretty US-centric but it's surprising the ways Disney can reach internationally to protect it's IP. It'll be interesting to see if Stable Diffusion ends up relegated to the parts of the Internet outside of the big three "jurisdictions" so to speak: US, EU, and China.

I've been thinking about this lately, in terms of dopaminergic activities like advertising, drugs, sex, gambling, bright colors, etc. When someone is too susceptible to addiction by one of these, their life is destroyed by it.

Pursuing dopamine, purely for the feeling of dopamine, results in this evolutionary dead end. So, every time modern society optimizes a product to produce more dopamine response, anyone susceptible is selected against, evolutionarily.

Your description is poignant. I can only see this going a couple of ways: 1. A society of people with fried dopamine receptors, too uninterested in food to grow it or eat it (Idiocracy). This collapses, and less dopamine-advanced people inherit the earth (until they do the same thing). Or 2. a society of people who can control, by whatever means, their dopamine urges.

AI can produce the same result in seconds allowing the content to be ripped-off quicker than an great artist trying to achieve the same result. Isn't that unfair?

As an example of someone with negative artistic talent of any kind, even if I were to take any one of their works and tried to trace them, it'd come out looking a mess, especially once I came to the portion that required any actual artistic skill like coloring and shading.

With an AI, I save a few of their works, stick it in some blackbox A"I" that gives me 8 trillion different derived images that are in truth just kind of spitting out whatever makes statistical sense to stick together and boom, I've just managed to take a dozen artists' works and gain something out of it.

> But, even if she did have a distinctive style

This is some rough criticism of an artist who's dedicated their profession and life to art.

> is (nice, but)

This made it all OK!

Good point. As the article itself says, her style is explicitly based on Disney. This isn't like, say, Cubism, a style (intentionally) very different from the contemporary norm, and nothing like anything that had come before.

If that thing becomes a lot cheaper and easier, and it starts being done a lot more - perhaps we realise we actually need different rules even though the difference is purely quantitative.

One guy juggling chainsaws on main street - how entertaining! No need to ban that. Dozens of chainsaw jugglers on every street, 24/7, the issues are easy to imagine.

To say that "Oh, you were OK with one chainsaw-juggler therefore you would be OK with 100,000" is IMHO a line of argument that obscures more than it clarifies.

It actually isn't interesting. Or, I should rather say, it's only interesting for singularitarians who anthropomorphize algorithms as part of their idiotic (pseudo)religion.

And, on a happier note, allows me to stay in touch with dear friends on the other side of the globe. Emails and co. just are not the same.

I'd say the fact that I can get any book I want and be reading it within 5 minutes without even having to get out of bed is amazing. That tops it for me.

Well, for one, most of the accumulated knowledge of the human race is now available to anyone with a cheap phone (quite common even in the poorest countries), thus making it possible for anyone who cares to spend the time to become educated (not necessarily having a piece of paper that says you're educated -- we still need to work on that -- but actually educated)

That wasn't the case in 1970. Or even 1990. I think that has unquestionably made the world a better place.

I would agree that smartphone-enabled social media has had some severe downsides for society in terms of productivity, attention, and opportunity cost, but that is just a subset of tech.

I thought it would be cool, like someone seeing the space race. Instead, I find it terrifying, like the nuclear race.

I could not imagine the custom work done that helps sell publications, *especially MTG or similar* only net $1000 per piece. Certainly they have some sort of royalties contract, at the very least.

If they do that, the quality of illustrations they'll get will be vastly worse (as can be seen from the comparisons in the article). If they were willing to spend $1000 on an illustration in the first place, I doubt they'd accept that quality drop.

Obviously if the thing is as complex as an AI model it might be hard to prove that a copyrighted work was among the inputs.

She does not own the style. She owns her name and can get fussy about how it’s used, but you can’t stop someone from learning your style.

It's like if a band wants to make music purely for the sake of make money - it's just a foolish endeavor.

I've been trying to articulate why I reacted negatively to that concept, and I think you nailed it.

Certainly whatever these models can output just from text plus a bit of work/skill on the prompt plus a bit of selection will not be very valuable.

But it will see applications that don't need something very valuable, and where otherwise a piece of art would be not be affordable. I run a daily word puzzle game, and every daily puzzle comes with an image that helps tie the theme together. This is a low value piece of art that's nearly free for me to make, which wouldn't exist otherwise.

But the other thing is that people will make scarce and valuable things using generated art. Right now we're seeing tons of art where the direct output of a model is posted after less than an hour of work on prompts and selection by a person.

But when more people start combining all of these tools, spending dozens of hours on an image that's made out of components that are generated using AI tools, and other components that are manually edited or created, I think we're going to see a lot of brand new art and brand new skills.

There's always going to be people who pour their creativity, skills, and time into something. I can't wait to see what people can make when they do that while incorporating all these new tools that are being created into their process.

This is literally the intro section to Chuck Klosterman's Nineties - about the number of people who watched Seinfeld and those that missed it, just missed it.

> There's a quality bestowed through scarcity.

There's a depth to scarcity, but your kids are going to watch way more things growing up than you did and you have no idea what that means for them.

I get that you aren't able to pass on that "value the thing you hold, not the two you can get later" sort of commitment to a single thing.

But that's valuing the only true scarce thing left in my life at least - my time and attention.

I remember feeling the "post-scarcity" thing going to a library for the first time in the US.

I used to buy books and read them, before I came to the US. Each book was a hard choice on whether to spend money on it or buy something else.

I now decide to read through a book based on whether I want to spend the time, not the money.

Unless I'm going to be immortal, there's no fixing that scarcity (and I get how young people/kids don't get that part at all - their life is endless from where they are).

Maybe do a little better so that my 70s aren't spent in a bed, but in a park outdoors reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Bougie_du_Sapeur

Valuable material in the disciplines of aesthetics and philosophy of technology on this.

What a silly question. How does an extension of an already bottomless internet of content that you couldn’t consume over the course of hundreds of lifetimes come anywhere remotely close to ending food insecurity?

Your line of thought "rhymes" in an interesting way with Matt Levine's column today about how illiquidity sometimes has value [0]:

> Another, funnier sort of financial innovation is about subtracting liquidity. If you can buy and sell something whenever you want at a clearly observable market price, that is efficient, sure, but it can also be annoying. Consider the following financial product:

> 1. You give me the password to your brokerage account. > 2. I change it. > 3. You can’t look at your brokerage account for one year, because you don’t have the password. > 4. At the end of the year, I give you back your password and you pay me $5.

> Is this a good product? For me, sure, I got $5 for like one minute of work.[1] For you, I would argue, it’s also pretty good. For one thing, you avoid the stress of looking at your brokerage account all the time and worrying when it goes down. For another thing, you avoid the popular temptation of bad market timing: You can’t panic and sell stocks after they fall, or get greedy and buy more after they rise, because I have your password.

[0]: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/matt-levines-money...

> Maybe I should be asking Gene Roddenberry but I'll ask all of you: do you think there's something lost by eliminating scarcity?

I'd like to think Gene would tell you, there's always going to be a scarcity of something - the adventure is in chasing it, but it's much more enjoyable when you aren't coerced into it by the need to feed and shelter yourself and your close ones. Basically, scarcity of food, healthcare, housing and opportunities is bad. Scarcity of unique experiences and relationships is enjoyable, and it's always going to be there.

I emphasize with how you feel about your kids, but I think this is less about scarcity per se, and more about your kids not wanting to participate in your tradition. It's possible they still might - after all, these kinds of traditions aren't really about a movie, but about the time spent together. Perhaps when they grow up, they'll voluntarily abstain from rewatching that movie on their own, outside Halloween.

Personal and much more childish example: in my more naive years, I've established a tradition, and roped a few friends into it, of watching "V for Vendetta" on the 5th of November. That was way back when the "oh fuck, the Internet is here" meme was funny, and not a stuff of nightmares. It was a completely random and voluntarily tradition, that lasted a couple years before naturally dissolving. My point being, the availability of the movie had little to do with it - it was all about voluntary choice of a group of people to do something together.

My suggestion is to accept it as a thing that will be here and tune our expectations appropriately. Because if it is made illegal, it will be one of those things that's illegal-but-omnipresent, like sharing music on BitTorrent... The Western copyright regime doesn't blanket the world, and the advantages of these tools are so big that places it doesn't reach will just use them. The fact that this story is about a Nigerian engineer in Canada using software developed in San Francisco running on some computers in Northern Virginia to ape the artistic style of an artist from LA, none of these parties having ever met each other, indicates how empty the bottle is the genie used to live in.

The core issue illustrating this is when people use an artist name in a prompt. If these models did not exist, if you wanted something in that style, you would likely be reaching out to that individual, or asking someone else to try to emulate someone. In that instance, the emulation is generally accountable. In these instances, there is no accountability towards the algorithm, as it's not making creative choices, to say nothing of moral or ethical ones. That was done by the individuals with venture-capital backing, using research loopholes to fund the legally questionable scraping of this data in the first place, which in some instances, violates the EULAs of the sites they were scraped from.

At the end of the day, these artists, styles, etc. would not exist without the artists who had no say in their "democratizing art".

This may actually end up making the few artists creative enough to create bold new art styles even more valuable, if they can basically not release their art and hide it behind a model.

Though I guess anyone with access to that model's output could then just generate a few samples and train on those, so maybe not.

This has already happened.

People used to get paid to recreate paintings but now we have the technology to do it without a painter.

You used to need a musician whenever you wanted live music but now we just play a recording.

Basically, what you are describing is how technology has worked forever. I am not sure why people have chosen this particular instance of technology lessening capitalistic opportunities for artists to get their knickers in a twist over.

The same thing that has happened in the past will happen again. Artists will adapt and learn to use new tools, less people will make money via art, and people will keep making art anyways because the reason most people do it isn’t money.

Technology has messed up industries before. Everyone's not going to die.

…because they like to make art?

The idea of making a living as an artist has only been possible for a very small fraction of human history, yet we have always had art.

We are in the process of reverting to the norm. The world will never again be like it was in the post industrialization and pre information era.

Does an artist own their name? Yes. I can’t publish a work of art and say “authored by savant_penguin”.

Can I sell art with product name “in the style of savant_penguin”? I think this varies by jurisdiction; it’s not going to be legal in the EU I think. It might well be in the US.

Edit: fleshed out more thoroughly by someone else already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33423857

2. I like this style of work. I cannot make this style of work. I will not pay the artist. I will instead take copyrighted material, and process it into a result using a machine that is not able to ethically refuse.

2.1. I like this style of work. I cannot make this style of work. I will not pay the artist. I will use this model someone else made to produce this style of work.

ofc that takes longer to say so it will never happen.