> The other side are human beings.
No, both sides are human beings. They are human beings using different tools in the same domain, and the side that wants to prevent the adoption of newer tools rather than adapt to them is…well, historically, that’s not a winning position, basically, ever. (In broad societal terms; if you want to create your own isolated subculture where certain newer tools are excluded, that can work.)
I think the arguments in this thread for why this is important, by supporters of it, indicate this is wrong. Yes, directly, this aims at preventing style fine-tunes from work of the artist who uses it (even though styles have never been proprietary.) But if you look at the arguments about why this is significant, its not anything connected to the copying of individual styles, but to the way the explosion of capacity of AI art generators is transforming the market. That’s the target. Even if a magic shield protecting every work that the creator wanted to protect from this day forward against style fine tunes (or AI training more generally) wouldn’t deflect that trend even a tiny bit – which it wouldn’t, IMO – that’s what this is aimed at sociologically.
I'm not an artist and I'm excited to use AI art generation to realise visuals I can obtain affordably. I just would like to be able to do that ethically.
The problem with the current discourse is that we're hung up on things that are largely irrelevant to providing an actual solution.
Arguments like "my IP is being violated" completely fall apart under any scrutiny and are readily abandoned in favor of some other useful proxy-concerns like "It's just copy and paste, not art!". I refuse to believe that the art community is stupid enough to make arguments like that without some existential dread clouding their judgment.
Do you really think anyone would complain if AI art didn't threaten their livelihood, in a space that usually celebrates inspiration and recognizes that IP rights often only benefit the biggest players? Do you really think a significant portion of that group would advocate for the strictest possible IP laws, which will wipe out a significant amount of human art as well, without some deeper motivation?
The ultimate issue is that people are losing their livelihoods and the ability to engage in work that is meaningful to them. We need to develop social programs that ease their fall, not run circles around the emotionally satisfying arguments that would "really show the other side what's what!". Ironically, a bunch of people are reducing one side to money hungry thieves and the other to lazy luddites below a comment calling out this exact behavior.
This is what gets me about this whole argument. When you're agreeing with The Mouse about IP law, you know something has gone awry. In reality, we should remove arcane IP restrictions, not continue to add them further into society. Copyright is already, what, 100+ years on average?
> The ultimate issue is that people are losing their livelihoods and the ability to engage in work that is meaningful to them.
Indeed, people are using a moral argument to mask their deeper intent, their fear of the economic damage done to their livelihood. In this case the solution is not to further calcify their work, but to...solve the actual issue, via UBI and the like.
Are you going to buy the necessary number of congressmen to make this happen? Because the people being aggrieved certainly can't afford to--and so "well just pass UBI" is the "just draw the rest of the owl" flavor of not-helping.
Insofar as its about treating “style” as a proprietary entitlement against the rest of the world, despite that it has not ever been proprietary, a kind of entitlement to an extension of copyright which itself is not even notionally a matter of fundamental right but privilege granted in the expectation of externalized utility, I am not convinced that it is a legitimate grievance, even to the extent it is clearly a genuine one.
> Arguing that they’re only saying that because their jobs are being affected is, well, not the best looking argument I’ve ever seen.
I didn’t argue that. I argued that the motivation is not that the threat to their jobs from the thing this would correct even if it worked, but the threat from something which it does not, even in the most optimistic view. That is, yes, its because “AI art” threatens their existing mode of work, but not because “style transfer based on their current and future artwork” moves the needle, in any meaningful way, on the threat. It is fundamentally (whether they are entitled to their existing mode of work or not) misdirected for the motivating concern.
I don’t think style is even the main issue here, although it’s a significant one. You may be right. Without scraping vast troves of copyrighted art, and using it in a way that is not at all clearly fair use, these models would be nearly as good at almost anything. But if that’s a legitimate concern, the fact that it might severely hamper these models is the right outcome. If these companies want to use copyrighted works to train them, maybe they should need to license it.
> historically, that’s not a winning position, basically, ever
In what universe do you think people who are staring down the gunbarrel believe they have any chance to win at all, in anything? When “join up”, if one is even allowed (and let’s be real, they’re not being invited) is also losing?
We are talking about telos here, and tech’s incessant drive to smash it. And this industry offers no alternatives or even the barest minimum of safety to anyone.