> You spent a lot of time deconstructing something I never said or implied.
> The keyword you missed is "style". Your word, that I quoted.
>
> As in, "the style of that artist". I wasn't referring to individual pieces of original art.
Sorry I miss-interpreted a little.
I guess we disagree on what style means maybe:
> Black and white street photography, gritty contrast, low wide angles, urban decay, weathered characters"... could be a style shared by many, that Ai learns.
I still think there's a lot more individual flavour in art that can't be captured with words.
You described a specific art style in your example, and within that there's probably a plethora that fit that description roughly, but there's often a unique signature every artists brings to the table through different application and mixture of those "sub styles" and techniques.
You can try to reduce Matt Inman's (Oatmeal) style to "line art, blobs for humans, vivid colours, absurdist face expressions, comic" etc, and spend ages explaining to an AI to steal the style, and it wouldn't get it probably, but just slapping "in style of Oatmeal" would probably get you very close.
Similar for xkcd, Oglaf, specific anime styles, concept artists (often time this is what gets them hired). They all have a flavour of style that's unique to them even if they use similar approaches and techniques. All manga or anime is in the similar vein of line art, but Miyazaki Hayao is indisputably Hayao; any fan of anime will recognise his style immediately. If this weren't true, nobody would be putting "in style of X", they'd just be saying "{generic technique}" instead.
Listing the individual composition of technique won't really get you close to how they work, but saying "in style of X" gets you crazy close.
You bring up a bunch of dead and famous artists, but ignore the fact that their styles can only be mimiced because they were studied. And they can only be mimced by someone with enough knowledge the theory behind the techniques composed to achieve the style, and the skills they spent years building to to execute it.
> You want others to take responsibility for your actions?
No, but the problem is that currently nobody is being held responsible. Not the model devs for using works without consent, nor the actors benefitting from it. For example, Fiverr is currently flooded with AI scam artists who get away with saying "in style of X" without even having a basic comprehension or intuition what that style is composed off, much less be able to describe the style intelligently. Everyone's turning a blind eye, artists are protesting, and people there's people saying "yes, this is the way it's meant to be".
You can't expect everyone to have the same moral standards as you do. If it's you create a tool and put it into the world, people will use/abuse it. That's just the way it is.
Who should be responsible? Like I agree with you that the profiteers abusing this "in style of X" are much worse and bigger assholes than the people developing the models, but nonconsensual use of someone else's work without their consent, or without any way to prevent abuse of that content (eg by properly anonymising the training data, at the very least) is also bad. The devs didn't even pay a one-time fee to the artists to use their work; which is IMO the rock bottom expectations of decency. They just paid to get the training set, which was probably collated through some scummy ToS loophole.
So they're eating the market of someone who spent a lot of time developing a unique style. Can these artists use the tools? Yeah, and I hope they do, but I still think it's a bit ludicrous how easy it is for me (or anyone else) to mimic a style someone spent years building, with a few words. And that's "thanks" to that artist trying to build a name for themselves. So the clout the artist tried to build is literally coming to bite them in the ass. Not to mention the fact their good will of sharing artwork with the internet is also coming to bite them in the ass too.
It's crazy to me people are being so incredibly flippant about the livelihood, careers and lives of other people.
Anyway. I'm happy to agree to disagree with you on this. It's an incredibly complex subject, and I wish people weren't so dismissive of... Well, other people. And if you feel like you aren't: you are; you're just oblivious to it.
Anyway, I hope I'm wrong and you're right, and maybe there won't be any detrimental effect to artists and art. But given how many scammers are already abusing this, I'm incredibly doubtful.