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Comment by chx

2 years ago

And AI art is theft.

Hell, even a18n have admitted it! https://i.imgur.com/auBNG0N.jpg

I have grave reservations about AI art, but...nope, that doesn't follow.

It's true that there are a lot of (human) artists in the US. (Something like 80 million, broadly defined.) And it's also true that the art and media each artist views shapes the art they create, including art and media we see quite incidentally - graffiti, ads on bus shelters, paintings in the hallways of office buildings. And in the course of the year each of us will view thousands upon thousands of such pieces of art and meida.

So if we had a licensing scheme such that every artist had to make a non-negligible payment to the rights holder of every bit of media they view, then artists, collectively, would be liable for hundreds of billions of dollars in royalty payments. 80m aritsts * 1k pieces of media * $5 license fee is $400b; that's just basic math.

This calculation is, very obviously, not an argument that all art is theft. It's just some math about a hypothetical licensing scheme, and that's all a18n were doing too.

You may think (and I'm inclined to agree) that a human paging through an artist's ArtStation profile is fundamentally different than an LLM using it as training data, but that's an argument not addressed by a18n in that quote.

Your source does not support your claim. They say that if every single individual piece of data used to train a model was to be paid out, there would be a lot of payouts. You could just as easily say that if you had to pay the state for every step you took on the sidewalk, you would have to pay the state a lot. This does not prove that you are indebted to the state for millions in sidewalk usage because fortunately for you the law has not decided to make you pay for using the sidewalk, just as it has not decided to make training data have to pay per file.

  • > just as it has not decided to make training data have to pay per file.

    That's quite exactly what the copyright law states, though. I never thought the day will come when I root for Getty Images but the techbros have managed to do it. Congrats, I guess?