They both use copyrighted matetial yes (and I agree that is bad) but let’s work this argument through.
Before we get into this, I’d like to say I personally think AI is an absolute hell on earth which is causing tremendous societal damage. I wish we could un-invent AI and pretend it never happened, and the world would be better for that. But my personal views on AI are not going to factor into this argument.
I feel the argument here, and a view shared by many, is that since the AI was trained unethically, on copyrighted material, then any manner in which that AI is used is equally unethical.
My argument would be that the origin of a tool - be that ethical or unethical, good or evil - does not itself preclude judgment on the individuals later using that tool, for how they choose to use it.
When you ask an AI to generate an image, unless you specify otherwise it will create an amalgam based on its entire training set. The output image, even though it will be derived from work of many artists and photographers, will not by default be directly recognisable as the work of any single person.
When you use an AI to clone someone’s voice on the other hand, that doesn’t even depend on data held within the model, but is done through you yourself feeding in a bunch of samples as inputs for the model to copy and directing the AI to.impersonate that individual directly.
As an end user we don’t have any control over how the model was trained, but what we can choose is how that model is used, and to me, that makes a lot of difference.
We can use the tool in a somewhat more ethical way (generate general things without impersonating anyone in particular) or a far less ethical way, to directly target and impersonate specific artists or individuals.
There’s definitely plenty of hypocrisy in using stolen content to generate images, while at the same time complaining of someone doing the same to your voice. But fundamentally, those two activities are tremendously different in scope, the directness of who they target, and the level of infringement and harm caused. To me, that makes one activity far worse, morally, than the other. And not by a small amount.
The tool is flawed, but that doesn’t absolve individuals for any personal ethical consideration in how they use it.
Unless you’re generating actual random noise with an AI image generator, it’s almost like buying a fence’s stolen goods, since it is mainly just copying and merging rather than creating. It’s the same thing as piracy, if you do it and then support the crestor no one should mind, but the creator for AI art is everyone it stole from. If I pay for the generation it’s also saying to them “please steal more artwork, it is profitable.”
The bigger issue is someone who might have commissioned an artist instead uses an AI version of their art because it’s close enough to the exact style they wanted, so now their artwork was stolen, and the AIs only source for actual good art is less likely to be in the art business. The photographer or artist whose art they would’ve used or gotten flak for not sourcing is still stolen in the case of AI generation, but now it’s stolen from 200 people so there’s no obvious thing to point to besides maybe a style or a palette. If you tell it to replicate an artist’s style, it’s very obvious that it is recreating parte of images it stole, it just becomes less obvious which parts are stolen as you change the prompt.
They both use copyrighted matetial yes (and I agree that is bad) but let’s work this argument through.
Before we get into this, I’d like to say I personally think AI is an absolute hell on earth which is causing tremendous societal damage. I wish we could un-invent AI and pretend it never happened, and the world would be better for that. But my personal views on AI are not going to factor into this argument.
I feel the argument here, and a view shared by many, is that since the AI was trained unethically, on copyrighted material, then any manner in which that AI is used is equally unethical.
My argument would be that the origin of a tool - be that ethical or unethical, good or evil - does not itself preclude judgment on the individuals later using that tool, for how they choose to use it.
When you ask an AI to generate an image, unless you specify otherwise it will create an amalgam based on its entire training set. The output image, even though it will be derived from work of many artists and photographers, will not by default be directly recognisable as the work of any single person.
When you use an AI to clone someone’s voice on the other hand, that doesn’t even depend on data held within the model, but is done through you yourself feeding in a bunch of samples as inputs for the model to copy and directing the AI to.impersonate that individual directly.
As an end user we don’t have any control over how the model was trained, but what we can choose is how that model is used, and to me, that makes a lot of difference.
We can use the tool in a somewhat more ethical way (generate general things without impersonating anyone in particular) or a far less ethical way, to directly target and impersonate specific artists or individuals.
There’s definitely plenty of hypocrisy in using stolen content to generate images, while at the same time complaining of someone doing the same to your voice. But fundamentally, those two activities are tremendously different in scope, the directness of who they target, and the level of infringement and harm caused. To me, that makes one activity far worse, morally, than the other. And not by a small amount.
The tool is flawed, but that doesn’t absolve individuals for any personal ethical consideration in how they use it.
Unless you’re generating actual random noise with an AI image generator, it’s almost like buying a fence’s stolen goods, since it is mainly just copying and merging rather than creating. It’s the same thing as piracy, if you do it and then support the crestor no one should mind, but the creator for AI art is everyone it stole from. If I pay for the generation it’s also saying to them “please steal more artwork, it is profitable.”
The bigger issue is someone who might have commissioned an artist instead uses an AI version of their art because it’s close enough to the exact style they wanted, so now their artwork was stolen, and the AIs only source for actual good art is less likely to be in the art business. The photographer or artist whose art they would’ve used or gotten flak for not sourcing is still stolen in the case of AI generation, but now it’s stolen from 200 people so there’s no obvious thing to point to besides maybe a style or a palette. If you tell it to replicate an artist’s style, it’s very obvious that it is recreating parte of images it stole, it just becomes less obvious which parts are stolen as you change the prompt.