But piracy is a MUCH smaller issue than theft. Piracy doesn’t deprive the original owner of any material thing. Piracy might decrease sales and profits (research actually says the opposite 🤷♂️).
And we have no idea the actual material impact AI will have on the arts. From the reaction we’re seeing it might even make people turn more and more to physical hand crafted art.
We’re already seeing that social media is favoring videos of artists’ processes much more than the final results.
So yeah, no, I don’t see this situation as so much more terrible than theft. I really don’t understand how it could be.
To me it seems the main issue is not even AI, it’s capitalism. If artists didn’t need to sell their art to survive, we wouldn’t even have this discussion.
No AI is the product of any theft. If we’re talking about piracy, piracy is NOT theft. I thought we all agreed on this already.
For me it boils down to: were the artists, whose work was used to build the large commercial models, asked about this and agreed to it? No.
Piracy only affects existing work, genAI affects all the future artwork they would try to make a living from. See AI hitting cultural sector hard: Fifth of freelance artists have lost income, work | NL Times
This is certifiable baloney.
Still not theft? Things can be bad without being theft.
That was the point I was trying to make too. The question of “is it theft” is moot, it still causes harm.
But piracy is a MUCH smaller issue than theft. Piracy doesn’t deprive the original owner of any material thing. Piracy might decrease sales and profits (research actually says the opposite 🤷♂️).
And we have no idea the actual material impact AI will have on the arts. From the reaction we’re seeing it might even make people turn more and more to physical hand crafted art.
We’re already seeing that social media is favoring videos of artists’ processes much more than the final results.
So yeah, no, I don’t see this situation as so much more terrible than theft. I really don’t understand how it could be.
To me it seems the main issue is not even AI, it’s capitalism. If artists didn’t need to sell their art to survive, we wouldn’t even have this discussion.