Dr. Holly WaltersDec 12, 2022

AI's aren't sentient. They can't "steal."

Programmers and institutions select the data with which to train the model. They take art and writing from artists and authors without credit or payment. The software then remixes and mimics what it is given.

Displacing agency by attributing intent to the AI is exactly how people and institutions erase human action in the creation of technology. It also leads to further perceptions of technology as acultural, unbiased, and, in essence, magical.

Show threadMatt BlazeDec 12, 2022

@Manigarm This is an interesting point, and certainly correct.

It's also exactly how humans learn to become artists and writers - by studying, mimicking, and eventually adding to the existing body of work. We don't generally consider that theft, unless the copying is exact or deceptive.

Yet AI feels somehow different, much more like plagiarism. Perhaps it's that the ONLY input an ML system has is others' art, with no real-world human experience of its own to contribute.

Show threadMatt BlazeDec 12, 2022
@Manigarm I think part of it is that we expect art and literature to have a creator, an actual person whose work expresses a human point of view, one that encompasses something beyond the literal work itself. By lacking an author who stands behind it, is AI-generated art somehow inherently fraudulent? Maybe.
Show threadPwnallthethingsDec 12, 2022

@mattblaze @Manigarm I think a substantial part of the reason also comes down to market effects.

What makes plagiarism grate for creators (artists, writers etc) is that their work is high-intensity, and they object to plagiarists in part because those plagiarists avoid the costs of developing the creative talent/expertise to produce cheaper alternatives and that impacts the creator's ability to get ROI on their work. AI does that to an *insane* scale, essentially annihilating the whole market.

Show threadMatthew GreenDec 13, 2022
@mattblaze @Pwnallthethings @Manigarm Playing devil’s advocate here: isn’t the whole point of technology to take things that are hard for humans to do, and build machines that make that work effortless?
Show threadGarrett Wollman
@matthew_d_green @mattblaze @Pwnallthethings @Manigarm I don't want to take the devil's side here, but it's worth thinking about the early Romantic backlash against photography: it was "not proper art", "slavish", "unoriginal", compared to "pictures" which were the sweat-of-the-brow work of a Real Artist. (Never mind how many of those Real Artists had assistants and entire workshops, especially in dimensional art.)
Dec 13, 2022 at 12:29amWeb
Show threadGarrett WollmanDec 13, 2022
@matthew_d_green @mattblaze @Pwnallthethings @Manigarm I'm no art historian but my recollection is that it took some decades for photography to be recognized as "proper art", at least by the majority. (There are probably some critics who still don't.)