I think my initial reply to you was meant to go somewhere else but Connect keeps dropping me to the bottom of the thread instead of where the reply I’m trying to get to is.

I’m going to leave it (for consistency sake) but I don’t think it makes much sense as a reply to your post.

Sorry about that!

But I’m not.

You’re trying to say that, because this one law doesn’t say it’s bad it must therefore be good (or at least okay).

I’m simply saying that if you profit from someone else’s labor, without compensating them (or at least getting their consent), you’ve stolen the output of that labor.

I’m happy to be done with this, I didn’t expect my first Lemmy comment to get any attention, but no, I’m not going to suddenly be okay with this just because the legal definition of “stealing labor” is to narrow to fit this scenario.

But they did.

(I’m on mobile so my formatting is meh)

They put his art in, only when called out did they remove it.

Once removed, they did nothing to prevent it being added back.

As for them selling the product, or not, at this point, they still used the output of his labor to build their product.

That’s the thing, everyone trying to justify why it’s okay for these companies to do it keep leaning on semantics, legal definitions or “well, back during the industrial revolution…” to try and get around the fact that what these companies are doing is unethical. They’re taking someone else’s labor, without compensation or consent.

No, I’m not using it incorrectly, I’m just not concerned with the legal definition as I’m not a lawyer or anyone tied up in this mess.

If you do a thing, and it takes time and skill to do it, then someone copies it, they stole your labor.

Saying they “copied his style”, the style he spent a lifetime crafting, then trying to say they didn’t benefit, at no cost, to the labor he put into crafting that style because “well actually, the law says…” is a bad argument as it tries to minimize what they did.

If their product could not exist without his labor, and they did not pay him for that labor, they stole his labor.

For, like, the fourth time in this thread: were this ethical, they would have asked for permission, they didn’t.

I’m not a fan of our copyright system. IMO, it’s far to long and should also include clauses that place anything not available for (easy) access in the public domain.

Also, I’m not talking about what laws say, should say or anything like that.

I’ve just been sharing my opinion that it’s unethical and I’ve not seen any good explanation for how stealing someone else’s labor is “good”.

Because that is what they’re doing, just with extra steps.

The company pulled down his work, fed it to their AI, then sold the AI as their product.

Their AI wouldn’t work, at all, without the art they “clicked on”.

So there is a difference between me viewing an image in my browser and me turning their work into something for resell under my name. Adding extra steps doesn’t change that.

And that’s where we have a fundamental difference of opinion.

A company hiring an engineer to design a machine that makes hammers, then hiring one (or more) people to make the machine to then make hammers is the company benefiting from the work product of people they hired. While this may impact the blacksmith they did not steal from the blacksmith.

A company taking someone else’s work product to then build their product, without compensation or consent, is theft of labor.

I don’t see those as equitable situations.

Taking someone’s work product and converting it, without compensation and consent, into your profit is theft of labor.

Adding extra steps, like, say, training an AI, doesn’t absolve the theft of labor.

We’re it ethical, the companies doing it would have asked for permission and been given cinsent. They didn’t.

Because this thread was about the companies taking art feeding it into their machine a D claiming not to have stolen it.

Then you compared that to clicking a link.

The machine didn’t take the blacksmiths work product and flood the market with copies.

The machine wasn’t fed 10,000 blacksmith made hammers then told to, sorta, copy those.

Justify this all you want, throw all the bad analogies at it you want, it’s still bad.

Again, if this wasn’t bad, the companies would have asked for permission. They didn’t.

Just because you’ve redefined theft in a way that makes you feel okay about it doesn’t change what they did.

They took someone else’s work product, fed it into their machine then used that to make money.

They stole someone’s labor.

But that’s not what they did, converting it into a set of instructions a computer can use to recreate it is just adding steps.

And, yes, that’s what they’ve done else we wouldn’t find pieces of others works mixed in.

Also, even if that was how it worked, it’s still theft of someone’s else’s labor to feed your business.

If it wasn’t, they would have asked for permission first.

You keep comparing what one person, given MONTHS or YEARS of their life could do with one artists work to a machine doing NOT THE SAME THING can do with thousands of artists work.

The machine is not learning their style, it’s taking pieces of the work and dropping it in with other people’s work then trying to blend it into a cohesive whole.

The analogy fails all over the place.

And I don’t care about copyright, I’m not an artist or an IP lawyer, or whatever. I can just look at a company stealing the labor of an entire industry and see it as bad.

“other people were bad so I should be bad to.”

Cool.

Yes, because “imitate” and “copy” are different things when stealing from someone.

I do understand how it works, the “overfitting” was just laying clear what it does. It copies but tries to sample things in a way that won’t look like clear copies. It had no creativity, it is trying to find new ways of making copies.

If any of this was ethical, the companies doing it would have just asked for permission. That they didn’t says a everything you need to know.

I don’t usually have these kinds discussions anymore, I got tired of conversations like this back in 2016, when it became clear that people will go to the ends of the earth to justify unethical behavior as long as the people being hurt by it are people they don’t care about.

By that logic I can sell anything I download from the web while also claiming credit for it, right?

Downloading to view != downloading to fuel my business.

Yes copies were made. The files were downloaded, one way or another (even as a hash, or whatever digital asset they claim to translate them into) then fed to their machines.

If I go into a Ford plant, take pictures of their equipment, then use those to make my own machines, it’s still IP theft, even if I didn’t walk out with the machine.

Make all the excuses you want, you’re supporting the theft of other people’s life’s work then trying to claim it’s ethical.

The fact that folks can identify the source of various parts of the output, and that intact watermarks have shown up, shows that it doesn’t work like you think it does.

No, you used it to inform your style.

You didn’t drop his art on to a screenprinter, smash someone else’s art on top, then try to sell t-shirts.

Trying to compare any of this to how one, individual, human learns is such a wildly inaccurate way to justify stealing a someone’s else’s work product.

Yes, it was.

One human artist can, over a life time, learn from a few artists to inform their style.

These AI setups are telling ALL the art from ALL the artists and using them as part of a for profit business.

There is no ethical stance for letting billion dollar tech firms hoover up all the art ever created to the try and remix it for profit.