#but my spite is reserved solely for entities who arent just. taking concerns about their continued survivability a bit too far

[tangibletechnomancy]

One big point where I find people talking past each other in the AI art debate is that in art, there are a lot of things that aren't illegal - and shouldn't be - but are rude.

It's not illegal to use a sample of someone's copyrighted material in a sufficiently transformative way, and it should never become so. I could photomanipulate an image of Mickey Mouse into a landscape if I wanted and sell it as a print and not even Disney could stop me. It never has been illegal to do this. It never SHOULD be. If it was, we'd start seeing a ton of SLAPP suits over vaguely similar poses because...hey, guess what, referencing is using someone's copyrighted material in a transformative way. We all recognize the idea of trying to copyright a pose or sue someone for using a similar color palette to you or for looking at your art as inspiration as patently absurd - so much so that it's regularly brought up as a bad-faith argument in other copyright discussions! - but imagine if someone could. Disney sure as hell would - imagine no longer being able to write about public domain fairy tales because you publicly mentioned you liked the Disney movie about the same fairy tale once. That is what you're opening the door for when you try to manage the dataset ethics issue by copyright law.

However, on the other side...it's still really fucking rude to use someone's work in a transformative way outside of the bounds of 1) what is broadly socially permitted, and 2) what that artist requests.

Even though it would be decidedly not illegal for me to go and copy-paste a single pixel from a dozen other people's work into a canvas of my own and make my own piece out of it using only the scale, copy-paste, and smudge tools, it still has the potential to be extremely rude depending on who I'm taking it from and why. I'd love to do a piece like this to open a dialogue on how transformative a piece must be to no longer constitute "stealing", but I'm not going to sample those pixels from small-time illustrators who are already scared for what sampling could do to their livelihoods as a "ha ha~ I took your wo-ork and you ca-an't stop me~" because that would be incredibly fucking rude, well beyond the level of emotional impact needed to make the statement.

Image synthesis is, unquestionably, transformative enough to constitute fair use under current copyright law, and any amendment to the law that would make it not so opens the door to far more harm than it would ever prevent - but, as it transitions from being a fun scientific novelty to an actual useful product, it becomes rude at best to ignore artists' wishes in model training. In fact, it becomes rude on a level that may be best managed with privacy laws, since, let's face it, there are a lot of entities out there that not only don't CARE about not being extremely rude, but REVEL in being jackasses because the law can't stop them (looking at you, Unstable Diffusion).

#not art #as a side note i AM working on art made entirely of single 'pirated' pixels #but theyre from like. BIG name copyright trolls. really notorious ones. ones most of us know and hate here on tumblr dot com. #im also working on some queer joy art with pirated pixels from notorious queerphobes. it's a whole thing #oh you think im stealing from you for my own agenda? point to which pixel in your art i stole. i will wait. #but my spite is reserved solely for entities who arent just. taking concerns about their continued survivability a bit too far #this is only for the famously awful #i dont touch indies unless theyve outright filed a SLAPP against someone smaller than them or something equally egregious #also a couple of them come from nfts