Asklemmy

The whole argumentation fails apart if you ask yourself a simple question, is the meme transformative to the art that it is using. As you already stated, "in a way the creator never foresaw" highly implies a transformative nature.

But isn't ai art transformative? Oh it might be. But well, the company making the ai, stole art to create the model. There is no transformative step between the art piece and the version of the art piece that they use to train the ai. It is stolen art but not because the model steals, but because the model is built on stolen art. Everything that an ai model can produce is based in stolen art. So any similarities are not a little reference to some other art piece but stolen art. As the whole model is based on similarities, it produces exclusively content that has similarities to that stolen art. And if everything is a reference to stolen art, the ai art become effectively stolen art.

But what about people and their faces? Yeah i don't think you should use/make those memes, unless the people are public figures. But not because it is stolen art, as the memes tend to be transformative, but because everyone has a right to privacy.

Imo the main difference would be that genAI models have been trained on a whole lot of art without consent, and the few privileged companies who are able to do this are making a ton of money (mainly by investors, not sure how much from paying users). Which is very extractive and centralised. Using others' art to do memes at least is distributed and not that remunerative

Putting AI aside, if we see art used in a meme of a random shitposter, it feels different than a political party or a big corporation using that art to do meme propaganda/advertisement.

Another interesting field for this is YouTube poops. They use tons of copyrighted materials, from big movies to local youtubers to advertisement. I would consider that fair, but if instead a big television network had a program showing youtubers' content without permission that's another story

Another example: Undertale's soundtrack being made with Earthbound's sound effects and samples. If it weren't an indie, especially if it was a big publisher using an indie's sounds, it wouldn't have been well received.

So back to AI, when it comes to a person using it for their own projects, the issue to me isn't really using stolen art, but using a tool that was made with an extractive theft of art by a big corporation, rather than seeking collaboration with artists, using existing CreativeCommons stuff, etc.

We also have to keep the context in mind: copyright laws mainly serve big publishers, hardly ever it protects smaller creators from such big publishers, in any field. The genAI training race is based on a complete lack of interest in applying or at least discussing the law.

I'm glad to see tho that thanks to this phenomenon more and more people are seeing how IP doesn't make any sense to begin with. Just keep in mind copyright and attribution are two different things.

I think you have done a good job arguing the facts but you missed intent and context, which I believe are vital to differentiating between AI copyright theft and meme copyright theft.

For one thing, companies aren't replacing living artists with memes - but they do intend to replace people with AI. When thousands of hard working people have dedicated their lives to developing a skill and craft, it's atrocious that someone can just steal their work with the excuse that "AI needs it".

Memes are likely to fall under "fair sure" given they are purely created to get a giggle out of someone, not to create financial gain. Sure there are some very popular meme sites and they should be held to account for the money they earn publishing copyrighted works that memes are made from...

Personally I would be fine with LLM AI if the underlying dataset is properly authorised and paid for. It's disgusting that the largest companies on Earth are now hammering the world wide web hoping to feed their personal Galactuses with enough data to create some shitty new product. As if the corporate and business communities parasitic relationship with the open source world leading up to AI wasn't bad enough!

"Not trying to defend AI art" The fuck you're not. Just be honest about it.

My actual answer to this wall of strawmen and thready arguments is that LLMs and generative AI were trained on incomprehensibly large pools of human produced content, much of which is copyrighted, without paying anything for it; Conversely, when people make memes they are manually altering or adding to the original content and it's an exception when there's misappropriation becasue it's socially enforced. AI simply merges data, there is nothing new conceptually or materially being added, just recombination. I'm not saying all memes are good, and I'm also not saying meme people who make that their life aren't assholes sometimes either.

All of this exercise you've taken upon yourself is a poorly executed attempt to distract from the scale of theft AI NEEDS in order to exist, and that's something Sam Altman, Zuckerberg, and other industry heads have openly acknowledged. If not for copyright violations it simply could not be feasible as a product, and even when there are instances of people stealing memes without attribution, that's not the standard or a necessity for the practice. This is on top of the other peripheral issues like IMMENSE resource consumption, and destruction of human livelihoods. Even if we grant your false equivalencies with single user offenses regarding meme theft, and I personally do not, these things are not comparable, and the later certainly doesn't justify or excuse the former.

well, for one thing, using ai image generation is supporting a business model that's whole thing is ripping off artists, even if you personally aren't turning a profit. and for another, if an image is used in a meme, it is not that hard to do a reverse image search to find the original, if it was posted online, whereas the blended chicken nugget ooze that is the output of image generators specifically defies attribution.

also, there's the fact that artists often like it when people like their art, even if it would be better to provide attribution. i don't think i've ever seen anyone argue that slapping some text on an image for a meme hurts the original artists ability to make a living, but tons of artists have noted such an effect from ai slop extruders.

I don't think AI art is theft. Copyright should be abolished.

Generally speaking, memes aren't being used to make money...whereas AI is almost exclusively being used to profit off of someone else's content.

There is no theft period. There is perhaps copyright infringement for commercial entities. This is a civil legal matter and has almost no bearing on anything you are discussing.

You must also consider all art is iterative. This means all art is based off art that came before it. You cannot create art in a vacuum and every artist borrows heavily from our culture

We are not here to judge what is or isn't art either. This is a treacherous road where people can deny art like a collage because it doesn't fit their definition of art. Everyone is actually an artist by definition unless they have literally never spoken, written, sang, or drawn.

There is definitely a worthy discussion around AI art. Right now we don't really have AI so it is not really creating anything. It is more of fill in the blank taking the best guesses based on prior work.

I believe, as other posters have stated, that Intellectual Property is actually anti-art, anti-science, and anti-technology. The problems we face with AI pale in comparison to a broken system beset by capitalists hell bent on controlling our culture and extracting as much money as they can through doing so.

AI companies are consuming all the electricity, and will destroy the economy when their bubble bursts, in their quest to eliminate millions of jobs and control the lives of everyone, to profit the global tech elite.

Memes are not-for-profit cultural detritus. They are not the same.

"You", the user of the AI model isn't engaging in copyright infingement directly.

However, whoever made the model that you used did. Most using copyright protected works.

Some people are paying for these models. This is what's the problem: financially benefitting off others' work without permission (or royalties).

It's like the age-old piracy dilemma: the person using direct downloads or streaming can't be fined in most jurisdictions - it's the duplication and sharing that's forbidden.

This exact analogue exists with AI models: training a model and giving it to others to use is distributing access to copyrighted material. Using an AI model is not.

If you can't see the difference between people doing something and hostile metahuman entities doing it, I don't know what to tell you.

Memes only have because they reference an original work. AI strips the connection between the original work and the final product deliberately.

The law mostly disagrees with the memes = theft. A lot of it is covered through freedom of speech and fair use. If you have taken a bit of content, changed it a bit, recontextualized, and reposted it, you are most likely in the clear. Especially if the original content was publicly posted. This gets less clear if you are using the likeness of a private person but this will also depend on context. Where in the world you are, if this content was captured in a public space or from something published - the list goes on, like some stuff can be trademarked as well, and I'm no lawyer. A lot of these things run under the legal doctrine of "no plaintiff, no judge." I feel artists in general have accepted that anything they post online is just potentially gone. And if no one steals their content to make money off it, they're not going to hire a lawyer, whom they cannot afford.

And I'm not saying any of this is great but that's an established status quo.

The reason why so-called AI generated art gets decried is twofold. It's new and we don't like new things. And in order for it to be created, the models have to suck in all the training data they can. And they don't tend to pay for it. So that's where some people see theft happening. But that's not settled law yet because it's fairly new, there are plaintiffs but not enough judges have passed judgement yet. Do they have to pay for stuff that's publicly available? Where is the line, if any? Is imitation of a style okay if there is more to the work than just copying something from Studio Ghibli or Disney? These questions are going to keep a lot of legal professionals in bacon for a long time still.

This shit is hard. It's more gray than black and white.

In my opinion this is too large of an attempt at reasoning memes as equal to an artist made piece of art but it is full of fallacies. The same images from memes being used can be traced and attributed to its original author with ease, AI cannot. So I'd argue that AI stealing is even more blatant as it attempts to hide its origin. AI makes people think they actually did something and partook in creating the piece, which is like taking an image off the internet and saying you made it. You can edit it, but it is not the same as saying you are the creator. AI blurs the line of ownership by including an algorithm in between, but it is being used to try and heavily commercialise its output in a way that memes never had. You say in italics a fallacy on the style of "memes occasionally can be profitable, therefore it is equivalent to selling AI art", but I think you know how different the reality of both forms is. It is exactly the intent behind the majority of AI image generation to industrialise art, while it is not the case of memes, and you see the same pushback if a company tries to use someone's photo commercially/politically without their consent. In a meme, the image is not the main product, but the context in which it is being used, so the image can be actually replaced but not the same can be done with the text.

And true, I'd argue there's also a component of inherent rejection of AI generated images because it is clear it "destroys art creation" in the sense that artists experience the world and create from said experience in connection with their own perception and ideas, while AI "remixes" said work without any understanding or self input and steals people's expression that is currently being aimed explicitly for commercial purposes. Meme makers do something far better than AI. If all art would be made by AI there would be no art. The only way I'd be ok with it is if you give the neural network sensors to perceive reality and process ideas and thoughts, to then create its own interpretation and expression. I guess it would be interesting to see "art" without emotion.

You pull out of nowhere that most people against AI are not artists, but that kind of claim needs some support behind it. Similarly to how you claim that people against AI art have nothing against using other people's work for memes without their consent. That kind of whataboutism does not contribute to the discussion, as it is just pointing to a "but they do that so I can do this" lame excuse. Sure, people should be more respectful about other people's images, so what.

Even with all of this, I do agree that using people's images for memes without their consent is bad. Doubt it can be stopped but I'd not be surprised if they are strongly affected by it. Empathy is scarce these days and makes me act a bit more bitter on the internet.

I'd argue memes that duplicate other peoples work are common but questionable on the ethical front.

Kind of like how alcohol consumption is common and got shoehorned in through our long history with it but newer drugs are more likely to have people question their cost to society (and demonise them usually for political gain, still many have some obvious costs).

Even tho the legal team at my work claims it's not true I know it is. Meme license.

That's why.

Because fear and hypocrisy, and pretending we're somehow special as humans. It's okay for us to copy this style, and replicate this drum set, and sample these sounds. We're okay torrenting stuff because screw the big rich studios. We're okay buying knockoff stuff because it's cheaper.

We only care because it's started crushing small creators struggling to make a living, and AI can gobble up training data faster than any human reasonably can in a lifetime.

Intellectual property has always been broken, AI just exposes the problem more clearly. It's always been a double-standard.

Forgive the Haters

I don't believe information can be stolen, just copied. Copying it doesn't remove it from the original person, so it's not theft and not bad.