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Ban on Ai Art

The current trend of Lensa, Midjourney, etc is rent seeking ghoulish behavior that seeks to destabilize  artistic labor even more than it already is. 


This is NFT shit all over again and theres needs to be a zero tolerance of it. This is automated theft and exploitation to be stopped.

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The copyright system is bad because of the ways it allows the bourgeoisie to hoard ideas. Huge IP monopolies are the most horrific example of the worst of this. But the petite bourgeoisie side with huge IP monopolies to protect their combined interest in copyright law are not exempt from criticism. Nobody gets to be an idea landlord. I don't side with rentseekers. Be it corperate owned AI, or copyright holders. Artists aren't owed rent for 1/100000th of their work ending up in an anime girl picture. Artists aren't owed rent for a public domain art style mimic. People who pay for Elon Musk's AI are also clowns. Use Stable Diffusion or something else FOSS. Have some dignity, yanno? But I know the which technology is the threat to artists right now, and not in a hypothetical future. The technology which hurts art right now is copyright law. . Feeding the art of a recently deceased artist into an AI is... tasteless at worst. Like, it sucks, don't get me wrong. But there's a lot of tasteless stuff in art history. I'm not going to start hating all painters over the Mummy Brown thing, yanno?
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The amount of protections that individual creators have is so remarkably small that I don't know "we have to destroy copyright by taking out the people who benefit from it least" is really that strong an argument. Neither do I think, no matter the language used to dress it up, that supporting corporations selling artwor stolen from individuals is really all that Marxist. I don't want artists to be paid rent, I would like for the models to only be trained on works which they have permission to use. Until that is true images created with such models should be banned.
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It is unfair that the small artists need to stand against copyright. We're also the only ones who can. Big corperations will never do it. "Legally there can be no distinction between Small Artists and Big Corporations when it comes to copyright ... There is no legal cutoff that says "copyright but only for the poor wittle small artists/content creators." The laws of the capitalist economy only favorably discriminate upwards." - Quote from a tumblr post by brendanicus. read the rest of the post its good and I agree. https://www.tumblr.com/brendanicus/703755700758806528/legally-there-can-be-no-distinction-between-small
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Wanting compensation for your labor does not makes you a landlord.  Landlords to not contribute anything and deny people something that is required to live.  Art is a luxury good and anyone can learn to be an artists.


Not only that but, these AI models are imperfect and are improving by having people, like you, use them and test them without compensation to you. You are being exploited into free labor by the people who own the AI models. By continuing to use them and allow their use you are aiding these companies who, at any time, can make it so these programs are no longer free.


You are helping the landlords build the house.



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It's pretty easy actually to ultimately be against copyright law and still think that tech startups bursting into a room, vacuuming up a bunch of stuff they had nothing to do with so they can put it into a blender and resell it to people (and eventually other corporations) in the hopes of replacing the people who made the original stuff sucks a big one.
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Artists are petite bourgeoisie, and hoping to charge rent on pngs that are infinitely replicable. You should get compensation for your labor. You cannot charge rent to a person duplicating an infinite resource. Artists, as idea landlords, do not withhold things needed for survival. Art is enriching and important for humans, but yes, you can technically survive an existence in an artless world. Other uses of copyright are not so kind. Poor people or inexperienced artists should have luxuries, too. Anyone can be an artist - I agree - and extend that to people who use AI. I think poor people should have nice things. I'm not helping landlords build a house, I am just sitting here. If somebody scraped my PNG, that's their labor, not mine. I guess technically Stable Diffusion is not immune to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. These are however tactics that FOSS communities are familiar with, and I trust they will fight to prevent such an outcome. This is a worry with AI art though, so its worth keeping an eye on! All AI art should be public domain, and I wish the huge pushback on AI art was instead refocused to this end. A compulsory public domain art fabrication technique... It would be so cool.
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The idea that you think of art as only a physical resource and not a representation of the time, skill, and labor that went into making a piece is the issue.
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Yeah this feels like working backwards to justify why it's actually fine the shiny new toy you want to play with was built with stolen labor.
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Yeah, not just stolen ip but also revenge porn, stolen medical photos, and isis executions. If you want to build an ai off of completely public domain images and works that the authors themselves submit. Share fine whatever. But there is no current model that does that. This person is just clearly a troll hiding behind pseudo Marxists language and has never talked to an actual artist ever.
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I do see the skill of art. I am an artist who has spent years honing my skills. I will repeat from my first post on the subject. I am a digital artist who has been creating online for over a decade. I have barely touched AI art. I know how digital art works. I am a part of the digital art community. AI art is not my shiny new toy. AI is something I've barely touched. I just know who my enemies are. I have seen digital artists fight copyright all their careers. And now I'm told we SHOULD become like the RIAA because we got a bit spooked by computer art? No thanks.
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As a BMA player, I have to vote against this. AI image generation isn't just 'omg lets replace all digital painters'- it is a tool that many people are using maliciously, or creating their own editions of in a malicious way, but it is not itself inherently evil. 


People post all kinds of heinous shit on twitter, including the revenge porn you use as your main talking point. Should we be banned from saying the word 'twitter', or embedding twitter posts? People write mean things with words, should we ban words?


I understand where you're coming from, but an outright ban would be overly hostile when the real threat is not AI image generation, but people who use it for evil. :/

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My statement wasn't based on what people WILL do with AI art, it is based on the fact that AI is already trained on revenge porn, stolen medical photos, and isis beheadings. It has already been used. Every time you use AI image generator you are using someone's stolen private medical photos. AI art programs as it stands is not ethical to use in any capacity.

"Should we ban words.' Certain words have been banned. Common. You know this.
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This guilt by association talking point depends entirely on lacking the most basic education about how diffusion models actually work, which is probably why nobody bothered to address it.


But whether the argument has any validity or not, if someone experiences such a strongly negative emotional reaction to it, tag muffling has been implemented.

I am one of the most frequent posters of AI generated material, and systematically use the tag "AI Generated" for the benefit of anyone who wishes to block or seek out this material.

I posted encouragements to others to use this tag. If someone won't follow AI users, also blocks the Stable Diffusion, Dall-e 2 and ChatGPT tags, they will certainly remove 90% of AI generated material from their timeline.


The fact staff certainly received reports about my AI generation experiments and did nothing about it, while members of staff have also stable diffusion images for shitposting, should make it clear where the policy stands anyway. Nobody wants to import the sorts of bitter fights we're seeing on Reddit or Twitter here.

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"I'm perfectly ok using a program that was trained on stolen medical, photos and isis beheadings because none of the actual pixels are in the new images! :)" 

We already have tag muffling, blocking and other features either implemented or planned for implementation which enable users to avoid content they are morally opposed to. It should be on the users to curate their experiences, not the site staff to react to controversial topics and take sides.


I am a digital artist myself and have used digital tools for many years, including AI, to assist me in my artistic process. That doesn't mean I support the bad practices that many visual AI have been built on at the present moment, but I also think it would would be incredibly shortsighted to ban an entire artistic medium based on a kneejerk moral panic. This is compounded by the fact that humans are often poor at telling the difference between AI-generated art and fully original paintings, or collage and photobashing techniques; I agree with the earlier point that a ban would only promote bullying and witch-hunting behavior toward artists, and create an atmosphere of accusation and distrust.


This isn't a defense of the ethical problems which concern AI art, but you could also make similar arguments for a number of other art forms or content which are already accepted on the site. Cohost is also not an image provider in the first place, so it also doesn't really make sense to compare it to a stock image website in terms of policy.


Regarding the concern of art theft, I don't see how it's any different from existing rules. If someone believes that their work has been stolen, they can report the offending user. I don't think it necessarily matters whether the theft is due to tracing, reposting or AI being used to alter it, all of which should fall under the same blanket of thieving behavior.

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