The general consensus here is that if you generate AI art at all, regardless of whether you use it commercially or not, you are engaging in art theft and are in fact an asshole.
So why doesn’t that logic get applied to straight up turning someone’s digital art and/or photos into memes and having millions of people repost it with zero attribution? I’m not talking about things like wojaks or rage comic characters where the creator intended for it to be a meme and knew for a fact that other people will copy it, nor am I talking about screenshots of popular media franchises, but the random art and photos people post that just happens to resonate with the internet in a way the creator never foresaw, becoming memes without the creator even initially knowing. Think the original advice animal meme templates like Scumbag Steve or Bad Luck Brian where it’s literally just a random photo of someone, probably taken off their personal social media. Or the two serious and one goofy dragon drawing and others that were very clearly posts on art sharing sites that got reposted with new context. I’ve even seen some meme templates go out of their way to crop out names and signatures that the original creator put there so they are credited when their work is reposted. And no one slamming AI art seemingly has a problem with any of it. In fact, if you as the creator of an image tried to get the internet to stop using your personal work as a meme with no attribution, you’d be ignored at best and targeted for doxxing and harassment at worst for spoiling their fun, probably by some of the same people condemning the use of AI.
If you go on art sharing sites, the consensus among the artists themselves is that you’re not supposed to repost their work at all unless given a CC license or otherwise explicit permission. Whether it’s for commercial use or just as a random internet post doesn’t seem to change their stance in the slightest. This implicitly includes not just AI but memes as well, as in both cases you are taking someone else’s work and redistributing it without permission or attribution. So why is this okay if AI art is not? It’s even more blatant than AI because it’s not just stealing tons of people’s work, blending them all in a neural network, and spitting out a “new” work that still has fragments of the stolen work, it straight up IS just stealing a specific person’s specific work, full stop. I feel like the reason is circular, it’s okay because it’s been happening since forever and that’s what makes it okay. And AI art is not okay because it’s new and doesn’t already have a history of everyone doing it.
The majority of people condemning AI art are not themselves artists but cite things like “respect for artists” as a reason for condemning it. But most artists aren’t just against AI but against their art being reposted by anyone for any purpose, profit or otherwise. Even if they were never going to make money from that piece, they are still against reposts on principle while most of the non-artists seem to only talk about AI separating artists from revenue. So if we’re actually to respect artists, wouldn’t we adopt that stance for everything and not just commercial use or AI?
And if this is okay, what about AI art makes it different enough to not be okay?
Finally, it’s not like people never make money off memes so a binary “AI is for profit while memes aren’t” doesn’t work.
Not trying to defend AI art, but trying to go further with the discussion that has appeared around it and genuinely trying to tease out some consistency and fundamental values in subjects everyone ostensibly feel extremely strongly about and are not willing to budge.
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.
I don’t think AI art is theft. Copyright should be abolished.
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.
I don’t believe in intellectual property
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.
so your actual problem is with capitalism as opposed to the tech itself
I don’t give a shit either way, fuck copyrights.
IP is helping strangle this world.
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.
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.
when I make a meme, I don’t make money.
when I make an AI “”“art”“”, water and power is wasted and datacenters are funded which stocastically increases the cost of residential electricity for regular people.
IDK anything about the liabilities of companies using memes in marketing materials (I assume it’s a legal gotcha that only 0.000001% of uses get punished for).
However, companies using AI art is about using work by artists and stiffing artists. There is the cultural loss of real art in products and the economic loss of jobs.
“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.
To adress the mems side of the question: Memes aren’t a large portion of the original work. Often times they’re screenshots of video material, so the “portion taken from the original” is minute. Some meme formats, however, are digital art pieces in and of themselves. (Note the word format - the “background” of the meme, for example the “If I did one pushup” comic)
But even with that consideration, a meme doesn’t bring harm to the original - it’s basically free advertising. And as the memes are usually low quality abd not monetized, it can be passed off as fair use or free speech in some jurisdictions, while others merely turn a blind eye. And why shouldn’t they?
As I said, memes have a multitude of points going against them being copyright infringement. They’re low-effort, short-form media, usually with a short “lifetime” (most memes don’t get reposted for years). Most often they’re a screengrab of a video (so a ‘negligible portion of the original’) and almost never bring harm to the original, but only serve as free advertising. Again, usually. This means most meme formats’ involuntary creators have no reason to go after memes. You could probably get a court to strike a meme, but probably on defamation grounds - and even then, the meme will most likely die (not the format!) beforehand, so such suits are usually dismissed as moot.
Compare this to an AI model (not an AI “artpiece”): It’s usually trained on the entire work, and they’re proven to be able to recreate the work in large part - you just need to be lucky enough with the seeds and prompts. This means the original is “in there somewhere”, and parts of it can be yanked out. Remeber, even non-identical copying (so takig too much inspiration or in academic speak, “plagiarism”) is copyright infringement.
And to top it all off, all the big AI models have a paid tier, meaning they profit off the work.
If you were to compare memes to individual AI “artworks”, then it is the same thing as memes. Except if the generation is a near-verbatim reproduction, but even then, the guilt lies with the one who knowingly commited infringement by choosing what to put into the model’s training data, and not on some unlucky soul who happened to step on a landmine and generated the work.
deleted by creator
while AI systems suck up every piece of art they can access in all of existence and make copies of it.
While also destroying the planet and contributing to the class war
I’m happy with a person making money off their effort even when it uses someone else’s work as a basis (ip rules are shit).
I’m not ok with lazy fucks churning out slop with no effort and no soul, and at the same time accelerating an impending climate disaster AND inflating the biggest speculative investment bubble of all time
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.
