In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
Because you as the artist are going to change that to make a unique work within certain legal guidelines. The fact is, the laws have not caught up to regulate this and protect artists.
Additionally though you're not thinking about this the right way. Your work as an artist is copyrighted. Meaning you own it and the right to license it to other entities. You as the artist did not license the use of your work to the company that used it for training data to give a result similar to your work when queried.
There are LLM's that do only use licensed work that they have purchased a license for or the rights to. Getty images is a really good example. But ChatGPT did not license anything. So everything that comes out the other end of a query is tainted by the stolen data or art that went into it.
Look up why the actors guild striked and protested to protect their art and likenesses. And then tell me you don't feel the same way. There's multiple lawsuits going on right now with multiple of these LLM's that have stolen data to use as training material.
A college can't just take your work offline and use it in their curriculum. Neither should an LLM be allowed to do that.
@atrielienz what I'm saying is that if the artwork is viewable in public, I have given the public license to hold that information in their brain and use it to influence their own output.
If a member of the public makes too similar of a replica then I can sue. We do not regulate the intake of public information into human storage/retrieval systems (brains) so why should we do that for synthetic ones?
We should only regulate the output to not reproduce art or an actors likeness etc.
If you go to college for art you are actively required to use specific licensed learning materials to learn from. They don't just go get random training material off the web and go "draw like this but make it your own". The same principles apply. The AI has no filters. It has no way of determining what is copyright infringement and what isn't. It can't decide what is fair use and what isn't.
@atrielienz and to your other point, the AI doesn't need to understand infringement. Because if it does infringe you can sue the person profiting off of the infringement. This is just like how it works now: If an artist isn't aware that they made an exact replica, they can still get sued.
The last step is just we need to make it clear that if a company profits off your use of an AI image generator that contains infringement, the company should be liable.