The problems with AI art

[Dice]

What company is this?  I know several companies making generative music AIs, including Google.  I can think of no company that stopped working on music AI because they were worried about music companies.

Not stopped working on it, used only music that was in the public domain or open source. There was a bunch of articles about this when it was first announced. The it was amusing that these devs would walk all over us (Visual artists) but not take on someone like Sony. Seems all those posts got buried by the news that they are getting sued for copyright stuff anyhow... so what the hell do I know anymore?

Anyhow I can not find the articles I am looking for, but there was a big blow up that pissed off a bunch of us (I am a photographer) because the early music datasets were not including copyrighted works where they did not give two shits about scraping all we had. The reasons given was we have no power but the Music Studios have actual muscle. It is all well and good to claim your datasets do not infringe of the rights of people who do not have the money to sue you, it is another to test that against the lawyers of EMI or Sony.

Seems these days though its all hands on deck, lets see who we can tread on to make the future. Honestly though, if they are going to ride roughshod over the Labels, I guess that is their fight to pick. I just hate that I know my photos are 100% in this mess somewhere.

[ninjawriter]

Dice, oh, yeah!  That issue arose because music companies were the first to get their art behind well-designed paywalls and the aggression of music companies in pursuing pirates.  You can't scrape for music because the music is behind various paywalls or protected by established contracts (such as the music found in movies.)  That's the essence of the Getty Images lawsuit, really.  They allege that the watermarks prove that their work is behind a paywall and therefore protected.  I don't know how that'll shake out - probably by removing the images from the datasets, which won't affect them very much - but that's tangential to my point, I think.

For me, the real issue is to what extent are machines allowed to do what humans do.  Humans study art (without paying anyone) and then based on what they study, create new art all the time.  Every artist I know can rattle off a list of their influences, right?  So far, though, the law has looked the other way when machines reproduce human labor after a study of those forms of human labor.  I do not say this gladly.  I despise it.  But it has been permitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution without question.

And I think that Disney and the other major media companies are drooling at the possibility that STYLES and INFLUENCES can be protected.  That would give them the tools to go after any competitors.

[Oniya]

The general artistic term is pastiche, and while it is usually pejorative, it is unarguably legal.  Or it has been legal. 

I'm not entirely sure that 'pastiche' is necessarily pejorative.  There have been several fairly famous pastiches.  'The Seven Percent Solution' is not based on any single Doyle story, most of the Bond movies before 'The Living Daylights' had bits and pieces from multiple Fleming novels - TLD itself wasn't even written by Fleming, and the myriad Conan storied that weren't written by Howard.  And I suppose I'm obligated to mention that the 'Fifty Shades' books started out as Twilight fanfic.

[GloomCookie]

I've said it before but I'll say it again. All work is built on top of the work that came before, and it's really an argument about how closely something resembles something else and where that line is blurred.

Ed Sheeran recently won a lawsuit that he didn't copy the rhythm, chords, etc. from "Let's get it on" by Marvin Gaye. The reason that's critical is because 3-note chords on musical instruments can only come in a finite variety before you start to become repetitive.

Patents are only good for about 20 years, meaning if I went out and invented a new type of motor that was even more energy efficient today (May 11) then it would become open to the public on May 11, 2043. Nothing I do short of come up with a new patent changes that.

Fashion, meanwhile, has no copyright. You can watch a fashion show from Milan and copy that style immediately.

The reason art is somehow separate is because of intense lobbying by corporations like Disney that wanted to take public domain works, add their own flair to them, and then lock in that new style to establish a brand. If I wanted to make my own version of Star Wars, I'd have to wait until 2072 in order to do so without calling it War of the Stars, which even that title might get me sued. The only thing protecting art is lobbying by big corporations, because originally, they were limited to 14 years. If I published a book today, and I lived to the US average of about 75, then there's an additional 70 years on top of that, then my book becomes public domain in 2133, which feels absurd to me.

I understand wanting to protect your brand, but copyright I feel is used more as a hammer to beat down new ideas rather than allowing people to come up with new ones. How many more bland and passe Superman movies will we see before the character becomes public domain in 2034? How will such a character be treated once anyone can publish a comic with Superman in it? Or put out a Superman movie?

Quietly waits for someone to scream at her. Again.

[ninjawriter]

The reason art is somehow separate is because of intense lobbying by corporations like Disney that wanted to take public domain works, add their own flair to them, and then lock in that new style to establish a brand. If I wanted to make my own version of Star Wars, I'd have to wait until 2072 in order to do so without calling it War of the Stars, which even that title might get me sued. The only thing protecting art is lobbying by big corporations because originally, they were limited to 14 years. If I published a book today, and I lived to the US average of about 75, then there's an additional 70 years on top of that, then my book becomes public domain in 2133, which feels absurd to me.

Indeed.  This is why I said that media corporations are silent with current artists proposing that using images to train upon and stylistic similarities are protected classes.  Because, in the end, this gives them the power to go after not just people who make Star Wars but also War of the Stars, War of the Distant Stars, War of the Faraway Galaxy, etc., with much greater power.  I think artists who are relying on arguments that people shouldn't train on images and protect styles are making a Devil's deal.

[Dice]

I've said it before but I'll say it again. All work is built on top of the work that came before, and it's really an argument about how closely something resembles something else and where that line is

That is true, yes, but art is the one thihng that is truly of the individual who makes it. If you do not have Oppenheimer you would still end up with the bomb. You might need five people to take his place but the rules of physics don't change. You can throw lesser minds at a problem and still crack it in the end.

Art is no like that. If there is no Waters then there is no The Wall. If there is no Freddy then there is no Bohemian Rhapsody. Even if we walk on the stones laid by those who came before us, we still make, we still build and we still give onto others the chance to build of their own two hands and feel something of the moment we shaped something into reality with our own skills.

My issues with AI art is not that someone is taking from my work, finding inspiration and building their own craft, that would be an honour and a privilege, it is that a lot of the craft and the self development is taken away from the "artist" and it reduces the value of what is made by the person involved. There is a gift in finding yourself in the moment and building something with your brush, pencil, notebook, camera or instrument. These things are not found in promoting the same system over and over like throwing darts at a wall.

Perhaps I am an old man in the 1910's looking at power tools and thinking there is no grace in them. Maybe I am out of touch, but I have already done this once before (Film camera's my father taught me on to Digital I now use) and that felt like a change of the tech but not a distruction of the skill. AI is something else.

Quietly waits for someone to scream at her. Again.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

[Kuroneko]

Could we please try not to confuse a copyright with a patent? They're two different things. Trademarks are another thing. Patents apply to technical inventions. Copyrights apply to artistic creations. Patents only last for 20 years, but copyrights last for far longer, generally the life of author plus 70 years. Comparing the two is apples and oranges.

U.S. Copyright Office
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Copyright Alliance

The article on fashion also points out that there are aspects of fashion that are subject to copyright. Many fashion designers are highly recognizable for the very things listed in the article that can be subject to copyright: graphics on fabric, logos included in designs, and textile designs.

I've said it before. While all artists learn from what came before, I don't know a single artist (including myself) that wants to copy what another artist did. I don't want to draw like Da Vinci, or paint like Van Gogh, Picasso or Miyazaki. We've already had one of each of them in the world, and we don't need more. We need new things, new ideas, not copycats. 

Points out that there are no capital letters in this post, or any of my posts, therefore no screaming.

[Kuroneko]

It also might be useful to know that copyright existed long before big corporations. They can definitely now use it to establish a trademark, but it was initially created to protect the intellectual property rights of individuals.

US Copyright Timeline


Hopefully, Anton Toynikov's work with Stable Attribution will make credit to the original artists behind an AI image a reality.

[ninjawriter]

Stable Attribution shut down without any fanfare.  My experience with it is that it wasn't very good, I should add.  I took a well-known image from a fantasy artist and told Midjourney to base an image on the Frazetta image I used, and fed it into Stable Diffusion, oh, I dunno, at least ten times.  It only ever returned one Frazetta image as a possible source and it was the wrong image.

[GloomCookie]

Could we please try not to confuse a copyright with a patent? They're two different things. Trademarks are another thing. Patents apply to technical inventions. Copyrights apply to artistic creations. Patents only last for 20 years, but copyrights last for far longer, generally the life of author plus 70 years. Comparing the two is apples and oranges.

U.S. Copyright Office
United States Patent and Trademark Office
Copyright Alliance

The article on fashion also points out that there are aspects of fashion that are subject to copyright. Many fashion designers are highly recognizable for the very things listed in the article that can be subject to copyright: graphics on fabric, logos included in designs, and textile designs.

I've said it before. While all artists learn from what came before, I don't know a single artist (including myself) that wants to copy what another artist did. I don't want to draw like Da Vinci, or paint like Van Gogh, Picasso or Miyazaki. We've already had one of each of them in the world, and we don't need more. We need new things, new ideas, not copycats. 

Points out that there are no capital letters in this post, or any of my posts, therefore no screaming.

No, it absolutely is not, because both work on similar principles. While art may be unique in that each artist is slightly different, fundamentals that make up the core of works stem from the works of others just as patents do. The works of the ancient Greek masters inspired the works of Renaissance artists who in turn inspired others. Work does not exist in a vacuum. Picasso would not have created his famous works had he not studied the works that came before.

The same can be said of other artworks such as literature. Chaucer was one of the earliest writers in Old English and created Canterbury Tales, and then you had Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, both works that influenced later works as the language and structure of literature evolved. They would go on to inspire Shakespear, who in turn would inspire others throughout history.

All works are built upon someone else's works, even if it's just a stepping stone or them reading and thinking "God this is so bad, I could do better." Stephen King, for example, states that he got a lot of his earliest inspirations with H.P. Lovecraft's The Lurker in the Shadows, stating "I knew that I'd found home when I read that book." He also read William Goding's Lord of the Flies.

Now, having beaten that horse to death, let me trot out the next argument. There are lots of patents covering software development. As anyone who has ever programmed something before, they will tell you that there's multiple ways to achieve the same function using programming, even within the same programming language. For example, how to program the game FizzBuzz.

https://youtu.be/QPZ0pIK_wsc

Now, if you try and patent FizzBuzz as an example, you can't patent the actual code, but instead the results of the program. That is remarkably similar to how copyright works for literature and art, since each programmer has their own unique style and it's all about the final product. So, if you hold the patent for FizzBuzz, and I produce my own unique program but it achieves the same goal, that's patent infringement.

But if I create a piece of art and call it FizzBuzz, and you then produce a piece of art that looks similar to FizzBuzz, I can sue you for copyright infringement.

Can you see where the lines blur?

Oh, and let me share something else that's common in my industry. My work as an engineer is copywritten by the owners of the company I am working for. Starbucks, for example, has all its plans and documents copywritten. Not trademarked, even though it has the Starbucks logo on it, but there is a large block of text on each document that states the drawings are owned by Starbucks and can't be copied without permission. I can't take a detail from Starbucks and copy it onto a new project.

Is it art? I mean, it's all physics and science, so why can't I copy it? Well, parts can and can't be copied. Starbucks doesn't own the symbol for a panelboard or disconnect, so I can copy that. I can copy information like I want to use Bussmann LPN-RK500SP fuses on the next project. So it has to do with the specific configuration of graphics on a sheet of paper that's copywritten.

So if the components themselves don't matter... then maybe the individual parts and pieces don't matter so much, and maybe it's the final, end product that's actually copywritten. Just ask Ed Sheeran, who just got accused of copyright infringement for having the same basic chords on his song as another.

[HeLaFem]

I don't know a single artist (including myself) that wants to copy what another artist did. I don't want to draw like Da Vinci, or paint like Van Gogh, Picasso or Miyazaki. We've already had one of each of them in the world, and we don't need more. We need new things, new ideas, not copycats. 

If we consider "artist" as "creator", then, of course, I agree with you.
But if we consider "artist" as a "profession", then copying (both style and full-fledged paintings) is a whole type of activity that they have been engaged in the past and are doing now. Because by copying a famous author\a successful picture, a person can get a fraction of his fame and money by doing craftsmanship, not art(so, I hope ChatGPT does not deceive me and these two concepts really reflect the same palette of meaning as the original thought). Especially in a place where the popularity of the original author is not represented. Another city, another country.
The same thing is happening now, just in a less explicit manner (and even then, not always. In musical works, at least in my country, there are some couple of complete copies of works \ parts of works from the USA\Europe just with a translation), and such people have been and will be as long as it benefits those who do it. And for so many of their fans, they will be real artists and even creators, while in fact they are a mix of thieves(in a copyright laws) and creators.

Considering that you suggest not to confuse copyright with a patent, I'm sure you understand this perfectly well, much better than me, because these things were created, including because of such people, complicating their lives and taking them beyond the letter of the law. So consider this an invitation to a conversation. :)


As for the main topic (or rather a more general view of AI), for me AI is another round of progress that can only be slowed down but not stopped. During the Industrial Revolution, people lost their jobs, and professions were devalued, but at the same time, new, other in-demand jobs were created. From the point of view of society, this is progress. From the point of view of a resident of that time, it is a tragedy. All we can do is try to delay or smooth out this effect in time, but it will be, and this cannot be avoided.
Already, some Chinese companies (from the rumors that I have seen) are quite starting to use music written by AI, art drawn by AI, while firing their employees who were previously engaged in creativity.

Because, for the most part, it is not the work of people that is important to their consumers but the final picture. And if it can be achieved in more straightforward ways, people will use it. Not only large corporations but also small artists, developers, and companies. And the human eye will not find the differences between an adequately selected work made by AI from one made by a natural person just because AI is trained on arts made by people and, as a result, adopts its pros and cons. One piece of evidence of this is the victory of the photo created by AI at the Sony photo contest.
One of the exciting things here is the oversaturation of consumers with high-quality things and the search for new, exciting styles through, for example, purposeful product corrosion. Plus, an interesting separate category of AI works trained on the works of other AI and a lot of iterations of this (as they did, if memory serves me right,
AI from DeepMind on the starcraft game), as a result, literally the whole idea of the art may change. This can also become one of the extremely unlikely, but possible ways to use AI for creativity. Separation of AI creativity from people's creativity and taking AI underground, which creates images based on people's works. More of a fantastic scenario, of course.

And as for the professions, the natural creators will remain one way or another. There will always be a certain number of people who care about human labor. It will go from the category of a full-fledged profession to the sort of enthusiast. The entry threshold and attitude towards this profession will change dramatically.
However, with this change, my profession will simply die out in its current form because engineering is about technical interaction with technology for the purposes and needs of a particular situation rather than about creative activity in general. ^^"


As for the ethical problem raised here, I would like AI works to consider people's copyright and respect their work and time spent. This discussion is essential, and discussions in society, as a result, will allow us to come to some kind of consensus.
But one of the problems (and dignity) of the our world is the competition of ideas and views, not only within society but also between different societies. As a result, it can easily be a situation where in country A, AI works are limited by ethics and copyright law. In country B, AI works will be significantly less limited and, as a result, create entirely different things. Worse or better is an open question, but this is one of the points of tension and disagreements between countries. It is also worth remembering that such work on discussing AI should go not only within one society but also in cooperation with other societies.

[Al Terego]

I've said it before but I'll say it again. All work is built on top of the work that came before, and it's really an argument about how closely something resembles something else and where that line is blurred.

This!

The only difference between AI training and artist training is scale and efficiency (the quality of the output and the similarity of content is a different question.

The reason art is somehow separate is because of intense lobbying by corporations like Disney that wanted to take public domain works, add their own flair to them, and then lock in that new style to establish a brand. If I wanted to make my own version of Star Wars, I'd have to wait until 2072 in order to do so without calling it War of the Stars, which even that title might get me sued. The only thing protecting art is lobbying by big corporations, because originally, they were limited to 14 years. If I published a book today, and I lived to the US average of about 75, then there's an additional 70 years on top of that, then my book becomes public domain in 2133, which feels absurd to me.

I understand wanting to protect your brand, but copyright I feel is used more as a hammer to beat down new ideas rather than allowing people to come up with new ones.

Copyright was established at the behest of, and for the benefit of the publishers, not the artists.  And the current terms are more than just absurd, it is outright robbing the commons.

IP protection in the US is based on Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the constitution, which states that gives Congress the power "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." after which the works should enter the public domain.

The original copyright term was 14 years (plus an option for another 14 years extension) and it required registration.  In my opinion it struck a good balance, which the current regime does not.
I fail to see how life+70 "promotes the progress of science and useful arts" and how it benefits the public at large.  If anything, it removes an incentive for successful authors to continue creating, and prevents others from improving on those works.

Health professional, first responders, and all other "essential workers" are paid for work done.  A heart surgeon does not expect the person they saved to continue paying in perpetuity for the privilege of using their fixed/transplanted/artificial heart, do they?  And yet, the idea that "creative work" should continue paying the bills for one's great great great grandchildren is pushed as sacrosanct.  I guess JRRT should be publishing another Middle Earth masterpiece any time now, and the fact that the law forbids me from singing "happy birthday to you" in a restaurant makes all our lives so much better.

Sophocles said that immoral laws should not be followed.

Quietly waits for someone to scream at her. Again.

I shall scream my agreement.

That is true, yes, but art is the one thihng that is truly of the individual who makes it. If you do not have Oppenheimer you would still end up with the bomb. You might need five people to take his place but the rules of physics don't change. You can throw lesser minds at a problem and still crack it in the end.

Art is no like that. If there is no Waters then there is no The Wall. If there is no Freddy then there is no Bohemian Rhapsody. Even if we walk on the stones laid by those who came before us, we still make, we still build and we still give onto others the chance to build of their own two hands and feel something of the moment we shaped something into reality with our own skills.

If there was no Waters or Freddy, someone else would have risen to fill that void.  They might not have created the same (or even similar) work, but it could have been just as good, or even better.  Nature abhors a vacuum.

My issues with AI art is not that someone is taking from my work, finding inspiration and building their own craft, that would be an honour and a privilege, it is that a lot of the craft and the self development is taken away from the "artist" and it reduces the value of what is made by the person involved.

It is not up to you to decide.  As it was not up to Oppenheimer to make a decision on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Could we please try not to confuse a copyright with a patent? They're two different things. Trademarks are another thing. Patents apply to technical inventions. Copyrights apply to artistic creations. Patents only last for 20 years, but copyrights last for far longer, generally the life of author plus 70 years. Comparing the two is apples and oranges.

The ideas behind them and their justification are the same, the only differences are the details of implementation.
See the relevant passage from the US constitution that I quoted above (I use the US model because information on it is easily accessible and I am too lazy to coduct global research for the sake of a post).

It also might be useful to know that copyright existed long before big corporations.

Say what?[/quote]

[...] it was initially created to protect the intellectual property rights of individuals.

It created those Imaginary Property rights.  Physical property rights are natural, without them society will colapse.  There is a reason that we find laws respecting them on clay tablets from over 4000 years ago.

[Al Terego]

Damn, screwed up the BBCode and cannot edit.  Oh well, the link works.

[Kuroneko]

Stable Attribution shut down without any fanfare.  My experience with it is that it wasn't very good, I should add.  I took a well-known image from a fantasy artist and told Midjourney to base an image on the Frazetta image I used, and fed it into Stable Diffusion, oh, I dunno, at least ten times.  It only ever returned one Frazetta image as a possible source and it was the wrong image.

Ah well, hopes for reliable attribution of sourced works through this method dashed, lol. I think the point of SA was to identify the artist, but hopefully new options will develop.

No, it absolutely is not, because both work on similar principles. While art may be unique in that each artist is slightly different, fundamentals that make up the core of works stem from the works of others just as patents do. The works of the ancient Greek masters inspired the works of Renaissance artists who in turn inspired others. Work does not exist in a vacuum. Picasso would not have created his famous works had he not studied the works that came before.

Bolding mine.

Of course work doesn't exist in a vacuum. But the key concept here in the way that work from previous artists influenced others that come after them, which is embedded in your very argument, is that it inspires others. It doesn't inspire them to simply copy what has come before. It inspires them to innovate. Why would I want to do what someone else has done? Stephen King may have found a home in Lovecraft's work, but he didn't copy it. His work is entirely different.

Copyrights and patents are inherently different or the laws regarding them would be the same. Similar does not equal the same. They apply to completely different types of ideas and objects. I've provided the links to the laws regarding the differences. In the end, it doesn't matter what you or I think about it; wiser people with more knowledge of the laws have made that decision, and we have to follow them. I'm pretty damn thankful that my books are covered by copyright. However, they're not inventions that require a patent.

And yes, the Starbuck's mermaid is indeed a trademark - Starbuck's Trademarks. Several versions of it have been trademarked.

Thankfully, we don't have to agree on this issue.

Al Terego, the Romans could never have imagined corporations are they are now. And since the link I posted specifically referenced copyright law in the U.S., it's not really applicable. Again, apples and origins.

Copyright was established at the behest of, and for the benefit of the publishers, not the artists.  And the current terms are more than just absurd, it is outright robbing the commons.

I don't understand what 'robbing the commons' even mean? Artists are under no obligation to place work in the hands of the public or the public domain.

Copyright absolutely benefits artists. My publisher doesn't own the rights to the content of my books. They currently own the right to print ,publish , and distribute them because that's the contract I signed with them. In return, they protect them from copyright violation and I earn royalties.

IP protection in the US is based on Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the constitution, which states that gives Congress the power "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." after which the works should enter the public domain.

And that term was set by the government. Whether anyone sees the value of the current copyright term or not, it's the law. If you want it changed, then work for change. 

I'm going to bow out of the conversation now. I'm tired of the argument that theft = the democratization of art. Ya'all have fun with it.

[ninjawriter]

The only difference between AI training and artist training is scale and efficiency (the quality of the output and the similarity of content is a different question.

Also that AIs aren't people.  Which is the big objection... though maybe if visual artists seemed to care about other people whose jobs have been destroyed by mechanization they'd have a bit more of a moral leg to stand upon.  But two wrongs don't make a right.  The consequences of AIs destroying human labor are serious and lasting.

[ninjawriter]

Ah well, hopes for reliable attribution of sourced works through this method dashed, lol. I think the point of SA was to identify the artist, but hopefully new options will develop.

Unlikely.  AI developers prioritize developing AI over the systems to analyze AI... but to analyze an AI, you need a system more powerful than the AI.  This means that we can, at best, substantially analyze previous versions of AI.  And, honestly, by this time, the large AI art generators aren't relying very much on extant instances of YOUR art.  Since the art that they generate goes into the database for further training, the large majority of images, by now, are those generated by AI.  Tracing the provenance of any specific image will only grow more complex as the size of the databases grows and the number of variables grows.'

Regardless, it's still a trap.  The people such an analysis will tend to benefit are large media firms because they both have the largest share of art that people are inspired by and they have the most resources to take legal action.  The problem isn't AI scraping the Internet for art.  It's that we live in a society run by corporations.  Midjourney is not your main enemy.  Disney is.

[Al Terego]

What I don't understand is the claim that art AI is plagiarizing artists by training on their images.

The AI is trained on very large data sets.  The percentage of images made by any single artist is minuscule.  Literally a drop in a bucket.  If you ask it to create an image of some scene, it will do so based on the aggregate of the weights the training data supplied.  Remove one artist's images from the equation and the end result will not be much different.

Now if you ask it to create the image "in the style of Albert Oehlen", it's a completely different situation.
But then, if I happen to have a very talented artist friend and ask them to do that, and they come up with something extremely close to the original, is there a difference?

[TheGlyphstone]

I'm not sure theft stops being theft as a matter of percentages. If an AI scraper steals 1 images from 10,000 artists, it's stolen from 10,000 artists. Each of those 1 images being 1% of their total creations isn't really relevant to whether it's theft or not.

[Al Terego]

1. There is absolutely no "theft" involved.  Please use the correct terms.
2. Looking at an image, memorizing it, and learning from it is not "stealing".  Please use the correct terms.
3. Copyright infringement is *absolutely* a matter of percentages.  An image that was 0.1% inspired by your art -- even of those 0.1% were directly lifted from your art -- is not infringing.

[TheGlyphstone]

Needing to fall back on semantic pedantry is rarely a good sign regarding the solidity of your argument. Just going to point that out.

[Al Terego]

Needing to fall back on emotionally loaded words and hyperbole is rarely a good sign regarding the solidity of your argument. Just going to point that out.

[TheGlyphstone]

'I know you are but what am I'? Really? That's literally the argument level of preteen school children. I can't offer any sort of coherent reply to that without burning IQ points, so a winner is you?

[Dice]

1. There is absolutely no "theft" involved.  Please use the correct terms.
2. Looking at an image, memorizing it, and learning from it is not "stealing".  Please use the correct terms.
3. Copyright infringement is *absolutely* a matter of percentages.  An image that was 0.1% inspired by your art -- even of those 0.1% were directly lifted from your art -- is not infringing.

OK dude, I'm mostly ignoring you, but you should read the thread your posting in some. This here puts to rest most of your arguments imo. Also I wish to point out that I believe you to be arguing in bad faith and will not seek to engage with you while you are doing so. Nothing personal mate, just not worth the blood pressure rise to explain how theft works only to have a semantic fight over already established principles.

This is likely to end up being a major issue for groups that have AI art programs. If your TOS claim they own the copyright to the "Art" they make they are in for hell over this.

https://petapixel.com/2023/02/02/ai-image-generators-can-exactly-replicate-copyrighted-photos/

TLDR:
You can get AI programs to spit out a near 1 to 1 of the images they were trained on. So close they would be in legal shit if someone tried to use them.

[Oniya]

As this is my thread, and the conversation has devolved to this level, I'm locking it.  Nobody wins.