I was originally going to put this into the Log, but it might be unwelcome.

You want a way to rattle image-generation Boosters? Most of the arguments they use can be used to defend Googling an image and putting a filter over it.

  • “All forms of media take inspiration from one another, so that means it’s fine to Google another image, download it, and apply a filter to call it mine!”
  • “Artists are really privilieged, so it’s morally OK to take their art and filter it!”
  • “Using filtered images I downloaded from Google for game sprites will help me finish my game faster!”
  • “I suck at drawing, so I have to resort to taking images from people who can draw and filtering them!”
  • “People saying that my filtered images aren’t art are tyrannical! I deserve to have my filtered images be seen as equal to hand-drawn ones!”

AI Boosters use a standard motte-and-bailey doctrine to assert the right to steal art and put it into a dataset, yet entice people to buy their generated images. When Boosters want people to invest in AI, they occupy the bailey and say that “AI is faster and better than drawing by hand”. When Boosters are confronted with their ethical problems, as shown above, they retreat into the motte and complain that “it takes tons of time and work to make the AI do what I want”. Remember this when you find Boosters. Or don’t, since I doubt the sites where they lurk are worth your time.

  • mindbleach
    2·
    3 months ago

    Yeah, can you imagine people slapping their own words over unsourced images?

    Or even screenshotting other people’s words-on-images, with their own words on that?!

    There might be whole websites dedicated to reducing stolen art to mere formats!

    This community is getting bizarre. You’re trying to create a slur for people who use a piece of software. Over… copyright. A subject Lemmy totally gives a shit about, outside this software. And I think you’re equating anyone using that software with the grifters who insist it belongs in toothbrushes. There is a wide range of opinion being distilled to one absurd extreme - which does exist, because the internet is an awful place - but it’s simply not representative. The divas and money-addicts are rare. Mostly, especially on Lemmy, it’s people choosing stupid puns and going ‘look what I got the machine to do.’

    I have photoshopped stupid pun images by hand. Mostly from images stolen from Google Images. When there’s zero dollars involved, who gives a shit? Hitting a Photoshop Phriday post isn’t exactly my username in lights. Culture borrows from itself and automating that is a non-issue. You can call it shameless theft and I will agree: it is without shame. Especially when the machine has dissolved everything into barely-identifiable parts. Should I get equally mad about each of the thousand images stitched together into a photorealistic Shrektopus? (Is any of that pearl-clutching owed to Dreamworks?)

    Now, the morons acting like they drew what the machine made, yeah, fuck 'em.

    They pulled it out of a bag containing all possible images. However deep you had to reach, the most we can say is “nice choice.” You objectively did not do it. You found it. And yet… you didn’t find it on one guy’s website. It’s less similar to any prior image than when I glued some guy’s dog over Darth Vader’s faceplate. Is that better than a melange of all dog photos to-date? There’s more inputs being sampled than pixels in the output. What any of them contributed is measured in fractions of a bit.

    I just cannot get excited about how this works. Rail against the dolts ruining companies. Shove tech-bros to their next grift. Ignore (at best) the talentless wannabes. But if the machine that churns out “banasaurus rex” on-command was fueled by a slurry of legally protected! uh, photographs of fruit, whoop de doo.