I am genuinely trying to get better at art. I’m not there yet (likely never will be), the lying machine is still better than me.
The context:
This is my sketch.
And this is what the ai output.
I like to think I poured my heart and soul into it. I know there are people who will tell me that I’m terrible for using ai at all. I’m also sorry if this is the wrong community to ask this question (ask reddit would delete my post instantly if I tried to post there).
Again, is this slop? I am not an artist. I drive a forklift real good, that’s my skillset. So if I were to use the ai upscaled version for my book, well, I’m asking for opinions.
But if someone directs the generation of an image, and represents it as an image generated by a tool trained on basically all public images ever, they aren’t really passing off the result as theirs, are they?
It’s hard to understand the resulting image as being made by particular people and stolen from them. None of those people have ever seen it or know it exists, for example; are they genuine co-author?
If you think of it as made by all artists, somehow, can one properly steal something that’s of an essentially publicly-owned or common-heritage nature?
If it couldn’t be made without using their unwilling contributions then that is theft sorry
So the people training the models are stealing art by using it for training over the objections of the artists, right?
The products of the models couldn’t be made without everything that went into the models. But why is (making? using?) those products “theft”, and also thereby bad, versus something like stealing spray paint and doing graffiti on the side of the hardware store? Or shoplifting a bunch of figure drawing reference books and cutting them up into a collage?
The fascist project to transfigure the entire history of art into capital they can rent out is obviously wrong. But surely when you steal a thousand works of art and sum them together to make something else, you’re making the very definition of a transformative work, right? What about all those human artists where appropriating stuff was an important part of the art?