Is it really ethical to train AI on dead artists' work without consent?

I keep seeing people defend using paintings from deceased artists to train image generators because 'they can't consent anyway.' My neighbor passed away last year and left behind hundreds of sketches. His daughter found out some company scraped his online portfolio to build a model. She's been crying about it for weeks. How is that different from grave robbing? They're profiting off someone who can't say no. But then again, blocking all dead artists would wipe out most of art history as training data. Where do you draw the line between honoring a legacy and exploiting it?

2 comments

2 Comments

barbaraw4714d ago

My grandfather was a sign painter in the 1950s who died in the 90s, and his family never put his work online at all. So this whole debate only applies to artists who had a digital footprint or whose families chose to share their work publicly. The real problem isn't the dead artist, it's the living people making money off them without asking. If a company wanted to train on my neighbor's sketches, they could at least reach out to his daughter and offer a small cut of whatever they earn. That's not honoring a legacy, that's just being decent.

grantadams14d ago

Wow, that detail about his daughter crying for weeks really got me, @barbaraw47 I can't believe people are just shrugging this off as no big deal. Companies scraping work from someone's online portfolio without even a heads up to the family feels just as wrong as digging through their stuff after they're gone.