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Overheard my nephew arguing with his friend about AI art stealing from real artists
My nephew Jake (he's 16) was going off about how AI art is just "recycling" and his friend said it's "inspiration" the same way humans do it. But here's the thing - I looked into it and some AI models like Stable Diffusion were trained on like 2.3 billion images scraped from the web without permission. On one hand, artists are losing commissions to people typing prompts into a box. On the other hand, my friend who can't draw uses it to make cool birthday cards for his kid. Where do you draw the line between fair use and just taking someone's work? Has anyone else had this argument and come out with a solid take?
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king.derek14d ago
Think about how this is playing out in so many other parts of life too. We got people scanning your face at the grocery store, algorithms writing your emails, and now machines making art from everything posted online without asking. It's like this whole system is built on taking what's already there and calling it progress. The real thing that bugs me is how nobody asked the artists if they wanted their years of practice turned into free training data for some company's product. But I also see that kid who can't draw making something for his dad's birthday and that's not hurting anyone. Where does the line get moved when the whole internet becomes the raw material for these tools?
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