The general consensus here is that if you generate AI art at all, regardless of whether you use it commercially or not, you are engaging in art theft and are in fact an asshole.
So why doesn’t that logic get applied to straight up turning someone’s digital art and/or photos into memes and having millions of people repost it with zero attribution? I’m not talking about things like wojaks or rage comic characters where the creator intended for it to be a meme and knew for a fact that other people will copy it, nor am I talking about screenshots of popular media franchises, but the random art and photos people post that just happens to resonate with the internet in a way the creator never foresaw, becoming memes without the creator even initially knowing. Think the original advice animal meme templates like Scumbag Steve or Bad Luck Brian where it’s literally just a random photo of someone, probably taken off their personal social media. Or the two serious and one goofy dragon drawing and others that were very clearly posts on art sharing sites that got reposted with new context. I’ve even seen some meme templates go out of their way to crop out names and signatures that the original creator put there so they are credited when their work is reposted. And no one slamming AI art seemingly has a problem with any of it. In fact, if you as the creator of an image tried to get the internet to stop using your personal work as a meme with no attribution, you’d be ignored at best and targeted for doxxing and harassment at worst for spoiling their fun, probably by some of the same people condemning the use of AI.
If you go on art sharing sites, the consensus among the artists themselves is that you’re not supposed to repost their work at all unless given a CC license or otherwise explicit permission. Whether it’s for commercial use or just as a random internet post doesn’t seem to change their stance in the slightest. This implicitly includes not just AI but memes as well, as in both cases you are taking someone else’s work and redistributing it without permission or attribution. So why is this okay if AI art is not? It’s even more blatant than AI because it’s not just stealing tons of people’s work, blending them all in a neural network, and spitting out a “new” work that still has fragments of the stolen work, it straight up IS just stealing a specific person’s specific work, full stop. I feel like the reason is circular, it’s okay because it’s been happening since forever and that’s what makes it okay. And AI art is not okay because it’s new and doesn’t already have a history of everyone doing it.
The majority of people condemning AI art are not themselves artists but cite things like “respect for artists” as a reason for condemning it. But most artists aren’t just against AI but against their art being reposted by anyone for any purpose, profit or otherwise. Even if they were never going to make money from that piece, they are still against reposts on principle while most of the non-artists seem to only talk about AI separating artists from revenue. So if we’re actually to respect artists, wouldn’t we adopt that stance for everything and not just commercial use or AI?
And if this is okay, what about AI art makes it different enough to not be okay?
Finally, it’s not like people never make money off memes so a binary “AI is for profit while memes aren’t” doesn’t work.
Not trying to defend AI art, but trying to go further with the discussion that has appeared around it and genuinely trying to tease out some consistency and fundamental values in subjects everyone ostensibly feel extremely strongly about and are not willing to budge.
Imo the main difference would be that genAI models have been trained on a whole lot of art without consent, and the few privileged companies who are able to do this are making a ton of money (mainly by investors, not sure how much from paying users). Which is very extractive and centralised. Using others’ art to do memes at least is distributed and not that remunerative
Putting AI aside, if we see art used in a meme of a random shitposter, it feels different than a political party or a big corporation using that art to do meme propaganda/advertisement.
Another interesting field for this is YouTube poops. They use tons of copyrighted materials, from big movies to local youtubers to advertisement. I would consider that fair, but if instead a big television network had a program showing youtubers’ content without permission that’s another story
Another example: Undertale’s soundtrack being made with Earthbound’s sound effects and samples. If it weren’t an indie, especially if it was a big publisher using an indie’s sounds, it wouldn’t have been well received.
So back to AI, when it comes to a person using it for their own projects, the issue to me isn’t really using stolen art, but using a tool that was made with an extractive theft of art by a big corporation, rather than seeking collaboration with artists, using existing CreativeCommons stuff, etc.
We also have to keep the context in mind: copyright laws mainly serve big publishers, hardly ever it protects smaller creators from such big publishers, in any field. The genAI training race is based on a complete lack of interest in applying or at least discussing the law.
I’m glad to see tho that thanks to this phenomenon more and more people are seeing how IP doesn’t make any sense to begin with. Just keep in mind copyright and attribution are two different things.
The whole argumentation fails apart if you ask yourself a simple question, is the meme transformative to the art that it is using. As you already stated, “in a way the creator never foresaw” highly implies a transformative nature.
But isn’t ai art transformative? Oh it might be. But well, the company making the ai, stole art to create the model. There is no transformative step between the art piece and the version of the art piece that they use to train the ai. It is stolen art but not because the model steals, but because the model is built on stolen art. Everything that an ai model can produce is based in stolen art. So any similarities are not a little reference to some other art piece but stolen art. As the whole model is based on similarities, it produces exclusively content that has similarities to that stolen art. And if everything is a reference to stolen art, the ai art become effectively stolen art.
But what about people and their faces? Yeah i don’t think you should use/make those memes, unless the people are public figures. But not because it is stolen art, as the memes tend to be transformative, but because everyone has a right to privacy.
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well, for one thing, using ai image generation is supporting a business model that’s whole thing is ripping off artists, even if you personally aren’t turning a profit. and for another, if an image is used in a meme, it is not that hard to do a reverse image search to find the original, if it was posted online, whereas the blended chicken nugget ooze that is the output of image generators specifically defies attribution.
also, there’s the fact that artists often like it when people like their art, even if it would be better to provide attribution. i don’t think i’ve ever seen anyone argue that slapping some text on an image for a meme hurts the original artists ability to make a living, but tons of artists have noted such an effect from ai slop extruders.
Generally speaking, memes aren’t being used to make money…whereas AI is almost exclusively being used to profit off of someone else’s content.
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while AI systems suck up every piece of art they can access in all of existence and make copies of it.
While also destroying the planet and contributing to the class war
I don’t give a shit either way, fuck copyrights.
IP is helping strangle this world.
I’m happy with a person making money off their effort even when it uses someone else’s work as a basis (ip rules are shit).
I’m not ok with lazy fucks churning out slop with no effort and no soul, and at the same time accelerating an impending climate disaster AND inflating the biggest speculative investment bubble of all time
because it’s not theft. IP laws are theft.
“You”, the user of the AI model isn’t engaging in copyright infingement directly.
However, whoever made the model that you used did. Most using copyright protected works.
Some people are paying for these models. This is what’s the problem: financially benefitting off others’ work without permission (or royalties).
It’s like the age-old piracy dilemma: the person using direct downloads or streaming can’t be fined in most jurisdictions - it’s the duplication and sharing that’s forbidden.
This exact analogue exists with AI models: training a model and giving it to others to use is distributing access to copyrighted material. Using an AI model is not.
To adress the mems side of the question: Memes aren’t a large portion of the original work. Often times they’re screenshots of video material, so the “portion taken from the original” is minute. Some meme formats, however, are digital art pieces in and of themselves. (Note the word format - the “background” of the meme, for example the “If I did one pushup” comic)
But even with that consideration, a meme doesn’t bring harm to the original - it’s basically free advertising. And as the memes are usually low quality abd not monetized, it can be passed off as fair use or free speech in some jurisdictions, while others merely turn a blind eye. And why shouldn’t they?
As I said, memes have a multitude of points going against them being copyright infringement. They’re low-effort, short-form media, usually with a short “lifetime” (most memes don’t get reposted for years). Most often they’re a screengrab of a video (so a ‘negligible portion of the original’) and almost never bring harm to the original, but only serve as free advertising. Again, usually. This means most meme formats’ involuntary creators have no reason to go after memes. You could probably get a court to strike a meme, but probably on defamation grounds - and even then, the meme will most likely die (not the format!) beforehand, so such suits are usually dismissed as moot.
Compare this to an AI model (not an AI “artpiece”): It’s usually trained on the entire work, and they’re proven to be able to recreate the work in large part - you just need to be lucky enough with the seeds and prompts. This means the original is “in there somewhere”, and parts of it can be yanked out. Remeber, even non-identical copying (so takig too much inspiration or in academic speak, “plagiarism”) is copyright infringement.
And to top it all off, all the big AI models have a paid tier, meaning they profit off the work.
If you were to compare memes to individual AI “artworks”, then it is the same thing as memes. Except if the generation is a near-verbatim reproduction, but even then, the guilt lies with the one who knowingly commited infringement by choosing what to put into the model’s training data, and not on some unlucky soul who happened to step on a landmine and generated the work.
If you can’t see the difference between people doing something and hostile metahuman entities doing it, I don’t know what to tell you.
Memes only have because they reference an original work. AI strips the connection between the original work and the final product deliberately.
AI companies are consuming all the electricity, and will destroy the economy when their bubble bursts, in their quest to eliminate millions of jobs and control the lives of everyone, to profit the global tech elite.
Memes are not-for-profit cultural detritus. They are not the same.
I don’t think AI art is theft. Copyright should be abolished.
“copy image” uses less than 0.01% of the resources used when generating an AI image
The “stealing art” thing is more about AI providing no way to trace back to the original works that were used to train it. It is completely opaque. With art that is copied for a meme, that is not really the case as it is not obfuscated in the same way. Often the art is easily recognized or can be located via a reverse image search.
AI as a tool can be useful, but so far most iterations are entirely in service to capitalist speculation. Burning through resources to generate aesthetic goo to hype up speculation deserves all the scorn that can be heaped upon it.
