Raw LLM Responses

Drawing... and most creative activities assocaited with creating an accurate representation of something from real life or one's imagination, with intent, takes a massive investment in time and effort. It is a highly desired skillset and ability. For people who put in the effort to learn said skills... it is a source of pride. For people who don't understand that... and engage in trolling artists are quite likely the same people who won't pay artists for what they are worth for their work. The copyright thing is so effing messy... and getting messier as different countries apply different laws. But when this first broke and the question of copyright was brought up... the argument was that you can copyright artwork, ie the reproduced image, but not the style, said artwork was done in. Could be wrong, but I think this was to avoid people essentially suing someone else for drawing in a similar fashion and preventing the development of art... but they hadn't foreseen generative AI technology. The disconnect between people who insist that they are standing shoulder to shoulder with other artists because they have access to a tool that can produce imagery defined by text through a statistical model derived of many billions of image elements... is because those who vehemently defend AI art and their right to it... see it as a tool. an island. Isolated. Think about DAW(s)... you can make music on it despite not being able to play an instrument. Those instruments and samples came from somewhere... granted there IS a legal framework for how that is licensed and works, so no insanity there. But I believe generative AI artists see it as that. A tool that lets them playback samples with "styles" applied in the form of a massive pool of statistical systems. Hmm... no, let me try this instead: Imagine someone finds a magical painbrush which allowed them to paint something, but only if they can verbally describe it. It just so happens that this paintbrush's magic draws on all of the art in existence that has ever been shown or displayed. Works are produced from this and while unknown at first.. .eventually it becomes known how the brush works. But by then, someone figured out how to duplicate the brush limitlessly. And the magic contionually absorbs art even as it is newly produced. Someone who finds such a tool would be enamoured of it, believing that the output is related to their own skill and creativity. That the creation of that generated art costs nothing of the original artists whose works served as a the foundation for those massive statistical models. And now that person is being told the art they produced is theft. That the magic brush employed dark magics to essentially steal from all artists of the world(for the purpose of this bit of writing). Threats and demands are made to have every magic brush confiscated and that the people who used such brushes have no right to be called an artist. I've tried learning drawing several times and each time it had been a struggle. Like so many others, I found said brush and was truly amazed and dazzled by its power. Truly. And yes... it wasn't perfect.. many images produced are quite frankly cursed... and the moral and ethical grounds on which it has been commercialized is something that needs to be looked at. The use of the educational funding/effort to hide behind to dodge legal protections is very concerning. But... this brush, like anyone who finds something amazing and powerful, there is a strong sense of ownership. A perception of one's own "ability" and labelling it as merely converting from one form, text prompts and controlnets and other things, into imagery and that that is sufficient human creativity. Definitely engaged in some arguments about it with people both for and against genAI art(as well as other genAI tech). At the end of the day... the skill isn't mine. The power isn't mine. And because... I spent no effort to acquire that skill and power... there is a corresponding lack of respect for said power. Copyright laws aside, how genAI(images, sound, music, text, etc.) statistical models are generated, through the analysis and distillation of many millions->trillions of works... is inherently unfair to artists and other content creators. It is once again, the "oh thats nice art and I love your style, but can you do XYZ for me for free? You'll get great exposure through my use of it!" Which is just asinine. Here's the thing, looking at the valuations of certain corporations via their stock value and the finanncial gains they have made through it via servng/hosting interfaces to monetize these models... compensating artists should NOT be a problem. Establishing source material and chain of derivation should not be a problem other since the analysis of said content requires meticulous notes. And the "datasets" are often times massive catalogs of links to image resources and not the images themselves. So to claim ignorance or inability to follow back to the source is... a very questionable claim. Artists SHOULD be compensated for what is essentially a transfer of future earnings rights away from artists to the entities that are now using said models and derived models(models trained on images generated by the 1st and 2nd gen models). The current laws are unable to address the matter because... and INAL, I suspect application of existing law to apply to this use case could have bad side effects on the use of content on the internet at large. So ideally... new laws are to be crafted with artists being properly legally represented and having a sizable representation as they are ultimately the injured party. I want to see the genAI technology creation technology fixed so that all who contribute to it are properly compensated for it. Though beware of the play/streaming music model. :/