Raw LLM Responses

When you make your art freely available to the public, you cannot complain that people are seeing it - and that is the essence of the problem here. As a copyright holder, one does not have the right to prevent derivative works. One part of copyright is to protect the financial interests of the artist, but the other is to stimulate the creation of new products by other artists, which is precisely what the criticism being leveled here is intended to prevent. But that problem applies to anyone as an artist, regardless of medium. If Sam wants to claim he's never seen another artwork and thus has never been influenced by any other artist, well good luck to him. But the rest of us work by collecting and collating our experiences of the work of other artists and reinterpreting it in a new form. And this is precisely how latent diffusion works. The anti-ai movement is pretending to protect "art", but is really interested in protecting "artists", and indeed only professional artists, and only professional artists who widely share their work online. It seeks to prevent artists using ai either from using it at all, or from having their work be seen by a larger audience. Consequently it cannot be said of this movement that it is protecting art, but rather that it is necessarily opposed to it. It is about marketing and profit, pure and simple. But that profit is not being lost by the mere presence of ai artwork. Even the otherwise "damning" image of the famous Nat Geo cover hasn't lost its photographer a dime. But ai art does threaten to do to the larger marketplace for art what has already happened to photography, which is to lower the barriers to entry and flood the market with producers. But none of the artists complaining about this have standing to complain that their capitalist platform is being replaced by...capitalism. I'm glad Sam has a strong understanding of the basic technology involved, but it's a shame that understanding doesn't seem to extend to copyright law or to the way art - and artists - actually work.