Grumpy, rok temu

If AI art is stolen data, then every artists on earth are thieves too.

Do you think artists just spontaneously conjure up art? No. Through their entire life of looking at other people’s works, they learned how to do stuff, they emulate and they improve. That’s how human artists come to be. Do you think artists go around asking permission from millions of past artists if they can learn from their art? Do artists track down whoever made the fediverse logo if I want to make a similar shaped art with it? Hell no. Consent in general is impossible too because whole lot of them are likely too dead to give consent be honest. Its the exact same way AI is made.

Your argument holds no consistent logic.

Furthermore, you likely have a misunderstanding of how AI is trained and works. AI models do not store nor copy art that it’s trained on. It studies shapes, concepts, styles, etc. It puts these concepts into matrix of vectors. Billions of images and words are turned into mere 2 gigabytes in something like SD fp16. 2GB is virtually nothing. There’s no compression capable of anywhere near that. So unless you actually took very few images and made a 2GB model, it has no capability to store or copy another person’s art. It has no knowledge of any existing copyrighted work anymore. It only knows the concepts and these concepts like a circle, square, etc. are not copyrightable.

If you think I’m just being pro-AI for the sake of it. Well, it doesn’t matter. Because copyright offices all over the world have started releasing their views on AI art. And it’s unanimously in agreement that it’s not stolen. Furthermore, resulting AI artworks can be copyrighted (lot more complexity there, but that’s for another day).