I first dabbled with AI image generation back in 2022 and sprinkled a few such images throughout my worldbuilding project. It was easy to look past all of the flaws with the idea that it was nothing more than a novelty. And I never cared nearly enough about my worldbuilding to pay anyone for artwork of it.
Now that I look back at it, those images are obvious slop, which I've grown to dislike as much as the next person. But recent comments I've seen here and on other sites have made me wonder if my brain has rotted in the same manner that makes some boomers fall for AI slop. There will be videos where the use of AI is not very noticeable to me, but not with deceptive intent. Maybe an illustration to get the point across or a subtle two-second animation. Commenters will very passionately point it out. To be honest, I don't see the creator either paying for the equivalent human work or drawing anything better themselves.
Does it really just look that bad? Is it an issue with what AI and the companies that sponsor it stand for? Theft of real artists' work? Does it change at all if the images were generated locally with the creator's own hardware and resources? What about upscaling images, like I do with old wallpapers so that they look better on new monitors?
I assume what I've just said will attract downvotes, but that was my thought process and I do want to understand where other people draw the line and for what reasons. Should we limit it to quick-and-dirty illustrations, pure novelty, upscaling existing images, a model that only incorporates work if the artist consents, or something else?
I'm probably the most anti-AI person I know, but I agree discourse around how "AI is theft" is a bit shallow.
However.
Copyright is often erroneously conflated with plagiarism. While the two do sometimes coincide, they're very different concerns.
I, myself, believe copyright is so broken we'd be better off throwing it away. (The only thing I believe I'd miss about copyright if I woke up tomorrow and it didn't exist would be copyleft.) But I do deeply believe in a right to attribution.
I don't think AI is theft. I think it's plagiarism.
And I do believe that listing the names of all those whose works were involved in training data for a model would still be a great disservice to the artists. Meanwhile, asking an LLM or image generating model which training data was involved in generating the particular output it produced is similarly futile to asking which rep at the gym allowed a stage strongman to lift a car.
And if someone objected that giving what I would consider "sufficient credit" to artists/authors/whoever would make AI models completely infeasible, then my response would be "that's exactly my point."
Finally, one more point I want to make is that if AI didn't make billionaires a huge amount of money, the legal system would have put a stop to the mass scraping of training data and made a very visible example of whoever undertook to do so first long ago. (coughAaron Swartzcough) As terrible as it is having to deal with the shitty IP laws we have, the greater injustice is that the laws only apply when billionaires want them to.