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Melinda24246 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

In short, what I’m saying is that we need to distinguish between using a tool to steal someone else’s work and using that same tool to modify your own work.

I think a perfect analogy would be a balaclava: the vast majority of people who wear them do so to commit theft, but if I’m actually on a mountain, I’m cold, and I don’t want my face to freeze, do I deserve to be called a thief for wearing one?

I had to reply to you here, Ratsnake. I'm sorry, but for some reason the site wouldn't let me reply to you directly...

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Ratsnake Games5 days ago(+1)

For the seven-hundredth time: if you are modifying your work by merging it with material stolen from other people, there is no fundamental difference between that and just stealing outright. No stupid analogy is going to fix that.

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Magicsofa5 days ago(+2)

It seems like you are thinking that when AI animates your image, it is doing so through programming alone. As in some sort of algorithm that takes your image and produces animations without any source material. But, this is not true - AI does it by prediction, and the way it builds the "knowledge" is by consuming vast amounts of other animated media. People don't have a problem with the program itself, they have a problem with the database it is using, which was constructed by scraping the entire internet for source material.

Your example would only be true if you "trained" your AI at home using exclusively your own source material. In other words, you would have had to make some hundreds or thousands of hours of animations first, then piped all of that into the AI model so that it could then play guess-the-next-frame with your images. Then you could say you are only using your own work.

On the other hand, whatever model you are using is almost certainly working off the backs of humans. That's the stealing part. It isn't a program that just uses math or procedural generation or anything "strictly code" to generate the animation. It uses a massive database of other people's work, most of which was never intended to be used for this purpose.

Please know that I'm not saying this to be accusatory toward you specifically, I just feel the need to correct the misconception that only your source image is going into the process. To be fair, it makes sense that people wouldn't necessarily understand this part of it, because the tools don't have a big banner that says "Hey, just remember that we can only do this because of the data we ripped from other artists." The stolen data is conveniently hidden behind the curtain. You'll never actually see it unless you specifically ask for a result that looks like someone's work. The results you normally get are an average of everyone's style. It doesn't matter if the end product looks similar to anything - the source material was taken without consent (and in huge quantities)

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Melinda24245 days ago

That explanation makes it easier to understand. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know which parts of the database are protected by copyright and which aren’t; in that sense, there isn’t much that can be done.

The truth is that people have already been given this toy, and it’s impossible to take it away from them now. AI isn’t going to disappear; it can be regulated (and obviously that needs to be done) but we also have to accept that the rules have changed, and I’m telling you this as an illustrator.

I’m from a generation that saw the birth of the internet; I bought cassettes, then CDs, then MP3s came along and music became free overnight...

Today we don’t see musicians complaining about that, and the music industry didn’t disappear, it just changed its rules. I think the same thing is happening here. I’m going to keep being an illustrator, and illustration isn’t going to disappear.

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Ratsnake Games5 days ago

"That explanation makes it easier to understand. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know which parts of the database are protected by copyright and which aren’t; in that sense, there isn’t much that can be done."

There is something very easy to be done: You just do not use the model unless all of the material that went into it was properly licensed.

If you know that a box of stuff contains some stolen material, and you buy the entire box knowing that some of the content is stolen, it doesn't suddenly become morally just or acceptable or even legal just because you do not know exactly which parts are stolen.

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Magicsofa2 days ago(+1)
Today we don’t see musicians complaining about that

Are you joking? Musicians are getting crushed under the weight of streaming services, which pay them a few cents unless they reach huge numbers of streams, and give customers a convenient "access-everything" platform which incentivizes NOT purchasing albums (even though they probably spend the same amount on subscription and in turn never own a single piece of music - Spotify shuts down, all your music is gone forever). Regular gigging musicians complain about streaming all the time.

Pirating MP3s is, and was, illegal. People got arrested for it. Musicians complained about it (ever heard of Metallica?). At the end of the day, it became something you just have to accept in a lot of cases because it's impossible to catch everyone, but it was never LEGAL. Also, there were some instances of people downloading music and then going out to buy the album for various reasons (didn't have the money at first, weren't sure if they would like it so tried it out before buying, wanted to support the artist, etc). Not everyone, obviously, but at least there was some recuperation of lost revenue. And there was always the legal barrier (depending on your location) and the general sense that you were in fact stealing. AND, to top it all off, the end product was still the work of a specific artist.

You can't compare that to genAI, which is like legalized stealing, but then recombining the stolen goods into something unrecognizable which now has no direct connection to the people whose work it was based on. Even streaming, which overall kinda sucks, is still putting your name and album art on the page at the very least, and throwing you your scraps. GenAI does no such thing.

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mid2 days ago

Comparing technologies is your fallacy.

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A Fals Fiction3 days ago (2 edits)

I feel the need to step up and clarify several points for the internet record….

A single illustration is not the same thing as an animation.

“AI” image generators don’t work without a training dataset. The vast majority of those sets are full of stolen images and secret movement tracking.

If you used AI in your project, you used AI in your project. Gamedevs who are purposefully using AI can be somewhat honest and click the Yes button. That disclosure a very simple task on this site.

Balaclavas are worn the vast majority of times for warmth or for fire protection. That’s what the article of clothing is made to do. That’s why it’s sold in camping supply and sporting good stores (where handknitting for someone close by isn’t the norm).

The same groups trying to push the message that face coverings as criminal are also using abusive AI systems to take away codified civil rights.

A better analogy for the core discussion: You have a right to take a photo of your own face, but sharing your photo is not the same as Photoshopping it into a video clip of someone who had no consent.

By the way, pixel art doesn’t all look the same. I would suggest you go look at specific collections of different artists, who agreed to participate in the collections, so you might see how different the art styles can be for snakes smaller than 48x48-pixels. I would suggest that if what I could believe you understand it’s not okay to copy the images and try to pretend they’re yours. Additionally: some of us put hours into small art pieces to the style how we want. It’s annoying how AI users refuse to acknowledge there are techniques, personality, and human experience that go into real artwork. The same goes for animation styles– it’s not all the same.

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