itch.io

but that’s all artistic judgement ultimately is: somebody’s subjective opinion.

Not exactly. There is consensus from multiple people needed for art to become famous. And there are objective criteria for a thing, if it can be considered art or not. Yeah, those criteria can be fuzzy and seem aribitrary. And it does not matter for individual apreciaton at all. But a musem will not put up a painting of your proverbial preschool niece, just because you think it is beautiful and want to frame it on your wall.

For me, art is demonstrated skill. Bonus points if the art manages to express or invoke feelings or has a deeper meaning. For other people, expressing feelings is already enough for a thing to be considered art. But all this does not mean, a piece of art is any good. Art can also mean, that a thing does not have any purpose, besides decorating your wall.

Did I say that?

You keep downplaying what photographers do and it comes across as you denying that what they do is art. If that is not your intention, why do you keep hitting that spot. A quantification of art is not needed. It stays art, even if you think it is less valuable art.

Is this legal? Well, yeah, because that’s the contract all parties signed.

Uhm. You already mentioned the important bit. The couple probably got a discount or a cheaper photographer, because they gave permission to use the photos for advertisement. And when they do not get the photos in digital format and with publication rights, they can only privately use them, and it gets complicated when they want additional prints. Or sell the photos to a newspaper.

This is baseline copyright issues. The photographer did the work. If the contract does not transfer copyright and other rights to the couple, the literal right to copy is with the creator. And ordering additional prints is literally making a copy. As in said copyright. This is not adressing the question if the depicted thing or person has any additional rights attached. Like, how you can not just make a photo of a random person and publish it, since you have copyright

And all this is not even about art. It's about a work that falls under copyright. Such pictures can be considered art. But just because a picture is professionally made, does not make it art that is worth being apreciated as art. It is art in the technical sense, that there is skill involved and that it was art-ificially made.

Wedding photos are the physical representation of memories, and now somebody else owns those memories.

That's a far stretch. You assert a transitive quality. But it does not work that way. Only copyright of those physical representations might be with someone else, depending on contract. Memories are not key locked to that object. And people that did not attend the wedding cannot suddenly remember the wedding, just because the physical representation is given to them.

Disney pretending they own fairy tales

They only own their specific version of the non copyrightable fairy tales. You need to have Snow White to have specific color coding to invoke this. And actually, that's not copyright, it's trademark laws. The probem arises, because some people invoking Snow White in their works do not refer to the original work, but rather to the well known version of Disney, because they copy the color scheme or other things Disney invented in their retelling.

That’s like saying we need to let go of 

I explained and elaborated why I think the plagiarsim argument is not future proof. Please do not try this type of fallacy:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum

And curiously you prove my argument by saying, literally the only argument that matters.

That's precisely because we cannot bet all our money on this card. It is a weak card. Even if law makers would decide that the training data is unlawful and therefore the ai things have to be removed, it would not help. The ai model makers would just invest in obtaining training data in law abiding ways and create new models that are compliant. There still would be generative ai systems and people using it.

But you could no longer call it a plagiarsim machine. The argument would be turned against all the current ai opponents. Soo, it's ethical training data, why do you not play that ai game now? You claimed you would not play it because of the "plagiarsim". You are a hypocrite! That's what would happen.

Also, on a technical level, the copyright and plagiarism arguments do not hold up. The machines are learning. They do not learn like humans, but what they do is learning. They do not simply compress the source material to later be able to retrieve it. You can't argue with copyright, if the result is not a copy, but a mangled thingy. Plus, copyright even has exceptions where you are allowed to copy. Even without consent. Forbidding machines to learn from your works, is a whole new level of concept. You can't tackle this with old concepts - if you do, you will eventually lose.

It's better to focus on the output of ai system. Like by prefering human works. Only then it will be future proof. The extreme would be a Butlerian Jihad. No one cares if the thinking machines are trained with consented material or not. Or would you suddenly accept gen ai made games, if the training data would be 100% consented? Really?

Do I block people that post it just so I don’t have to look at it?

AI slop is soulless because it is slop, not because ai was involved. There is plenty non ai slop on Itch as well. OP's work for example is not slop, even if one would not like it for other reasons.

Literal blocking does not help. But there are ways of filtering developers. And of course there is the no-ai tag.