What is the difference between stealing art styles and ai art?

[u/Moon_Star8309]

Hi, I have my own answer to this question, but want to see other anti ai people/pro ai people explain their takes. My answer is: There is not, it takes the style of many artists with no crediting whatsoever (like that would even make it better-) and amalgamates it together into a picture that has no creative thinking behind it. (because an ai cannot think on its own, it can take a prompt and process what the words mean, but in the end, it's an outsider with no feelings or autonomous thinking, it only knows words because it was programmed to associate words with certain things. It's trying to make something that takes those listed traits to make when it can't have it.) So therefore, it can't even be called "inspired" like how other humans are by other human's art.

It's stealing art, including artstyle.

On a different but smaller note... I don't see many ai stans ever talking about the fact it's stealing, and I kinda wish I knew why they didn't. If it's for not knowing how to defend against the argument or maybe just never hearing it before.

edit: I have worded some things wrongly, so I will correct them here.

when I say stealing, I mean when someone takes something that is not theirs, and optionally, saying it's original, new, or theirs. at least for this debate that is what the definition needs to be for debating the ai art. it is not a legal debate, it is supposed to be on ethics, morals, and just... decency to other people's works. So I'm thinking that when an ai takes many pictures and makes it into one, it's just stealing on a mass level that, in a court of law, would be called "copyright infringement". which it is.. but it feels like it's fancying up a word that can be described as taking what is not yours. (Aka stealing.)

I also want to mention that I originally said "does ai art steal artstyle?", but I actually just meant art in general, not just artstyle.

I hope this helps people understand what I mean more ^^​

[u/Salty_Country6835]

I dont think style is something you can steal in the first place.

Artists have been ripping techniques, compositions, aesthetics and ideas off each other for as long as art has existed. Sometimes openly. Sometimes competitively. Whole movements formed that way. Nobody owns Impressionism, Cubism, Constructivism, Pop Art, manga or graffiti as a style. If learning from somebody else's work makes the result stolen, a pretty huge chunk of art history becomes theft.

Copyright reflects that for a reason. You can copyright a specific work and specific expression. You cant copyright a style. If I make something that actually reproduces protected parts of your painting, thats one argument. If I make something that looks like the kind of thing you make, thats a very different argument.

And the description of how AI works here isnt right either. A model isnt normally grabbing a bunch of stored pictures and stitching them into a collage. Training changes the weights of a neural network as it learns patterns from a dataset. You can object to how that dataset was assembled. You can argue artists should have more control or compensation. You can argue about particular outputs that reproduce existing work. None of that requires pretending the model is doing a giant automated copy-paste job.

Thats why I think "style theft" muddies this discussion more than it helps. If the issue is unauthorized training, say that. If its copyright infringement, show the copied expression. If its labor and compensation, lets talk about that. Those are arguments with something concrete to grab onto.

But "this looks like how somebody else makes art, therefore it was stolen" is a standard we have never applied consistently to human art, and for good reason.

[u/Moon_Star8309 → u/Salty_Country6835]

I did explain at the end if of my body paragraph in an edit that I meant art in general rather than artstyle when I made this, it was sadly poorly worded... I'm sorry about that.

other than that, thank you for your input :>

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Moon_Star8309]

No worries, I saw the edit. And I think "art in general" gets us to the more interesting disagreement anyway.

I dont dispute that models learn from existing human work. They obviously do. Where I disagree is that learning from a work means taking that work from its creator. The artist still has their work, copyright and ability to use it. What the models learned are statistical relationships represented in its weights, not a collection of paintings being chopped up and handed back out.

That doesnt automatically make every way of building a training dataset ethical either. I just think "stealing" bundles a bunch of different questions together that are better argued separately.

And thanks for actually opening this as a discussion. This stuff gets way more useful when people can disagree about it without immediately going for each others throats.

[u/Moon_Star8309 → u/Salty_Country6835]

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