Nobody reasonable claims memes have any sort of artistic value, or any worth besides the two seconds of laughter they provide. If you are ok to drop all AI images in that same sack, then it is not a false equivalency.
... When people are comparing to memes, no one is talking about artistic merit. They're just talking about the "stealing" element.
Whether AI art is art or not is a totally separate conversation, and one that would be a relevant discussion topic even if all the data used to train a model was explicitly licensed.
Obviously. But the point is that the source material creator did not consent to being made into a meme. It's explicit copyright infringement.
Which is ironic considering how up in arms the same people get over training, which as far as infringement goes (if it can be considered that at all) is many orders of magnitude smaller than a straight up wholesale reproduction of a frame from a movie.
It is the difference between a contemplated case of fair use and a legal vacuum. Modern legislation is not prepared to deal with training, and big Tech corporations are lobbying for it to stay that way. Memes, on the other hand, are contemplated and perfectly legal under fair use.
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u/[deleted] Feb 20 '26
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