I find the complaint about copyright so strange in this case. Copyright has a purpose, stopping some random person from creating an imagine only they will see and use is not that purpose. In this case it's just spiteful. Ultimately, if you think he's infringing your copyright you should sue him, but I don't think you'd win.
they could do a step-by-step art tutorial, and wouldn't have to pay anybody, nor use tools that rely on stolen artwork. but nope.
highly ironic how they made this thing, and promptly showed it off to thousands of people on the internet, immediately invalidating your example
they also promote (just by choosing and mentioning all of these things) those services, like Replicate, that monetize the use of stolen artwork (by selling compute, directly coupled with nn models), and ultimately profit from it (solely, without "giving back to artists whose art they perused" or anything).
they could make art in a way that wouldn't participate in tech art theft racket, but they didn't. and they didn't just participate in it, but promote it and perpetuate it.
Is the solution to prohibit any type of processing of such images, or should it specifically prohibit the calculation of derivatives of the loss function based on those images, or something else entirely?
is there precedent for this? How are the services you reference operating if it were so clear?
This sort of image generation (especially extrapolating probable upgrades & improvements of just the next few years) displaces artists without providing an upgrade path. It shouldn't take much empathy to understand how that's frustrating and scary that must be for them.
I think pxoe's expression of frustration is totally reasonable. The engineers who made this stuff could have focused on using AI to enable new possibilities, instead of undercutting existing possibilities (to create new markets instead of overtaking existing ones). They could have used 100% consensual training data, but instead felt entitled to exploit a loophole/ambiguity in the social contract under which artists have been sharing their work on the internet.
A more appropriate analogy would be, this sounds a lot like social movements complaining about capitalist co-opting of their symbols, e.g. the use of "communist" rhetoric to build oligarchies (or the sale of "save the earth" mugs made from oil-derived plastics, etc.). Even that isn't a perfect analogy, though, as the co-opted output wasn't itself the displaced work-product, although it does a better job of capturing the emotional side of it, the sense of betrayal. Ultimately, I don't think it's productive to reduce the reaction to the decisions behind Stable Diffusion etc. to a single analogy, and it shouldn't be so hard to say "sorry, you're right, this is bad for you and good for me and you have every right to express your frustration over that irreversible decision".
I'd like to point out that _computer_ used to be a job title for a human worker who would _compute_ things. This is a job that no longer exists.
Hiring an artist removes control, it's not your art, but the artist's what ends up on the wall. That's the reason that I avoid hiring artists when I want some art made.
With that said, I have found that at least for now using AI for art is just too much work and too little control. I want my art on the wall, not whatever the AI model outputs. So, I'm in your camp of "just learn to paint the darn stuff". I find it's a lot more fun.
as well as, doing all that nn/ml stuff, instead of just, trying to learn a bit of how to make an artwork themselves, how to draw something, even by tracing over a photo, like doing a 'how to do a vector colorful painting dog' search and going off on that.
like, this end result doesn't even look far off from what a 'colorful vector dog portrait' tutorial would yield. it just involves tons and tons of questionably sourced artwork, and violated copyrights. (i know techbros are very confused about copyrights, but stuff like 'all rights reserved' and such actually does have its meanings)
specifically picking stablediffusion, probably the most blatantly stolen artwork-based model (given how open and clear it is with what data has been used for it, and how you can't just squirm 'i didn't know what were the terms of use of their data' with other, more closed-off services), that's just another great touch as well.