If we could copyright every stroke in our paintings or every line in our artwork, nobody would be able to make anything new. Humans copy painting techniques, photography tricks, shot setups (angles, margins, etc) and make new pieces all the time that advance the world of art.

Ah. So when challenged with facts, we defer to the good reliable ol slippery slope and exaggeration.

>humans copy techniques

And as I already addressed, when humans are creating, there is real intent. When an ai does it, it’s a copy and paste with no intent.

The intent is whatever the human puts into the prompt. If a human downloads an image, copies and pastes a solid black line thousands of times to make a mediocre drawing, is that not just copy and paste?

What is your actual intention here? Where does the "intent" in humans come from that AI doesn't, even when commanded by a human to perform something?

Where it comes from is that AI cannot create beyond its training scope.

If you ask an AI to train itself from its own images, it’ll always actually become worse using its own evaluation.

If you ask a human to train themselves, the human will notable become better of their evaluation.

AIs are fundamentally limited to their training set. Humans are not.

The fact that you can tell an AI to draw a specific thing, and it’ll steal content from other people doesn’t result in the AI having uniquely created an image. It has searched and blended strings together. That’s it.

> AI can only copy.

That's just plain wrong. AI can generate things that are not in the training set, hence it can not "only copy" (on the other hand, I could understand trying to argue that AI can only create pastiche, or that it "uses" training examples in a fundamentally different way than we do).

Prove it.

Fundamentally, AI image creators stitch together images, then try to apply an art style.

You might call it “unique” because it stitches things together wrong (hello 10 fingers on one hand), but it is still fundamentally just copying, pasting, and then deforming lines together.

People claiming that AIs understand what they’re doing and that what AIs do is not fundamentally copying and pasting are the ones who have the burden of proof here.

>but it is still fundamentally just copying, pasting, and then deforming lines together

That's called "photobashing", very common to see used by concept artists. Also, it's fair use.

So now you've got a bigger problem in that almost all concept artists are engaged in theft I suppose? Since they are "only" copying, pasting, and then deforming things together?

Funny how you declare photo bashing as “fair use” but a cursory glance at the actual legality shows that you’re lying and that it is also in a somewhat ambiguous grey area at the moment, with lawsuits pending.

It is also massively frowned upon in art sharing circles.

>but a cursory glance at the actual legality shows that you’re lying

[[citation needed]]

>a somewhat ambiguous grey area at the moment

That's a funny way of admitting I'm right.

>It is also massively frowned upon in art sharing circles.

Who gives a shit? What part of "commonly used in concept art", and among professionals in drafting and conceptual stages in general, do you deliberately seek to not understand?

You mentally unwell or are you just an internet troll?

Ad hominem usually demonstrates you know that you’re wrong.

I am not the one arguing that a computer has thoughts, feelings and intent as you are here. It is you that is deliberately attempting to misunderstand through ignorance, lies, and insult.

Here’s an article specifically on the legality of photo bashing:

https://www.owe.com/is-fan-art-legal-fair-use-what-about-mas...

Your “carte Blanche fair use” claim is nonsense. Copyright owners can, in fact, today stop derivative works that they know about, including photobashing.

By your own admission, AI is barely doing photobashing, so is very obviously not creating original works and is subject to copyright claims.

It gets tiring listening to HN AI enthusiasts pretending that AI is an actual comparison to human intelligence when it’s actually demonstrably a specialized search engine that does little more than copy and paste. If this were not the case, then:

-An AI would be able to feed itself without becoming shit tier nonsense

-An ai would be able to create materials not discernible from its training material

Neither case is true for any AI, including diffusion models.

>Your “carte Blanche fair use” claim is nonsense

Since you seem to not be aware of this: Fair use is an affirmative defense. By definition nothing I have written is therefore "carte blanche" as no defense of fair use can be ever said to be "carte blanche". This is pure sophistry on your part and transparently so.

>Here’s an article specifically on the legality of photo bashing

And mashups, photobashing, and many things likewise, remain legal and with fair use defenses in the courts as precedent. You continue to reach to any dishonesty or deflection including projection to avoid dealing with any of the points anyone has brought up.

That’s not a sound argument. AI doesn’t copy, but that doesn’t mean it must know what it’s doing in any human analogue of the “knowing” process.

That it doesn’t copy it’s very easy to prove: ask for something that is not in the training set. Does it generate it? Then it’s not a copy.

“Copy-pasting and deforming lines” is such a generic description (and to a certain extent a misrepresentation of what is actually happening) that I don’t see how it’s useful, or relevant. Even if we supposed this was true, you would be claiming that many of Duchamp’s works or potentially Arcimboldo’s or mosaics or collages are “just copies”.

AI does not copy

Diffusion models are exposed to a blank canvas and then instructed to produce something. At no point are they looking into a database. They simply produce an image that will score highly in their aesthetic estimations.

Prove it.

Train an AI just on a few techniques. Then a couple fundamental stock photos with nothing but the subject. Then have it generate things outside of the realm of the stock photos recombined in a general style. Let us see your completely unique and unpredictable results.

Can you explain in more detail what you want? If you undertrain a diffusion model it will produce meaningless gibberish. Which is still 'creative', just not what you expected. Training for a diffusion model is not 'inserting' images into a dataset. Rather you should view it as a 'taste' alignment.

>“If you under train a model, its results being copy and paste are fundamentally more obvious so I refuse to do that!”

Exactly dude.

But it's not copy paste. At no point does it not 'create' something from thin air. With training it produces things along the lines of what you want. That's the difference. It doesn't copy. It just notices what you like, and generates that.