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Unpopular opinion: my friend's take on AI art made me rethink copyright
I was having a beer with my friend, a graphic designer, last week. She said, 'If an AI makes a picture from a million photos it saw, that's just how any artist learns, but faster.' I always thought AI art was straight up theft. But she pointed out that human artists look at other art all the time too, they just do it slower. She said the real issue is who gets paid, not if the AI 'learned' the right way. That hit different because it shifted the problem from a moral one to a practical one about money and credit. How do we decide who gets paid when the 'artist' is a mix of a programmer, a user, and a giant dataset?
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the_rowan19d ago
Your friend's point about learning is interesting, but doesn't that ignore intent? A human studies a style to understand it, maybe to add to their own voice. An AI just matches patterns from data it was fed without any choice. @angelarivera's idea about a fee is practical, but how would it even work? Like, if an AI image has a watercolor look, do you track down every watercolor painting online to pay them a fraction of a cent? The system seems impossible to manage fairly.
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angelarivera19d ago
Oh man, that's a good point... it really does come down to the money. Maybe the answer is some kind of new license or fee that gets split between the original artists in the dataset?
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