AI Content Help- Ask questions, discuss, comment, complain

@Parallel Black
That’s an incredibly dismissive view on coding. Sure, lots of people just copy code around, just as lots of people just open up photoshop and move photos around or make generic UX icons; but to a lot of coders, their work is unique, expressive, and art.

I’m not immediately seeing the difference between a programmer reading someone’s code and understanding how someone else solved a problem or being inspired by an out of the box solution, and an artist liking how another artist draws chest fluff on foxes and using the same on ponies.

Leaks/piracy are a different issue altogether, that’s taking a work outright and creating a loss of income from that exact work (aside, but potential loss of income from AI is something I do see as a concern, same with anything automated).

A more appropriate comparison would be one studio creating a successful game and then another copying many of the game design / mechanics to make a different game. And I’m very happy that almost everyone thinks that’s a good thing, actually.

@Parallel Black
Programming is art, and no copying code is not the norm only bad programmers do that. Using ideas from other people’s code is done though especially with math and other complex algorithms which are infeasible to derive yourself, and this is “taking inspiration” from other people’s work by building on top of it when you incorporate such ideas into your own code.

Also no, people open source their code to also help their fellow skilled programmers not just less skilled ones. Being able to see the source helps people understand the software better, fix bugs in it, and use those ideas in their own software.

Finally it depends on if you care about copyright or not. Secrecy is not copyright. You have the right to keep code private yes, but if you post it publicly online then it’s fair game for anyone to download (if you are like me and do not believe in copyright, because you cannot own information). Art however inherently requires posting to the internet usually for people to see so it’s always fair game to copy (though this does not mean you need to publish the PSD file).

However even if you do care about copyright, you are ignoring fair use. Under fair use people may use copyrighted work with absolutely 0 permission from the owner, as Wikipedia explains:

Things like Google indexing webpages has been ruled as fair use as the act of using this data to provide a great service is considered transformative, obviously Google is not claiming they own the works presented they are just indexing it to make it accessible. Similarly in my view the usage of art in AI is transformative just like a human learning from it is, each image very slightly influences the AI’s ability to produce art as it learns from billions of examples. If AI learning from art isn’t fair use then well I don’t know how you expect people to learn from things either.

@The Smiling Pony
???
In which line was I dismissive about coding?

The reason I brought up the leak example was because of Lemon’s idea that any art posted online is free game to do with as one wishes, and they compared it to coding, so I used a coding-related example.

@Parallel Black
It’s dismissive because you acted like it isn’t an artform and reduce it to “just copying things”. That is just not how programming works. It’d be like saying all artists do is trace over other people’s work.

@LemonDrop
Jfc, I didn’t say that was the only thing the coding community does. I said it was the norm. As in, you can go on literally any site to do with programming and find thread after thread of people posting their own code in order to ask questions or answer them. I’m not going to take you seriously if you stick the worst interpretation of my words in my mouth.

@Parallel Black
Sure you didn’t say that exactly but even suggesting it is the norm is wrong. Again, only noob programmers do that. Code is there for you to reinterpret and inspire the stuff you write, directly copy pasting it is just bad practice and shows one has really no idea what they are doing.

Would the nuance in saying “the norm in the art world is to trace images” really change how you interpret that?

@LemonDrop
The correct response here is “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to misinterpret your words and imply you were insulting an entire industry.”

@Parallel Black
Well you’re ignoring the part where you didn’t classify it as an art form, so no, you still did.

@LemonDrop
https://derpibooru.org/forums/meta/topics/ai-content-help-ask-questions-discuss-comment-complain?post_id=5603346#post_5603346

You called it an artform in this post, which is after the post that you’re basing your accusation on.

@Parallel Black
Dunno what you mean, I am saying you said it is not comparable to the world of art which implies it is not an artform. Maybe that’s not what you meant by it but it’s how I read it. After all, how could it not be comparable to the world of art when it is art?

@LemonDrop
You called coding an artform and then criticised me for not using that label in a post that was posted before you even labelled it.

@Background Pony #A00C
Hate to break it to you but none of those posts are mine so I’d appreciate you dropping the baseless accusations.

You said that coding is not comparable to art because coding is just adapting other people’s works. Under that presumption I could say that your art is merely a adaption of Hasbro’s or other pony artists’ creations. Explain to me the difference. How do you want to measure how far something has to diverge from what you took inspiration from to consider it something new / your own? Unless it is just some math library I can’t really think of a single time it’s been as simple as “slightly adapting” some function for my usecase. Your always working with the greater whole in mind like a conductor, not haphazardly slapping lego pieces together.

@Ada
Never said coding was just adaption. I said adaption was something that commonly happens in coding communities online, due to people sharing their code in order to solve each others problems. Obviously that would require adapting the offered code for each project.

@Jewellier
You can tell that they’re particularly uncreative in that thread because they didn’t even use the obvious term “pencels”

While there’s a lull in conversation I figure I should state my exact opinions on the legal side of all this, for future reference or comparison. It’s late, so forgive the ramblingness.

No, I do not support the idea of a giant, sweeping law that restricts the rights of a current or would-be artist from drawing whatever they want. What I would be in support of is an addendum to fair use, or whichever law is applicable, that makes it so companies no longer face losing their rights if they knowingly allow third parties (us) to create fan art of their properties. It’s not like you would forget who the source was, after all.

For art styles, rather than specific IPs? That’s a little trickier. Yes, I agree that you can’t copyright a style, because that’s a nasty, jagged slippery slope I’d rather not explore. Certain companies already do what they can to claim ownership over specific words, so restricting visual language like that is just straight up a shit idea.

That said, AI images that copy an artist’s style still get deleted from Derpi. There’s no legal side to that, but it’s still seen as an infringement, which I’m in agreement with. Maybe that’s more of an emotional reaction than something I can put into proper words, though. I’m tired, so someone else can do it for me.

Obviously I have many problems with AI-generated art, but the most important issue I have with it is and always has been the very beginning; the non-consensual scraping of every image on the internet, ownership, copyright, and content be damned. It was lazy and immensely immoral, and those two factors serve as the foundation of my hatred for this technology. There are many other reasons that spawned from that, of course - competition, dilution, aggression - as well as questions - why didn’t these companies ask permission from giant, scary media companies like Disney, if nothing else? - but that initial scraping will always be the big stopping point for me. If a generator comes along that sourced its images ethically, gaining permission and granting compensation to the owners of its training data, then alright. Smaller problems persist such as the “lazy convenience” aspect, but it would be a form of this technology I could just about tolerate coexisting with.