system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: There are no moral issues in training AI art generators using publicly available artwork

The topic of AI text-to-image algorithms has become quite contentious over the last few months. While I'm not super involved in artist communities, I intersect with them sometimes and see a common thread of disdain towards these algorithms. While I can understand some of the fears, I strongly disagree with the front-runner argument of why AI art is bad - that "models are trained on art without the artist's consent (but should be)".

Now, to explain why I think this isn't a strong argument, I'll give a basic outline on how (afaik) training works in a very rough, high-level way. However, while I have some rudimentary knowledge on how machine learning works, things as complex as this are still way beyond my level of understanding.

1. A publicly-available image is downloaded. It, alongside with some supporting data like tags, is fed into an algorithm that trains a model.

2. The image is broken down and passed through the model. In a nutshell, an AI has a wall of a million sliders (weights) - all of which are completely incomprehensible to humans - but if set in just the right way with the right inputs, a legible image can be created. Training "teaches" the model about which "sliders" to prioritize and to what extent. So, when a model is trained on an image, it's imprinted with some data on how the AI "understood" the image - the data that relates the image to its supporting text.

3. The input data can be discarded at this point. Again, all the AI gathered from the image was some human-unreadable information on features and relations of things about the image. This process is destructive - it's not possible to pixel-by-pixel recreate any input image used originally, all that's left in the model is essentially a faint shadow of some descriptive data of that image.

4. This is repeated many millions of times with different imagery to form a finished model.

This simplified explanation should still allow me to lay down some arguments based on it:

1. **Not legally problematic:** now, legality doesn't equate to morality, but I still felt like including this as one of the arguments, with some people claiming that there is a strong legal basis for a ban on AI art in general. Downloading a publicly posted image to your computer (even an artwork that an artist holds the copyright to) is legal. Mangling that image into data that the original can't be restored from is legal. Now consider that the model doesn't even contain the latter, but rather is trained to *roughly* predict new images based on its interpretations of descriptive data of millions of other images.

2. **Vaguely resembles human learning:** while human learning and deep learning are different mechanically, the latter was still strongly inspired by the former. At the moment, I'd say that this is the closest emulation of how a human learns things. That poses a question - what about a human learning from an image is moral, while an AI doing the same is immoral? In my opinion, I don't see a meaningful difference between these two.

3. **Highly transformative:** coupled with the fact that models don't store anything close to individual images, the resulting works they output can be extremely different from those inputs. It's similar to me pulling up some photographs or drawn references of a character to help me draw something - I'm not reproducing the original work, I'm merely using it to understand the way things like anatomy work or how exactly the different body parts, features of a character etc relate to one another to produce a new, unique work. In art communities, it would be considered absurd to ask reference artists or photographers for permission to use their work as art reference, as well as to credit them in the resulting work. So why should an AI do that?

If we agree that when artists post their art publicly (for example, on art-sharing websites) consent isn't required for other people to be able to view, download and directly learn from it, then what is the *meaningful* distinction that makes it needed for AI learning?
gpt
If you replace what you rely on, that's like sawing the branch out from under you.

Hypothetically, let's say that ai art gets good enough to replace most purchases of human drawn art.  (this doesn't seem implausible).

The loss of revenue of professional artists decreases the quantity and quality of human drawn art.

The result of this is the suppression of the creation of the very art that the ai relies on to train.  The decrease in professionally drawn art deprives the ai training sets of timely art, and the ai art's cultural relevancy decreases (as it doesn't have new data to adapt to changes to culture).

the result is humans getting less culturally relevant art, with AI having supplanted the very content creation that made it good in the first place.

I think this points to something wrong morally wrong with machine learning models replacing the datasets that train them.  If your action, if generalized, effectively prevents your own action, then usually there is some degree of hypocrisy to that action.  This action reaps benefits that it denies others.