This is similar to file sharing in the sense that a lot of people are talking about it and it came about through technological advances, but the two cases are not really similar beyond that. In file sharing, people were making exact copies of things and distributing them electronically. If the files had all been copyright free, there wouldn't have been anything to complain about. The whole reason people were actually using file sharing was to reproduce exact copies and not pay for them. In AI art, the new art being produced is completely different from any previous image. The people complaining do not own those new images. There's nothing about those images that suggest they have any sort of legal claim whatsover, other than they just sort of wave their hand and say it is stealing. Copying discrete items under copyright is stealing. Making brand new things based upon what you learn by looking at other things is *not* stealing. I don't know if they are scared of technoilogy and shaking their arms like a muppet in its general direction or if they really think AI art must be like a patchwork quilt just stitching copyrighted images together because they can't conceive of any other possibility. It doesn't work like how they imagine it works.
The idea that using the art is dependent on an interpretation of fair use is the wrong way at looking at this. The only way that would make sense was if AI art were copying and pasting discrete elements of the original art. That, again, is not how the technology works. You can't line up any part of AI art to any art in original dataset. It uses the original art to devise complicated instructions on how to make different types of art. And, copyright expressly does not cover procedures / recipes / instructions.
If there were anyrthing, anything at all to the idea that there were copyright problems, the person making the claim should produce the original image that they think was infringed upon and then the AI image, and point out the similarities. The original database is public. People can search it. They are even using AI to try to find anything remotely similar to the AI art they are searching on. I've done it myself as a test. It's pretty eye opening. I thought you might get something thats sort of kind of close but not rising to the level of copyright infringement. What I found instead are a bunch of images that look *nothing similar* to any image actually in the database. I know people have a hard time grasping that, because they think it must be like a Xerox machine on ten different images and blurring them together or something. No, it doesn't do it that way.
People who still try to complain are only getting anywhere by twisting the meaning of words. It's "copying," and all copying is bad, especially digital copying, so AI art is bad. But the copying is not copying any discrete element. It's not copying anything covered by copyright. It's more akin to McDonald's having a successful burger with red sauce and suddenly other fast food places introducing items with red sauce. That's copying, or derivative, in the broadest possible sense, but it's not copying or derivative by intellectual property law.
Fair Use is an attempt to justify why what otherwise would be infringing should not be considered infringing. This isn't fair use, because the part they are using - the instructions or rules that can be used to make the example images they are looking at - isn't even covered by copyright. When someone goes to art school and learns to be an artist, it's ridiculous to then claim that they are somehow tainted by that knowledge and everything they do after that must be infringing the copyrights of someone. But that's exactly what these people are claiming. I don't know why anyone is taking what they say seriously, other than the age-old issue of people being afraid of new things.
I'm going to try to be brief here. My original was about fifty times as long, with excessive detail, because I am passionate about it.
We're currently at the intersection between people not understanding copyright law, people not understanding what companies can state in their terms of service, and people not understanding how AI art diffusion models work.
Lets go with the terms of service question first. Companies cannot have a contract that says, "By working here you give up your rights to collective bargaining and overtime and OSHA requirements" If it were that easy to get around the law, all companies would do it and employment laws would have no effect. Similarly, a software company can't say, "By using this site you agree that everyrthing you produce is not covered by copyright." I don't care if the terms of service say it, that's insane. Copyright law still exists. It's even protected internationally by the Berne Convention. You can't just wish it away.
Similarly, artists are spreading the fiction that if someone ever looked at their artwork in an attempt to learn how to make new images that *they* made the resulting images and should be paid. That's blatant overreach and copyfraud. And they better be careful, because what would stop another artist from claiming that their work sort of looks like their own work and demand money from them? There are already systems in place to determine what to do about inspiration and copying. and those rules, which they should be aware of if they are in that profession, do not at all support what they are claiming.
For example. Andy Warhol republished photographs of Prince without permission after he redrew the images and made a stylistic modification. Current copyright allows that, because the art was considered transformative. It's obvious, just looking at the photos and the artwork that he copied them. We even know he waas given access to photos the general public didn't have, which included those photos. He didn't take the photo of Prince and turn it into a grizzly bear with seven fingers holding a toaster. He took specific photos of Prince and traced them and made drawings of Prince that he sold to accompany an article about Prince. And it was perfvectly legal, according to actual court rulings. I bring this case up since it is in the news, so people who pay attention to the real world should already know this. It might get overturned in the Supreme Court. In fact, I hope they do overturn it. But this is an example of where the line currently is. That line is nowhere near what AI art does. AI art diffusion models set rules for how certain images are made. They then use prompting for specific kind of images and overlay it on random collection of static in various shapes, The different aspects means that the resulting images generally bear no resemblance to the initial images at all, except by trivial degrees. A cat has fur, let's make fur now. It's shaped this way, so, based upon the noise model we have, let's put a cat shape here. And so on. At times people who program AI muse that they might create a near copy of original source image by accident, but that's always been mere speculation. Pure random chance can do a lot of outrageous things. It has about the same chance of actually happening as a human artist has of inadvertantly making art that looks eerily similar to another artist's work. But AI art is less likely to do that. though, as they have taken extra steps after the fact that try to ensure that that never happens.
On the data collection end, Google was affirmed by a court to be able to scan copyrighted books and collect the data. They were even allowed to make the data be searchable and to produce pages of the books for free and available to the public. Check Google Books out sometime. They don't own those books, they are just there. On their side they have full digital copies of everything. If you search repeatedly and meticulously, you can get it to show you sample pages over time that would be the whole book. For free. Courts don't care. Now people collected data about images for making new images with AI. Why do they suddenly want us to believe that this is unfair or illegal?
Or, in other words, locking AI art so it can't be downloaded on this site seems really pointless. In the absense of new court cases on AI art copyrights, we should default to like, you know, the actual copyright laws and not what some vocal subset of highly misinformed people on social media say. If they started a Twitter campaign tomorrow that said no art is covered by copyright, you'd ignore them. What they are saying now is equally baseless, just focused on AI art because it's easy to try to paint it as villain of the week because it is so new.
Love that the 26 monsters line up with the 26 letters of the alphabet, for true Roguelike-ness. I think most of them are obvious but guessed on the rest:
A - Air elemental / B - Bat / C - Centaur / D - Dragon / E - Emu / F - Flytrap / G - Griffin / H - Hobgoblin / I - Ice Elemental / J - Jabberwock / K - Kestrel / L - Leprechaun / M - Medusa / N - Nixie / O - Orc / P - Phantom / Q - Quagga / R - Rattlesnake / S - Snake / T - Troll / U - Umber Hulk / V - Vampire / W -Wraith / X - Xorn / Y - Yeti / Z - Zombie
I see this was changed to CC0. That's extremely generous. Thank you!
There's a lot to like about this one, especially as a first attempt at pixel art.
Main criticism I have is that the birds and the bushes end up looking two dimensional because of the single pixel black lines and lack of shading. There's a place for that if it was all like that and a choice, but most everything else has some indications of depth.
I was going to go through and pick out the ones I especially like, but it ended up being more than half of them. But just for singling things out, there are the various kinds of plant life, the soil pattern, the particle effects and the shine on the water and coin.
This is similar to file sharing in the sense that a lot of people are talking about it and it came about through technological advances, but the two cases are not really similar beyond that. In file sharing, people were making exact copies of things and distributing them electronically. If the files had all been copyright free, there wouldn't have been anything to complain about. The whole reason people were actually using file sharing was to reproduce exact copies and not pay for them. In AI art, the new art being produced is completely different from any previous image. The people complaining do not own those new images. There's nothing about those images that suggest they have any sort of legal claim whatsover, other than they just sort of wave their hand and say it is stealing. Copying discrete items under copyright is stealing. Making brand new things based upon what you learn by looking at other things is *not* stealing. I don't know if they are scared of technoilogy and shaking their arms like a muppet in its general direction or if they really think AI art must be like a patchwork quilt just stitching copyrighted images together because they can't conceive of any other possibility. It doesn't work like how they imagine it works.
The idea that using the art is dependent on an interpretation of fair use is the wrong way at looking at this. The only way that would make sense was if AI art were copying and pasting discrete elements of the original art. That, again, is not how the technology works. You can't line up any part of AI art to any art in original dataset. It uses the original art to devise complicated instructions on how to make different types of art. And, copyright expressly does not cover procedures / recipes / instructions.
If there were anyrthing, anything at all to the idea that there were copyright problems, the person making the claim should produce the original image that they think was infringed upon and then the AI image, and point out the similarities. The original database is public. People can search it. They are even using AI to try to find anything remotely similar to the AI art they are searching on. I've done it myself as a test. It's pretty eye opening. I thought you might get something thats sort of kind of close but not rising to the level of copyright infringement. What I found instead are a bunch of images that look *nothing similar* to any image actually in the database. I know people have a hard time grasping that, because they think it must be like a Xerox machine on ten different images and blurring them together or something. No, it doesn't do it that way.
People who still try to complain are only getting anywhere by twisting the meaning of words. It's "copying," and all copying is bad, especially digital copying, so AI art is bad. But the copying is not copying any discrete element. It's not copying anything covered by copyright. It's more akin to McDonald's having a successful burger with red sauce and suddenly other fast food places introducing items with red sauce. That's copying, or derivative, in the broadest possible sense, but it's not copying or derivative by intellectual property law.
Fair Use is an attempt to justify why what otherwise would be infringing should not be considered infringing. This isn't fair use, because the part they are using - the instructions or rules that can be used to make the example images they are looking at - isn't even covered by copyright. When someone goes to art school and learns to be an artist, it's ridiculous to then claim that they are somehow tainted by that knowledge and everything they do after that must be infringing the copyrights of someone. But that's exactly what these people are claiming. I don't know why anyone is taking what they say seriously, other than the age-old issue of people being afraid of new things.
I'm going to try to be brief here. My original was about fifty times as long, with excessive detail, because I am passionate about it.
We're currently at the intersection between people not understanding copyright law, people not understanding what companies can state in their terms of service, and people not understanding how AI art diffusion models work.
Lets go with the terms of service question first. Companies cannot have a contract that says, "By working here you give up your rights to collective bargaining and overtime and OSHA requirements" If it were that easy to get around the law, all companies would do it and employment laws would have no effect. Similarly, a software company can't say, "By using this site you agree that everyrthing you produce is not covered by copyright." I don't care if the terms of service say it, that's insane. Copyright law still exists. It's even protected internationally by the Berne Convention. You can't just wish it away.
Similarly, artists are spreading the fiction that if someone ever looked at their artwork in an attempt to learn how to make new images that *they* made the resulting images and should be paid. That's blatant overreach and copyfraud. And they better be careful, because what would stop another artist from claiming that their work sort of looks like their own work and demand money from them? There are already systems in place to determine what to do about inspiration and copying. and those rules, which they should be aware of if they are in that profession, do not at all support what they are claiming.
For example. Andy Warhol republished photographs of Prince without permission after he redrew the images and made a stylistic modification. Current copyright allows that, because the art was considered transformative. It's obvious, just looking at the photos and the artwork that he copied them. We even know he waas given access to photos the general public didn't have, which included those photos. He didn't take the photo of Prince and turn it into a grizzly bear with seven fingers holding a toaster. He took specific photos of Prince and traced them and made drawings of Prince that he sold to accompany an article about Prince. And it was perfvectly legal, according to actual court rulings. I bring this case up since it is in the news, so people who pay attention to the real world should already know this. It might get overturned in the Supreme Court. In fact, I hope they do overturn it. But this is an example of where the line currently is. That line is nowhere near what AI art does. AI art diffusion models set rules for how certain images are made. They then use prompting for specific kind of images and overlay it on random collection of static in various shapes, The different aspects means that the resulting images generally bear no resemblance to the initial images at all, except by trivial degrees. A cat has fur, let's make fur now. It's shaped this way, so, based upon the noise model we have, let's put a cat shape here. And so on. At times people who program AI muse that they might create a near copy of original source image by accident, but that's always been mere speculation. Pure random chance can do a lot of outrageous things. It has about the same chance of actually happening as a human artist has of inadvertantly making art that looks eerily similar to another artist's work. But AI art is less likely to do that. though, as they have taken extra steps after the fact that try to ensure that that never happens.
On the data collection end, Google was affirmed by a court to be able to scan copyrighted books and collect the data. They were even allowed to make the data be searchable and to produce pages of the books for free and available to the public. Check Google Books out sometime. They don't own those books, they are just there. On their side they have full digital copies of everything. If you search repeatedly and meticulously, you can get it to show you sample pages over time that would be the whole book. For free. Courts don't care. Now people collected data about images for making new images with AI. Why do they suddenly want us to believe that this is unfair or illegal?
Or, in other words, locking AI art so it can't be downloaded on this site seems really pointless. In the absense of new court cases on AI art copyrights, we should default to like, you know, the actual copyright laws and not what some vocal subset of highly misinformed people on social media say. If they started a Twitter campaign tomorrow that said no art is covered by copyright, you'd ignore them. What they are saying now is equally baseless, just focused on AI art because it's easy to try to paint it as villain of the week because it is so new.
This whole thread is odd. Why are you posting an image and calling her a harlot?
How do you get a criminal record for generating AI art? That's nonsensical.
Does this have anything to do with game art?
Is this performance art, or an AI poster reporting an AI person for making AI art?
The Mac game came out first.
Tiny and monospace. Love it!
For some reason I am reminded of Edgar Alan Poe.
Ah, OK. I should have realized it came from somewhere because it was so specific. I started with Nethack and missed the actual Rogue.
Love that the 26 monsters line up with the 26 letters of the alphabet, for true Roguelike-ness. I think most of them are obvious but guessed on the rest:
A - Air elemental / B - Bat / C - Centaur / D - Dragon / E - Emu / F - Flytrap / G - Griffin / H - Hobgoblin / I - Ice Elemental / J - Jabberwock / K - Kestrel / L - Leprechaun / M - Medusa / N - Nixie / O - Orc / P - Phantom / Q - Quagga / R - Rattlesnake / S - Snake / T - Troll / U - Umber Hulk / V - Vampire / W -Wraith / X - Xorn / Y - Yeti / Z - Zombie
I see this was changed to CC0. That's extremely generous. Thank you!
Thesehave a lot of potential. They also make good symbols for use on top of generic graphics for scrolls and books, for example.
There's a lot to like about this one, especially as a first attempt at pixel art.
Main criticism I have is that the birds and the bushes end up looking two dimensional because of the single pixel black lines and lack of shading. There's a place for that if it was all like that and a choice, but most everything else has some indications of depth.
I was going to go through and pick out the ones I especially like, but it ended up being more than half of them. But just for singling things out, there are the various kinds of plant life, the soil pattern, the particle effects and the shine on the water and coin.
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