AI Derangement Syndrome / Anti-AI artists / Pro-AI technocultists / AI "debate" communities - The Natural Retardation in the Artificial Intelligence communities

[Skylavijas]

But there is a major dissonance to people who are pro-trans yet anti-AI, because the same kind of arguments they use to defend trans, are the same arguments they use against AI.

For me, the dissonance manifests in the fact that they are against "kink shaming", yet start behaving like the fucking Spanish inquisition at the mere suspicion of some piece of pornography being AI. They are perfectly ok with disgusting fetishes like watersports, yet AI art of the most vanilla porn imaginable is reprehensible and horrid. I can't for the life of me connect the dots in this logic.

The dissonance is there because these people are NPC's who follows the popular zeitgeist.

It's not so much them being NPCs, the thing nearly all of these anti-AI people have in common, is that they have a friend that does commissions and that said friend can't shut the fuck up about how ever since AI became prominent, their orders had dropped and now are struggling to make a livable wage from this new freelancing environment. Now again, keep in mind that these people are typically neurodivergent and a bit of social outcasts IRL, so they develop intense connections to their hobbies and their online friends, which leads to them taking seemingly innocuous things with equally intense reactions.

Yeah, it can be dismissed as them simply being NPCS, them watching 1 hour long youtube video essay and then proceeding to parrots made from that like gospel, but it doesn't explain the circumstances where I needed to stop myself from arguing, not because somebody made a valid point, but because they started to genuinely have a mental breakdown and causing a scene within a discord server before promptly leaving. If I wasn't well known within that specific community, I might've ended up being banned. This sort of behavior goes much further than being merrily and NPC, having surface level understanding on a topical issue and just sort of going with the flow with the crowd, this is genuine passionate rage that makes even NPCs feel concerned and feel like something isn't quite right.

Frankly, all this behavior does is harm their cause, more than anything else. I don't care if they make fun of AI art or AI "artists" and hell, I'd say it is somewhat admirable if they use their understanding or art to expose scammers and tracers, or they use the topic of AI to engage in genuine, good faith, philosophical discussion, but what bothers me is how I can't so much as share a silly shitpost without somebody going "hEy iS tHiS aI?!".

 

[tumblrkek]

Funny as fuck seeing these arttroons seethe about "muh property" when one of Picasso's most notable quotes is "good artists copy, great artists steal".

This quote gets misconstrued so often, it is irritating. Picasso never once talked about rights or property.

Good artists "copy" because when you look at their work, you think about how well they used a technique or style developed by someone else.
1980s Miyazaki is a good artist because he can direct Lupin and Future Boy Conan competently, adapting pre-existing aesthetics to the screen.

Great artist "steal" when they appropriate and perfect a subject so well that they make it their own.
2000s Miyazaki is great because he does Miyazaki style. His work is no longer likened to his inspirations, but synonymous with himself and his brainchild.

Under its intended meaning, this quote essentially takes a jab at AI. I don't care what arguments AItrannies use to justify the existence of their corporate shitbot to mediocre Twitter fetish artfags. But this certainly isn't one of them if you care the slightest bit about art and its history. As you probably do, if you stepped in this thread.

 

[Skylavijas]

This quote gets misconstrued so often, it is irritating. Picasso never once talked about rights or property.

Good artists "copy" because when you look at their work, you think about how well they used a technique or style developed by someone else.
1980s Miyazaki is a good artist because he can direct Lupin and Future Boy Conan competently, adapting pre-existing aesthetics to the screen.

Great artist "steal" when they appropriate and perfect a subject so well that they make it their own.
2000s Miyazaki is great because he does Miyazaki style. His work is no longer likened to his inspirations, but synonymous with himself and his brainchild.

Under its intended meaning, this quote essentially takes a jab at AI. I don't care what arguments AItrannies use to justify the existence of their corporate shitbot to mediocre Twitter fetish artfags. But this certainly isn't one of them if you care the slightest bit about art and its history. As you probably do, if you stepped in this thread.

 

[FILTH Tourist]

For me, the dissonance manifests in the fact that they are against "kink shaming", yet start behaving like the fucking Spanish inquisition at the mere suspicion of some piece of pornography being AI. They are perfectly ok with disgusting fetishes like watersports, yet AI art of the most vanilla porn imaginable is reprehensible and horrid. I can't for the life of me connect the dots in this logic.

It is even stranger because anime models like illustratious and pony can produce some pretty wild fetish material. Whatever goon material they want is at their crusty fingertips, on demand and truely unlimited.

This sort of behavior goes much further than being merrily and NPC, having surface level understanding on a topical issue and just sort of going with the flow with the crowd, this is genuine passionate rage that makes even NPCs feel concerned and feel like something isn't quite right.

Their rage is something special. Programmers are also dealing with the fallout of AI taking over their space, but in general they are a lot more chill about it. Even programmers critical of AI are not this angry, more concerned about over hype and over reliance if anything.

 

[invisibult plus+]

I think the backlash from artists stems partially from the grinding and having a different approach to work from coders/programmers. Not that the latter aren't affected, they are. Coders in particular had to compete with open source repositories and outsourcing for a long time. Not all the code is good, and it gives programmers the extra trouble of wrangling disparate (jeet) code together, but AI is arguably more competition on top of what exists already. Fewer people are raging because the predominant mentality is "don't be a jeet, understand the code, and as long as it works, it's fine." It's more impersonal. It helps if it's good code that wouldn't need more and more maintenance in the future.

AI is more of a shock to artists. Artists grind their skills much like the above do, but unlike the work speaking for itself, there's more focus on personal branding. Online art has a similar problem of being oversaturated, but besides the money-laundering, modern and post-modern artists get more focus for invention than craft (be it a banana on a wall or a robot sweeping fluids until it breaks). Despite outsourcing, say, inbetweening for example, (online) artists thought they could never be replaced until a few years ago.

There's some talk about photography, and while techniques like photobashing exist, a lot of art's appeal is abstract. You're portraying something that doesn't exist, or putting concepts in a different light. It's a more personal process. AI automates it and that terrifies people. They say that you can't automate soul. However, besides the fake Sonic drawing, a lot of people don't want soul, they want what either looks good, or what gets them off. There's always AI models learning from each other and getting more ridiculous, but right now it's up in the air whether companies try to use that for more supernormal stimuli in their marketing, it turns people away from AI, or something else will happen.

 

[Trench Raider]

God, I hate them so much.

I'm kinda late to this thread but I can relate to your feelings a lot. These folks have absurd level of narcissism and insufferability. If anyone knows how this technology works and understand what art theft the entire theory of ai "stealing" from artists is fucking stupid. AI generated images are completely new thing, and due to that calling it theft is quite ignorant. It is true that AI is derivative from works of others, but still it's not theft. These people want further expansion of copyright laws not for safety of their IP, but to protect their egos. These lads just want to still feel special about their skill and don't want to be bothered by the idea that people can produce images with far less skill and time. Also the idea of expanding copyright law for these retards makes me feel ill, in my opinion those laws should be far more liberalized, not expanded. Just imagine what big IP holders could do with such strong copyright laws...
And honestly I prefer AI dystopia over corporate copyright dystopia where any form of creativity is ruined by draconian IP laws.

 

[linchan]

Great artist "steal" when they appropriate and perfect a subject so well that they make it their own.
2000s Miyazaki is great because he does Miyazaki style. His work is no longer likened to his inspirations, but synonymous with himself and his brainchild.

Ever notice how people accuse AI of stealing but unless explicitly stated by the person who prompted it, they never say who they stole it from?

 

[FILTH Tourist]

Ever notice how people accuse AI of stealing but unless explicitly stated by the person who prompted it, they never say who they stole it from?

If you are familiar with an artist's work then it would be pretty easy to spot their style being used in an AI image, especially if their style is very distinct like studio ghibli for example. But the style is the main thing that gets "stolen" when using artist tags, which is free game as far as copyright is concern. Even then, some models like Pony are trying to appease artists by removing artist tags and instead create style tags by grouping together artists with similar styles. But the issue with that is that artists don't care and it is easier to search for a particular look by browsing artists.

 

[tumblrkek]

It is true that AI is derivative from works of others, but still it's not theft. These people want further expansion of copyright laws not for safety of their IP, but to protect their egos

I have seen this sentiment echoed throughout this thread quite a bit but I'd like to point out that it isn't really true if you look at legal guidelines and history. Lots of kiwis (rightfully) laugh at furfaggot tankies losing their shit over AI but uncritically turn into Lenin the second the subject shifts to ©

Are you guys familiar with the concept of Fair Use?

Fair use is a doctrine in United States law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder. Fair use is one of the limitations to copyright intended to balance the interests of copyright holders with the public interest in the wider distribution and use of creative works by allowing as a defense to copyright infringement claims certain limited uses that might otherwise be considered infringement.

Fair use presents 4 criteria that ALL need to be respected. If you fail even one of these 4, you're potentially in big trouble if the © holder has a bone to pick with you. They are as follow:

• the purpose and character of your use (is it for profit? is it transformative?)
• the nature of the copyrighted work (you can't © facts, so is it a work of fiction that actually belongs to someone, or a fact? was it already previously published?)
• the amount and substantiality of the portion taken (how much of the original work was used?)
• the effect of the use upon the potential market

To give you a concrete example, remember that Warhol case that was very publicized? It only dealt with ONE of these four criteria: transformativeness. The plaintiff won.
Even if AI IS transformative (even though the slot machine occasionally spits out something that's suspisciously close to a picture it was trained on because its virtual graph was weighted too heavily in that direction etc. etc.), it's not really in the clear, because it still needs to be scrutinized regarding the other 3 criteria.
So no, AI isn't "not theft" just because it isn't derivative. With a little © context sprinkled in, you can see that it arguably completely fails in other areas- some of which are considered LESS important, but considered nonetheless.

Besides that, there's something else going on under this legal bullshit that copyright-savvy writers/artists with an actual IP of their own are pissed off about.
Most popular LLMs are obviously for-profit ventures. But the datasets they used to train, big aggregators scraping the Internet like Laion-5b, are nonprofits. The only reason the likes of Laion-5b are even allowed to offer access to this much copyrighted data is because they explicitely offer it for research purposes. German court already ruled in 2024 that in the EU, you cannot even get your copyrighted images out of these massive data aggregators for such reasons.
That's all fine and dandy but do you know who funds it, though? Who bankrolls the wholesome nonprofits for-research scrapers that are conveniently used to train all these big LLMs? Well of course, it's the likes of Emad Mostaque, founder of StabilityAI.
I'm pretty sure everybody understands what's going on here: AI companies doing what tech startup jews do best, exploit a loophole to fuck over an entire industry before the law has a chance to catch up, if it ever does.

Before the billion-dollars backed corporate tech firms set their shit-stained boots all over the doorstep of these creative industries, no independent artist really even questioned copyright status quo. A laissez-faire attitude is prevalent, indies can do fan art of anything; for the holder it's free advertisment, and for the artist, a way to hitch on the popularity of an already established brand. But the way AI assaulted these creative industries actually forced a lot of artists to become aware of their rights and the shaky legal grounds this entire business threads upon.
Artists- the sane ones, not the butlerian djihadist calling for your head to roll because you asked chatgpt to generate you a chungus- don't want a © stranglehold similar to what the music industry fell into as a result of the .mp3 revolution and Spotify taking over everything. Creators, producers, publishers, consumers- no one wants that, it's terrible for everyone involved except the rich faggot on top of the residual pyramid. But AI is forcing everyone into it, and the goblins owning these LLMs also took note of what happened with the music industry and are now trying to jew everyone even out of these residuals; the Spotify stranglehold is the best case scenario here.
Not "just an ego thing": provided you do a little digging, there are legal and historical bases for the indignation. And all of that isn't even going into how AI firms use existing names and brands as a feature of their programs because that's another legal shithole in itself.

 

[linchan]

Lots of kiwis (rightfully) laugh at furfaggot tankies losing their shit over AI but uncritically turn into Lenin the second the subject shifts to ©

>Calling people Marxists because they want to have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want with the ideas and materials they are exposed to without having to pay tax.
Your post is actually a very thorough and sound legal analysis of how AI training can come-in conflict with existing US copyright laws, my position is that Copyright and patent laws are gay and retarded by it's very nature and is a federal subversion of a free market.

 

[Mario Piss]

"Imitation is the most sincerest form of flattery".
The fact damn near every artist from online reacts with vitriol and seethe at people making AI slop from their art instead of being appreciative that people take time out of their day to use their art to make models and have fun with it tells you all you need to know about their character.

Should they be grateful? I don't know, should Nintendo be grateful that there exists bootlegs of Mario merchandise at the flea market? Point is at the end of the day, your art is still your art and people who like it will come back to it, and using a model that vaguely, roughly looks like your work to make their own artwork in "your style" shows that people really like your artwork. If they didn't, nobody would have cared and nobody would have bothered to make a model at all.

 

[Skylavijas]

God bless kiwis like @tumblrkek that use their university education to make thorough posts like this, even if it takes them an hour and they don't even receive a "DRINK!" for it.

 

[cybertoaster]

don't want a © stranglehold similar to what the music industry fell into as a result of the .mp3 revolution and Spotify taking over everything

The music industry has always been incredibly autistic about copyright to protect their insane profit margins, they ruined perfectly good tech like the minidisc and wanted to make cassettes illegal for a while because people could tape songs off the radio. It was that insanity that caused the MP3 revolution not the other way around, and it took the industry nearly a decade to finally give in and allow legal sales of MP3 files.

 

[Runch]

The only reason the likes of Laion-5b are even allowed to offer access to this much copyrighted data is because they explicitely offer it for research purposes.

Laion doesn't share copyrighted material. The dataset is a collection of raw links to sites and other entities who are hosting it, along with descriptions of what's at those links. If you want the content, you have to go download it yourself, and much of it might not even be there anymore (it's just that there's so much of it that some dead links doesn't sink the entire effort). I don't care how it's funded, they are unquestionably doing nothing wrong here. I am legally allowed to say "hey go to cakefarts.gov/amazingcake.jpg to see a picture of an amazing cake."

 

[tumblrkek]

The music industry has always been incredibly autistic about copyright to protect their insane profit margins, they ruined perfectly good tech like the minidisc and wanted to make cassettes illegal for a while because people could tape songs off the radio. It was that insanity that caused the MP3 revolution not the other way around, and it took the industry nearly a decade to finally give in and allow legal sales of MP3 files.

Yes! And I might not have been very clear with my reasoning, so I'll clear it up.
I was specifically referring to Napster here. The reason I believe we can easily draw comparisons with this Napster situation, is that back in the 90s, Major Labels perceived piracy as an existential threat the same way creative industries now see AI. They sued and won, and it ultimately led to the existence of the Spotify compromise. That was the "best case scenario" the music industry ultimately reached, and what it is currently stuck with.

But now picture this. Instead of a council of rich cutthroat label holders versed in ritual © beheading collectively taking a dump on like one guy doing P2P shit in his basement, we now have a suite of incompetent clowns led by Karla Ortiz flailing in the dark trying to take a shot at a couple heads of the AI hydra, which is... Well, the massive multi billion $ complex that it is.
Not looking too good, and I am not overjoyed at the thought of sycophants like Altman winning anything, but hey you never know! I cannot predict the future. Maybe Disney will wake up and sic the freaks they use as © guard dogs on the tech chuddies.

Laion doesn't share copyrighted material. The dataset is a collection of raw links to sites and other entities who are hosting it, along with descriptions of what's at those links. If you want the content, you have to go download it yourself, and much of it might not even be there anymore (it's just that there's so much of it that some dead links doesn't sink the entire effort). I don't care how it's funded, they are unquestionably doing nothing wrong here. I am legally allowed to say "hey go to cakefarts.gov/amazingcake.jpg to see a picture of an amazing cake."

That is technically correct, however in that key case that set a legal precedent, this reasoning didn't even come up.
The reason for that is, you are obviously allowed to say "hey go to cakefarts.gov/amazingcake.jpg to see a picture of an amazing cake." as an individual. However your legal status and the implications of such a statement change when you create a nonprofit aggregating millions of links each leading to cake picture JPGs and decide to bunch them up in a package gift with the explicit goal of being a dataset created for LLM training. Which Laion-5b did!

 

[Runch]

That is technically correct, however in that key case that set a legal precedent, this reasoning didn't even come up.
The reason for that is, you are obviously allowed to say "hey go to cakefarts.gov/amazingcake.jpg to see a picture of an amazing cake." as an individual. However your legal status and the implications of such a statement change when you create a nonprofit aggregating millions of links each leading to cake picture JPGs and decide to bunch them up in a package gift with the explicit goal of being a dataset created for LLM training. Which Laion-5b did!

I genuinely do not see the difference. They can have whatever goals they want, they still didn't break any laws by aggregating links while not actually storing/distributing the content at those links.

If I have a nonprofit with the stated goal of total world domination and we believe we can achieve this by counting grains of sand in a big pile in my garage and sending the final count to Sam Altman, I don't see how that changes my legal status. Regardless if my goal is good or bad, or who I believed I was benefiting, the actions I took were still completely legal.

 

[tumblrkek]

I genuinely do not see the difference. They can have whatever goals they want, they still didn't break any laws by aggregating links while not actually storing/distributing the content at those links.

If I have a nonprofit with the stated goal of total world domination and we believe we can achieve this by counting grains of sand in a big pile in my garage and sending the final count to Sam Altman, I don't see how that changes my legal status. Regardless if my goal is good or bad, or who I believed I was benefiting, the actions I took were still completely legal.

To be honest I found it strange too but ultimately you can attribute it to the idea that none of these grains of sand were copyrighted. Speaking from experience, when you scale things up, any time a project or company deals with ANYTHING dealing with someone else's IP then you're walking on eggshells and HAVE to ask for permission and make a deal beforehand. It's been that way for about 50 years and businesses are used to it across the globe due to conventions like Berne's or the UCC.
But again, you would be correct that they did not do anything wrong, and the judge agreed with you here. In a vacuum, that is.

Imagine if you owned a parcel covered with nice delicious sand. It's yours by law and you completely depend on it to make a living renting it to people. But one day a little retard called Larry walks up and picks up the grains one by one and puts them in a pile in his garage "just to count for research". Hey who cares? He's just counting grains of sands.
But then you follow him and realize that he's not just counting the sand, he's putting all the grains in his friend Barry's concrete mixer. Barry is pouring concrete for profit, he's building a parcel right next to yours and needs your sand for his business to even exist. So you politely ask Larry and Barry to pay you for your sand but they both tell you to fuck off.

You can't sue Larry because he's counting FOR FREE, "for research", even though he's very blatantly feeding it into Barry's concrete mixer.
It's hard to sue Barry because the individual grains are so well mixed into his concrete that it's hard to prove it ever was yours. You cannot reverse-engineer the concrete to get your grains of sand back.
And then you realize that even though the law considers them two distinct individuals, Larry and Barry are actually the same fucking person, Bhareej from a giant Indian concrete corporation, and doing all of this was his plan all along.

What the fuck do you even do in this situation? I wouldn't blame you for resorting to the pipe bomb immediately.

 

[Skylavijas]

You can't sue Larry because he's counting FOR FREE, "for research", even though he's very blatantly feeding it into Barry's concrete mixer.
It's hard to sue Barry because the individual grains are so well mixed into his concrete that it's hard to prove it ever was yours. You cannot reverse-engineer the concrete to get your grains of sand back.
And then you realize that even though the law considers them two distinct individuals, Larry and Barry are actually the same fucking person, Bhareej from a giant Indian concrete corporation, and doing all of this was his plan all along.

That does explain why one form of AI that has the hardest time breaking through is voice AI. When you use a voice of a celebrity to advertise your product, instead of hiring them, it is very easy to prove that you weren't counting grains of sand, but stole the whole bag. So we're more or less stuck with generic TTS sounding, neutral voices for official products, with shitposts being the only realm where people can use celebrity voices and even then, it's only a matter of time until somebody chimps out after seeing their likeness being used for something they don't like.

 

[Runch]

But in that case, physical objects you own are being taken and used, presumably you notice that your own resources are missing/dwindling. Larry didn't have the right to give what he borrowed from you to others. But in the real world, Laion isn't giving anything to anyone. If someone else misuses their giant database, it's not their problem. It's not even a problem if you find out it wasn't "someone else" and they were secretly funded by some company who benefits, because the act that would get them in trouble is the misuse of the dataset, not the entirely legal creation of it. A benign act doesn't become illegal because of a criminal act that later happens derived from it.

You can't sue Larry because he's counting FOR FREE, "for research", even though he's very blatantly feeding it into Barry's concrete mixer.

I don't think this is why you can't sue Larry. I mean, in this case, you probably CAN sue him, because he's actively giving your stuff to someone else without permission.

But in real world terms, I don't think the reason you can't sue Laion is because they're a nonprofit doing research. The reason you can't sue them and expect to win is because they're not doing anything illegal. Like trying to sue a rival company for sending someone to walk into your store and look around and take notes. Sorry, they're simply allowed to do that. If they actually perform some illegal action like directly copying your trade dress, then you have a case.

 

[linchan]

But in that case, physical objects you own are being taken and used

This is what pro-IP cannot fathom, they make these allegories comparing limitless supply and limited supply and equates intellectual theft with physical theft.