I think I said in the AI seething thread that aside from the most anal copyright fanatics, referencing multiple works isn't considered "art theft" when done by a person. But if AI does the same thing, suddenly SJWs and/or "furries" see it is "art theft" and "hurts artists" or other such claims -- ironically from those addicted to "social media".
"Quit using AI, it's destroying humanity, it's raping everything, if you use it you're a Nazi." (All intended as a distraction while the people screaming the loudest are doing exactly that, planning to unleash it as a "tamed" AI.)
There's a lot negative sentiment towards AI art from Japanese artists like you see on the English-speaking internet, and a bunch of them sticking retarded anti-AI watermarks on their art. Some Japanese companies seem to want to force people to pay for using their media as training data, but that's also not different from American companies doing the same, and I think more aggressively here. But the Japanese government itself has avoided putting hard limitations on AI because they're afraid doing so will mean they'll fall behind other countries economically. A video I saw from a Japanese AI expert who was called to give his opinion to the Japanese diet on the matter said the current approach was looking to be softer than the EU but not as soft as the US, with a focus on keeping a watch over AI development with hopes it will progress.
How the hell is any generative AI a "fascist project" anyways?
While I can read Japan, I'm not confident I hang out on Japanese social media enough to really give a good answer. But from I've seen, maybe less. As I said before, a lot of Japanese artists get really mad at the idea of their work being "stolen" for training data and will stick pointless "do not use for AI" watermarks on their art, like a lot of Western artists. But at the same time, I feels like it's mostly an entirely self-centered thing, like "I don't want anyone violating my copyright by stealing my art". I haven't noticed the sort broad-range derangement against the very concept of using AI for anything from Japanese internet posters likes you can see thousands of examples of in this thread from English-speaking posters I know a few Japanese artists quickly started messing around with using AI generation for backgrounds or using AI trained on their own art to generation to low resolution details to stick in their art, and I don't think they suffered any blowback like a lot of Western artists would probably get for that. There was also that one mobile game involving famous Shin Megami Tensei artist Kazuma Kaneko where they made a system to generate unique cards using an AI image generator trained on Kaneko's artwork, and the usual suspects in the West threw fits over it and acted like Kaneko was dead to them now, but from what I've seen there's wasn't any such nonsense from Japanese posters about it.
I think that overall, there's less copyright fanatics among Japanese artists than among Western artists.
As long as it's not lying about who made what and isn't sale-replacing, ideas publicly available should be able to be built on. That's how creativity worked in the past BTW.
Well thinking about it, a big thing is probably how being anti-AI has been absorbed into the internet leftist uni-cause, so that makes it hard to talk in any left-leaning internet space without at least giving lip service to the idea that generative AI is the devil. The leftist uni-cause doesn't have much penetration into Japan as a social contagion, so there's no reason for Japanese internet posters to virtue signal to one another about how much they hate generative AI.
And the copyright fanatic "AI art is always soulless" types still REE that human artists should be paid for everything they make ever?
I think even before generative AI, Japanese artists were less anal on copyright vs. Western -- or at least deviantART -- artists overall, like with less usage of watermarks.
The blatant ignorance of how generative AI works combined with growing incompetence and excess reverence of copyright could lead to some really bullshit legislation someday.
If you think about, if people are okay with others writing fanfiction that uses someone else's characters and ideas, then having an AI make up some characters and plot ideas for you to write a story around should be fair game, it's close to the same thing. The best you can complain about is that it's not "fair" that the latter can still own full copyright of their story, but the former can't.
