>>84745>I need an explanation on how diffusion steals art.Technically it's not theft, but it does learn to copy people's 'unique' art styles.
The thing is, humans do that anyway. Most artists learn by copying other artists before developing their own style. The notion of whether or not an artist can 'own' a particular style is an awkward grey area, and often people will inconsistently side with whatever suits them.
E.g. people will supposedly 'unique' or notable styles will say "you can't just copy me", whilst other people (and sometimes those same people) will have no qualms about copying the art style of their favourite cartoons. If you look at DA through the years you'll see countless examples of people copying the style of whatever cartoons are popular at the time (e.g. Ben 10, Gravity Falls, Steven Universe).
Anyway, really it would be more accurate to say that AIs copy other people's styles/aesthetics. They don't directly reproduce the original works (if they did people could accuse them of 'art forgery', which might get more attention).
But where the theft aspect does enter into the equation in is how the AIs came to be in the first place. The AI companies basically harvested a load of online art without permission and used it as training fodder for their AIs.
Unfortunately the current consensus seems to be that they haven't broken any laws by doing so.
However, the majority of people would recognise that there's something morally wrong there. The trouble is that our laws haven't yet caught up with the technology. These companies have been getting away with just harvesting people's data for years and the law has failed to keep up with it.
There's a case that the art produced by the AI might be able to be classed as derivative works in certain scenarios, but because of the technological process involved it's hard to prove definitively. The only way it's going to have legs is if a legal team can show a selection of the AI's training data and the AI's output to a jury and the jury deem that the two are alike enough that it warrants a derivative work and thus breaches copyright law.
Really though, artists are going to struggle simply because they don't have the funding to pursue the matter in court.
Google & co can say "this is our look and feel" and bully other companies in coury because they can afford to, but the average 'starving artist' is screwed, thus we live in a state of hypocrisy where the big companies can defend their "look and feel" but the lowly artist can't.
I'm not an anticapitalist, but I'm not afraid to call out unfairness when I see it. The law is not yet as egalitarian as it should be.