The general consensus here is that if you generate AI art at all, regardless of whether you use it commercially or not, you are engaging in art theft and are in fact an asshole.
So why doesn’t that logic get applied to straight up turning someone’s digital art and/or photos into memes and having millions of people repost it with zero attribution? I’m not talking about things like wojaks or rage comic characters where the creator intended for it to be a meme and knew for a fact that other people will copy it, nor am I talking about screenshots of popular media franchises, but the random art and photos people post that just happens to resonate with the internet in a way the creator never foresaw, becoming memes without the creator even initially knowing. Think the original advice animal meme templates like Scumbag Steve or Bad Luck Brian where it’s literally just a random photo of someone, probably taken off their personal social media. Or the two serious and one goofy dragon drawing and others that were very clearly posts on art sharing sites that got reposted with new context. I’ve even seen some meme templates go out of their way to crop out names and signatures that the original creator put there so they are credited when their work is reposted. And no one slamming AI art seemingly has a problem with any of it. In fact, if you as the creator of an image tried to get the internet to stop using your personal work as a meme with no attribution, you’d be ignored at best and targeted for doxxing and harassment at worst for spoiling their fun, probably by some of the same people condemning the use of AI.
If you go on art sharing sites, the consensus among the artists themselves is that you’re not supposed to repost their work at all unless given a CC license or otherwise explicit permission. Whether it’s for commercial use or just as a random internet post doesn’t seem to change their stance in the slightest. This implicitly includes not just AI but memes as well, as in both cases you are taking someone else’s work and redistributing it without permission or attribution. So why is this okay if AI art is not? It’s even more blatant than AI because it’s not just stealing tons of people’s work, blending them all in a neural network, and spitting out a “new” work that still has fragments of the stolen work, it straight up IS just stealing a specific person’s specific work, full stop. I feel like the reason is circular, it’s okay because it’s been happening since forever and that’s what makes it okay. And AI art is not okay because it’s new and doesn’t already have a history of everyone doing it.
The majority of people condemning AI art are not themselves artists but cite things like “respect for artists” as a reason for condemning it. But most artists aren’t just against AI but against their art being reposted by anyone for any purpose, profit or otherwise. Even if they were never going to make money from that piece, they are still against reposts on principle while most of the non-artists seem to only talk about AI separating artists from revenue. So if we’re actually to respect artists, wouldn’t we adopt that stance for everything and not just commercial use or AI?
And if this is okay, what about AI art makes it different enough to not be okay?
Finally, it’s not like people never make money off memes so a binary “AI is for profit while memes aren’t” doesn’t work.
Not trying to defend AI art, but trying to go further with the discussion that has appeared around it and genuinely trying to tease out some consistency and fundamental values in subjects everyone ostensibly feel extremely strongly about and are not willing to budge.
I don’t give a shit either way, fuck copyrights.
“You”, the user of the AI model isn’t engaging in copyright infingement directly.
However, whoever made the model that you used did. Most using copyright protected works.
Some people are paying for these models. This is what’s the problem: financially benefitting off others’ work without permission (or royalties).
It’s like the age-old piracy dilemma: the person using direct downloads or streaming can’t be fined in most jurisdictions - it’s the duplication and sharing that’s forbidden.
This exact analogue exists with AI models: training a model and giving it to others to use is distributing access to copyrighted material. Using an AI model is not.
To adress the mems side of the question: Memes aren’t a large portion of the original work. Often times they’re screenshots of video material, so the “portion taken from the original” is minute. Some meme formats, however, are digital art pieces in and of themselves. (Note the word format - the “background” of the meme, for example the “If I did one pushup” comic)
But even with that consideration, a meme doesn’t bring harm to the original - it’s basically free advertising. And as the memes are usually low quality abd not monetized, it can be passed off as fair use or free speech in some jurisdictions, while others merely turn a blind eye. And why shouldn’t they?
As I said, memes have a multitude of points going against them being copyright infringement. They’re low-effort, short-form media, usually with a short “lifetime” (most memes don’t get reposted for years). Most often they’re a screengrab of a video (so a ‘negligible portion of the original’) and almost never bring harm to the original, but only serve as free advertising. Again, usually. This means most meme formats’ involuntary creators have no reason to go after memes. You could probably get a court to strike a meme, but probably on defamation grounds - and even then, the meme will most likely die (not the format!) beforehand, so such suits are usually dismissed as moot.
Compare this to an AI model (not an AI “artpiece”): It’s usually trained on the entire work, and they’re proven to be able to recreate the work in large part - you just need to be lucky enough with the seeds and prompts. This means the original is “in there somewhere”, and parts of it can be yanked out. Remeber, even non-identical copying (so takig too much inspiration or in academic speak, “plagiarism”) is copyright infringement.
And to top it all off, all the big AI models have a paid tier, meaning they profit off the work.
If you were to compare memes to individual AI “artworks”, then it is the same thing as memes. Except if the generation is a near-verbatim reproduction, but even then, the guilt lies with the one who knowingly commited infringement by choosing what to put into the model’s training data, and not on some unlucky soul who happened to step on a landmine and generated the work.
Memes only have because they reference an original work. AI strips the connection between the original work and the final product deliberately.
In my opinion this is too large of an attempt at reasoning memes as equal to an artist made piece of art but it is full of fallacies. The same images from memes being used can be traced and attributed to its original author with ease, AI cannot. So I’d argue that AI stealing is even more blatant as it attempts to hide its origin. AI makes people think they actually did something and partook in creating the piece, which is like taking an image off the internet and saying you made it. You can edit it, but it is not the same as saying you are the creator. AI blurs the line of ownership by including an algorithm in between, but it is being used to try and heavily commercialise its output in a way that memes never had. You say in italics a fallacy on the style of “memes occasionally can be profitable, therefore it is equivalent to selling AI art”, but I think you know how different the reality of both forms is. It is exactly the intent behind the majority of AI image generation to industrialise art, while it is not the case of memes, and you see the same pushback if a company tries to use someone’s photo commercially/politically without their consent. In a meme, the image is not the main product, but the context in which it is being used, so the image can be actually replaced but not the same can be done with the text.
And true, I’d argue there’s also a component of inherent rejection of AI generated images because it is clear it “destroys art creation” in the sense that artists experience the world and create from said experience in connection with their own perception and ideas, while AI “remixes” said work without any understanding or self input and steals people’s expression that is currently being aimed explicitly for commercial purposes. Meme makers do something far better than AI. If all art would be made by AI there would be no art. The only way I’d be ok with it is if you give the neural network sensors to perceive reality and process ideas and thoughts, to then create its own interpretation and expression. I guess it would be interesting to see “art” without emotion.
You pull out of nowhere that most people against AI are not artists, but that kind of claim needs some support behind it. Similarly to how you claim that people against AI art have nothing against using other people’s work for memes without their consent. That kind of whataboutism does not contribute to the discussion, as it is just pointing to a “but they do that so I can do this” lame excuse. Sure, people should be more respectful about other people’s images, so what.
Even with all of this, I do agree that using people’s images for memes without their consent is bad. Doubt it can be stopped but I’d not be surprised if they are strongly affected by it. Empathy is scarce these days and makes me act a bit more bitter on the internet.
Even tho the legal team at my work claims it’s not true I know it is. Meme license.
That’s why.
