An AI doesn't think, this is something that people hugely misinterpret about machine learning algorithms and how they work. It is not sentient AI and I partly blame the marketers and people trying to explain how AI works for that because as it turns out you have to be extremely specific in order for people to get it correctly.
This is precisely why the AI is stealing, to try and explain the human equivalent of what the AI is doing. A human being takes reference images and takes inspiration as you rightly point out from stuff they see around them or other artists to create something original. However that is not what the current machine learning we know does, it does the human equivalent of tracing over an already existing image, editing it and then claiming it's an original piece.
Even if you can make the legal argument that's not 'theft' it's almost certainly plagiarism and that's what many artists and programmers have noticed when tinkering with this stuff in detail. Mind you I shouldn't be stopping this I should be accelerating it because then I'll be the only vaguely competent competition around because everybody else will be endlessly generating AI trash for their work.
An AI doesn't think, this is something that people hugely misinterpret about machine learning algorithms and how they work. It is not sentient AI and I partly blame the marketers and people trying to explain how AI works for that because as it turns out you have to be extremely specific in order for people to get it correctly.
This is precisely why the AI is stealing, to try and explain the human equivalent of what the AI is doing. A human being takes reference images and takes inspiration as you rightly point out from stuff they see around them or other artists to create something original. However that is not what the current machine learning we know does, it does the human equivalent of tracing over an already existing image, editing it and then claiming it's an original piece.
Even if you can make the legal argument that's not 'theft' it's almost certainly plagiarism and that's what many artists and programmers have noticed when tinkering with this stuff in detail. Mind you I shouldn't be stopping this I should be accelerating it because then I'll be the only vaguely competent competition around because everybody else will be endlessly generating AI trash for their work.