General Discussion

harm done by theft of intellectual property.

You're arguing with a straw man you set up.

That's another straw man argument, another diversion from the subject of my OP. Yes, Eaton custom-trained an AI. It took him years to train it, starting with him taking hundreds of thousands of photos of nudes, photos of several volunteers, by himself, in his studio. Those photos were his intellectual property.

He then trained the AI by showing it the nude photos along with drawings that MIMICKED his drawing style. MIMIC was the word he used, in this interview:

https://thelondonmagazine.org/interview-scott-eaton-artistai/

He doesn't say where he got the drawings, but using the word MIMIC suggests they were done by someone else copying his style as they drew. He may or may not have owned the drawings, but I'm guessing he had permission to use them. They might have been work for hire, or a gift.

To be honest, I can't imagine why anyone would want to spend years to train an AI to do this, but it did give him a reason to take hundreds of thousands of photos of nude volunteers.

I'm not aware of anyone else who's trained an AI this laboriously. I don't think there's any chance anyone here at DU has trained an AI this way. And you know very well an oddly trained AI like this is not what we're talking about here.



No, the ethical issues are not at all distinct. And some artists using custom AIs in no way changes the worldwide theft of intellectual property for the AI tools most people use.

You're right that AI doesn't "inherently steal." The AI tools that are widely used were deliberately trained on stolen intellectual property. And their creation and peddling and their use by people aware of that theft is the slap AT artists.