This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
To an extent, (and even more so where steps 1/2 are replaced by 'use img2img'), though the state of copyright for 'traditional' cloning of media kinda makes this a weird or awkward question. The United States doesn't have any case quite as close to the line as the UK's infamous Red Bus case, but the Korean War stamp is pretty close: there certainly are ways in which even traditionally-created 'art' can be so derivative that it is infringement, even if the processes used to make the piece would otherwise allow copyright.
But these standards are incredibly tight. I like to use Rafman and similar 'found/outsider' art in furry contexts, simply because their 'transformative' nature is often limited to filing off signatures, but for a mainstream one, this Warhol v. Goldsmith case may fall one way or the other... and you'd have to overtrain the everliving hell out of a diffuser to get something that narrowly replicative. Indeed, the same complaints (in addition to the juvenille nature of the 'joke') would apply to any diffuser that produced the same result as the art in Leibovitz v. Paramount (cw: artistic nudity, mpreg), which is a clearly settled case. Or for a more boring example, see Cariou v. Prince. There's a pretty wide variety of contexts where lifting and directly copying an original work, even without commenting on that original work, is still considered transformative use, and while AI art can fall short of that, it's not a unique tool in doing so (compare: literally any color filter), and even the most moderately useful models will not favor doing so normally.
((And this entire thing is statutory interpretation: Congress could theoretically change the whole approach overnight for better or wo- ha, sorry, can't keep a straight face; any changes would be a clusterfuck even if best-intended, and more likely it'd get written by Disney.))
I do think there are novel technical and social problems, though -- img2img or overtuned models can launder art theft in ways that current perceptual-hash-and-search methods do not detect but clearly would not meet even the low standards of Cariou, we might want to consider AI-gen stuff more inherently economic than traditional 'inspiration', ML spam is a novel danger to artist communication and coordination.
Yeah, it's perfectly reasonable that a company wanting to make AI art tools doesn't want to stick their foot into that bear trap; it'll be a huge resource drain away from their core mission, even in the optimistic case that they'd win every matter.
The trouble's that they don't really have a choice of avoiding the question; they've just decided to let someone answer it for them.
More options
Context Copy link