The once-prophesized future where cheap, AI-generated trash content floods out the hard work of real humans is already here, and is already taking over Facebook.
All of these images are AI-generated, and stolen from an artist named Michael Jones.
It absolutely is not “stolen” from Michael Jones.
He made, in real life, a wooden statue of a dog.
That certainly gives him no exclusive right to make images with a wooden statue of a dog. And he is definitely not the first person to do a carving of a dog in wood; dogs and humans have been around for a long time, and statues of dogs predate writing.
The problem that someone like Jones has isn’t that people are making images, but that Jones doesn’t have a great way to reliably prove that he created an actual statue; he’s just taking a picture of the thing. Once upon a time, that was a pretty good proof, because it was difficult to create such an image without having created a statue of a dog. Now, it’s not; a camera is no longer nearly as useful as a tool to prove that something exists in the real world.
So he’s got a technical problem, and there are ways to address that.
He could take a video – right now, we aren’t at a point where it’s easy to do a walkaround video, though I assume that we’ll get there.
He could get a trusted organization to certify that he made the statue, and reference them. If I’m linking to woodcarvers-international.org, then that’s not something that someone can replicate and claim that they created the thing in real life.
It might be possible to create cameras that create cryptographically-signed output, though that’s going to be technically-difficult to make in a way that can’t be compromised.
But in no case are we going to wind up in a world where people cannot make images of a wooden dog statue – or anything else – because it might make life more difficult for someone who has created a wooden dog to prove that they created that statue in real life.
Do you really think it’s OK to seed an AI with other people’s work, generate strikingly similar images with it, pass them as real and farm engagement from that? Because that’s the trend this article is about.
Agree with you, it’s a hard take there and some real victim blaming there. “He should have known better than try to prove he did it just by posting a photo” when that’s been the standard for… since the camera was invented.
The fact is that he is a victim now, and so is any online creator. They run the risk of being copied and duplicated even worse than before. Now rather than someone just copying and pasting pictures which are easily proven as duplicated, someone can literally set up a pipeline to say:
On a new photo posted:
Take the description text they posted and reword it to be more ____
Take the image and redo it to be more ____
Post to my timeline
and just bring in profit. You could change ____ to anything. Take any mommy blogger and replace ____ with San Francisco, or Christian, or whatever garbage.
And to be clear I hate influencers… but this is just the tip of the iceberg for how AI is going to manipulate us.
“Made it with my own hands,” the Facebook caption reads.
Maybe try reading the article next time 🥴 it goes into much more detail about how the photos are manipulated from the originals to try and hide the theft.
That’s right, taking someone’s creation and putting it through AI or any other image manipulator or whatever then it could be “your image”, but claiming the creation depicted within that image is yours is stealing the original artist’s work.
It’s stolen in the fact that these people are using Image-2-Image generative AI. That means that his original image is directly used as an input to make the resulting pictures, which then compete against his original image for attention on the internet. Fewer people will then see his original, and perhaps purchase one of his carvings.
Is it “real” theft? No
Does it harm him? Yes
It’s a very tricky situation, given that there’s no way to stop it. We cannot shove this back into Pandora’s box. Even if you made it illegal, it would be almost impossible to enforce in a court because of the lack of jurisdiction across borders.
I suspect our culture is about to see a seismic shift again, I just don’t know how yet.
If these are made by using img2img, then they used a photograph from this guy. He’s in the UK, so as an individual taking a photograph of his statue, that photograph is automatically considered copyrighted and he legally is (in theory) able to control its distribution. So, the image WAS illegally obtained.
Even if we rewind to before the advent of AI generated images, if someone were to take his photo of his art, and painstakingly use Photoshop to create a believable second image with a different person standing next to it representing it as their own without giving him any credit, we would call that process “stealing”.
No, we would call it copyright infringement if it indeed was. Or if not that you would have to find some other specific legal theory.
Stealing generally applies to property and intellectual property is a misleading term used to describe certain other rights not related to property law.
It absolutely is not “stolen” from Michael Jones.
He made, in real life, a wooden statue of a dog.
That certainly gives him no exclusive right to make images with a wooden statue of a dog. And he is definitely not the first person to do a carving of a dog in wood; dogs and humans have been around for a long time, and statues of dogs predate writing.
The problem that someone like Jones has isn’t that people are making images, but that Jones doesn’t have a great way to reliably prove that he created an actual statue; he’s just taking a picture of the thing. Once upon a time, that was a pretty good proof, because it was difficult to create such an image without having created a statue of a dog. Now, it’s not; a camera is no longer nearly as useful as a tool to prove that something exists in the real world.
So he’s got a technical problem, and there are ways to address that.
He could take a video – right now, we aren’t at a point where it’s easy to do a walkaround video, though I assume that we’ll get there.
He could get a trusted organization to certify that he made the statue, and reference them. If I’m linking to woodcarvers-international.org, then that’s not something that someone can replicate and claim that they created the thing in real life.
It might be possible to create cameras that create cryptographically-signed output, though that’s going to be technically-difficult to make in a way that can’t be compromised.
But in no case are we going to wind up in a world where people cannot make images of a wooden dog statue – or anything else – because it might make life more difficult for someone who has created a wooden dog to prove that they created that statue in real life.
Do you really think it’s OK to seed an AI with other people’s work, generate strikingly similar images with it, pass them as real and farm engagement from that? Because that’s the trend this article is about.
Agree with you, it’s a hard take there and some real victim blaming there. “He should have known better than try to prove he did it just by posting a photo” when that’s been the standard for… since the camera was invented.
The fact is that he is a victim now, and so is any online creator. They run the risk of being copied and duplicated even worse than before. Now rather than someone just copying and pasting pictures which are easily proven as duplicated, someone can literally set up a pipeline to say:
and just bring in profit. You could change ____ to anything. Take any mommy blogger and replace ____ with San Francisco, or Christian, or whatever garbage.
And to be clear I hate influencers… but this is just the tip of the iceberg for how AI is going to manipulate us.
Maybe try reading the article next time 🥴 it goes into much more detail about how the photos are manipulated from the originals to try and hide the theft.
That’s right, taking someone’s creation and putting it through AI or any other image manipulator or whatever then it could be “your image”, but claiming the creation depicted within that image is yours is stealing the original artist’s work.
It’s stolen in the fact that these people are using Image-2-Image generative AI. That means that his original image is directly used as an input to make the resulting pictures, which then compete against his original image for attention on the internet. Fewer people will then see his original, and perhaps purchase one of his carvings.
Is it “real” theft? No Does it harm him? Yes
It’s a very tricky situation, given that there’s no way to stop it. We cannot shove this back into Pandora’s box. Even if you made it illegal, it would be almost impossible to enforce in a court because of the lack of jurisdiction across borders.
I suspect our culture is about to see a seismic shift again, I just don’t know how yet.
If these are made by using img2img, then they used a photograph from this guy. He’s in the UK, so as an individual taking a photograph of his statue, that photograph is automatically considered copyrighted and he legally is (in theory) able to control its distribution. So, the image WAS illegally obtained.
Even if we rewind to before the advent of AI generated images, if someone were to take his photo of his art, and painstakingly use Photoshop to create a believable second image with a different person standing next to it representing it as their own without giving him any credit, we would call that process “stealing”.
No, we would call it copyright infringement if it indeed was. Or if not that you would have to find some other specific legal theory.
Stealing generally applies to property and intellectual property is a misleading term used to describe certain other rights not related to property law.
No.