Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
One difference is that the photographer has to go the places they’re taking pictures of.
Another is that photography isn’t comparable to paintings and it never has been. I’m willing to bet photography and paintings have never coexisted in a contest. Except, when people say their generative art is comparable to what artists have been producing by hand, they are admitting that generative art has more in common with photography than it does with hand-crafted art but they want the prestige and recognition those artists get for their work.
Photography did “compete” with paintings, or rather, it killed off a very common job for artists which was portraits, landscapes and, to an extent, still lifes. It sparked a whole revolution of (ultra) realistic painting by giving favour to art forms that weren’t able to be recreated by photography. For example expressionism became much more liked.
People often mention Photography or Photoshop even as comparable to the current situation. But I think it’s not comparable at all.
As you can see from the discussions AI changes how (some) people think about what art is. But not in the way of “let’s do art differently” but more like “Artists aren’t really doing anything different than what AI does”.
I also think it’s a different situation because AI attacks artists of many different genres all at ones. You can’t just slightly move a different style or art form because AI targets practically everything. With 3D printing etc. not even sculpting is safe.