I'm sure you've never referenced a photo, or an art-book. I'm sure that you learned to draw by constructing the figure in a vacuum and never gained inspiration from another artist, and that you emerged fully formed, and were never placed in a collaborative environment where you were asked to do things "like this." That is a very unique position to be in.
I recently graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts where, of course, all of the students spat on AI without knowing the least thing about it. Of course, any time they attempted verisimilitude, they'd be recopying photos they found online. But an AI image that at least has the decency to mash together millions of points of "inspiration" into a generalized facsimile gleaned from common elements amongst them - that is forbidden.
And if using the best available spell-checker is lazy - it is because I have better things to do with my time than thumb through a paper-dictionary double-checking words - or should we ban dictionaries as cheating, too?
If you're from Ottawa, there's a very good chance we graduated from the same school. But, with all due respect to our common community - you are being an ignorant crank. A sensible person does not accuse strangers on the internet of being criminals based on flimsy ideology.
First of all, plagiarism is many things, but it is not a crime, it is a civil matter. That's why, unlike with theft, conversion, or other actual property crimes, you have to sue the other person and prove damages. There are no police involved. I further note that there exist no cases in any relevant jurisdiction characterizing anything I have done with the assistance of AI tools as plagiarism - namely because such a claim would be patently absurd, and you'd understand that if you knew the least thing about the law, how AI works, and how it figures into the modern artistic process.
I would hazard a guess that you have no proof at all that you've been so much as scraped by big tech. Go on - show me where you are in the LAION dataset. It's all publicly available, and that case is actually being litigated. But I get the sense you're likely another embittered luddite - the type of person who saw some blurry, grainy, black and white art photography and assumed that because it bore a passing resemblance to your blurry, grainy, black and white art photography, it must have been stolen from you personally. I mean, it could always be that you're just not very original, but some people are indeed comforted by the idea that there work must have been "stolen" by a jealous rival, or a big corporation, or the evil robots. Moreover, I suspect that if you did graduate from the likes of Ottawa U in the 70's (this is just a guess here) I would have absolutely no interest whatsoever in your work, let alone stealing it.
Besides, and as low tech as I suspect you to be, this is something you ought to understand: the tool for plagiarizing other artist's work is nothing from AI - it's Google Image Search, where you can find the copyrighted work of anyone who's anyone, without a license, free of charge, in it's exact original.
If you want to know how AI works (I suspect not based on your palpable, calcified lack of curiosity) I've described a little of it in some posts below, but in summary, even to say that AI is a skilled mimic of various artistic styles is a vast over-estimation of its capacities that does a disservice to real artists. If the thing can't generate a proper phony of a master like Vermeer, I can't imagine why you should feel so threatened about whatever it is you do.
If you're referring to Claudine Gay - she wasn't fired, she resigned. And in her case, it wasn't even a civil matter (no one was sued) it was pure academic incompetence if not outright dishonesty. None of it, to my knowledge involved AI - one of the central focuses of that investigation was her dissertation from 1998, well before this was even an issue. Lifting other people's academic prose is, of course, incredibly unethical and unprofessional - but if you were to let a large language model write an academic essay for you, you'd have much more fundamental problems than plagiarism - like a lack of footnotes to source documents that actually exist.
If my tone seems overly hostile, it is because I don't take kindly to strangers accusing me of criminality out of sheer ignorance. I get enough of people saying stupid things about my demographics to put up with that when it comes to my art, which is the inmost representation of my individual identity in an otherwise rutheless and hostile world. I don't need to see your resume, but when you accuse me of stealing your work, I certainly demand proof of that claim.
I've been experimenting with AI for 10 years as a part of my practice - well before most people bothered to take notice. To me it is every bit as natural as the way so many impressionists took an interest in early photography, which did more to disrupt the art market than AI ever will. Every day I face the existential dread of seeing this new technology threaten the relevance of the skills and identity I've spent the last 30 years and more cultivating - to hear people debase the entire issue with hysterics over intellectual property and artistic credit is maddening to me when the real issue of putting the vision of real humans at the center of media has yet to be grappled with. Without appreciating what we bring to the art we make that no machine can, we deserve to be as obsolete as the mechanical typesetter.
"Yes go ahead help yourself to my work to aid the lazy AI shortcuts you wish to employ."
"What I address is plagiarism, a crime of another order. Is profit is your goal? Have at it then, but keep your hands off my work, done the hard way. "
I'm sure you've never referenced a photo, or an art-book. I'm sure that you learned to draw by constructing the figure in a vacuum and never gained inspiration from another artist, and that you emerged fully formed, and were never placed in a collaborative environment where you were asked to do things "like this." That is a very unique position to be in.
I recently graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts where, of course, all of the students spat on AI without knowing the least thing about it. Of course, any time they attempted verisimilitude, they'd be recopying photos they found online. But an AI image that at least has the decency to mash together millions of points of "inspiration" into a generalized facsimile gleaned from common elements amongst them - that is forbidden.
And if using the best available spell-checker is lazy - it is because I have better things to do with my time than thumb through a paper-dictionary double-checking words - or should we ban dictionaries as cheating, too?
If you're from Ottawa, there's a very good chance we graduated from the same school. But, with all due respect to our common community - you are being an ignorant crank. A sensible person does not accuse strangers on the internet of being criminals based on flimsy ideology.
First of all, plagiarism is many things, but it is not a crime, it is a civil matter. That's why, unlike with theft, conversion, or other actual property crimes, you have to sue the other person and prove damages. There are no police involved. I further note that there exist no cases in any relevant jurisdiction characterizing anything I have done with the assistance of AI tools as plagiarism - namely because such a claim would be patently absurd, and you'd understand that if you knew the least thing about the law, how AI works, and how it figures into the modern artistic process.
I would hazard a guess that you have no proof at all that you've been so much as scraped by big tech. Go on - show me where you are in the LAION dataset. It's all publicly available, and that case is actually being litigated. But I get the sense you're likely another embittered luddite - the type of person who saw some blurry, grainy, black and white art photography and assumed that because it bore a passing resemblance to your blurry, grainy, black and white art photography, it must have been stolen from you personally. I mean, it could always be that you're just not very original, but some people are indeed comforted by the idea that there work must have been "stolen" by a jealous rival, or a big corporation, or the evil robots. Moreover, I suspect that if you did graduate from the likes of Ottawa U in the 70's (this is just a guess here) I would have absolutely no interest whatsoever in your work, let alone stealing it.
Besides, and as low tech as I suspect you to be, this is something you ought to understand: the tool for plagiarizing other artist's work is nothing from AI - it's Google Image Search, where you can find the copyrighted work of anyone who's anyone, without a license, free of charge, in it's exact original.
If you want to know how AI works (I suspect not based on your palpable, calcified lack of curiosity) I've described a little of it in some posts below, but in summary, even to say that AI is a skilled mimic of various artistic styles is a vast over-estimation of its capacities that does a disservice to real artists. If the thing can't generate a proper phony of a master like Vermeer, I can't imagine why you should feel so threatened about whatever it is you do.
If you're referring to Claudine Gay - she wasn't fired, she resigned. And in her case, it wasn't even a civil matter (no one was sued) it was pure academic incompetence if not outright dishonesty. None of it, to my knowledge involved AI - one of the central focuses of that investigation was her dissertation from 1998, well before this was even an issue. Lifting other people's academic prose is, of course, incredibly unethical and unprofessional - but if you were to let a large language model write an academic essay for you, you'd have much more fundamental problems than plagiarism - like a lack of footnotes to source documents that actually exist.
If my tone seems overly hostile, it is because I don't take kindly to strangers accusing me of criminality out of sheer ignorance. I get enough of people saying stupid things about my demographics to put up with that when it comes to my art, which is the inmost representation of my individual identity in an otherwise rutheless and hostile world. I don't need to see your resume, but when you accuse me of stealing your work, I certainly demand proof of that claim.
I've been experimenting with AI for 10 years as a part of my practice - well before most people bothered to take notice. To me it is every bit as natural as the way so many impressionists took an interest in early photography, which did more to disrupt the art market than AI ever will. Every day I face the existential dread of seeing this new technology threaten the relevance of the skills and identity I've spent the last 30 years and more cultivating - to hear people debase the entire issue with hysterics over intellectual property and artistic credit is maddening to me when the real issue of putting the vision of real humans at the center of media has yet to be grappled with. Without appreciating what we bring to the art we make that no machine can, we deserve to be as obsolete as the mechanical typesetter.
"Yes go ahead help yourself to my work to aid the lazy AI shortcuts you wish to employ."
"What I address is plagiarism, a crime of another order. Is profit is your goal? Have at it then, but keep your hands off my work, done the hard way. "
Those accusations are pretty stark.