George Carlin Estate Files Lawsuit Against Group Behind AI-Generated Stand-Up Special: ‘A Casual Theft of a Great American Artist’s Work’::George Carlin’s estate has filed a lawsuit against the creators behind an AI-generated comedy special featuring a recreation of the comedian’s voice.
Well put.
Eh…. I don’t know that I can agree with this.
I understand the intent behind it, but this specific instance is legitimately in parallel with impersonators, or satire. Hear me out.
They are impersonating his voice, using new content in his style, and make no claim to be legitimate.
So this comes down to “this is in bad taste” which, while I can understand and might even agree with… isn’t illegal.
The only novel concept in this, is that “scary tech” was used. There was no fraud, there was no IP violation, and no defamation. Where is the legal standing?
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I didn’t say this was satire, I said it was in line with satire on a legal front. And why did you ignore the “impersonator” line immediately before it and jump straight into parody?
They sampled his work, yes. To get voice, pacing, image, etc. they didn’t then have it spit out copies, or even remixes of his previous work, they had it create new content and made it clear it was not him.
I don’t see this as any different than an impersonator watching hundreds of hours of his routines, getting into character visually and verbally, and walking out on stage to do their own routine.
In fact, let me just ask directly: would you be taking issue with this if it was a real human, no AI involved, who had dressed and trained to move and sound approximately like the man, and then filmed it and put it online? Would you say that is illegal?
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Oh good, you understood what I said.
Tell me you’ve never seen a high quality impersonator without telling me you’ve never seen a high quality impersonator. 🤦🏻♂️
No, it really isn’t. Why would it be? Is Carlin a law enforcement officer? Is there an attempt to commit fraud I missed in the middle? What law do you think impersonating a random person breaks?
Not to mention, the title description and opening line make it pretty obvious this isn’t Carlin.
I also noticed a lot of skirting around my question with a distinct lack of a direct answer. So I’ll ask it again: If that was a human who put out the exact same video, and AI was not involved, would you have a problem with it? Because it really seems like you wouldn’t.
I remember when impersonators, such as Rich Little, used to show up on TV. Their whole bit was the skill it took to do the impersonations, not so much what they said. And I don’t remember any instance of them only doing one person. There are single impersonation shows, like a Judy Garland concert, but I am not sure where that falls legally.
When I think of impersonator personally, I go straight to Elvis impersonators. It’s a running joke in movies, they’re all over Las Vegas, and you can rent an Elvis impersonator for various events, including weddings, in just about any major city.
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I could send you a Cease and Decist notice on my finest letterhead insisting that you stop being a stupid overreaching authoritarian. That doesn’t mean a court would uphold it. C&D isn’t proof of anything.
Wait. I can just send Cease and Decist letters to anyone for anything?
Wouldn’t the issue there be the fact that “of the Colbert Report” is using the actual name of the show in a way that would create profit for him? This, profiting off of someone else’s IP? It’s not the fact that he is “Stephen Colbert”. It’s the part that isn’t his name.
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So you’re telling me you’ve never heard of celebrity impersonators? Elvis would be one of the more famously impersonated, but even living individuals have impersonators. Hilariously, there have been stories of impersonators winning in an impersonation contest when the actual individual being impersonated was also in the contest.
You k ow what doesn’t happen with celebrity impersonators? They don’t get arrested or successfully sued. Because there’s nothing illegal about it.
Now, the CnD Colbert got is a different story. He likely signed paperwork saying he wouldn’t “be the character” after leaving. Not to mention, he was the literal actor who portrays that character.
On the other hand, you notice how SNL doesn’t get sued for their impersonations?…
Are you noticing a theme yet?
Because I am. You just won’t answer my simple question. So let me jump to the assumption that you’d be fine with it if it was fully human made. That begs the question, why is AI different? If the poster came out tomorrow with proof AI was not involved, why would it suddenly be okay?
AI is different because a human didn’t make it lol that’s the point
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They trained the AI on his material. That’s theft of IP without a license or agreement.
So any human comedian listening and learning from other comedians is also STEALING the intellectual PROPERTY of them? That is very incendiary language btw.
Morally this imho comes down to a workers right issue. So there are legitimate reasons to argue that AI should not take our jobs. A kind of socialist market protection act.
But to use intellectual property in this case is just asking to make anything “Disney like” to be treated as copyright by Disney.
PS: BTW actually listen to the video https://youtu.be/2kONMe7YnO8 it is eerily good.
Presumably they paid to see the show each time they wanted to go learn from him. Also, it’s extremely poor form to copy jokes. Learning the art of telling jokes like using callbacks wouldn’t require watching solely one comedian either.
No matter how much they say this isn’t Carlin, the entire selling premise here is that it’s Carlin.
The AI didn’t copy jokes, it learned how to generate jokes just like Carlin. The point of this impersonation for me is to be able to actually compare it to Carin, as a benchmark.
It seems also clear that while this is mediocre at best, the next versions of AI will become as good as, and then better than Carlin. And then better than any human comedian could ever be. Might take a while but no doubt in my mind we’ll get there sooner than later. So then they’ll use artificial persona that become brands and are fully owned by corporation.
And they’ll not just be insanely funny, they’ll also become incredibly good at propaganda and reprogramming human minds to their master’s agenda. Now a human entertainer at least has to have some humanity.
My point is that IP law is the WORST thing you can use to try to limit AIs. The hurt feelings or lost moneys of Carlin’s heirs or other corporations are so utterly irrelevant in regards to the repercussions of this issue.
Machines aren’t people. Machines don’t learn. Machines copy data, manipulate and replicate it. That is copyright infringement. The laws for Machine duplication don’t apply to human learning.
It’s called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning
That they actually learned to do creative writing is the shocking thing. Mediocre so far, but they will improve. And denial won’t help.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalize to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions. Recently, generative artificial neural networks have been able to surpass many previous approaches in performance. Machine learning approaches have been applied to many fields including large language models, computer vision, speech recognition, email filtering, agriculture, and medicine, where it is too costly to develop algorithms to perform the needed tasks. ML is known in its application across business problems under the name predictive analytics. Although not all machine learning is statistically based, computational statistics is an important source of the field’s methods.
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I teared up listening to this special. It was like he was still alive. A lot of good material and definitely in his spirit. People who want to lock up our culture behind paywalls can get bent.
No don’t you understand. If we don’t enforce copyright laws we won’t get a 19th Fast and the Furious movie.
“That use AI to violate the law”
Watch out impressionists. If you get too good you might become a lawbreaker. The AI hysteria is beyond absurd.
That’s not what this is about though.
AI should follow the standard norms and conventions we’ve established up to this point. Which, generally speaking, would prohibit using someone’s likeness without their consent to make a profit, and also not using the likeness of a well loved, dead man, in such a trashy way.
You know, basic human decency.
On reddit years ago a whole mess of people attacked me and demanded that I agree that photographs have a right to take pictures of my house, car, property, and even children and put it on the internet.
Which one is it? Do we humans own our image in which case we deserve compensation and permission for it’s use or do we not own it and in which case this is a perfectly acceptable?
This is complex – I was surprised to learn paparazzi have been suing celebrities:
A New Type of Internet Troll: How Paparazzi Use Copyright Law to Cash Out on Celebrity’s Instagram Posts
More generally, terms of interest here are “privacy rights” and “publicity rights”. They’re not the same in every state (in the US).
While the estate might have a fair case on whether or not this is infringement (courts simply have not ruled enough on AI to say) I think this is a silly way to characterize the people that made this. If you wanted to turn a profit from a dead person using AI to copy their likeness, why Carlin? He’s beloved for sure, but he’s not very ‘marketable’. Without context to those who have never seen him before, he could be seen as a grumpy old man making aggressive statements. There are far better dead people to pick if your goal was to make a profit.
Which leads me to believe that he was in part picked because the creators of the video were genuine fans of his work (the video even states so as far as I remember) and felt they could provide enough originality and creativity. George Carlin is truly a one of a kind comedian whose words and jokes still inspire people today. Due to this video (and to an extent, the controversy), some people will be reminded of him. Some people will learn about him for the first time. His unique view on things can be extended to modern times. A view I feel we desperately need at times. None of that would be an issue as long as it was made excessively clear that this isn’t actually George. That it’s a homage. Which these people did. As far as I see, they could be legally in the wrong, but morally in the right. It’s unfair to characterize them purely by their usage of AI.
Au contraire, literally the only reason cares about this or is paying any attention to it at all is because George Carlin is widely recognized (correctly IMO) as one of the best standup comedians that have ever lived.
If you took this same (tepid, garbage IMO) routine, removed Carlin’s “impersonation” (an interesting linguistic side point that George may have found interesting is how can something be an “impersonation” if there’s no person involved?) you’d get a lukewarm reception similar to the ones to the material the writers have had previously. But since it’s Carlin, you get headline after headline and even people who believe (my own brother for instance) that this material was actually composed in its full, hour-long, coherent format by some machine approximating George Carlin.
I agree that George is one of the best stand up comedians, but that doesn’t change that his material is very much counter-culture. It’s made to rub people the wrong way, to get them to think differently about why things are the way they are. That makes it inherently not as good of a money maker as someone who tries to please all sides in their jokes. I’d like to believe if he was alive today he would do a beautiful piece on AI.
In your second point I have to wonder though. Who made it a headline? Who decided this was worth bringing attention to? Clearly, the controversy did not come from them. There is nothing controversial about an homage. But it is AI, and that got people talking. You can be of the opinion they did it for that reason, but I would argue that they simply expected the same lukewarm reception they had always gotten. After all, people don’t often solicit themselves to be at the center of hate. Even when the association pays off, experiencing that stuff has lasting mental effects on people.
And again, if they wanted to be controversial to stir up as much drama, they could have done so much more. Just don’t disclose it’s AI even though it’s obviously AI, or make George do things out of character, like a product endorsement, or a piece about how religion is actually super cool. All of that would have gotten them 10x the hate and exposure they got now.
But instead, they made something that looks like and views like an homage with obvious disclosure. The only milder thing they could have done is found someone whose voice naturally sounds like George and put him in a costume that looks like George, at which point nobody would have bat an eye. Even though the intent is the same, just the way it was achieved is different.
We can argue their motives all we want (I’m pretty uninterested in it personally), but we aren’t them and we don’t even know what the process was to make it, and I think that is because the whole thing sure would seem less impressive if they just admitted that they wrote it.
I laughed maybe once, because the whole thing was not very funny in addition to being a (reverse?) hack attempt by them to deliver bits of their own material as something Carlin would say.
Yes, that is sort of my point. I’m not sure either, but neither did the person I responded to (in my first comment before yours). And to make assumptions with such negative implications is very unhealthy in my opinion.
It’s the first time I hear someone suggest they passed of their own work as AI, but it could also be true. Although AI assisted material is considered to be the same as fully AI generated by some. But again, we don’t know.
I definitely don’t think it meets George’s level. But it was amusing to me. Which is about what I’d expect of an homage.
Healthy or not, my lived experience is that assuming people are motivated by the things people are typically motivated by (e.g. greed, the desire for fame) is more often correct than assuming people have pure motives. The actions a person takes also count a great deal and if these bozos truly wanted to create an homage to Carlin, they would have talked to his living family members and started the process with a conversation rather than throwing it up on YouTube.
George Carlin worked his ass off in his last years on Earth purposefully to provide for his family and relatives and to create a legacy that he could pass onto them…not consulting them at all is at least a little bit of a piss on his grave.
Watch “George Carlin’s American Dream” which was made with the full consent and involvement of his family by a person who truly admired him and you will see the difference in material. George wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and his material was often dark…but he was clearly motivated to continue working long after most people would have retired, and that had to do in large part with his family and the role he felt he needed to play within it.
It was very mediocre but this is basically the first version. Just wait a few years. Computers didn’t win in Chess and now apparently even running on smartphones they beat the strongest players.
BTW impersonation probably makes a much better benchmark to compare the quality.
If you want to promote your comedy podcast, doing it with a fake George Carlin album sounds like a pretty good way to do it (if you can get away with it).
“using someone’s likeness”
Again, so someone can’t do a gilbert gottfried impression while doing their own stand-up? That’s illegal to do because their voice itself is copyright protected? Man, all these AI covers on Youtube are fucked then.
You completely misunderstand the law to appeal to emotion which continues to feed into the hysteria around generative AI. Photoshop isn’t illegal, generative AI isn’t illegal, doing impressions isn’t illegal. This would be no different if someone took that same script and did their best George Carlin impression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
I don’t see why that wouldn’t apply to a comedian as well.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Midler v. Ford Motor Co. , 849 F. 2d 460 (9th Cir. 1988) is a United States Court of Appeals case in which Bette Midler sought remedy against Ford Motor Company for a series of commercials in the 1980s which used a Midler impersonator.
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The court might rule in favor of his estate for this reason. But honestly, I do think there are differences to a singer (whose voice becomes an instrument in their song) and a comedian (whose voice is used to communicate the ideas and jokes they want to tell). A different voice could tell the same jokes as Carlin, and if done with the same level of care to communicate his emotions and cadence, could effectively create the same feeling as we know it. A song could literally be a different song if you swap an instrument. But the courts will have to rule.
Carlin had a unique and distinctive voice and cadence, which was absolutely part of his act. And this fake album imitates it.
I don’t disagree with that, but such differences can matter when it comes to ruling if imitation and parody are allowed, and to what extent.
Building those isn’t illegal. Using them to make a profit without consent is. The law is very clear here. This is what is at issue here.
In that case why can’t I demand that my face not appear on Facebook? If the law is very clear here.
Right so every single song, every use of Frank Sinatra’s voice on YouTube to cover songs is wildly illegal, yes? They have ads, they’re doing it for profit. The people who made the special didn’t sell access to it so how’d they make money? Same way I’d imagine.
those the use ai for it, yes actually. in fact, if we’re following the letter of copyright law, almost every meme is technically illegal.
This is the best argument I have ever heard for getting rid of copyright law. It can’t be followed even if you want to.
yeah, that’s exactly the point i was trying to get at. it’s all fucked already anyway…
Okay then let’s focus on impressionists. Grapple with that for a minute because you seem to be avoiding it. If someone does a stand-up special they wrote and did a highly accurate impression of George Carlin, why is that illegal?
I’m not trying to say what’s right or wrong it should out shouldn’t be. I’m just saying that if we apply copyright literally and aggressively there’s numerous things that we take for granted that would go away.
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This is the concise way of putting it that I’ve been missing.
Using AI to do something that actually intelligent beings already legally do, like impressions and parody (with disclaimers and all that), isn’t suddenly theft or stealing because AI was used in the process. I’m really disappointed in the Lemmy community for buying into all this bs
Not trying to be glib but
That’s another way.
I’ll concede that there is some skill involved in generating some this content, but nowhere near what the humans it purports to replace. And seemingly less and less skill or even intent is required with each advancement. It’s conceivable that someone could mimic real artistic output without actually caring about it.
Not at all, I think this is the most valid take in the whole thread.
Personally I don’t think automating the process should have all that much of an effect on whether or not it infringes on copyright, but I definitely see where you’re coming from. I can see that being a big point of contention in courts if/when they try to sort this stuff out.
Impressionists have nothing to do with this.
If I scraped all Beyonce’s videos, cut it up and join it into another video, and called it “Beyonce: resurrected”, I’m not doing am impression. I’m stealing someone’s work and likeness for commercial purposes.
Are you sad that your garbage generator is just a plagiarism machine?
Actually cutting it up into another video makes it transformative and it’s protected under the DMCA. Thank you for proving you don’t know what you’re talking about. Take care.
Sure mate. You try selling a copy of it.
Likewise. You’re either too dumb or stubborn to even google what “transformative work” is.
Typical “AI” techbro.
It’s possible to get away with quite a lot under transformative use even when it’s commercial, consider Cariou v. Prince for example: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/landmark-copyright-lawsuit-cariou-v-prince-is-settled-59702/
That is transformative work. Remixes are tranaformative work. Impersonations are transformative work.
Using a source and shuffling it around, then repackaging it as “from the same source” is not transformative work. It’s copyright infringement.
I think it’d be entirely plausible to argue that, while transformative, current generative AI usage often falls short on the other fair use factors.
I don’t really see how it can be argued that the linked example - relatively minor edits to a photograph - are more transformative than generative AI models. What is your criteria here?
Take a Nike shoe. Draw a large dick on the shoe. Try selling it as a Nike Shoe.
Vs.
Take a Nike Shoe. Draw a large dick on the shoe. Sell it as a piece of art. (As commentary on capitalism, etc)
Do you feel that one is copyright infringement and the other is a piece of transformative work?
Sold for 71 million. Which if that were people would be more than the UK.
Your comment reads like ChatGPT generated garbage.
You must be a hit at parties.
Is that what you do in parties? Interrupt people’s discussions with completely unrelated nonsense?
I really want to drill this home, search YTP (YouTube Poop) on YouTube. The volume of evidence against your claim is enormous.
“evidence”
Take a Taylor Swift song. Sing on top of it. Try selling it with the name “Taylor Swift - I’m Not Dead”
You can sell it as “My garbage cover remix of Taylor Swift’s song”, but you cannot make an impression that this originated from Taylor Swift.
Same thing with Carlin, Beyonce, etc.
It is using the name and identical appearance of Carlin, to appear as if Carlin was speaking himself. A person who cannot read would not be able to differentiate. It is plagiarism and malicious copyright infringement.
I see so the law now depends on the illiterate and not the reasonable person standard?
We’ve shifted the goalpost from splicing together her entire discography to singing on top of a song. Neither of which is what AI does, or what that channel did with Carlin’s work.
A person who can’t read or hear. If you can’t understand the narrator telling you for nearly a full minute that this is not George Carlin’s work then you can’t understand the next hour of the video that uses his voice anyways.
I’m trying to dumb down the problem so we can have a conversation. I am not saying it is what “AI” is doing.
I’ve said this elsewhere, a sticky note with a “no cppyroght infringement intended lol” is absolutely worthless.
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Oh no, did I offend your AI girlfriend? Talk about being a sad fuck
Tell me about how great Elon Musk and Joe Rogan are, bro.
If you think this is what AI is doing I recommend looking more into how generative AI actually works. Even if that was what it did, as long as the ones publishing the work are not claiming or leading people to believe that this is Beyonce’s work, then who cares? Should the entire genre of YouTube Poops be paying royalties to all the commercials and politicians they sample and splice?
No, this is not (and never was) how copyright works, nor how it should work.
If you take a second to read the article, you’ll knotice that the title of the supposed standup is literally “George Carlin”.
The video spends nearly a full minute telling you that the channel is dedicated solely to AI content, and that this is not the work of George Carlin. It fills the entire screen with “THIS IS NOT GEORGE CARLIN” several times as the words are spoken by the narrator.
As valid as uploading a copyrighted song to Youtube and saying “No copyright infringement intended” in the description.
A complete false equivalence. Just because improper disclaimers exist, doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate reasons to use them. Impersonation requires intent, and a disclaimer is an explicit way to make it clear that they are not attempting to do that, and to explicitly make it clear to viewers who might have misunderstood. It’s why South Park has such a text too at the start of every episode. It’s a rather fool proof way to illegitimize any accusation of impersonation.
The video is now private so I can’t check, but I’ve read that the disclaimer stated that it was an impersonation.
That’s not why south park had that “disclaimer”. South Park doesn’t need it, it’s a parody.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
A disclaimer is generally any statement intended to specify or delimit the scope of rights and obligations that may be exercised and enforced by parties in a legally recognized relationship. In contrast to other terms for legally operative language, the term disclaimer usually implies situations that involve some level of uncertainty, waiver, or risk. A disclaimer may specify mutually agreed and privately arranged terms and conditions as part of a contract; or may specify warnings or expectations to the general public (or some other class of persons) in order to fulfill a duty of care owed to prevent unreasonable risk of harm or injury. Some disclaimers are intended to limit exposure to damages after a harm or injury has already been suffered. Additionally, some kinds of disclaimers may represent a voluntary waiver of a right or obligation that may be owed to the disclaimant.
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The title is “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead (2024)” and it talks about his own death. Even if someone believes in communication beyond the grave to the extent that they could still mistake it as really being George Carlin, it’s immediately explained as AI in the opening segment of the video.
It really was good material and I liked the alluding that AI was as close to heaven as you can get. Too bad it has been taken down. Locking our culture up is a disservice to everyone who has ever existed.
A sticky note is not a legal disclaimer, nor it has any legal value. It’s like writing a “disclaimer” about privacy on your facebook wall. There are many works that talk about death, resurrection, being undead, etc. Carlin being dead has nothing to do with the title being an obvious infringement.
Have you watched the video? It’s a thousand times more obvious than any legal disclaimer I’ve ever seen. They are not in any way hiding the fact that it is using AI.
Talking about death in the abstract is entirely possible while you’re still alive. Creating material ~two decades after your own death about your death and events that happened since then, less so.
Copyright doesn’t protect names or titles.
The Beatles have just officially released a song with their dead singer’s voice.
No? Go to Spotify and try uploading a track as Michael Jackson, see if copyright “doesn’t protect names or titles.”
You’re understimating what generative AI can do. I was shocked when I realized that GPT-3 was able to do creative writing, something that we thought would be out of reach after things like doing management and self driving cars. Turns out, creativity is what AI can actually do. Watch the video. This is like George Carlin but not using any of his material, instead creating something completely new in the style of George Carlin. They could have used the style and a slightly different voice, but they wanted to make a point here.
If your argument is that minds, be they artificial or human, are not allowed to learn from other peoples works then… well then that is a very immoral argument to make imho.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
video
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If you think that LLM has a “mind”, there’s no discussion with you, sorry.
That’s not what I’m saying, What we currently have is more like the disembodied creative writing center of a brain, without memory or conscience but able to do creative writing. But it seems pretty clear now that we will have sentient artificial minds sooner than later.
And the last thing we need is to use intellectual “property” arguments to regulate this.
Me: hey chatgpt how many words were in your last response to me
Chatgpt: there were 79
Me: what is the approximate limit on your contextual window?
Chatgpt: The approximate limit on my contextual window is around 2048 tokens, which usually translates to around 1500 words, depending on the complexity and length of the words used. This limit affects how much text I can consider from previous interactions in a single conversation.
Define mind or at least list off criteria.
Theft means to deprive someone of their property. How is editing a video of Beyonce doing that? The owners of the videos still have it.
Wait did Beyoncé die?
Edit: no.
She still alive? Damn.
That title had me having to check though.
Again, video editing, plagiarism, and garbage generation have all always been possible. All AI did was make it easier.
That’s like being mad at matches because now anybody can make a fire, and by George, one of those fires could burn down an orphanage. But just forget about all the good things that fire can do like cook food or provide heat or forge steel or whatever else you use your fire for idk I’m not here to judge or kink shame you.
If the skills required are the justification for making AI bad, that’s cool. Let me just take away your GPS apps until you become a pro at operating a sextant.
No disagreement here. I’m using GPT for basic programming help.
Better tools, faster, skill bla bla bla. I couldn’t give two shits about the contemporary garbage created. It’s jut not interesting to me. It’s like listening to someone about a dream they had.
“AI” isn’t bad, it’s the garbage that’s being pushed as revolutionary. Nothing has changed. If you can’t write a good poem, even if AI writes it for you, you still can’t write a good poem. And that is what matters to me.
Any image generated by the garbage collecting machine using my input will never be better than my scribble on a piece of paper. Because it’s just not “my”.
That’s a much bigger discussion around licensing.
AIs are nothing without that the precious input that it learns from. That input comes from tons of different licenses and tons of different creators from tons of different countries and tons of different laws. You ironically need an AI lawyer to even start to sort it all out.
Thats kind of a significant issue, especially if you create something that years later, the AI later regurgitates a significant portion or obvious recreation of.
On your last point, for me, the output of an AI is the combination of its prompt, the inputs it has available to it (or at least the curation of said inputs), and the underlying code that combines it. If an individual or team of people create unique and novel art while being responsible for all three, I would say that deserves proper attribution and compensation where appropriate.
But for any schmuck just typing “alien with purpel boobs” in DALL-E is not an artist. I don’t care how many adjectives he uses to describe the nipples, or even if he fidgets with the lighting to accentuate the curls in her mane. I’m not even going to question why an alien species is assumed to be mammalian, even though that’s just patently absurd right off the bat. Like, seriously, the number if evolutionary dice rolls to get from self-replicating protein to a species that generates milk to feed its young is insane. The chances of that happening in two completely different environments is insane^2. None of that matters to me, because that person has nowhere near enough skin in the game to be considered a creator.