zlacker

>>dredmo+(OP)
Context, too long to fit into the HN title: "In order to protest AI image generators stealing artists work to train AI models, the artists are deliberately generating AI art based on the IP of corporations that are most sensitive to protecting it."

>>dredmo+1
Interesting approach, but is drawing fan art illegal?

I would think that generating those images is okay by Disney, the same as if I painted them. The moment Disney would object is when I start selling them on merch, at which point it is irrelevant how they were created.

Am I mistaken?

>>yreg+D3
Artists have a complicated ethical system where 1. reposting/tracing a solo artist's images without "citing the artist" is "stealing" (copyright violation) 2. imitating their style is also "stealing" but 3. drawing fanart of any series without asking is fine and 4. any amount of copyright violation is not only fine but encouraged as long as it's from a corporation.

The punishment for breaking any of these rules is a lot of people yell at you on Twitter. Unfortunately, they've been at it so long that they now think these are actual laws of the universe, although of course they have pretty much nothing to do with the actual copyright law.

That actual law doesn't care if you're selling it or not either, at least not as a bright line test.

(Japanese fanartists have a lot more rules, like they won't produce fan merch of a series if there is official merch that's the same kind of object, or they'll only sell fan comics once on a specific weekend, and the really legally iffy ones have text in the back telling you to burn after reading or at least not resell it. Some more popular series like Touhou have explicit copyright grants for making fanart as long as you follow a few rules. Western fanartists don't read or respect any of these rules.)

>>astran+Ya
Japan doesn't have fair use, so the only thing ensuring that copyright owners don't go after fanartists is that fanart is generally either beneficial to them or is not worth going after. However that would change if the artist were attempting to directly interfere with their revenue, which is why they won't do things like producing imitations of merch.

Copying an artist's style isn't in and of itself looked down upon, any artist will tell you that doing so is an important part of figuring out what aspects of it one likes for their own style. The problem with AI copying it is that the way the vast majority of users are using it isn't in artistic expression. The majority of them are simply spamming images out in an attempt to gain a popularity "high" from social media, without regard for any of the features of typical creative pursuits (an enjoyment of the process, an appreciation for other's effort, a desire to express something through their creativity, having some unique intentional and unintentional identifying features).

Honestly maybe the West messed up having such broad fair use protections since it seems people really have no respect for any creative effort, judging by all the AI art spam and all the shortsighted people acting smug about it despite the questions around it being pretty important to have a serious conversation about, especially for pro-AI folk.

The AI art issue has several difficult problems that we are seemingly too immature to deal with, it makes it clear how screwed we'd be as a society if anything approaching true AGI happened to be stumbled upon anytime soon.