Style is not copyrightable so I see nothing wrong with making essentially a robot that can paint in the style of someone else.

In isolation, no. But the produced works can be too close for fair use (as demonstrated with the Prince pieces by Andy Warhol), and passing it off as a piece from the original artist can open you up to forgery/fraud charges.

To put another way, the motivations to produce art in another artist's style can still land the artist/buyer in legal trouble regardless of fair use.

Yes that is true, but I don't think the people who use style transfer are actually passing it off as the original, they just like it for the aesthetic value of their own images. In other words, no one using the Van Gogh LoRA is actually trying to forge the Starry Night.

I guess there's always a greater fool, but forging an oil painting using AI digital images seems pretty far fetched.

You can paint over the printed image?

Not that it’d look anything like the artist you are copying, but it’s a fun idea.

Do you use AI art generators? Flaws are extremely easily found out, it is only good for a rough snapshot (without much fiddling and even then, artifacts remain). I can guarantee you it is definitely not popular to sell existing works made with AI, you are better off hiring an actual forger. In fact, your suggestion is even the first I've even heard of such an idea.

The legality of using someone’s copyrighted work to train a model to reproduce it without their consent is still under debate - but the morality of the act at least, is not related to its legality - be it positively or negatively; and I personally consider it abhorrent.

Under what morals do you consider it "abhorrent?" I bet got a straight answer from those I've asked about this as the counter arguments seem too easy to make.

It's just pure exploitation. You're using the product of someone's work to create a machine that takes away their work.

Why is doing a task with a machine suddenly objectionable when the same task performed by humans is perfectly fine?

A man with a small canoe catching a few fish with a fishing rod for his dinner is very different to a commercial fishing vessel trawling through the ocean with a massive net to catch thousands of fish at once. The two are treated differently under the law, and have different rules that apply to them due to the difference in scale.

Scale matters, and the scale that computers/these AIs operate under are absurd compared to a person doing it manually.

Why does scale matter in terms of AI? Just because a computer can do it at scale doesn't mean it should be treated similarly to your analogy. Rather than using an analogy, please tell me why it matters that computers can do something like AI at scale rather than individuals doing it.

Chiefly, scale and accountability.

The work of a person can be mitigated and a person can be held accountable for their actions.

Much of our society operates on the idea that we don’t need to codify and enforce every single good or bad thing due to these reasons; and having such an underpinning affords us greater personal freedom.

This does not actually answer the question of why it is bad (in your opinion) in the first place, it just states that bad things are mitigated. I am looking for a concrete answer to the former, not a justification of the latter. The former is what usually AI opponents can never answer, they assume prima facie that AI is bad, for whatever reason.

I answered your question plainly, but I'll try to go into detail. I have a suspicion that you don't see this as the philosophical issue that AI detractors do, and perhaps that hasn't been clearly communicated to you in the answers you've received, leading to your distaste for them or confusion at why they don't meet your criteria.

I believe that this kind of generative AI is bad because it approximates human behavior at an inhuman scale and cannot be held accountable in any way. This upends the entire social structure upon which humans have relied to keep each other in-check since the advent of the modern concept of "justice" beginning with the Code of Hammurabi.

In essence: Because you cannot punish, rehabilitate or extract recompense from a machine, it should not be allowed in any way to approximate a member of society.

This logic does not apply to machines that "automate" labor, because those machines do not approximate human communication - they do not pretend to be us.

Your argument can be applied to the printing press or the automatic loom, and before you say that AI is much more at scale, I do not think that it is any more at scale than producing billions of books and garments cheaply. If you instead say that AI is more autonomous than the prior which require human functionality, I will remind you that no AI today (and likely into the future) produces outputs autonomously with no human input (and indeed, many humans tweak those outputs further, making it more like photo editing than end-to-end solutions). Even if they could perfectly read your mind and output end-to-end, you must first think for them to do what you desire.

Should those machines then be subject to your same philosophies? I'd suspect you'd say "that's different" somehow but it is only because you are alive at this moment and these machines have been normalized to you that you do not care about them. Were you to be born in a few centuries, you would likely feel the same way most do about the prior machines, and indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who think that future generation's AI (probably simply called technology then) is problematic as you do today. Recency bias is one hell of a drug.

Why does someone's work matter?

Why do you want the end result of the work if the work itself doesn't matter?

I replied to the other comment.

If it didn’t matter, you wouldn’t want to take it.

The word "work" is being overloaded here, their work as in output might matter but I am asking why they must work at all in the first place. If your answer is because they must procure money to survive, that is an economic failure, not one of AI. Jobs are simply a roundabout way of distributing money for output to be produced, if an AI can produce the output, the job need not exist. This is the same argument that has been used for centuries as automation advances in every field, but suddenly, when it comes for my white collar high tech industry? It's an outrage.

Even then, their work as output can matter but that doesn't necessarily mean they (should) have a per se right to their work without other people also using it, especially in cases where their work is not used as outputs directly, which is what plagiarism is. If that were the case, no one could learn from a other's work, regardless of whether that one is a person or a computer.

Remember, we are discussing art here, not white collar tech jobs. AI coming for my job would be unpleasant and devastating, but that, like you said, is an economic problem. That I agree on.

I don't think there is a way to continue this particular branch of this argument without devolving into a debate on the value of human life like a couple of Macedonian philosophers - suffice to say, my point of view is that the work of others has intrinsic value tied to intent, and machines do not have intent.

If no output of humans has intrinsic value, then once machines can approximate humans sufficiently there is no reason for humans to exist - and that is an outcome that I, as a human, reject with all of my being.

Output of humans has value to humans; art does not have value to beings outside of humans, of course. That does not mean that one cannot use a machine to create new outputs, and it doesn't mean that those will or will not have value, as again, value is subjective to the (human) beholder. We see this already with people praising AI art. Therefore, I do not believe that intent matters in the slightest as long as people deem something valuable.

The reason for humans existing is not because of the output they produce (indeed, that is dystopic), humans have worth inherently, regardless of what they output. This is also what nihilists have figured out, so maybe that is something you should look into if you seriously have such an opinion as expressed in your last paragraph.

If you believe intent does not matter and is unrelated to human worth, then we are at an inherently impassible disagreement as to the nature of human society and will never agree on this issue. My belief is that this point of view, as well as others (like Nihilism, as mentioned) are fundamentally destructive to human society, which likely clarifies why you don't see a problem with what I and others believe is an existential threat to said society.

I don't see how your viewpoint is useful, though; Nihilism has been around for a century but I do not see how it is "an existential threat to said society." It seems like you believe something but don't have any empirical backing for it, therefore, let me remind you, as my other comment says [0], that people do not have the best record of stating why "society" is decaying.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919253&p=2#40920318

I sure wish I could non-consent to people observing me in the world, I'd like to move through society invisibly and only show myself when it benefitted me. Unfortunately, the only answer is to stay inside if I don't want people to see me.

> I sure wish I could non-consent to people observing me in the world,

You aren't allowed to use photos featuring a non-consenting person to, for instance promote a product.

You are allowed to use photos including a non-consenting person.

There's a lot of complicated law, differing between different jurisdictions to cover this question, and to balance the needs of the public with commercial desires. It's not as simple as you make it sound, and there's no reason we should just default to bending over backwards for commercial interests.

Laws exist to serve society, not the other way around.

I'm sure that the people who are being constantly victimized by paparazzi would like to know those rules that you just quoted, and have them be enforced.

If you had done a little research into this question, you'd realize that 1A use cases ('journalism') are treated by law quite differently than use of likeness for commercial intent.

This is my whole point. There isn't a single, one-size-fits-all rule that a five year old can comprehend that describes any particular country's legal framework around the many, many different dimensions of tension between public and private interests on this incredibly broad question.

And none of the existing frameworks fit the new use cases well, and we should probably have an open political debate about what we want to do going forward.

Okay? What will that prove? That you can be an ass?

Being an ass is generally not illegal. Particular behaviours might be, but no legal or social system intends to censure you for every possible one, and most people who are experts in law or ethics don't believe that they should.

If you identify particular problems with the particular paparazzi laws in your country, that's an interesting conversation, and maybe, if framed well, an interesting data point for this discussion, but is not in itself the 'last word' on it. Just because you can torture an analogy, doesn't mean the analogy has a lot of power.

Note that in Europe (broadly speaking), this is a right people have.

We are not discussing people observing people. We are discussing programs observing people.

Seems like a meaningless distinction in the face of a government that defines giving money as speech.

Try getting Mickey Mouse comics.

That should be fun...