this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Of course I see the difference - direct, outright theft and direct profiting from the theft is much worse then using content that's been stolen to train computer image generation software.
If your complaint is about the copyright infringement, then danbooru should be the target of your complaint - but no one seems to care about that. Why don't people care about that?
If the concern is that this software makes it easier to commit crimes, sure, I guess? But, again, danbooru. And like every other site on the internet.
The concern, it seems to me, is with person A being an artist, person B makes art and tries to pass it off as an original work by person A. And that's valid - but I still don't feel like it's worse than actually just taking the artwork and calling it "content" and using it to generate as revenue.
The main problem i have with this criticism is that (imo) there are much more important issues at stake with midjourney or whatever - and this (alleged) concern (alleged because it only seems to go skin-deep) prevents people from caring about the real issues.
Many many many jobs now, when a person leaves, they're replaced with 2 part time people. This benefits profits and hurts everyone else.
The issue with computer generated images is that, when a movie studio needs a sci fi background, it used to require an artist; now, it just requires midjourney - and you can hire the artist for 4 hours (instead of 4 days) to touch it up, fix the fingers, etc - which not only takes less time, but also less talent, which increases the labor supply, which pushes wages down.
This technology has the potential to take the career of being an artist and turns out into a low-wage, part time thing that you can't live off of. This has happened in so many parts of our economy and it's really bad, and we need to protect artists from that fate.
So no, I really can't muster up giving a shit about whether someone on pixiv copies your art and makes 3$ a month from a patreon. The entire field of visual arts is under threat of complete annihilation from greedy capitalists. They're the villains here, not some neckbeard's patreon.