@esvrld@octodon.social this is interesting input. It definitely would be an issue that certain niche art styles in the corpus could end up zeroing in non-trivially on a specific artist's style. I hadn't fully considered this, and have been assuming that in the absence of an artist's name in the prompt that the art would be more generic. This immediately has me feeling more skeptical of third party models that don't share their datasets and could be weighted in such a way to be infringing by default.
@esvrld@octodon.social I think your proposal that "ai isn't actually capable of copying either the style or the subject matter of artists in the way that is alleged" is a philosophically interesting idea, but as a cautious AI advocate I would argue that, in practical terms, AI is very capable of copying an artist's style to the level of infringement, and would argue that responsible and ethically informed use of generative models is of high importance to anyone exploring this tech.
@esvrld@octodon.social There are also some holes in my philosophy as I consider this. There are a few models out there are unabashedly designed to copy a specific style. I have a Pixar-theme model that I have played with that is undoubtedly trained on Pixar's IP.
But I feel substantially less conflicted in infringing upon a $7.4B company, and should be more nuanced about how such training directed at smaller artists' works could be damaging to those artists.