Digital artists and illustrators are abandoning Elon Musk’s blogging platform X (formerly Twitter) over the introduction of a new controversial image-editing feature powered by artificial intelligence (AI). According to reports, the creators claimed that the new tool could be used to modify others’ works without their consent.
One such popular creator championing the boycott is Mu-jik Park, the renowned South Korean artist known by the pen name Boichi. Boichi is the creator of the hit manga series Dr Stone and Sun-Ken Rock.
This specific part is kinda stupid.
Nothing was ever preventing anyone from modifying an artists work. Its incredibly common. No one needs consent to modify anything.
To distrubute something that isn’t yours that doesn’t fall under fair use, absolutely. But modifying without consent is a joke.
I think all the uproar is about new Grok functions that allow you to edit with AI and repost (aka distribute) images directly from within Xitter (I’m not sure that this is the case but I’m definitely not going to log in that thing to verify that).
I wasn’t going to log in to verify either lol.
Even if that’s the case, it will come down to fair use policy which will allow quite a lot.
If the specific instance of sharing isn’t fair use and Twitter allows it, then sue them, someone will. Reddit for example though is just littered with modified images and they’ve been fine. Same with Lemmy.
Edit: If someone starts trying to make money off modified images via Grok, then that becomes a much easier case to win.
They can use it to farm engagement. Is that the same thing?
And yeah, that’s the icky part. This is a dream for spammers and “cheap SEO” types who don’t really care about copyright law in this context.
I wonder how that would go in court, I wonder if it’s been tried before? I could see an argument that if that was the intention and how they made money via gained followers, even indirectly, maybe it wouldn’t be fair use.
Edit: Like if they gain followers reposting grok modified images, and then they also show sponsored ads to their followers, now they are benefiting commercially by gaining followers via modified grok images. That might not be fair use, assuming the modified item was fair use to begin with otherwise.
Many artists explicitly state no repost without their permission, requiring proper credits and such. It IS a dick move to AIgen-fed edit while directly interacting author’s post; that makes people using the AI feature violating author’s will knowingly.
In reality, people don’t read artists’ comment or bio, when “single button to AIgen and use the art as prompt” exists. It’s basically X greenlits anyone to do so against artists’ will, and fair use can argue the use of art but never force artists to stay on a platform. That’s what’s happening. They may have overstayed on a horrible platform blinded by clout they can get there but that is a different story.
May I introduce to you, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
May I introduce you to Fair Use Doctrine.
https://www.dmca.com/FAQ/What-is-Fair-Use