The general consensus here is that if you generate AI art at all, regardless of whether you use it commercially or not, you are engaging in art theft and are in fact an asshole.
So why doesn’t that logic get applied to straight up turning someone’s digital art and/or photos into memes and having millions of people repost it with zero attribution? I’m not talking about things like wojaks or rage comic characters where the creator intended for it to be a meme and knew for a fact that other people will copy it, nor am I talking about screenshots of popular media franchises, but the random art and photos people post that just happens to resonate with the internet in a way the creator never foresaw, becoming memes without the creator even initially knowing. Think the original advice animal meme templates like Scumbag Steve or Bad Luck Brian where it’s literally just a random photo of someone, probably taken off their personal social media. Or the two serious and one goofy dragon drawing and others that were very clearly posts on art sharing sites that got reposted with new context. I’ve even seen some meme templates go out of their way to crop out names and signatures that the original creator put there so they are credited when their work is reposted. And no one slamming AI art seemingly has a problem with any of it. In fact, if you as the creator of an image tried to get the internet to stop using your personal work as a meme with no attribution, you’d be ignored at best and targeted for doxxing and harassment at worst for spoiling their fun, probably by some of the same people condemning the use of AI.
If you go on art sharing sites, the consensus among the artists themselves is that you’re not supposed to repost their work at all unless given a CC license or otherwise explicit permission. Whether it’s for commercial use or just as a random internet post doesn’t seem to change their stance in the slightest. This implicitly includes not just AI but memes as well, as in both cases you are taking someone else’s work and redistributing it without permission or attribution. So why is this okay if AI art is not? It’s even more blatant than AI because it’s not just stealing tons of people’s work, blending them all in a neural network, and spitting out a “new” work that still has fragments of the stolen work, it straight up IS just stealing a specific person’s specific work, full stop. I feel like the reason is circular, it’s okay because it’s been happening since forever and that’s what makes it okay. And AI art is not okay because it’s new and doesn’t already have a history of everyone doing it.
The majority of people condemning AI art are not themselves artists but cite things like “respect for artists” as a reason for condemning it. But most artists aren’t just against AI but against their art being reposted by anyone for any purpose, profit or otherwise. Even if they were never going to make money from that piece, they are still against reposts on principle while most of the non-artists seem to only talk about AI separating artists from revenue. So if we’re actually to respect artists, wouldn’t we adopt that stance for everything and not just commercial use or AI?
And if this is okay, what about AI art makes it different enough to not be okay?
Finally, it’s not like people never make money off memes so a binary “AI is for profit while memes aren’t” doesn’t work.
Not trying to defend AI art, but trying to go further with the discussion that has appeared around it and genuinely trying to tease out some consistency and fundamental values in subjects everyone ostensibly feel extremely strongly about and are not willing to budge.
In my opinion this is too large of an attempt at reasoning memes as equal to an artist made piece of art but it is full of fallacies. The same images from memes being used can be traced and attributed to its original author with ease, AI cannot. So I’d argue that AI stealing is even more blatant as it attempts to hide its origin. AI makes people think they actually did something and partook in creating the piece, which is like taking an image off the internet and saying you made it. You can edit it, but it is not the same as saying you are the creator. AI blurs the line of ownership by including an algorithm in between, but it is being used to try and heavily commercialise its output in a way that memes never had. You say in italics a fallacy on the style of “memes occasionally can be profitable, therefore it is equivalent to selling AI art”, but I think you know how different the reality of both forms is. It is exactly the intent behind the majority of AI image generation to industrialise art, while it is not the case of memes, and you see the same pushback if a company tries to use someone’s photo commercially/politically without their consent. In a meme, the image is not the main product, but the context in which it is being used, so the image can be actually replaced but not the same can be done with the text.
And true, I’d argue there’s also a component of inherent rejection of AI generated images because it is clear it “destroys art creation” in the sense that artists experience the world and create from said experience in connection with their own perception and ideas, while AI “remixes” said work without any understanding or self input and steals people’s expression that is currently being aimed explicitly for commercial purposes. Meme makers do something far better than AI. If all art would be made by AI there would be no art. The only way I’d be ok with it is if you give the neural network sensors to perceive reality and process ideas and thoughts, to then create its own interpretation and expression. I guess it would be interesting to see “art” without emotion.
You pull out of nowhere that most people against AI are not artists, but that kind of claim needs some support behind it. Similarly to how you claim that people against AI art have nothing against using other people’s work for memes without their consent. That kind of whataboutism does not contribute to the discussion, as it is just pointing to a “but they do that so I can do this” lame excuse. Sure, people should be more respectful about other people’s images, so what.
Even with all of this, I do agree that using people’s images for memes without their consent is bad. Doubt it can be stopped but I’d not be surprised if they are strongly affected by it. Empathy is scarce these days and makes me act a bit more bitter on the internet.