Warning: I used to think AI art was just a cool tool, but a comment on my post last month made me stop and think.

I posted a fantasy landscape I made with Midjourney, and someone replied, 'Cool image, but did you credit the thousands of artists it learned from without paying them?' I mean, I hadn't even considered that. I looked into it and found out the training data is a huge legal gray area. Now I always try to find out if a model was trained ethically before using it. Has anyone else changed their habits after getting called out like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

vera3081mo ago

Yeah, my friend had a similar thing happen. She posted a portrait she made and got a really long comment about the training data. It totally changed how she picks which AI tools to use now.

milestaylor14d ago

People don't think about the human cost behind these tools. Those artists spent years perfecting their style. Now their work gets scraped into a dataset without permission. That's theft, plain and simple. I quit using AI art altogether after learning that. Not worth the guilty feeling every time I hit generate.

nathana481mo ago

Oh man, that's the new version of asking an artist for their influences. Like @vera308 said, one comment can really shift your whole view. Now I feel like I need a degree in AI ethics just to make a silly picture of a cat in a spacesuit.