I’ve been trying to think of a way to have a nuanced discussion about art and AI, but hesitant to do so since people online can get incredibly vitriolic about it if they suspect that I’m in favor of AI. For the record I dislike AI being shoved in my face, from the uncanny-valley line art to the shovelware game apps that I keep seeing ads for.

To get to the point, I’m struggling to understand the moral difference between an AI model scraping art to use as training data, or an aspiring artist studying it to learn how to make it themselves. In both cases, the original artist has posted their work to a public website fully knowing that people will look at it. What’s the difference between an AI model vs a human learning from it? And how is it theft when the product is demonstrably different from the original?

I want to be clear that I just want to understand the logical underpinning of the arguments, and not arguing for one side or the other.

Case in point: All the 9/11 memes today