this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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If I drew something myself, those artists would also not be paid. I can understand a deontological argument against using AI trained on people's art, but for me, the utilitarian argument is much stronger -- don't use AI if it puts an artist out of work.
It's not about anyone getting paid, it's about affording basic respect and empathy to people and their work. Using AI sends a certain message of 'I don't care about your consent or opinion towards me using your art", and I don't think, that this is a good thing for anyone.
Well yeah, I don't care about IP rights. Nothing has been materially stolen, and if AI improves, then the result could some day in theory be indistinguishable from a human who was merely "inspired" by an existing piece of art. At the end of the day, the artist is not harmed by AI plagiarism; the artist is harmed by AI taking what could have been their job.
They're harmed by both IMO.
how
By systems positing human creativity as a computational exercise
the human brain follows the laws of physics; it therefore follows that human creativity is already computational.
Three problems with this:
Please note that I'm not arguing that current AIs actually are on the level of human creativity, just that there's no law against that eventually being possible.
The fact that we do not know or understand all the laws of physics (and again, if these are even indeed universal!) means that we cannot be certain about equating computation and physics - assuming we define computation as deterministic, as you seem to be doing here.
Can you 'simulate' a human brain? Sure, easy, all you have to do is just build a human brain out of DNA and proteins and lipids and water and hormones etc, and put it in an exact replica of a human body built from that same stuff.
We have no evidence that consciousness can be separated from the material body that gives rise to it!
And even if we try to abstract that away and say "let's just model the entire physical brain & body digitally": that brain & body is not an island; it's constantly interacting with the entirety of the rest of the physical world.
So, you want to 'simulate' a brain with ones and zeroes? You'll need to simulate the entire universe too. That's likely to be difficult, unless you have an extra universe worth of material to build that computational device with.
Okay, I agree that the universe may not be Turing-computable, since we don't know the laws of physics. Indeed, it almost certainly isn't, since Turing machines are discrete and the universe is continuous -- there are integrals, for instance, that have no closed-form, but are physically present in our universe. However, I have no particularly good reason to believe that infinite precision is actually necessary in order to accurately simulate the human brain, since we can get arbitrarily close to an exact simulation of, say, Newtonian physics, or quantum physics minus gravity, using existing computers -- by "arbitrarily close," I mean that for any desired threshold of error, there exists some discretization constant for which the simulation will remain within that error threshold.
Sure, maybe there are more laws of the universe we don't know and those turn out to be necessary for the human brain to work. But it seems quite unlikely, as we already have a working reductionist model of the brain -- it seems like we understand how all the component parts, like neurons and such, work, and we can even model how complex assemblages of neurons can compute interesting things. Like we've trained actual rat neurons to play Doom for some ungodly reason, and they obey according to how our models predict. Yeah, maybe there's some critical missing law of physics, but the current model we have seems sufficient so far as we can tell in order to model the brain.
I feel like the rest of the world shouldn't actually matter for the purposes of free will. I mean, yes, obviously our free will responds to the environment. But if the environment disappeared, our free will shouldn't disappear along with it. In other words, the free will should be either entirely located in the mind, or if you're not a compatabilist/materialist, it's located in the mind plus some other metaphysical component. So, I don't agree that it requires simulating the whole universe in order to simulate a free will (though I do agree that you can't simulate an actual mind in the real world unless you can simulate all its inputs, e.g. placing the mind in some kind of completely walled-off sensory deprivation environment that has within-epsilon-of-zero interaction with the outside world. Obviously, it's not very practical, but for a thought experiment about free will I don't think this detail really matters.)
So would you agree that people should be locked up for crimes that a sufficiently advanced AI system predicts they will commit?
Or would you agree that these systems cannot calculate human behaviour?
Hahaha, I didn't expect that.
I saw Minority Report, and I think it has a plot hole. If you can see the future then you can change it, meaning that if there is any way to relay information from the oracle to the person who would commit the crime, then that could change whether or not the person will commit the crime.
No free will doesn't imply no change. Lifeless systems evolve over time, take rock formation as an example, it was all cosmic dust at some point. So no, even if we do accept that there is no free will that shouldn't mean perfect stasis
I never said that no change would occur. I said there was no season to advocate for it if there is no free will.
I mean how many of us are pirating stuff
Thank you, you canβt both love piracy (which lemmy overwhelmingly does) and hate AI
plenty of examples where piracy harms no one devs get paid no matter what, ppl working on and making shows like south park that have 5 year deals, many devs get fired right after a game gets released they dont benefit if it does well, indie games i never pirate, I use the 2 hour steam window instead to see if I want it
ai on the other hand lol, actively takes away jobs
There would be no job designing a lemmy banner
I'm glad I don't think like you, thatd be a confusing time
It's sad that you think that is what I was arguing
If I saw the artwork myself and it inspired my artwork, would it be any different? Everything is based on everything.
Yeah, but if you drew it yourself then they wouldn't expect to be paid. Unless you plagiarised them to the degree that would trigger a copyright claim, they would (at worst) just see it as a job that they could have had, but didn't. Nothing of theirs was directly used, and at least something original of theirs was created. Whereas AI images are wholly based on other work and include no original ideas at all.
You're posting on lemmy.ml; we don't care much for intellectual property rights here. What we care about is that the working class not be deprived of their ability to make a living.
Agree with that. I don't think the two are mutually exclusive though?
I agree that they are not mutually exclusive, which is why I usually side against AI. On this particular occasion however, there's a palpable difference, since no artist is materially harmed.