And even with that base set, even if a computer could theoretically try all trillion possibilities quickly, it’ll make a ton of noise, get throttled, and likely lock the account out long before it has a chance to try even the tiniest fraction of them

One small correction - this just isn’t how the vast majority of password cracking happens. You’ll most likely get throttled before you try 5 password and banned before you get to try 50. And it’s extremely traceable what you’re trying to do. Most cracking happens after a data breach, where the cracker has unrestricted local access to (hopefully) encrypted and salted password hashes.

People just often re-use their password or even forget to change it after a breach. That’s where these leaked passwords get their value if you can decrypt them. So really, this is a non-factor. But the rest stands.

While this comic is good for people that do the former or have very short passwords, it often misleads from the fact that humans simply shouldn’t try to remember more than one really good password (for a password manager) and apply proper supplementary techniques like 2FA. One fully random password of enough length will do better than both of these, and it’s not even close. It will take like a week or so of typing it to properly memorize it, but once you do, everything beyond that will all be fully random too, and will be remembered by the password manager.

Beginning artists also need good reference material to become good artists and create new transformative material, is that also copyright infringement? For training to be useful you need more refined material than what you can currently produce, that’s just how knowledge works. The goal of these AI isn’t to produce the same as it’s reference material, if it was then you’d have a case. You can easily see from the output of these generators that the vast majority of what it produces is transformative, confirming it’s intended goal.

Scraping data is also very well established as not infringing on copyright if used for analysis purposes. And if you’ve ever done any kind of analytical research yourself for a PhD or any kind of higher educational degree you know this to be a fundamental freedom required for a healthy society, not even just for artists to learn.

Proposing it should be seen the way you put it would essentially turn ideas into a property one can own and license, and I can tell you now, the same companies you probably dislike will own so many of these ideas that you could effectively do nothing without paying a license to one of them. Is this what you want?

And well, shouldn’t need to be said but, if a company gets sued when they think they’re in the right, they’re going to defend themselves lol. And as far as I know none of these lawsuits have been settled in the favor of artists claiming copyright infringement.

Yes exactly. The people who can conceivably use AI the best are those with very little to begin with. And should you create something successful you would most likely eventually hire actual artists to assist you. It’s never that black and white. There’s a lot of bad things to say about the big companies and their fascination with putting AI into everything, but that’s really just overlooking the much broader societal impact of AI, which is much more visibly positive for independent creators and smaller companies.

The sudden change in how copyright infringement is weighted by some feels mostly like a tactic to me too. Which is a shame because you don’t need such things to get sympathy from most people. Losing job security is not something people are stone cold about, and will most likely support protections on that basis alone. Misrepresenting or lying about it will make allies shy away from you even if they have your best intentions in mind. As someone else put it in one of these threads: “If ethics is on your side, slam ethics. If the law is on your side, slam the law. If neither are on your side, slam the table.” and this fascination with harshly applying copyright infringement to people doing things with AI that artists did without AI since the dawn of time is stupid.

I’d argue not from a different point of view. The overwhelming majority of AI aren’t trained to mimic one specific person or style. Users can still guide the AI towards doing that, but that’s exactly the same as what @ZILtoid1991@kbin.social said. Most artists using AI assisted tools do not try to intentionally use AI for that, they try to guide it towards new creative expression, as it should be.

So yes, technically there is a clear difference. The people as described by @ZILtoid1991@kbin.social are edging far more closely to intentional copyright infringement than AI is. But still well within the lines of fair and ethical use. Usage of AI is well within those borders as well if used correctly.

Funny - I distinctly remember not having any time to recreationally make, and most importantly, actually finish small art pieces. Because our society nowadays demands me to be working on things that aren’t quite art for 80% of the time I’m awake. AI assisted tools have caused me to be able to use that 20% to actually make something again in a satisfactory way. At least for me and most people I talk to in a similar situation, it has allowed me to enjoy being creative again.

Yeah I can’t look at artists with zero nuance for AI as anything but being hypocritical. Most artists I know from the industry understand that legally they have no case against these companies because they use the same fundamental freedoms and ideas extracted from the collective human creativity they themselves used to get where they are. And art and creative studies explicitly teach you this. You will spend a lot of time analyzing great works to see what makes them so special, and replicating those ideas as practice.

It’s how it’s been since forever, and many great artists in history are on record as having directly studied, imitated, or producing homages of other great artists. The Mona Lisa is the best example, it has uncountable derivative works, but nobody questions the ethics of that because we accept even works directly based on another have room for creative input that can make it distinct. And nobody is claiming to have made the original, just their own version.

Hiding or downplaying those facts about the creative industry so you can call AI theft without being a hypocrite is very questionable behaviour, especially since it’s often used to convince people that don’t know much about the creative process and can’t properly realize their ignorance is being taken advantage of to condition them these aren’t just a normal part of becoming a better artist. And if pressed on that, the response is usually “but it’s okay if a human does it.”, admitting that the point was intentionally misrepresented to not hint people in on the fact the AI is doing the same as the human, and not explicit copyright infringement akin to real theft.

You can still not like AI or argue to provide better protections for people displaced by AI, I honestly partially agree. The technology needs to remain something in the hands of the working people that contribute to the collective, not gated behind proprietary services built to extort you. But arguing against AI on a level of theft or plagiarism (barring situations where the person using the AI intends to do exactly that) is just incredibly disingenuous and makes allies not want to associate with you because you’re just spouting falsehoods for personal gain. Even if I think you deserve all the help in the world, you’re asking me to accept and propagate a lie to support you, I will not do that.

And there’s the flipside. Limiting those freedoms in a way that AI would be outlawed or constrained would most likely cause unintentional side effects that can blow up in artist’s faces, limiting not only their freedoms but also the freedoms of artists that embrace AI and use it as the tool it’s meant to be. And you bet your ass that companies like Disney are just salivating at the idea of amending copyright law once more.