It is indeed a more complex scenario than it first appears.

I think the lawsuits have a case if they can prove copyrighted images were taken and used directly in the commercial product.

The moral arguments about AI and it's use and abuse are broad and difficult, because they rely on the intent of the end user rather than the developer of the tool to prove an argument has merit.

I personally don't like AI art, but I can't declare that it's the devil's tool and should be purged with fire. I only think it overall will be a net negative, like I feel with AutoTune. It cheapens the artform.

> It cheapens the artform.

Everyone make their own artistic judgements, nobody's ideas are better. If people prefer this https://lexica.art/ (scroll down) then that's their right.

Tell me how those are 'ideas?'

I imagine there are plenty of people that prefer Autotune voices for some reason too. Doesn't mean everyone needs to agree that it's good in itself or for artists.

Whether we like it or not, technology will always make it worse for some people.

And it's not a new phenomenon. The printing press made scribes nearly obsolete, cars led to a mass slaughter of horses (and all related professions), and so on wherever you look. Invention of photography nearly killed whole genres of art (and gave rise to impressionism, abstractionism etc.)

Unfortunately, we can only judge the outcome of these changes only decades (or even centuries) after they happen.

I think that's an excuse to not argue against (also, how many is 'some people?' Wiping out entire fields is not a tiny negative, much as it might be 'inevitable'). "Hey let's just wait and see shall we." There is no reason things cannot be judged as they arrive and of course those impacted more directly will judge more harshly (e.g. photo developers when digital photos arrived, digital art apps, etc).

I'm personally not against the idea of "AI as a tool to help." I just think with art, and the way the AI art software works, it's not a helping tool; aside playing around with it for fun, it's a "quick riches" type tool, more like faux leather/Pleather/PU leather.

The important question being, why would you pay for these tools? All I've seen are articles around how well they can create art 'in the style of X' as the exciting bit.

I don't think cars led to a mass slaughter of horses. What happened was that fewer horses were bred and raised. Cars were expensive at first.

> I think the lawsuits have a case if they can prove copyrighted images were taken and used directly in the commercial product.

This is what I think would be the easiest thing to prove.

Other people's work was used to create a product that is sold for a quite a bit of profit. No attribution, no compensation. To me it sounds like a pretty clear copyright violation, even if you don't consider what the product does.

DeviantArt probably violated their own TOS.

It'll be interesting to see how the courts view this.

Isn't this exactly how language translator applications work, through ingesting a huge amount of training data?

Automatic machine language translation puts translators out of work and would not be possible without huge amounts of ostensibly unlicensed training data.