AI generators are like if somebody went around and stole random things from every house in your neighborhood and offered them all for free at a big free garage sale.
Many people might not even notice that something had been stolen from them and say "wow, isn't it wonderful that all of this stuff is free?" and not even ask where it came from.
Some people might know where it came from but not care because it is free and they can go there and load up everything they can carry and make off with more than they are robbed for.
Some people will shut their ears and not want to hear about where it came from because they don't particularly miss their junk and don't want to believe anything bad is happening.
Some people recognize their things and are offended.
Some people got robbed for more valuable items and see others making off with them or pieces of them, and yell at their neighbors who reply, "what? I didn't get it from your house and it is only one bead from the jewelry collection you assume is yours but it could have been anyone's lmao."
Everyone has to watch their neighbors go in and haul out junk from the free garage sale and when you tell them to stop and that's stolen property they look at you like you're crazy.
This would be a good analogy if either of the following were true:
AI-generated art consists of verbatim quotes from its training data
AI training somehow deprives the owners of the training data of their original works
Unfortunately, both of the above are false. The original creators or owners of training data still have their works and the rights to it, and while you can certainly get an AI to stylistically imitate other artists, in general it's incapable of producing anything exactly.
(The exception I'm aware of for the latter point largely has to do with text, where it turns out that LLMs do effectively memorize large parts of famous works that show up often in their training data, Harry Potter being the most salient example. This is "theft" in the same way that it's "theft" for a human to memorize something they're read several times. And I don't believe that the phenomenon of exact duplication shows up at all in image-generation models.)
Plagiarism doesn't require verbatim quotes, as any academic person of any stripe knows.
AI training deprives the owners of the original works of the market value of their original works, which is why pirating is illegal, so the law already recognizes this as a type of stealing.
Plagiarism doesn't require verbatim quotes, but also very little in the nature of generative AI meets the broader criteria for "plagiarism". This is something that could maybe be said of particular outputs derived from particular prompts, but not of generated text in general.
"AI derives the owners of the market value of their works". This is simply objectively false. Your books (and my books, for that matter) are still for sale. No one is preventing you from selling them, and no one is selling other copies of them without your permission. No one can generate them from AI. People can use AI to create other, worse texts, but this is also true of any moron with a keyboard.









