I dunno, to me I think thats kinda weird. Am I infringing on someone’s rights by remembering someones painting and trying to paint something similar? Collages and minor edits are even protected forms of expression. I could go grab some official nintendo art, make it Mario but with Boobs™️ and that is my art.
I'm mostly just talking about the nature of transformative works and profiting from them. Like if you went to deviantart and painted over someone's picture in a way that obvious that you did/not transformative enough and posted it on deviantart without their permission, that's generally considered bad form, and on some art sites it's even outright against the rules. Then you take it one step forward and you try to sell it off of redbubble. That's not Nintendo you're trying to extract profit from, it's kawaiimewmew93 from deviantart.
But you could still take kawaiimewmew93's image and paint over it but you change it so much that even the artist themself wouldn't recognize the picture. That's a transformative work, that's generally considered fair.
When you look at Stable Diffusion. you can see countless kawaiimewmew93s in the dataset. Their images have all been used and broken down into mathematical equations via algorithms that "learn" by recreating their images over and over out of noise fields. The only reason you can't pick out the individual artists (most of the time) is because they're drowned out by even MORE artists turned into math equations.
I think in a world without capitalism that would still be considered bad form, to some extent, just because of the lack of crediting. In this world, people using all this unpaid labor that the datasets are built off of is what makes things so complicated and unfair.
And I do think you can use these for transformative works in a way that IS fair, hence my examples.
I'm mostly just talking about the nature of transformative works and profiting from them. Like if you went to deviantart and painted over someone's picture in a way that obvious that you did/not transformative enough and posted it on deviantart without their permission, that's generally considered bad form, and on some art sites it's even outright against the rules. Then you take it one step forward and you try to sell it off of redbubble. That's not Nintendo you're trying to extract profit from, it's kawaiimewmew93 from deviantart.
But you could still take kawaiimewmew93's image and paint over it but you change it so much that even the artist themself wouldn't recognize the picture. That's a transformative work, that's generally considered fair.
When you look at Stable Diffusion. you can see countless kawaiimewmew93s in the dataset. Their images have all been used and broken down into mathematical equations via algorithms that "learn" by recreating their images over and over out of noise fields. The only reason you can't pick out the individual artists (most of the time) is because they're drowned out by even MORE artists turned into math equations.
I think in a world without capitalism that would still be considered bad form, to some extent, just because of the lack of crediting. In this world, people using all this unpaid labor that the datasets are built off of is what makes things so complicated and unfair. And I do think you can use these for transformative works in a way that IS fair, hence my examples.