Technology

It isn't wrong to use copyrighted works for training. Let me quote an article by the EFF here:

First, copyright law doesn’t prevent you from making factual observations about a work or copying the facts embodied in a work (this is called the “idea/expression distinction”). Rather, copyright forbids you from copying the work’s creative expression in a way that could substitute for the original, and from making “derivative works” when those works copy too much creative expression from the original.

Second, even if a person makes a copy or a derivative work, the use is not infringing if it is a “fair use.” Whether a use is fair depends on a number of factors, including the purpose of the use, the nature of the original work, how much is used, and potential harm to the market for the original work.

and

Even if a court concludes that a model is a derivative work under copyright law, creating the model is likely a lawful fair use. Fair use protects reverse engineering, indexing for search engines, and other forms of analysis that create new knowledge about works or bodies of works. Here, the fact that the model is used to create new works weighs in favor of fair use as does the fact that the model consists of original analysis of the training images in comparison with one another.

What you want would swing the doors open for corporate interference like hindering competition, stifling unwanted speech, and monopolization like nothing we've seen before. There are very good reasons people have these rights, and we shouldn't be trying to change this. Ultimately, it's apparent to me, you are in favor of these things. That you believe artists deserve a monopoly on ideas and non-specific expression, to the detriment of anyone else. If I'm wrong, please explain to me how.

If we’re going by the number of pixels being viewed, then you have to use the same measure for both humans and AIs - and because AIs have to look at billions of images while humans do not, the AI still requires far more pixels than a human does.

Humans benefit from years of evolutionary development and corporeal bodies to explore and interact with their world before they're ever expected to produce complex art. AI need huge datasets to understand patterns to make up for this disadvantage. Nobody pops out of the womb with fully formed fine motor skills, pattern recognition, understanding of cause and effect, shapes, comparison, counting, vocabulary related to art, and spatial reasoning. Datasets are huge and filled with image-caption pairs to teach models all of this from scratch. AI isn't human, and we shouldn't judge it against them, just like we don't judge boats on their rowing ability.

And humans don’t require the most modern art in order to learn to draw at all. Sure, if they want to compete with modern artists, they would need to look at modern artists (for which educational fair use exists, and again the quantity of art being used by the human for this purpose is massively lower than what an AI uses - a human does not need to consume billions of artworks from modern artists in order to learn what the current trends are). But a human could learn to draw, paint, sculpt, etc purely by only looking at public domain and creative commons works, because the process for drawing, say, the human figure (with the right number of fingers!) has not changed in hundreds of years. A human can also just… go outside and draw things they see themselves, because the sky above them and the tree across the street aren’t copyrighted. And in fact, I’d argue that a good artist should go out and find real things to draw.

AI don’t require most modern art in order to learn to make images either, but the range of expression would be limited, just like a human's in this situation. You can see this in cave paintings and early sculptures. They wouldn't be limited to this same degree, but you would still be limited.

It took us 100,000 years to get from cave drawings to Leonard Da Vinci. This is just another step for artists, like Camera Obscura was in the past. It's important to remember that early man was as smart as we are, they just lacked the interconnectivity to exchange ideas that we have.