For art's sake

I want to go back and unpack the first irritated response:

I’m not stealing from artists. I’m having fun in a way that nobody’s losing a job. People using technology to eliminate jobs is a different story. Is photoshopping bad, too? You shouldn’t question my ‘goodness’, for simply using AI in a victimless manner.

AI "art" absolutely does steal from other artists, though not always obviously. 

The first AI comic I saw was using rendered images of Zendaya. A romance writer aggressively promoting her books on Facebook recently had a merman on the cover that was totally Jason Momoa. 

If you felt like the pictures of you in different decades or cowboy you didn't really look like you, that may just mean that there was not a close match in the images that were being harvested. 

Okay, photos of famous people get used; so what?

There's a ton of ethical issues in that question that I am not getting into today, focusing on the production itself. 

There is a good chance that these are not photos of the actual actors, but artwork that other people did of them. Those images are then harvested from somewhere like DeviantArt. 

Were they going to earn money for turning Jason Momoa into a merman? Maybe not, and maybe not enough to live on, but the artwork can be monetized. Some professional artists do use art sites as one point of sale, and then find their images stolen. That used to mainly happen with T-shirts, but there are many other options for stealing now.

As it is, there are repositories of images out there that can be used with the artists' (including photographers) permission, including https://creativecommons.org/.

Part of that inclusion is that it specifies what uses are permitted and under what conditions. Maybe you can use it without fee as long as your use is non-commercial but it requires attribution. Therefore, if someone else sees it and wants to use it commercially, they know whom to ask for permission. 

Something you are doing for fun might affect someone else's ability to be compensated for work. Should that matter for art, which we do for love?

There are some problems if we don't.

One overarching principle that I will keep coming back to is this big circle of devaluing people. 

Yes, you do have studio heads (who make lots of money) questioning the value of writers and artists and even actors because they no longer believe it's necessary. It is easy to draw the connection to job elimination there, as well as the decline in innovation and quality of the entertainment.

It may be harder to connect when whipping up an AI image for the cover of your romance series where lords of the sea find love and passion with human women who have had a hard time with land-dwelling men. However, it's not that no one provided work for the covers; it's that you are using that work without any recognition or caring for that contribution.

Now, I have seen some pretty cheesy romance novel covers done with Photoshop, but yes, from an ethical standpoint I would have to say that was better.

I have self-published novels. None of the covers are great, but I didn't steal. That's worth something to me.

Besides, there are artists out there who might help you for a small amount, thus helping both of you. That's something that can happen but is becoming progressively easier not to think about. 

When AI keeps stealing (they sometimes dismiss it as "theft from the commons" which opens up a whole new can of worms about how we got to the problems that we have today), there is someone making a profit. 

Maybe it's not you, but are you still abetting it?