If you’ve ever read through the terms of service/use for most websites that artists like to show off their work on (Instagram, Facebook, DeviantArt, ArtStation, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) you would realize that the work was indeed not stolen.
It was given away freely by artists due to fine print buried in the terms of service with royalty free licenses. Just lookup any Terms of Service and search for the word “royalty”.
If artists should be going after anyone, it’s the companies that either freely gave the artwork away by “sharing it with their partners” or by making a profit off of their work by selling it to any of these companies for training these image generating models.
The root of the problem here is the lack of ownership of our own data when it comes to any sort of online service. Part of that problem is just the nature of posting something in the first place.
DeviantArt
One artist raised the alarm back in 2016 about the licensing at the time: https://www.deviantart.com/dsc-the-artist/journal/DeviantArt-CAN-USE-your-ART-WITHOUT-PERMISSION-616830749
ArtStation
They do allow you to tag your projects now to prohibit them from being sold for use with Generative AI programs, but this option obviously did not exist some years ago.
You additionally grant a royalty-free, perpetual, world-wide, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers) license to Epic limited to using, copying, editing, modifying, inputting, and integrating Your Content into and in connection with the development and testing of Epic’s Safety and Discovery Tools (together with the above license, the “Licenses”).
When you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). ::
Etc…
I wouldn’t consider this slop.
Let’s compare this to photography. If you use a camera to take a picture of something, sure, the machine is doing most of the work, but the photographer is playing a vital role in this.
Now there are photographers that spend a lot of time composing a shot. They’ll mess around with shutter speed, aperture size, ISO, zoom, depth of field, etc. They’ll also figure out the subject matter and may add some other elements to it. Afterwards they’ll make adjustments to the picture with something like Lightroom or Darktable, and maybe touch up some things with Photoshop.
Then there are people that take pictures with their phone of a computer screen showing something cool happening in a game and post it on Reddit.
On one end of the spectrum I would consider the photo to be art, on the other I would consider it to be slop. However, there are many degrees between one end of this spectrum to the other.
With AI tools it’s not much different. The machine is doing a lot of the work, but how much of it is guided, reshaped, or directed by a human? With Image Generating tools you can tweak the seed, the steps, the cfg, the sampler, denoise, etc. You can choose the base model, add multiple LoRAs and embeddings, or train your own if you’re looking for a certain style.
Then you have users that go to ChatGPT, type in a prompt and have ChatGPT do everything else.
Like photography, on one end of the spectrum I would consider it art, on the other I would consider it slop.
But this all begs the question, what is art? How do you draw the line between what art is, and what it is not?