Dude you see how much I rant about AI art and how it steals things to make it. Why would ya put my actual face in there, and even if I did like it, why didn’t you ask me? D:
op had their brain turned off. They saw “oooh anime boy filter” and just didn’t take a second to think it through.
This is honestly a really great example of intentionality, and how important it is in ethics! As a preface, I don’t know any content from pmseymourvrite this without referencing any of his aforementioned rants on AI. This is noteant as a comprehensive review of every possible element of a situation like this! That would be a much, much longer piece than I have the attention span to produce right now. Instead it’s touching on a few of the big elements defining the ethical dimensions, for want of a better phrase, before looking at the role of intenion.
That said, there’s a few places that the OP fucked up ethically speaking. The first is obviously the taking someone’s likeness, and using it without their permission. Granted this is an example of the OP doing it in a “non-commercial” sense (I might revisit this bit later), which while it may be relevant legally I would argue is a non-factor ethically. This not only matters because one’s likeness is their property, especially in the case of someone who is putting themselves out in a public sense, but because by using their likeness without their consent you are violating their privacy. Fuck ESPECIALLY in a case like this where the “likeness” in question is apparently a person’s real, actual, face!
Second is the whole AI art thing. I’ve said before that my job involves AI/ML, and I’ve had exposure to some of the techniques that are used for AI art outside of work (there isn’t too much call for GAN’s in an IT department!). The really important thing they do is extract pattern - that’s how they can copy styles, either those of a genre such as anime or of an individual artist. They can combine these features in ways no artist is currently doing, but ultimately all they can do is replicate things they have been exposed to. That’s a gross oversimplification of course, but it’s sufficient for the moment. Anyway to me there’s really not much to talk about ethically with regards to AI art. Until it’s genuinely innovative, and not using any real existent media for training, it’s just not ethical.
Ok, an aside. The only situation I can think of where AI art could, maybe, POTENTIALLY, not be unethical is when:
a. The model is made by the artist
b. All data used for training, testing, and validating the model is entirely created by the artist without any influence or contribution from other sources
c. All use of the model is entirely at the artists discretion, and they retain full ownership and control of the products.
If all the above conditions are met, then I suppose there could be room for discussing a possible ethical use. But the state of AI art as it is currently does not meet any of these three guidelines, at all. These three conditions outlined above are not meant to be a comprehensive set of guidelines. They’re just a really quick set of basic conditions that are intended to give a starting point for ethical discussion, and I welcome critique/criticism of them!
Anyway back on topic. The intent of the OP was, hopefully, not to violate the privacy of the person who’s image was used for this. I haven’t browsed their blog, but this is written assuming the intent of OP was to post something nice. And in doing so, they violated at least the privacy and consent of pmseymourva as well as the ownership of the artists whose art was used in the training dataset. From a cursory search, many/most labeled data sets seem to be scraping image boards and booru’s… In short, the OP despite intending well acted in an unethical fashion towards at minimum two people (the person whose likeness was used and the artists used to train the model. I suppose if the model was entirely trained on one artist’s art, AND the likeness used was the artists, the number wronged would be one - but I think that is unlikely!) and if more time and analysis was given, the number of ethically bad outcomes would only grow. The conclusion is simply that intentionality is insufficient to perform ethically “good” acts. This kinda got away from me a bit, so discussion of consequentialism and it’s similar insufficiency will be left to future posts.
TLDR: intent isn’t sufficient for ethical action. AI ‘art’ is unethical, respect people’s privacy
Another thing: that app states in their terms of service that all images uploaded automatically become the intellectual property of the company behind the app, and that also includes the “likeness” of the people in the pics
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
