frog , 7 months ago

My understanding of the open source community is that taking copyrighted content from people who haven’t willingly signed onto the project would kind of undermine the principles of the movement. I would never feel comfortable using open source software if I had knowledge that part or all of it came from people who hadn’t actively chosen to contribute to it.

I have seen a couple of things recently about AI models that were trained exclusively on public domain and creative commons content which apparently are producing viable content, though. The open source community could definitely use a model like that, and develop it further with more content that was ethically obtained. In the long run, there may be artists that willingly contribute to it, especially those who use open source software themselves (eg GIMP, Blender, etc). Paying it forward, kind of thing.

The problem right now is that artists have no reason to be generous with an open source alternative to AIs, when their rights have already been stomped on and certain people in the open source community are basically saying “if we can’t steal from artists too, then we can’t compete with the corporations.” So there’s literally a trust issue between the creative and tech industries that would need to be resolved before any artists would consider offering art to an open source AI.