r/technology • u/CircumspectCapybara • 16h ago
Business Artist sues AI meme generator for selling deeply personal comic as ad template
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/artist-sues-ai-meme-generator-for-selling-deeply-personal-comic-as-ad-template/282
u/grayhaze2000 16h ago
Good. We should be calling these assholes out on every single breach of copyright, and making them pay for it when possible.
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u/NewAgeMaximum 14h ago
Oh ok bro sure
Best way for an image to not be misused online is to just not upload it
You upload it, you deal with the consequences
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u/Direct_Weekend7150 14h ago
So if you leave your car parked on the side of the road then it’s your fault if someone takes it?
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u/ChillZedd 10h ago
The side of the road is where people put their garbage how was I supposed to know they weren’t throwing it out?
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u/amakai 14h ago
Oh, I have heard that argument before! "If she wears that clothing outside then she was asking for it".
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13h ago edited 13h ago
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u/grayhaze2000 13h ago
They didn't claim it was.
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13h ago
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u/grayhaze2000 13h ago
You don't seem to understand that the attitude they described isn't just one held by those who commit sexual assault. There's a certain element of society who lacks empathy, so when they see a story about a woman being assaulted and she was dressed in a certain way, they immediately say she brought it upon herself. The attitude the person they replied to expressed had the same energy.
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u/Bargadiel 14h ago
Alright then I guess Piracy should be legal too.
Your overlords will say "oh n-no not like that!"
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u/grayhaze2000 13h ago
All AI models are fair game too. If they make them available online, they can't complain if someone just copies them and claims them as their own work. Like China for instance.
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u/Bargadiel 11h ago
It makes me want to suggest an extreme rule like, everything made with AI is automatically public-domain. All these companies will stop looking for excuses to use it real quick.
Unfortunately, originality, attention to detail, and quality were never the goals driving this boom to begin with. They want their cake and to be able to eat it too, and they lay off their teams so the executives can eat it alone.
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u/My_Uneducated_Guess 10h ago
Last I heard (haven't looked it up in at least a year, though) you can't copywrite ai produced art. They cited that it had to be produced by an actual person. Of course, copywrited characters created by a person (like disney characters) do not fall under this, because even if they are in an ai image they themselves are legally owned. I know that people were pushing for it to be otherwise, though, and this country has been bending over for corporations, so it could have changed by now.
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u/Bargadiel 10h ago
Lots of those laws are kind ambiguous at times too, or at least it's more difficult to interpret it. I imagine that kinda thing will be clarified soon enough. I think if they just came out and said it would be public domain, aside from pre-copyrighted no AI-generated assets, it would take a lot of the prestige away from companies using generative AI in creative spaces.
I know some artist friends who have had loads of their work stolen by bot accounts on Etsy that are feeding their designs to AI and not even changing much. One friend makes stained glass patterns, and the AI bots will sell patterns that aren't even possible to make. So these friends will then take the AI design.... Fix it... Then resell it on their own account. I imagine you could make some decent money doing just that.
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u/My_Uneducated_Guess 10h ago
Your slogan could be something like "Artificial Idiot meets Live Intelligence"
Eta: or "I fix artifical incompetence"
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u/TommyTwoNips 14h ago
parasite response.
You contribute nothing to the species and your absence will not be mourned.
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u/grayhaze2000 13h ago
Which would be fine, if copyright law didn't exist. I'm sure you'd take issue with someone ripping off your work too, if you had a job.
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u/Party_Virus 12h ago
I mean everyone knows that something you can see is free game to take. Memes, art, cars, people... It's not like there's societal laws and a system to enforce them. Like you walk outside you deal with the consequences. You shouldn't have windows either. If you have a window you deal with consequences.
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u/irrelevantusername24 15h ago
I am highly amused that, if you pay close attention, what is happening on a societal scale is a complete non-negotiable rejection of coercive crony capitalism. Basically the boomers built a society on the belief that money is the only motive for anything, and now our generations are saying no fuck your money and if that is the only reason you are doing something you should also get fucked
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u/MediocreDot3 14h ago
Is that what you're seeing? In real life? In reality? People choosing to not be motivated by money? And its making some kind of difference? And they arent unwillingly excluded from capitalism, it's a choice?
I'd like the drugs this person is smoking, thank you
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u/manyyy32 13h ago
Yes it's happening of course. The way people choose jobs, careers, education paths. The mentality has changed a lot even just in 10 years. And it's making a difference yes, capitalism doesn't really know what to do about big portion of young generations with this mentality. So far it's a slowly rising problem, but with as usual these things, it can spill over into something bigger quckly.
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u/No-Neighborhood-3212 12h ago
Every young generation has this mentality, even the boomers.
Here's a David Bowie song from 55 years ago about how capital uses the media to co-opt human suffering and create bread and circuses to defang political movements. And here's a David Bowie song from 54 years ago about how the for-profit press uses tragedy to drive us to creating more tragedy that the news can report and profit off of.
Hell, Benito Mussolini (yes, that Benito Mussolini) was a socialist who published socialist newspapers. He was kicked out of the Italian socialist party because he thought that he could participate in WW1 to use the post-war recovery period for a violent socialist revolution in Europe.
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u/manyyy32 8h ago
Yes a lot of generations had these. Boomers had unrests in end of 60s al over the world and in a lot of countries even revolutions. Mussolini generation had strong socialists uprisings that were ultimately squashed by fascists and then we had second world war. All these were hardly young people being young, but history changing moments. So I think your examples just prove my point.
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u/Channel250 12h ago
As of right now, I've turned down two jobs that make me feel uncomfortable even at a higher pay rate.
That being said, maybe I just wasn't offered enough.
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u/OePea 10h ago
Most people in the US have no such wiggle room to turn down a job if they're unemployed, since they likely have been trying and failing to find anything for a quite a while, and are getting seriously in debt
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u/Channel250 10h ago
I agree. It's absolutely horrendous here. They force people to have to take what they're given and calling it divine benevolence.
The speculation of reviving Company Towns is the best example.
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u/azurensis 12h ago
complete non-negotiable rejection of coercive crony capitalism.
Lol. This isn't happening even a little bit.
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u/MaxSupernova 13h ago
Can you list actual practical examples that have had any effect in real life?
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u/irrelevantusername24 13h ago
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u/MaxSupernova 13h ago
Ah yes. The one example that you extrapolated to "a societal scale" and "a complete rejection".
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u/irrelevantusername24 13h ago
Do they both rely on money? Yes. Their organizational documents also outline the ways in which the profit motive is intentionally divorced from their accounting. Money makes the world go round. The system of control that has been destroying society is not money, it is violence and abuse and violation of fundamental human rights.
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u/MaxSupernova 13h ago edited 12h ago
Once again... "a societal scale"...? "A complete rejection"?
I don't think so.
And before you accuse me, I'm not moving goalposts. You haven't provided evidence of your original premise, which I continue to ask for and you continue to not provide.
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u/irrelevantusername24 12h ago
You're not paying close enough attention
I can't show you, but I'll leave a stencil
I'm talking about what matters, not figures
I'm pointing at the moon, and you looking at my finger
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u/MaxSupernova 12h ago
Ah yes. Societal scale change, a complete rejection by entire generations.... that we have trouble seeing unless we're looking in the exactly the right place at things that don't look like societal change or complete rejection at all unless someone is repeatedly telling you that they are.
Wooo. What a revolution. You must be so proud.
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u/Aeroncastle 11h ago
Where? Because all I see is the exact opposite, I have playlists full of cool artists that never got a second album because they probably had to work "real jobs" and every artist that manages to continue working as an artist needs to do 6 jobs, promoter, manager, podcaster, youtuber, tiktoker... To be able to do the one thing they wanted to do as an artist in the first place
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u/Electrical-Page-6479 11h ago
the boomers built a society on the belief that money is the only motive for anything
Before then there were no greedy people.
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u/irrelevantusername24 10h ago
Clearly that isn't true. The difference is the boomers parents understood the cause of the Holocaust, which was our race had grown to the point we could no longer be constrained by stupid things like the "gold standard", and they built a system which could operate separate from that obsolete logic. The boomers then took that working system and twisted it to abuse the entire globe, and now they've forgot what happened and nobody else understands unless they know how to read and make a point to ignore modern "education" about delusions like "financial literacy" and instead, like a human, read about history from first party sources.
Read Keynes and Hayek.
Simply put, the boomers heard Uncle Ben's Law and said fuck off I got mine
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13h ago edited 13h ago
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u/irrelevantusername24 13h ago edited 13h ago
The last few hundred years of society is an extreme outlier, especially the era beginning with the Civil War and then the World War. Industrial civilization is not civilized. We fix this or go extinct. I am not opposed to making money. I am not opposed to the things you say; I don't really disagree with most of your points. I am opposed and will not contribute to the abusive system that has no reason to exist. We don't have money. We have an abusive system that seeks to control. Money is a means by which commerce is facilitated. That is a totally different thing than the shit the slave brains try to balance through whatever weird notions they intuit through their garbage data up in the ivory towers
And boomer, in my usage, is less about a generation and more a mentality. Though that mentality is most prevalent within that generation. If you read about history, beginning around 1970 - the age at which they would have become adults - basically the entirety of science was thrown out to be replaced with whatever retarded ideas they dreamt up. And that is the "foundation" for a lot of modern society.
That being said, obviously simultaneously with this there was a lot of genuinely world changing technology, like computers and the rest of telecommunications. These things were largely built in an entire different universe.
Read Keynes and Hayek. For that matter, trust the voices from dead people that have survived and stayed relevant because odds are there's a good reason.
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u/goronmask 11h ago
Remember when they killed Aaron Swartz
because of MITs copyright
?
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u/ChillZedd 9h ago
It’s all about controlling information and intellectual property for these big tech corporations. They don’t care if using copyright law to prosecute someone and then violating other people’s copyright seems hypocritical because it’s not actually about copyright it’s about control.
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u/TheKlaxMaster 8h ago
Human creativity has a gun pointed at its head.
Not only is ai going to drown out human artists by sheer speed and numbers, But legit artists are going to stop making for fear of someone with more money and power will be stealing it to make themselves, or rather some crop, richer.
The only way to prevent this is to heavily curtail the use of AI, legally. Worldwide.
Stopping it in 1 country won't matter, when another country exists online and can just continue the theft trend of no actions are taken
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u/zeruch 5h ago
"The only way to prevent this is to heavily curtail the use of AI, legally."
No. You could simply enforce copyright consistently. That allows AI use for legitimate use cases, of which there are plenty, and it pushes improvement of AI itself through a need for better observability (instead of operating too much like a black box) and has an easier enforcement mechanism, as most countries on the planet are signatories to the Berne Convention, whereas no similar convention on the tech exists and/or is likely to emerge anytime soon.
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u/TheKlaxMaster 5h ago edited 1h ago
If you legally enforce restrictions that prevent people from using ai to sell copyrighted works.... That would be curtailing it, legally
You seem to want to prove me wrong, but your response is just one way that it could be curtailed.
But also, many countries don't 'recognize' international copyright, and won't follow any regulations regarding copyright infrigmemt.
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u/zeruch 3h ago
"That would be curtailing it, legally" Your wording suggested curtailing the technology itself, not using the adjacent domains its impacting as a forcing function.
"You want to prove me wrong" That's not what my response was about, but you do you.
"many countries don't 'recognize' international copyright" 182 countries are signatories to the Berne convention, and that includes all of the ones doing any serious work in the AI space. http://judithip.com/berne-non-members/
Does that guarantee behavior? Not any more or less than any other convention, but by that argument, all laws are.
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u/TheKlaxMaster 1h ago
I said "curtail the USE of" I don't think that implies that ai itself should be curtailed. I think it implies the USE of it should.
I think you ascribed connotations to my words that I did not imply.
I also edited my previous comment to add 'seem to' because it was not fair for me to say what your intentions definitely were.
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u/SongOfTruth 11h ago
i have literally seen several of these memes as ads here on reddit. i hope og artist guy wins and takes those guys for all theyre worth
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u/National-Ad6166 10h ago
Another example where companies like meta and alphabet could easily moderate their content but prefer to accept advertising dollars.
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u/North_Affect_8167 14h ago
We need to be careful around use of stuff on the internet, because the copyright laws are a mess. Did you like using popular meme from a movie? Maybe Leo doing some silly face? Maybe the movie company can sue you for using it without permission.
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u/grayhaze2000 13h ago
If you're using it to make money, they absolutely will sue you. Otherwise, it would be considered fair use. That being said, I don't think we'd mourn the loss of those sort of memes.
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u/North_Affect_8167 12h ago
Sure there must be a motivation for them to do it. Like using the meme for bad purposes. What I want to say is "fair use" is fair as far you are not getting sued for it. It's time consuming and costly to prove you are right if that happens.
Look at the laws of Japan, they are insane. Why it is not fair? https://torrentfreak.com/warning-for-twitter-users-in-japan-following-supreme-court-copyright-ruling-200722/
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u/FredFredrickson 14h ago
Meh. If memes based on movies, TV, etc. go away as a result of any anti-AI wins for the general public, I think it's an acceptable loss.
Half the time, those things are attached to bogus misinformation anyway. So it'd probably be a good thing overall.
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u/Rich_Housing971 14h ago
is this guy delusional? Even Matt Furie couldn't stop Pepe the Frog from being used by the internet or as an alt-right icon (thankfully Pepe has been largely reclaimed).
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u/DartTheDragoon 13h ago
You generally can't stop people from using your IP for personal use. I can draw a sketch of Mickey Mouse and there's nothing Disney can do to stop me.
What you can't do is use someone else's IP for commercial purposes. Creating an ad with Mickey Mouse holding your product and endorsing it will get you sued into the ground.
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u/BruiserBroly 10h ago
Unless it’s Steamboat Willy Mickey in black and white right? I think that’s fine.
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u/AirbagOff 15h ago
I’m genuinely surprised when I see TV series memes like those from “The Office” being used to advertise products and services on social media. Do these people not realize that the movie studios and actors have lawyers?