This isn’t the same thing. This is a matter of copyright infringement, not theft. Yours is the same flawed idea used by the film and music industry to claim that piracy is “theft” when it’s not.
I reject your question due to its fallacious premise
The phrasing was poor, but what Adobe did is effectively the money laundering version of copyright theft. Just churn it a couple of times and then the original creators are now “AI models” and not the peoe whose work was used to create the “AI models”
I agree that what Adobe did was… underhanded, but if anyone infringed copyright, it was Midjourney. I don’t really disagree that Adobe’s grubby for what they did, but my ethical evaluation here is whether they violated their presentation/promise that their Firefly AI wasn’t sourced from human-produced content (ill-gotten or otherwise). It wasn’t.
Noooow, it would have been naive to think they wouldn’t find some shitty way around that, and shame on all of us for not being as imaginative as Adobe and their lawyers were, but here we are.
And, FWIW, I was a little sly myself when I said I was only ‘kinda ok” with it. In my equivocation, I didn’t really commit, and I’m still evaluating my position. I don’t really see this as a black-and-white issue. Not to say that I’m a moral relativist, but I understand that there’s a lot of nuance here, and i understand how something’s are worse than others.
So if I buy a load of stolen apples and bake them into pies I’m in the clear?
This isn’t the same thing. This is a matter of copyright infringement, not theft. Yours is the same flawed idea used by the film and music industry to claim that piracy is “theft” when it’s not.
I reject your question due to its fallacious premise
The phrasing was poor, but what Adobe did is effectively the money laundering version of copyright theft. Just churn it a couple of times and then the original creators are now “AI models” and not the peoe whose work was used to create the “AI models”
I agree that what Adobe did was… underhanded, but if anyone infringed copyright, it was Midjourney. I don’t really disagree that Adobe’s grubby for what they did, but my ethical evaluation here is whether they violated their presentation/promise that their Firefly AI wasn’t sourced from human-produced content (ill-gotten or otherwise). It wasn’t.
Noooow, it would have been naive to think they wouldn’t find some shitty way around that, and shame on all of us for not being as imaginative as Adobe and their lawyers were, but here we are.
And, FWIW, I was a little sly myself when I said I was only ‘kinda ok” with it. In my equivocation, I didn’t really commit, and I’m still evaluating my position. I don’t really see this as a black-and-white issue. Not to say that I’m a moral relativist, but I understand that there’s a lot of nuance here, and i understand how something’s are worse than others.