Memes

I think the biggest problem is the license we have all chosen to give our artwork explicitly doesn’t cover this. Your work isn’t being copied by AI, it’s training AI and sometimes being emulated by AI, but there are literally 0 laws about reading copywrited work unless you break down a barrier to do so like a paywall, and there are no laws on derivative work otherwise we wouldn’t have Pokémon knock offs and such. Lastly artists post a lot of content online freely to entities who do in turn claim control over their distribution.

Ultimately, I think reddit as the owner over the distribution of our data (yuk) did the right thing by making paid api access, but it was stupid of them to do it at normal human scales and not just at bot scraping scales and then using their TOS to give them the ability to sue if they aren’t paid for training data.