www.404media.co: Artists&Clients is a website that connects independent artists with interested clients. Around August 30, a message appeared on Artists&Clients attributed to the ransomware group LunaLock. “We have breached the website Artists&Clients to steal and encrypt all its data,” the message on the site said, according to screenshots taken before the site went down on Tuesday.
3 comments:
There literally aren't words to describe how angry this makes me. I think the comment about how “it's always nice to hear about new features to the Orphan Crushing Machine” left on the article says it best. The ability to use AI as a threat against artists is a feature rather than a bug. There is nothing incentivizing these companies to respect and protect intellectual property because exploitation is far easier to make a profit. What we need is legislation willing to put limits on data scraping; however this will likely not happen due to the ramping up of lobbying from large AI companies. I actually recently read an article about how in just the last quarter of this year OpenAI spent $620,000, Anthropic spent $910,000, and Meta spent a whopping $5.8 million on lobbying. That is over seven million dollars spent in about three months by three companies, all pushing for legislation to be as lax as possible. Gross
This is quite an interesting threat for people to make. Submitting art to AI would be quite concerning to artists, and yes AI will learn to draw with their exact style, but it isn’t the end of the world to me. While yes, this can be considered a violation of copyright and IP, it isn’t going to cause the artist much harm to a certain degree. AI already can access anyone's art work when they upload it to the web, thats why you see links in your chatgpt results. OpenAI also recently gave AI its own computer with agent mode, which makes it able to look up other people's art easier now. While it is a question of the ethics behind it, the hackers didn't do anything new, AI has been able to do this for a while and has been doing it for a while. I’m very interested to see what happens next and if anything changes because of this.
I find it very upsetting that this happened. Ransomware is, in my opinion, already the scariest type of malware or virus. It’s already terrible that the site was hacked and that the hackers are threatening to release personal information, but it just adds insult to injury when they threaten to use users’ art to train AI models. It’s a strange kind of evil, and it also says a lot about AI and the art community in general. Just the fact that they are able to use it as a threat means that we really need to put regulations on AI. I’d be interested to know more about the process for submitting the art to an AI company goes. Given that this has been reported on, I wonder if any AI companies are taking precautions to avoid using the stolen art with their AI. I’m not sure if they are actually obligated to or not.
Post a Comment