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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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It may sound pendantic but that person is correct: It's not stealing. Stealing involves taking a physical thing away from its owner. Once the thing is stolen the owner doesn't have it anymore.
If you reproduce someone's art exactly without permission that's a copyright violation, not stealing. If you distribute a derivative work (like using img2img with Stable Diffusion) without permission that also is a (lesser) form of copyright violation. Again, not stealing/theft.
TL;DR: If you're making copies (or close facsimiles) of something (without permission) that's not stealing it's violating copyright.
You may want to read through what I actually wrote again.
Someone takes an image, runs it through image-to-image AI with 90% strength (meaning 'make minor changes at most'), and then claims it as their own.
That last part there is what makes it stealing. It's not the theft of the picture. It's the theft of credit and of social media impressions. The latter sounds stupid at first, until you realise that it is an important, even essential part of marketing for many businesses, including small ones.
Now sure, technically someone who likes and comments under the fake can also do the same underneath the real one but in reality, first exposure benefits are important here: the content will have its most impact, and therefore push viewers to engage in some way, including at a business level, the first time they see it. When something incredibly similar pops up, they're far more likely to go "I've already seen this. Next.".
Human attention is very much a finite thing. If someone is using your content to divert people away from your brand, be it personal or professional, it has a very real cost associated with it. It is theft of opportunity, pure and simple.
It's still not stealing. It's plagiarism or fraud or any number of other terms, but stealing necessarily requires the deprivation of a limited, rivalrous thing, like money or property. You can't steal fame or exposure or credit, except poetically. And by that point, the word becomes so watered down that it's meaningless. You might as well say I'm stealing your life seconds at a time by writing this extra sentence.
The purpose of using the term stealing here is only to borrow the negative moral connotations of the term, but it doesn't communicate clearly what exactly is happening.
It's perfectly valid to say you consider it morally equivalent with theft, but it's not stealing.