This site presents "both sides" of at least one aspect of AI art by displaying the content of a current lawsuit over AI art on the left, and via fair use, a response or rebuttal on the right.
http://www.stablediffusionfrivolous.com/
(Replace frivolous with litigation in the URL to get the original site.)
I'm obviously a fan of AI art, and occasionally post it here. I'm also very far from a copyright maximalist, although I'm *not* in favor of abolishing copyright altogether. I agree with the right side of the site on at least two points:
1. Copyright law doesn't apply here.
2. The suit dramatically misrepresents, I think because Butterick doesn't understand, how latent diffusion works.
That said, while I overall agree with the critique, I think I'm more sympathetic to the complaint than the rebuttal writers are.
There's something truly disconcerting about adding an artist's name to an existing prompt and seeing the result change to be much closer to something in line with previous works of that artist.
I can understand that statements about how latent diffusion works fall flat after seeing that. No, there are no images stored in the model, not even textual representations of images. And yet, there's something, right? It's not nothing. There's some sort of minimal association of given names with a given set of characteristics, more so for some than for others, and the effect is often uncanny. The example of what seems like an arbitrary series of words consistently producing Buddha statues is a good start to counter that, but it doesn't quite seem adequate.
Overall, I think there are serious ethical issues with how art is being sourced for training the current generations of AI art models. However, I don't think there are legal issues; copyright certainly isn't being violated.
More to the point: the primary users of these tools currently seem to be artists. In that sense, it really does seem like the advent of photographs, or the advent of photoshop, and it will likely be quite a while before we will know how these issues settle. In the meantime, anybody using these tools to try to mimic a particular artist is probably missing out.
