Your whole comment here quite succinctly demonstrates that you truly don’t understand ethics. “licenses and permissions are irrelevant” is quite a way to put “I don’t care about your desires, imma do what I want as long as it’s legal”. It’s unethical, full stop. You should do some introspection as your ideas are harming others and your inability to see that is quite sad.

And I have to say, it’s pretty telling that you saw my comment and took “unethical” for “illegal”. Your focus is clearly “this isn’t illegal, and here’s the evidence to support it”, rather than introspecting and seeing that legality isn’t tied to ethics in a lot of cases. Instead try looking at it from an ethics standpoint, you’ll find there’s a lot less to stand on supporting how models are created, of course trying to get every artist’s permission for using their images in a model would be incredibly difficult, so you instead support the “it’s not illegal” route, even though it’s clearly unethical.

I never once mentioned legality. I mentioned ethicality. Clearly you are talking one while I mean the other. It doesn’t really matter if you are technically within the confines of the law here, this tool is clearly meant to bypass authors intent to steal image data, no matter the source. If an author has a clearly posted notice stating that you cannot use their images in a model, there would be no need for this tool, as you wouldn’t bother using those images in the model. But since these image models are built off of massive data sources that were obtained by scraping without even bothering to ask for permission, then you have people building tools to make sure that that can continue.

This is unethical. It does not matter what the law says, you are ignoring what an author might have indicated their rights to an image are and instead trying to use the law to bypass the ethicality and use those ill obtained images to train something that will eventually replace the author.

And bringing up the creator of nightshade here once again does not matter, this is a discussion about the ethicality of the tool you posted, not about the legality of others actions.

Paywalled

Why would someone make something like this? Geez, people really love building unethical stuff don’t they?

The adventure zone. It’s all I listen to so 🤷

I wish we would stop arguing about stuff being anti-competitive and start talking about how the only reason Amazon is doing this is to enter households where it doesn’t have an Alexa foothold. That alone should be the reason to block any company from purchasing another. I don’t want an Amazon vacuum cleaner and never will. For things that aren’t connected to the internet, sure, allow companies to buy other companies. But literally half the reason tech stops working today is due to companies buying internet connected things and then turning them off remotely. I’m frankly sick of it.

I’ve seen several of these articles over the past few months. Someone is pushing hard to make self checkout seem bad. If it wasn’t for self checkout I’d absolutely hate the grocery store. Lines fucking suck. Self checkout is a more efficient line because it usually feeds many machines, rather than being 1-1. Not only that but I can do self checkout in about half the time it takes any normal cashier to check me out. I know exactly the stuff I picked up, exactly the way I want it in bags, and exactly the order I need to do things in.