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Caitlin McColl 🇨🇦's avatar

out of curiosity i asked google: is blunge ai still ethical if it uses nano banana and other gpt models? and this is what the AI overview spit out:

AI Overview

The ethical status of Blunge AI when using models like "Nano Banana" is a subject of debate, primarily stemming from concerns over the potentially unethically sourced training data used by foundational models from companies like Google and OpenAI. Blunge AI itself claims to be ethical by focusing on specific principles, but its reliance on underlying models with questionable data practices makes its overall ethical standing complicated.

Blunge AI's Stated Ethical Principles

Blunge positions itself as an "ethical AI artwork generator" that aims to protect artists' rights. Its stated principles include:

- Manual Image Ownership Verification: A process designed to prevent AI-generated art theft.

- Full Copyright Retention: Users retain 100% ownership and copyright of the artwork they create using the platform.

- Private AI Models: Custom-trained models run on secure, private servers and are not shared publicly or uploaded to public domains.

- Ethically-sourced internal datasets: Blunge provides pre-trained models based on open-source and non-copyrighted datasets for users who don't have custom models.

Ethical Concerns with "Nano Banana" and GPT Models

The ethical issue arises because major AI companies, including those behind "Nano Banana" (Google's AI image model) and GPT image models (OpenAI), have faced criticism and lawsuits for training their models on vast amounts of data "slurped up" from the internet, which often includes copyrighted material used without permission or fair compensation.

- Unethically Sourced Data: Critics argue that any images generated using a model based on unethically sourced data are, by extension, also unethically sourced.

- Lack of Transparency: The exact composition of the training datasets for many of these large models is often shrouded in secrecy, making it difficult to verify their ethical compliance.

- Bias and Harmful Content: Models trained on broad internet data can also perpetuate biases and generate discriminatory or harmful content.

Conclusion on Ethicality

Whether Blunge AI is still ethical depends on the specific models used for an image generation request:

- If Blunge solely uses its own, privately-trained models on verified, ethically-sourced or user-provided data, it aligns with its ethical claims.

- If a user generates an image using a Blunge feature that leverages a foundational model like "Nano Banana" or a GPT image model, the process may be considered unethical by critics due to the original model's potentially problematic training data.

Ultimately, the ethical consensus is that while it is possible to train AI models ethically, many current major AI tools are not, and their use in any downstream application carries those same ethical considerations.

Karen Smiley's avatar

Thank you for looking more closely at the ethicality of Blunge with me, Caitlin! ‘Complicated’ is a good word for it and most of this summary on ethics is on point, although incomplete.

I notice one comment in this Google response that seems inaccurate: people might *own* what they generate, but that does not mean they have *copyright* to it. So far, in the US at least, courts have indicated that machine-generated content cannot be copyrighted.

I’m also not convinced that Blunge is really training a whole custom image generation model on the small quantity of user-owned content a user might upload. It’s more likely training a style model that is applied to what Nano Banana or GPT Image produce. I’m eager to see how Blunge responds to my email questions and will share what I find.

Caitlin McColl 🇨🇦's avatar

thanks for this deep dive into Blunge! Your experiments/iterations were interesting! (and frustrating! lol) but worked out in the end? but that's interesting about the Blunge x different models potentially erasing any ethicalness (not a word, I know!)...I'm curious to hear what they say to your inquiries! Please let us know!

Karen Smiley's avatar

Will do, Caitlin!