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Comment by jollofricepeas | Hacker News Reader

Art is not the same as potato’s or furniture.

What is the market price for a potato?

What is the market price for a chair?

What is the price of developing an art career over 40 years? Unless you believe that art, music, poetry, literature, and the rest have no value to society then IP protections are what incentives a portion of humanity to do something crazy like go to art school…

…instead of you know doing the “responsible” thing and getting a CS degree so you can one day get an AI gig stealing “training data” in the name of profit

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I purposefully put furniture because it can be a utilitarian box, or a custom carpentry art piece. Why is your brother art more valuable than a custom table? Or a delicious dish? Or the portrait I buy from the street artist that cannot rent-seek from it? With the best intention, it seems you are biased because we are talking about your brother's lifehood (but I'm still happy to discuss politely).

> IP protections are what incentives a portion of humanity to do something crazy like go to art school

Hard disagree, most of the art fields are first a passion and then a profession. People who go to art school is normally because they love it so much that they cannot imagine themselves doing something else, even though they already know it pays little. I've never ever heard of someone going to art school "because of IP protections".

One of the reasons it's so hard to make money is because there's many people doing it as a hobby that are already great at it, and so would jump at the chance of getting some money for it, leaving people who want to make livable wages outcompeted. Which is fine, this way society as a whole benefits greatly, sure it's unfortunate there are no more people living off it, but in exchange there are many, many amateurs experimenting and doing art, and from time to time one finds a formula that allows them to live off it (or "shills" to corporate).

> purposefully put furniture because it can be a utilitarian box, or a custom carpentry art piece. Why is your brother art more valuable than a custom table? Or a delicious dish? Or the portrait I buy from the street artist that cannot rent-seek from it? With the best intention, it seems you are biased because we are talking about your brother's lifehood (but I'm still happy to discuss politely).

I really didn't get any vibe of bias from them.

Either way, it seems you miss their point entirely, which is that you cannot equate a creative idea as the same as a product.

The furniture example all boils down to if the work is allowed by the author to be mass produced (if it even can be done) but the creative idea is still theirs.

>I've never ever heard of someone going to art school "because of IP protections".

Similar with my first point you misunderstood their point. Their point is that thanks to ip protection they can invest the time needed to become a successful artist within their lifetime.

Oh the bit I found seemed biased is this:

> "He should be able to at least provide for his kids college after his death if his IP still has value in the marketplace."

Why should he, besides because that's a good desire for a family member? If it was a 3rd party wanting this, usually we'd call that rent-seeking behavior and it's usually seen negatively.

> But the creative idea is still theirs

Why is this (besides copyright law ofc)? The carpenter doesn't forbid me from creating a similar chair of him, and if we are talking about a painting and e.g. I was learning I could definitely copy it for learning purposes and everyone would be fine with that, so at which point should it "not be okay" to copy it? To lend to a friend in private? Can I share (in person, no copies) to a group of friends? I bought a painting, can I print it on a t-shirt for myself? What I can do after I purchase a copy of the idea in private should not be up to the author IMHO, and that line is often very blurry.

It's very simple.

Technically as long as you don't sell a product that is a copy, you are "fine" to have said product.

However if you do sell it, it would incentivize a parasitic market.

Something you see sometimes in open source software, esp with IaaS.

If we go by the average income of a creator, then society indeed considers most of it less valuable than flipping burgers. The average writer for example earns well below minimum wage from their writing.

If you want to encourage more creative work, maybe look for other mechanisms, because going into creative work in the hope of making it is pretty much gambling with awful odds.

Your reasoning is faulty. If the average wage for a writer is "well below minimum wage" that doesn't necessarily imply people don't value creative endeavors. It could alternatively imply, for example, that the average creator doesn't produce creative content that others find valuable. With that thesis, if burger flippers do get paid more it could be a result of there being less variance in the value of the work performed.

Even far above average creators, who win awards and sell far above average earn next to nothing. The average full time traditionally published author still earn below minimum wage in the UK (the median household income of full time authors in the UK is above the UK average; most UK authors are able to be full time because of their partners rather than their creative output)

Sure, we can say that still isn't "good enough", but that kinda proves the smaller point that the actual creative output of most creatives is not valued, and at the same time ignores that the main point I made above is that it is irrational for people to gamble on being valued, because the vast majority of "successful" creators as measured by relative rank within their peer group has no realistic prospect of that happening today.

That should be "most UK authors who are full time are able to"...

I find it hard to believe that a society with weaker IP protections would be a society with noticeably less art. People love creating stuff and putting it out into the world, whether they can make a profit from royalties or not.

Of course, with weaker IP protections, there would be change. Some very specific business models that exist today would go extinct. And other business models (e.g. live performances) might see a renaissance in popularity.

There's quite a lot of assumptions there.

* Rejecting intellectual property necessitates rejecting that art provides any value to society.

* The only reason artists make art is to make money.

* (Implicitly) Without IP artists would have no incentive to make art, monetary or otherwise.

* Making art requires going to art school.

* Getting a CS degree and making art are mutually exclusive.

>Art is not the same as potato’s or furniture.

You sure about that, legally?

>…instead of you know doing the “responsible” thing and getting a CS degree so you can one day get an AI gig stealing “training data” in the name of profit

You're right about this, though. But this strikes me as a discursive issue that has more to do with the generalized butthurt over schooling that you see here in HN and tech circles - I think it's funny that it's Local Boob Paul Graham talking about writing (which to be fair he cannot shutup about) that set this whole thing off.

> stealing “training data” in the name of profit

They just show it to the AI, it doesn't store it - just data about it. The same as you when you look at something, be it a painting or a chair.

The only reason AI companies store the data is they want repeatability. If you want to train two copies on the same data you can't rely on the same sites being up. I commit the same crime by saving websites I've read because I don't want my sources to dry up on me.

> What is the price of developing an art career over 40 years?

Market price. How does it benefit the customer here and now?

It's no different than being a furniture maker with years of carpentry skills. The value to the customer is still just the marginal benefit over an IKEA stool.

> They just show it to the AI, it doesn't store it - just data about it. The same as you when you look at something, be it a painting or a chair.

In general for machine learning, yes, but deep learning models with large numbers of parameters such as transformers and stable diffusion do actually memorise part of their training data verbatim. The problem is mainly duplicate data points. E.g.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/resea...

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.07646.pdf Quantifying Memorization Across Neural Language Models

Yeah, currently many models do seem to have copied a few pieces of their source material.

I was translating code with one of the code- models at OpenAI and it spit out about thirty words of someone's code of conduct from Github, almost verbatim. I found the repo by searching what it had produced. That's when I changed my prompts to remove comments, but it stuck with me.

In general though, I think the pigeon-hole principle is relevant. The model is fairly small compared to the training material and couldn't contain much actual full content or it wouldn't be able to contain anything about the rest.

I've heard people talking about using the model to judge similarity of new training data to what it's already seen, mainly to train more efficiently, but also to avoid this.

Going to art school is a waste for most artists—why not be like Alexander Borodin and compose symphonies when you need to take a break from being a research chemist?

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