Hacker News Reader

Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

No.

But we're not talking about humans, we're talking about software intended to put the artists whose work it was trained on - without permission or compensation - out of business, or which is at least capable of devaluing their work with its ability to copy styles (literally by name.)

Even if one could argue (as I probably have) that AI is more than simply a "stochastic parrot," a philosophical argument about whether it resembles a primitive mind (and therefore whether its output can be considered "art" in any form) doesn't answer a legal argument about copyright infringement. Humans are allowed to be inspired by other humans, software used by other humans is not.

Also you shouldn't delete your comment just because it gets downvotes and repost it. Bad form.

View on HN

The issue with comments like this is that many people are talking about the law as it is, and others are approaching it from a moral/solution-based point of view.

Legally, AI is likely free and clear since the work it outputs is vastly different from any one art piece, therefore not being a derivative work of anything else (unless you tell it to copy an artists' style AND ask it specifically to remake an artists' existing work with the intent to recreate it).

But morally, there are indeed externalities that can/should be thought of, and possible even put into law, but starting a discussion of this front is a losing game since everyone will have a different opinion on how much we should restrict, and whether it will even work (if you consider that China and Russia will forego any sort of copyright protection for AI generation, these laws could enable these countries to surpass the rest of the world in capability and quality).

> edit

What if someone trains a model on public domain works only?

Also adobe sort-of did that already - they trained their own model only on their own images. So no "IP theft" there.

The bigger argument is in the form of cost of reproduction.

A human has finite time and output volume.

A machine has no such limits, only compute/memory/network/disk.

Ergo, gray areas where we could afford a human the benefit of doubt ("What? They can paint 4 in-the-style-of-Rembrandts?") produce substantially different results with machines ("Here are a million in-the-style-of-Rembrandts, produced in 30 minutes").

Whether we should permit or limit machine art is a discussion worth having -- but human copying vs machine copying is clearly a very different discussion.

Right, this is why we should burn the combines and go back to harvesting wheat by scythe, or we should dig ditches with spoons instead of using an excavator...

The problem here is we want the system we currently have to keep working when there is really no possible way that can happen in a world of AGI. IP is already a horribly broken system that can lead to absurdities. While making IP stronger will protect people like artists (maybe) it will provide far more protection to monied corporations that can afford to buy up works, and then feed them into their AI. In the pathological cases you end up with stories like 'The Right To Read'.

In a world where particular things can be created in almost infinite amounts, why will we go to such efforts to ensure they are only created in limited supply?

> we want the system we currently have to keep working

No.

We want *a* working system, that probably looks very different than the previous one.

But the "AI and let the chips fall where they may" crowd is being disingenuous with the "just like human copying" argument.

It's not. It's fundamentally different in scale.

> It's fundamentally different in scale.

yes, it is. But this increase in scale is going to be something that produces progress (ala, cheap imitations of good styles that already exist). And with unprecedented amount of "generated" works, originality is going to be highly sought after, and those who do produce original content will be capable of succeeding.

And yet, once they succeed, they cannot rest on their laurels as the AI will be very quick to reproduce that "originality" - therefore, forcing the artists/creatives to continuously come out with highly original works all the time.

> originality is going to be highly sought after

You and I are not seeing the same Walmart, McDonald's, Amazon, Netflix, etc.

This is almost precisely the argument made by the Luddite movement. “Intended to put artists out of work” is a tellingly emotional way to describe a transformer NN which self-evidently is “intended” to do no such thing. I can imagine 19th century textile workers terrified of mechanical looms using very similar language.

> Humans are allowed to be inspired by other humans, software used by other humans is not.

This absurd statement is not supported by any law you can cite. It’s nothing more than wishful thinking.

It’s hilarious that people confidently compare the anti-AI crowd to the Luddite movement, while at the same time demonstrating they know absolutely nothing about its actual history. Workers were not “terrified of mechanical looms,” but outraged that they were used to reduce pay and working conditions, instead of improve them. Of course the same will be true of AI, but I don’t expect the “can’t be bothered to even read the Wikipedia entry” crowd to understand this.

It's funny in a sickening but not unexpected way that a crowd that professes to be more learned, and interested in learning, than most others, chooses to ignore this on a consistent basis. They know they're building a world of pain, they just think if they ignore it and feign ignorance of it that they can launder their consciences.

> Workers were not “terrified of mechanical looms,” but outraged that they were used to reduce pay and working conditions, instead of improve them.

This is consistent with what I wrote. They were terrified of their jobs vanishing and sought to stop this. Ultimately it’s not realistic to prohibit useful new technology, even if it has harmful effects on some groups.

I’m sympathetic to people that are fearful of new technology that will obviously have a major impact on our society but there’s a reason Luddite is a shorthand for futile technological obstructionism.

It’s not a matter of pro vs anti AI and I wouldn’t put myself in either camp, it’s a matter of naïveté vs realism about how the world works.

The ignorance of history continues. The Luddites were not naive, but less successful in labor organizing than, say, their French counterparts, who quite successfully resisted downward pressure on wages and working conditions, allowing a more gradual transition to the new technologies. As a result, they likewise did not suffer much of the injury, cruelty, and dispossession that was inflicted on their counterparts in their English working class. The Luddite movement is more popularly know for precisely this reason: it was crushed and humiliated by the ruling class, and thus became useful for those interests to cite as an example of what happens when you oppose them vs. those who practiced solidarity, overcame them, and preserved more of their dignity and quality of life.

Letting the wealthy and powerful inflict whatever they want on you is not realism. It’s cowardice.

People are using the term "luddite" as a means to trivialize and dismiss real concerns others have. It's just an insult that deserves to be ignored, nothing more.

What if someone trains a model on public domain works only? It hasn't been done, because the law doesn't require it.

LAION-5B is a big mess and its caption quality is all over the place. Stability.ai basically chose a brute-force approach and threw a lot of data at the problem.

But now imagine if someone took all the public domain images that they could find, properly labelled them and then trained a base model on all of that.

I'm pretty sure that its output would also be very good. There are a ton of public domain photos out there so photorealism shouldn't be a problem.

So - what's your argument then?

https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one is an image generation model which is "trained from scratch using only public domain/CC0 or copyright images with permission for use".

Thanks for the link. The project looks really interesting. If it's successful - it will basically kill all the arguments about ethics.

> Humans are allowed to be inspired by other humans, software used by other humans is not.

Why?

Because humans are beings capable of inspiration and software is a tool that can only transfer and transform data, and that data is subject to existing copyright laws, because we recognize the difference between ourselves and the tools we use.

And (more importantly) because the intent behind this violation is anti-human, creating a system that debases human creative endeavor, leeches off of talent and puts humans out of work for the sake of banal facsimile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com