Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

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No, it just means that if they sue you, they're pre-committing to not try and foreclose on your own generated outputs by claiming they're derivatives that they would then own.

Of course, this is a water sandwich. If model outputs are derivatives of the model, it'd be difficult to argue that the model itself isn't a derivative of all the training data, most of which isn't licensed. So if anything, this covers Stability's ass, not yours. There's also the related question of if AI models - not their outputs, just the models themselves - have any copyright at all. The logic behind the non-copyrightability of AI art would also apply to the AI training process, so the only way you could get copyright would be a particularly creative way of organizing and compiling the training dataset.

Remember: while the "AI art isn't art" argument reeks to high heavens of artistic snobbery, it's not entirely wrong. There isn't a lot of creative control in the process. Furthermore, we don't give copyright to monkeys[2], so why should we give it to AI models?

"Noncommercial" isn't actually a thing in copyright law. Copyrighted works are inherently commercial artifacts[0], so if you just say "noncommercial use is fine", you've said nothing - and you've invited the legal equivalent of nasal goblins[1] into the courtroom. Creative Commons gets around this by defining their own concept of NonCommercial use. So what did Stability's lawyers cook up?

> “Non-Commercial Uses” means exercising any of the rights granted herein for the purpose of research or non-commercial purposes. Non-Commercial Uses does not include any production use of the Software Products or any Derivative Works.

Uh... yeah. That's replacing a meaningless phrase with a tautology. Fun. The only concrete grant of rights is research use, and they categorically reject "any production use", which is awfully close to all uses. Even using this to generate funny fanart mashups for your own personal enjoyment could be construed as a 'production use'. Stability could actually sue you for that (however unlikely that would be).

[0] In the eyes of the law. I actually hate this opinion, but it's the opinion the law takes.

[1] Under ISO 9899, it is entirely legal for C programs with undefined behavior to make goblins fly out of your nose.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

I think the artists get to say whatever they want about this bullshit considering it's entirely dependent on their work to even function. I don't think the AI community gets to call the people who make the models possible at all snobs or anything else. The AI people didn't make shit. They should have some respect for the people that do.

The so called "AI People" built the entire architecture, something people didn't think was possible at the scale and quality a year ago, and the matter of "artists should get whatever they want" because it trained on their works isn't the point. Diffusion Models don't rip parts of pictures together, they happen to be trained to make art out of noise, finding patterns in art. same things happening with LLM's in court with the LLama model and book authors claiming it only makes books.

I still remember that piece of art that was submitted to an art contest and won, only to be announced an SD prompt later

These models can't exist without the training sets. Their value is entirely derived from existing data. The ml architecture does not matter at all. Sure, throw enough compute and data at a problem, do a little parallelization, and you can extract plenty of patterns. Does that mean the ml engineers understand art? Or are they just using glorified brute force to alienate people who actually make things from their labor? No, I have very little respect for the AI people. Once you get over the novelty, their creations inspire little else beside disgust. They seem to take pride in how little they understand about the models they create.

If these creations inspire such violent disgust, then it's likely that you perceive them as authentic art. If AI images were devoid of meaning or value, they wouldn't have sparked such passion.

You cannot claim ownership over culture, nor can AI. Culture is a collaborative process, and no one can barricade themselves from the input of others. Artists using AI are simply exercising their right to contribute to the collective creative pool. Art flourishes in an open environment where it can stimulate other artistic endeavors. The only art off-limits to AI is the art that remains unpublished.

This is, imo, an extremely naive take. You claim culture is a collaborative process, yet AI only takes from the communities that produce art. It gives nothing back. You claim AI produces culture, but all it does is atomize our society, promising personal yet meaningless experiences for everyone. There's no shared culture if everyone is just consuming individualized streams of content. It's simultaneously homogenizing too, producing uninteresting torrents of homogenous images from the same model. This also harms culture, stamping out uniqueness under the weight of thousands of meaningless images flooding online art spaces. You claim the only art that's off limits to AI is that which remains unpublished, yet you continue to use the labor of others without permission, discouraging people from publishing their work in the absence of any protection for that work. You claim AI will make art more open, yet most of these models are built and operated by massive corporations with closed source code. They steal from the public and cry out fair use while trying to build walled gardens they can monopolize.

So I'm sorry but there's an argument to every point you're making. I trust the artists I speak to far more than the proponents of this technology. At least they're striving for something genuinely instead of making disengenuous claims about "democratization".

I don't try to swim against the current. But you're welcome to do it.

What do you mean AI doesn't give back? It serves everyone and gives back everything it can create. Artists are the number one users here, and they will unlock the AI skills better than regular people playing around.

What individualized streams? you mean like imagination, where everyone of us has their own "individualized stream"? AI art is augmented imagination. No obstacle in sharing, in fact it's easier now. You don't need to be an artist to create depictions of your imaginations, and sharing a generated JPG is much easier than drawing it by hand.

> yet you continue to use the labor of others without permission

That's how culture works. The artist who never took inspiration from the cultural environment should throw the first stone. Pablo Picasso is widely quoted as having said that “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

I think you (and possibly __loam) are talking past one another.

You're assuming that artists are just being elitist. While that's not entirely untrue, artistic skill is not merely a gatekeeping exercise. "Just prompt what you're thinking" is great until you need at least a little bit of control over what the AI generates, upon which the whole process disintegrates into banging your head at the model until you get something you want. Furthermore, art skills don't transfer to prompt engineering very well - that's more the realm of SEO keyword stuffers.

What __loam is imagining is that the best use of generative AI right now would be to create content slurry. If you've ever used TikTok or YouTube shorts you know what I mean - the vast majority of videos there are very cheaply made dopamine traps. And while AI can sorta kinda do art if you ask it politely and fight it a bit, it's really good at generating statistically plausible imitations of existing images[0]. Being able to generate lots of normal looking images for little effort is a grifter's best friend, and there's loads of people on YouTube bragging about how they make lots of money by spamming up art marketplaces with artistically meaningless pablum.

It doesn't matter how you make your art. You will be competing with the people who are shitting out spam art, and losing.

[0] To be clear, this is not the same thing as a photo mashup. I would actually be impressed by an AI that could take images and mash them up at inference time.

Yes, the vast majority of AI images so far are surprising but not better than human made art, and same for LLM generated text. Maybe they are a new kind of AI slurry, but that's just a phase. If you compare generative art one year ago vs today, or even six months ago vs today you know I am right. It won't be slurry forever. In fact I believe the internet will become an AI feedback system, and much of it will be built with AI.

That sounds completely horrible.

Do humans understand art? Does it matter? How do humans learn to create art? By looking at other peoples art, for the most part. Those other artists are not compensated for this either, nor do they need to be credited. If you exactly copy another persons art style, that may be frowned upon by some, but otherwise it is of no consequence, unless you claim the work is actually made by that artist. If you believe that humans should be afforded a privilege that machines (or rather their operators) should not be afforded, make your case on why.

You're the millionth person to make the argument that we should treat AI learning the same as human learning. It's still a bad argument, but I'm getting very tired of explaining why treating a human the same as a computer program sucks ass.

You're the millionth person to make the argument that AI art sucks. That didn't stop me from typing up a reply for you. Why don't you link one of your previous replies?

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