On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
catandgirl.com
catandgirl.com
This is the sticking point for me. OpenAI isn't a profit-making company, but it's certainly a valuable company. A valuable company that is built from the work of content others created without transferring any value back to them. Regardless of legalities, that's wrong to me.
Put it this way - you remove all the copyrighted, permission-less content from OpenAIs training, what value does OpenAI's products have? If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content.
I don't see why Disney or Universal would be more legitimate than OpenAI to profit from stuff made from now dead authors 60 years ago. Both seems as legitimate.
If you sell your art, then art marketplaces and printers and shipping services all profit from your work, but I don't imagine she's complaining about that. What's the difference? In all of those cases, as with social media, companies are making money from your work in return for providing a useful service to you (and one you don't have to use if you don't think it's useful).
The author, presumably.
> particularly when that value comes at no cost to you?
Who would (has) argued that there is a cost.
> in return for providing a useful service to you (and one you don't have to use if you don't think it's useful).
I think they agree with you, and are making the claim that since they choose not to use the service (considering it exploitative), it is getting increasingly difficult to distribute their work in a way they find ethical.
I'm not sure I agree with their arguments completely, but they aren't really "strange" as you suggest.
Perhaps your artwork has an anti-capitalist message, and you do not want it to appear anywhere near an Ad for the latest beauty cream.
In the early days of the Internet, there were places to promote a webcomic with no commerical interest, like usenet and forums, and it was typical to visit an artist's website directly.
These days, the average new Internet user might not even be aware of the concept that an artist can have their own website, and own the user experience of visitng that website from end to end. Web design in the early 2000s had a lot of creativity and easter eggs built into the experience of navigating the pages themselves.
An artist absolutely has the right to not want to upload their creative work (which takes days and weeks to produce), onto a bland social media site with it's own terms and conditions with regard how that content is treated and monetized.
Places like Instagram are bleak compared to what was pushing creative boundaries of the web in the mid to late 2000s. Sure, there are still fun websites like this but they are difficult to find (what happened to StumbleUpon?)
We’ve forgotten how to appreciate digital artworks.
On the contrary, I think it is very natural. The environment changed, and thus the deal. There's no clear way to negotiate the terms of the deal. It may be easy to say to just drop off the platform, but we've seen how difficult it can be to destroy a social media platform. Sure, Myspace and Google+ failed, but they didn't have the network base that Facebook and Twitter do which have also fallen into this trap (I'd even add Amazon here for the more general context. Certainly none of these companies are optimizing for the public because there's difference between who their customers are and the public). Network effects are powerful.
So I see complaints like these as attempts to alter the deal and start a coalition. The deal was changed under them, so why do they not have a right to attempt to negotiate? It is quite clear that there is a very large power differential. It's quite clear that unless you're exceptionally famous (which means the alteration is less impactful) that abandoning the platform comes at risking your entire livelihood unless you can garner a large enough coalition. It's like quitting a shitty job without a new job and not knowing who would hire you. Most people are going to stick around and complain __while__ looking for a way out.
But that points at the main question, what was this magical old way of distribution that was somehow pure that's now gone? Mailing lists. Still there. RSS? Still here, Google Reader died (peace be upon it), but the next day others started to grow as its shadow was gone. IRC? Forums?
So maybe the author is really missing the audience? Sure, platforms and powerful interests shape userbases, but it's not like those old sites were run on pure air.
Of course now there's a new possible way to use copyrighted works, and while it's very similar in effect of what human artists can do (and of course sometimes do), there's a very clear difference in scale, economics, control and thus it's natural that politics is involved.
This sounds like another way to say that the environment changed and thus the deal did.
There's still a ton of ads. And it isn't like Meta is making less money. They're just below their all time high[0] and it's not like there was one of the largest global financial crises between these two periods or something. Meta is in the top 10 for market caps and just shy of getting into the trillion dollar club. I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make because I'm not seeing how Meta (or any FAANG) is struggling.
> And there are amazing non-FAANG spaces today like the Fediverse where the author can distribute their work, and the number of users there are easily comparable to the 'old internet' user counts.
Be realistic. We both know that 1) many of the artists are trying to distribute there, 2) that this doesn't prevent their work from being used in ML models since you can still download the material, 3) the audience is substantially smaller and Mastodon is not even close to replacing Twitter.
> platforms and powerful interests shape userbases
Also remember that platforms with large userbases shape users. There's a reason why the classic Silicon Valley Strategy is to run in the red and attempt to establish a (near) monopoly. Because once you have it, you have a lot of power and can make up for all the cash you burned. Or you now have a product to sell: users.
What are we building for here?
It is?
But also this is dismissive without understanding either system at play. Traditional art has galleries because no one wants to buy art that they haven't seen. But this creates a problem if our galleries are on the internet. It no longer matters how much you attempt to stop a user from downloading or copying the art, they still can. We even see efforts to watermark art on public posting but we also see efforts to remove the watermarks. It's very clear to me that this is becoming a more complex time to be an artist than it was, say 5 years ago. Maybe better than 100 years ago, but that would be ridiculous to compare to as we'd have to get into an argument about the point of societies and if a goal is to make life better.
Strangely this is something some in the NFT crowd were attempting to solve. We can all agree that there were lots of scams (I'd even say dominated by scams and grifting) in the area and that there was poor execution of even good faith attempts, but I'm just trying to say that this was motivation for sum. They weren't even trying to solve as difficult of a problem, they were just trying to solve the problem of proof of ownership. It's not like you can use timestamps or public/private key pairs for proof. It still wouldn't even solve the problem of redistribution or training. It wouldn't prevent someone from even buying the art and training on it even if the artist specified that that was against the TOS (a whole other philosophical debate about TOS and physical ownership that I don't want to get into).
I think you're simplifying the problem and being ready to dismiss without adequately demonstrating an understanding of the issues and environment. I don't know what the answer is but I sure as hell know it is a lot more complex than "let the 'free market' run its course".
If the emergence of automata and internet creatures also means that people can spend more of their time doing what makes them happy, and if people doing that results in amazing art and music emerging, then I don't think that the purvey of selection will be so dangerously cornered by an elite.
But it's up to us to do the work to build that future.
hopefully yes, unless you foresee some inescapable transfer to dictatorship, which you'll have to argue for to maintain your argument
That just doesn't seem like the direction of the internet to me.
As for the rule of law, it seems that what we're talking about here is what authority can be capable of supplying the law. I highly doubt that a confusing and contradictory set of mandates from nation states will continue to be "the law" on the internet.
And this whole ecosystem of credit (or not sharing credit) is undoubtedly encouraged by Instagram (because it's valuable to me to have an Instagram account with many followers)
That's copyright infringement. You can't claim to own other people's work and then give license to others to use when you don't own the work.
And if you're a tiny independent artist you also aren't well-resourced to do anything about it.
(Afaict the best thing we can do is maintain a culture that demands attribution)
This isn't like some TV ad using a song they forgot to license
What you probably get is a LLM that can perfectly understand well written text as you might find on Wikipedia, but which would struggle severely with colloquial language of the kind found on Reddit and Twitter.
> then it should give some of that value back to the content.
That's literally built into their corporate rules for how to take investment money, and when those rules were written they were criticised because people didn't think they'd ever grow enough for it to matter.
How is OpenAI compensating the owners of IP they trained their models on? Or is that not what you mean? It's certainly how I read the part of the GP comment you quoted.
So the researchers, shareholders, and leadership of OpenAI will be happy to give up being ridiculously wealthy so they can be only moderately wealthy, and everyone else gets a basic income?
I'm also just skeptical of UBI in general, I suppose - 'free' money tends to just inflate everything to account for it, and it still won't address scarcity issues for limited physical assets like land/property.
I've love to be wrong about both of these things.
There are still risks in this scenario.
That makes no sense. If I write a book by myself, post part of it on my website and OpenAI ingests part of it - how does that make anyone besides me myself and I an "owner" of the IP?
If you write a book by yourself and post parts on your website and they ingest it, you are the copyright holder of that specific IP, and when I post this specific comment to Hacker News I am the copyright holder of this specific IP.
In aggregate you and I together are the copyright holders of that book sample and this post, and I don't know any other way of formulating that sentence, though it sounds like you think I'm trying to claim ownership of your hypothetical book while also giving you IP ownership of this post? But that's not my intent.
[0] I find the phrase "stochastic parrot" to be ironic, as people repeat it mindlessly and with a distribution that could easily be described by a Markov model.
[1] if the model is asked to produce something in the style of NYT, but everyone knows it may randomly insert a nonsense statement about President Trump's first visit to the Moon, that's not detracting from the value of buying a copy of the newspaper.
Imagine a scenario where your employer decides that it's going to go plant trees to save the environment, a laudable goal, in lieu of your paycheck. Their excuse would be "it's too difficult to process payroll and easier to plant trees. Since planting trees is good for the environment by the transitive property it's good for the employee. Thus, they should be happy."
It's not merely "difficult", so far as I know the only way even in theory, and I am about to explain why this is sufficiently hard as to be impossible in practice even though it may not sound like it before you get to that explanation, is to try retraining the model from scratch with certain subsets removed.
Unfortunately, while can do this for any single source, you absolutely cannot owing to the computational limits of the universe do this for all 2^(2*10^9)) permutations of people on the internet who produced some training data (even a mere 2^(765.5) is too large to *count* within the theoretical computational limits of the universe); and those permutations are necessary because inside the model all these sources interact with each other, so you also can't (accurately) just assume that whatever Alice's contribution was, was independent of whatever Bob's contribution was — as a toy model, pretend Alice explained algebra and Bob explained geometry, there's a lot you can do with either one, but even more you can do with both.
As for "changing our entire economic model": if/when AI is good enough to make everyone permanently unemployable, what else would you suggest?
Even in the lead-in to that if/when conditional, I think we need something like UBI when there's an AI that's "only" making everyone of IQ≤85 permanently unemployable; similar economic changes, but with different potential solutions, are also needed for "only" truck drivers (as a category, I'm not making an IQ claim about them), or "only" the traditional handloom weavers[0], as in all cases the alternative is they choose between rioting and starving.
And in case you're wondering, I think the image generators may put artists in the second group (a specific role in society that is quite understandably upset about being suddenly automated out of a perfectly respectable career), while LLMs look like they might be the former (even if the question of exactly what this whole "IQ" thing means anyway is surprisingly difficult to answer).
> Imagine a scenario where your employer decides that it's going to go plant trees to save the environment, a laudable goal, in lieu of your paycheck. Their excuse would be "it's too difficult to process payroll and easier to plant trees. Since planting trees is good for the environment by the transitive property it's good for the employee. Thus, they should be happy."
Bad example. For one, as a software developer my job is to automate myself into redundancy. For another, I am saying that *all actual harm* from GenAI has to be balanced by someone else making *the same economic output*, which in the environment/trees example would have to be "my employer plants 2,400 trees per minute to make up for not paying anyone" (according to Wikipedia)… or possibly "my employer cut down literally all the trees on the planet and has decided to make up for this by planting replacements, which means they no longer have any money to pay anyone", which would leave me very confused about my financial status but I'd probably ask the government to step in to make sure they didn't go under before finishing putting the trees back?
As a thought experiment, let's say I pirate enough ebooks to stock a virtual library roughly equivalent in scope to a large metropolitan library system, then put up a website where you can download these books for free. I make money on the ads I run on this website, etc. This is theft, but as "compensation" I put some percentage of my revenues into funding a UBI study that might, if we're lucky—in half a century or so, in a progressive, enlightened version of the future we are by no means guaranteed to realize—make a fractional contribution to the thrust of a successful UBI movement.
Does that make what I'm doing okay? Should all those authors deprived of royalties on their work now, even deprived of publishing opportunities as legitimate sales collapse, understand my token contribution to UBI as fair compensation for what I'm taking from them?
That to me is a joke, and the only difference between it and what OpenAI is doing is that OpenAI's product relies on a technical means of laundering intellectual property that seems tailor-made to dodge a body of existing copyright law designed by people who could not possibly have conceived of what modern genAI is capable of. We will see what our lawmakers and courts make of it now, but either way, making a promise to pay me back later does not justify you in taking all the cash out of my wallet without my consent. Nor, for that matter, does tearing it up and returning it to me in the form of a papier-mâché sculpture of Shrek's head protruding from the bowl of a "skibidi toilet".
LLMs do not store enough content or with enough accuracy to even close to a virtual library. Unlike, say, Google and the Wayback Machine, the former of which stores enough to show snippets from the pages it's presenting to you as search results (and they got sued for that in certain categories of result), and the latter is straight up an archive of all the sites it crawls.
Furthermore, the "percentage" in question for OpenAI is "once we've paid off our investors, all of it goes to benefitting humanity one way or another" — the parent company is a not-for-profit.
> Does that make what I'm doing okay? Should all those authors deprived of royalties on their work now, even deprived of publishing opportunities as legitimate sales collapse, understand my token contribution to UBI as fair compensation for what I'm taking from them?
Here's a different question for you: If a generative AI is trained only on out-of-copyright novels and open-licensed modern works, and then still deprives everyone of all publishing opportunities forever as in this thought experiment it's better and cheaper than any human novelist, is that any more, or any less fair on literally any person on the planet? The outcomes are the same.
I'm sure someone's already thought of making such a model, it's just a question of if they raised enough money to train such a model.
> OpenAI's product relies on a technical means of laundering intellectual property that seems tailor-made to dodge a body of existing copyright law designed by people who could not possibly have conceived of what modern genAI is capable of
You may have noticed from the version number that they're on versions 3 and 4. When version 2 came out in 2019, they said:
"""Our model, called GPT-2 (a successor to GPT), was trained simply to predict the next word in 40GB of Internet text. Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model."""
They were mocked for this: https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/openai-gpt2-text-genera...
Even here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21306542
Indeed, they are still mocked for suggesting their models may carry any risk at all. Of any kind. There are plenty of people who want to rush forward with this and think OpenAI are needlessly slow and cautious.
You may also have noticed their CEO gave testimony in the US Congress, and that the people asking him questions were surprised he said (to paraphrase) "regulate us specifically — not the open source models, they're not good enough yet — us".
To the extent that any GenAI can pose an economic threat to a creative job, it has to be better than a human in that same job. For now, IMO, they're assistant-level, not economic-threat-level. And when they get to economic-threat-level (which in fairness could be next month or next year), they'll be that threat even if none of your IP ever entered their training runs.
I already addressed this: "the only difference between it and what OpenAI is doing is that OpenAI's product relies on a technical means of laundering intellectual property that seems tailor-made to dodge a body of existing copyright law designed by people who could not possibly have conceived of what modern genAI is capable of."
You are certainly welcome to disagree with what I've said, but you can't simply pretend I didn't say it.
> Furthermore, the "percentage" in question for OpenAI is "once we've paid off our investors, all of it goes to benefitting humanity one way or another" — the parent company is a not-for-profit.
A quick Googling suggests that OpenAI employees are not working for free—far from it, in fact. In this frame I don't particularly care whether the organization itself is nominally "non profit", because profit motives are obviously present all the same.
> Here's a different question for you: If a generative AI is trained only on out-of-copyright novels and open-licensed modern works, and then still deprives everyone of all publishing opportunities forever as in this thought experiment it's better and cheaper than any human novelist, is that any more, or any less fair on literally any person on the planet? The outcomes are the same.
They are certainly welcome to try! Given how profoundly incapable extant genAI systems are of generating novel (no pun intended) output, including but not limited to developing artistic styles of their own, I think it would be quite funny to see these companies try to outcompete human artists with AI generated slop 70+ years behind the curve of art and culture. As for modern "public domain"-ish content, if genAI companies actually decided to respect intellectual property rights, I expect those licenses would quickly be amended to prohibit use in AI training.
AI systems will probably get there eventually, though it's very difficult to predict when. However, that speculation does not justify theft today.
> I'm sure someone's already thought of making such a model, it's just a question of if they raised enough money to train such a model.
People are absolutely throwing money at genAI right now, so if nobody has thrown enough money at this particular idea to give it a fair shake then the obvious conclusion is that people who know genAI think it's a relatively bad one. I'm inclined to agree with them.
> You may have noticed from the version number that they're on versions 3 and 4. When version 2 came out in 2019, they said [...]
Why is this relevant? I'm not talking about AI safety or "X risk" or whatever—I'm talking about straightforward intellectual property theft, which OpenAI and their contemporaries are obviously very comfortable with. The models they sell to anybody willing to pay today could literally not exist without their training datasets.
Libraries are awesome and great for reducing inequality, using ads to support that cause and also funneling cash to UBI initiatives? Even better
My observation of the vast majority of people who think intellectual property law is moral anathema to some idealized notion of "freedom" is that they either know nothing about making art themselves, or at the very least they are dilettantes who don't rely on it for any substantial portion of their livelihood. And, as it turns out, the latter group very rarely produce anything of note. Why is that? Because making interesting art is hard—just making art the average person would be willing to spend more than a second or two thinking about is hard enough, let alone art they'd be willing to pay for. It's hard, and it takes time and incredible effort and focus.
By taking (in whatever sense) an artist's work for less than it's worth, you're damaging their ability to extract value from their time investment in art, and so forcing them to choose between their artistic endeavors and other profitless aspects of their lives (e.g. their families). Even if you think that's your right (which I absolutely, categorically disagree with), your theft will have a very real effect of stunting young artists' development and reducing their output, and therefore cultural impact, in aggregate.
The sort of (frankly) idiots who think AI art is "giving power back to the people", or whatever, probably don't care about that because they don't understand art, or its impact on people and culture, at all. All I can say to them is that they have an incredibly juvenile outlook on the whole subject, and that instead of whining about artists gatekeeping art they should spend $10 on a pad of paper and a box of pencils, or $0 on a Google Doc, and go make some fucking art for themselves. Nobody's stopping them, and if they put in enough work maybe they'll start to understand some things.
Or, if you think UBI fixes everything, go ahead and start sending out checks (with a robust guarantee that they will keep coming). I'm sure that will change the tenor of the conversation.
So far as I can tell, the capacity to do that is called "communism". Specifically "fully automated luxury communism". Why? Because governments are the only entities capable of making such a robust guarantee, and they can only do it without hyperinflation if they own the means of production… which in this case would be the AI.
Now, convincing a government to take an AI into public ownership and use its economic productivity to fund a UBI, that's going to be hard work, and will need evidence to show which of the many options within this very ill-defined and barely researched topic will work vs. which are mere wishful thinking.
This research is what's currently being funded by the actual entity you're most visibly upset with (OpenAI).
And that research may well also determine the answer is "no", at which point we have to come up with something else.
Saying "if you want that why don't you fund it yourself?" was a retort against government funded pensions back in the Victorian era, which I mention because pensions are an age-gated UBI[0]. It's never sufficient to find volunteers for stuff of this scale in a democracy, because "sufficient" is on the same scale as becoming the government and changing the laws.
[0] thus not literally universal, but that's always going to be a sticking point — one open question is if "UBI" should apply to just "all adults" or be the same rate also for minors
I think funding UBI studies and lobbying for that sort of thing is a public good, but is entirely unrelated to -- and does not make up for -- wholesale copyright infringement.
But moral/ethical, and/or sufficient compensation?
IMO (and it is just opinion), the damage GenAI does to IP value happens when, and only when, an AI is good enough to make some human unemployable, and that happens to all e.g. novelists around the same time even those whose IP was explicitly excluded from training the model. So, twist question: is it fair to pay a UBI to people who refuse to contribute to some future AI that does end up making us all redundant? (My answer is "yes, it's fair to pay to all even if they contributed nothing, this is a terrible place for schadenfreude").
Conversely, mediocre regurgitation of half-remembered patterns that mimic the style of a famous author cannot cause any more harm when done by AI than when done by fan fiction.
Right now these models are pretty bad at creative fiction, pretty good at writing code, so I expect this to impact us before novelists, despite the flood of mediocre AI books reported in various places.
Other damage can happen independently of IP value damage, like fully automated propaganda, but that seems like it's not a place where compensation would go to a copyright holder in the first place.
Sufficient compensation? If AI works out, nobody will have any economic advantage, and UBI is the only fair and ethical option I am yet aware of for that.
It's what happens between here and there that's messy.
that sounds like insane bullshit to me. they're trained on the whole internet. there's no way they give back to the whole of the internet, more likely a lot of jobs will be taken away by their work.
plus, there was no consent.
> plus, there was no consent.
I agree with you about this. That's a different problem, but I do agree.
The reason I'm not sure how much this tech really is at the level of replacing humans in the workplace, is that there's always a lot of loud excitement about new tech changing the world, and a lot of noise and confounding variables in employment levels.
But if it is actually replacing them, then it must be at the level of those employees in the ways that matter.
This maybe isn’t strictly related to the topic of this post or conversation but a lot of companies have been replacing most, or even all, support channels with AI assistants. No, it isn’t good enough to replace those humans in a sense most would consider essential - helping customers which reach for the support line, but businesses find it „good enough” in a sense that it’s cheaper than human workers and the additional cost of unhappy customers is small enough to still have it be worth it.
I would agree with you that what counts as "good enough" is kinda hard to quantify (which itself leads into the whole free market vs state owned business discourse from 1848 to 1991), but I do mean specifically from the PoV of "does it make your jobs go away?"
Although now I realise I should be even more precise, as I mean "you singular and jobs plural for now and into the future" while my previous words may reasonably be understood as "you plural and each job is just your current one".
Plus side: Smaller more focused model with lower rate of falsehoods.
Minus side: it kant reed txt ritten liek this, buuuut dat only matters wen nrml uzers akchuly wanna computr dat wrks wif dis style o ritin lol
I suspect there is a lot of value in the latter, and while I don't expect it to be as much as the value in the former, I wouldn't want to gamble very much either way.
Great. Let's do that then. No good reason to volunteer it for a lobotomy.
But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's copyrighted work, then lock it in a box and don't show it to anyone.
I have some, but diminishing sympathy for artists screaming about how AI generates images too similar to their work. Yes, the output does look very similar to your work. But if I take your work and compare it to the millions of other people's work, I'd bet I can find some preexisting human-made art that also looks similar to your stuff too.
This is why clothing doesn't qualify for copyright. No matter how original you think your clothing seems, someone in the last many thousands of years of fashion has done it before. Visual art may be approaching a similar point. No matter how original you think your drawings are, someone out there has already done something similar. They may not have created exactly the same image, but neither does AI literally copy images. That reality doesn't kill visual arts as it didn't kill off the fashion industry.
It would be as if instead of cars running on gasoline, they ran on chopped up horseflesh. Not good for the horses, and not sustainable in the long term.
You removed the value and authenticity that artist in 30 minutes, you applauded it, and defended that it should be the norm.
OK then, we can close down all entertainment business, and generate everything with AI, because it can mimic styles, clone sounds, animate things with gaussian splats, and so on.
Maybe we can hire coders to "code" films? Oh sorry. ChatGPT can do that too. So we need a keypad then, only the most wealthy can press. Press 1 for a movie, 2 for a new music album, 3 for a new book, and so on.
We need 10 buttons or so, as far as I can see. Maybe I can ask ChatGPT 4 to code one for me.
Artists style is not copyrightable, at least in the US.
And if they changed that because of "AI"? My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists...
You can't copyright style of a Rolex, but people pay a fortune to get the real deal. Same thing.
> My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists...
Artists imitate/copy artists as a compliment, at least in illustration and comics world. Unless you do it in bad faith, I don't think artists gonna do that. Artists have a sense of humor to begin with, because art is making fun of this world, in a sense.
Pixar, Disney and Dreamworks have different styles, same for actors, writers, and designers, too. You can generally tell who made what by reading, looking, listening, etc.
I can recognize a song by Deep Purple or John Mayer or Metallica, just by their guitar tone, or their mastering profile (yes, your ear can recognize that), in a couple of seconds.
If style was that easy, we could have 50 Picassos, 200 John Mayers, 45 Ara Gulers (A photographer) which you can't tell them apart, but it doesn't work that way.
XKCD took a couple of guest artists because of personal reasons. It was very evident, even if the drawing style was the same.
People, art, and hand made things are much more complex than it looks. Many programmers forget because everything is rendered with their favorite font, but no two hand-made thing is ever the same. Eat the same recipe from two different cooks, even if you measure the ingredients independently and give them beforehand, you'll have different tastes.
Style is a reflection of who you are. You can maybe imitate it, but you can't be it.
Heck, even two people implementing the same algorithm in the same programming language doesn't write the same thing.
Isn't this an argument that AI-generated artwork will never be more than a lesser facsimile? That'd suggest that human-made works will always be more sought-after, because they're authentic.
When the replacements become "good enough", it'll push the better things because of being cheaper and 90% being there. I have some hand-made items and they're a treat to hold and use. They perform way better than their mass produced ones, they last longer, they feel human, and no, they're not inferior in quality. In fact it's the opposite, but most of them are not cheap, and when you want to maximize profits, you need to reduce your costs, ideally to zero.
...and the writers' guild, too.
But once it is? I mean, yeah, it'll replace Hollywood.
People will tell Netflix, "hey I want a move about X in the style of Y and I want Z to star in it", and bam -- your own bespoke movie.
I mean, once the capability's there, it's just inevitable. And yeah -- acting will become a hobby, just like sewing is today.
I want to see what the person has imagined, what the story carries from the author, what the humans in it added to it and what they got out of it.
When I read a book, I look from another human's eyes, with their thoughts and imagination. That's interesting and life-changing actually. Also, the author's life and inner world leaks into the thing they created.
The most notable example for me is Neon Genesis Evangelion. The psychological aspects of it (which hits very hard actually) is a reflection of Hideaki Anno's clinical depression. You can't fake this even if you want.
This is what makes human creation special. It's a precipitation of a thousand and one thing in an unforeseen way, and this is what feeds us, albeit we are not aware of this and love to deny it at the same time.
Thinking our creation has some kind of 'specialness' to it is like believing in a soul, or some other stupid thing. It's pure hubris.
There are many breakthroughs and realizations in science which excite me more than "this thing called AI": Bacteria have generational memory. Bees have a sense of time. Mitochondria (and cells) inside a human body communicate and try to regulate aging and call for repairs. Ants have evolved antibiotics, and expel the ones with incurable and spreadable diseases. Bees and ants have social norms, they have languages. Plants show more complex behavior than we anticipated. I'm not entering the primates' & birds' region because only the titles will be a short chapter.
While some of them might be very simple mechanisms on chemical level, they make a much more complex system, and the nature we live in is much sophisticated than we know, or want to acknowledge.
I'm not looking from "Humans are superior" perspective. Instead, I'm looking from "our understanding of everything is too shallow" perspective. Instead of trying to understand or acknowledge that we're living in a much more complex system on a speck of dust in vast emptiness, we connect a bunch of silicon chips, dump everything we babbled to a "simulated neural network", and it gives us semi-nonsensical, grammatically correct half-truths.
That thing can do it because it randomly puts a word after word after a very complex and weighted randomization learned from how we do it, but imitating it blindly, and we think that we understood and unlocked what intelligence is. Then we applaud ourselves because we're one step closer to strip a living thing from its authenticity and making Ghost in the Shell a reality.
Living things form themselves over a long life with sight, hearing, communication, interaction and emotions, at least, and we assume that a couple of millions lines of code can do much better because we poured a quadruple distilled, three times diluted version of what we have gone through.
This is pure hubris if you ask me, if there's one.
What will actually happen is people will think "meh good enough", shitty AI art will become the norm, and we'll be boiling frogs and not realize how shitty things have become.
The objectively superior product is the one that people pay for. They are exchanging labor/capital for the item/content.
I could make the best movie ever conceived, the movie to end all movies. If nobody watches it, it has 0 value.
The market selects for that, and only that. Other qualities of the product are secondary, making any statements to the effect of "the best product [outside the context of simply making the most money] will win" misguided at best.
No, that assumes perfect discovery of options. The product people see first is often chosen.
> I could make the best movie ever conceived, the movie to end all movies. If nobody watches it, it has 0 value.
Things only have intrinsic value if validated by others? That's just not true.
For one moment, let's think it this way. You are a 20-year experienced engineer who is making whatever money you are making. Suddenly, your skills are invalidated because of a new disruption. And you have another friend in, the same situation.
Fortunately for you, luck played out and you could transition! You found a way into life, meaning and value. Your joy and your everyday life continued as it is.
But the other friend enjoyed the process, and liked doing what they were doing and there was no suitable transition for them. Humans are adaptable, but to them, nothing mattered because the whole existence didn't offer any value. The sole act of doing was robbed WITHOUT ANY ALTERNATIVE. The experience and value of a person rendered worthless.
Can you relate to that feeling? If yes, thank you.
If no, your words are empty and hold no value.
Artist went through the similar phase during the invention of photography. Now, it is rather soul-crushing because anything an artist make can easily be replicated, making the whole artistic journey a moot.
> If no, your words are empty and hold no value.
Being sympathetic towards those people doesn't mean you should bend to their will if you don't believe it's the right thing to do. I can be sympathetic to a child who cries over not being able to ride a roller coaster because they aren't tall enough without thinking the height requirement should be removed.
Obviously this is a bit facetious, but basing your ethical framework on utilitarianism and _nothing_ else is pretty radical.
I agree that the current crop of artists are worse off with AI art tools being generally available. But consumers of art, and people who like making art with AI art tools, are better off with those tools being available. To me it’s clear that the benefit of the consumers outweighs the cost to the artists, and I would say the same if it was coders being put out of jobs instead. You can prove this to yourself by applying it to anything else that’s been automated. Recording music playback put thousands of musicians out of work, but do you really regret recorded music playback having been invented?
P.S. Adobe firefly is pretty competent and is only trained on material that adobe has the license to. If copyright were the real reason people didn’t like AI art tools, you would see artists telling everyone to get Adobe subscriptions instead of Midjourney.
Worse how? As defined by whom?
You could make a pretty compelling argument that "the world" would be better off by, e.g., forcing cancer patients through drug trials against their will. We basically could speed run a cure to cancer!
These longtermist, ends justify the means, ideas can easily turn extremely gross.
But unethical =/= illegal, unfortunately.
That is very much fortunate.
If it's the latter how do we find the line between what's acceptable and what's not? For example, most people wouldn't be against the creation and release of a cure for cancer developed in this way. It would lead to the loss of opportunities for cancer researchers but I believe most people would deem that an acceptable tradeoff. A grayer area would be an AI art generator used to generate the designs for a cancer research donation page. If it could potentially lead to a 10% increase in donations, does that make it worth it?
Intellectual property law does presently restrict the development of cancer treatments and demands in many cases exorbitant royalties from patients and practitioners, so I'm not convinced that this is accurate. If people believed that the loss of opportunities would constrain innovation in the field of cancer research, I think they'd expect the AI users to pay royalties as well.
What I was questioning was whether people would think it's morally right or not to generate inspired works. For example, if someone made an algorithm to read the relevant papers and make a cancer treatment that addresses the same areas/conditions of a method under IP law but don't equate to the exact method, I don't see that as a morally wrong action by itself.
This comes down to the product of AI.
If the AI produces a cancer treatment identical to what is already covered by patent, I think commercialization would be contingent on the permission of the IP holder.
If the AI produced a novel cancer treatment, using a transformative synthesis of available knowledge, Most people would not expect royalties.
Replace loom for printing press etc, you realize you're a luddite?
I am hearing a strong rhyme.
Commercialized LLMs are absolutely labour theft even if they are useful.
Boggles my mind how warped peoples thinking is.
The Luddites and the original saboteurs (from the French sabot) had a problem where the capital class invested in machines that let them (a) get more work done per person, (b) employ fewer people, and (c) pay those fewer people less because now they weren't working as hard. The people they fired? They (and the governments of the day — just like now) basically told them to go starve.
> The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers which > opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the > machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines > in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and > drive down wages by producing inferior goods.[1][2] Members of the group referred to > themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver > whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and > government officials.[3]
Yes, we want to work less. But fair work should result in fair compensation. Ultimately, this is something that the copyright washing of current commercialized LLMs cannot achieve.
The tools are not the problem, it's how humans use them.
They can be used in an illegal way if used to copy copyrighted material, yes.
You do not have to produce an exact copy of something to violate copyright, and I think anything the LLM outputs is violating copyright for everything it has ever trained on, unless the operator (the person operating the LLM and/or the person prompting it) has rights to that content.
I personally am not against LLMs training on things the operator has rights to, and even training on copyrighted things, but I am against it laundering those things back out and claiming it's legal.
OpenAI built a machine that does exactly that. They just sampled _everyone_.
I also firmly believe that commercializing models built on top of copyrighted works (which all works start off as) does not qualify as fair use (or at least shouldn't) and that commercializing models build on copyrighted material is nothing more than license laundering. Companies that commercialize copyrighted work in this manner should be paying for a license to train with the data, or should stick to using the licenses that the content was released under.
I don't think your example is valid either. The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. That is literally what they are and how they work. That is very different than people having similar styles.
Should I pay the authors of the books I read when I sell mine?
Arguably the U.S. courts are in the wrong here. We can only hope first sale doctrine is extended to digital goods in the U.S. in the future, as it has been in the EU for over a decade.
[0] https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...
But they did. The presence of a secondary market for used books increased the value of some new books. People buy them knowing that they might one day recoup some costs by selling them. Would people pay more, or less, for a new car if they were told they could never sell or trade it away as a used car?
Baffling
Please back up this statement.
I for one, buy primary market books for the content; and to support creators whom I wish to support. Not to display the book or resell it. That is some capitalist jive.
People typically use libraries because
A) they are too poor to afford the books, and libraries therein provide a valuable community function
B) they are doing research and only need the books for a short time
C) they read more books than they can afford
and other such reasons.
How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style?
I don't think any person who actually has worked on anything creative in their life would compare a personal style to a model that can output in nearly any style at extreme speeds. And even if you're inspired by a specific author, invariably what happens is it becomes mix of yourself + those influences, not a damn near-copy.
With visual mediums it's even worse, because you have to take the time [months, years] to specialize in that specific medium/style.
On my laptop, using modern tools backed by AI? ... many.
>> How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style?
Thanks now to AI, hundreds. I can plug the output of the book-reading AI into the input of the tool I use to write my books and thereby update my personal style to incorporate all the latest trends. Blame the idiots who are paying me for my books.
You completely ignored the premise of the question.
I don't think anyone who has ever read a novel in their life would say that an AI can write literature at all, in any style.
> not a damn near-copy.
The obvious solution is to just treat it as if a human did it. If you did not know the authorship of the output and thought it was a human, would you still consider it copyright infringement? If yes, fair enough. If no, then i think is clearly not a "damn near-copy"
If you write that book, chances are you will gain some fans that are also fans of other authors in that genre.
If ML models write that genre, they can flood that genre so full that human artists won't be able to complete.
It's not even a remotely equivalent scenario
Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not?
Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models, when many other technologies were allowed to bloom despite killing other existing business models?
Nobody can really answer these questions.
It shouldn't be.
As soon as someone makes an AI that can produce it's own artwork without requiring ingesting every piece of stolen artwork it can, then I'm on board.
But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as that.
Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings?
Also, FYI, you can't steal digital artwork. You can only commit copyright infringement, which is not the same crime as theft, because theft requires depriving the owner of something in their possession.
> Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings?
This still is pretending that humans and AI models are equivalent actors and should have the same rights
Emphatically no they shouldn't. The capabilities are vastly different. Fair use should not apply to AI.
Fair use applies even to use of traditional algorithms, like the thumbnailing/caching performed by search engines. If I make a spam detector network, why should it not be covered by fair use?
The extent to which it supplants the original work is one of the fair use considerations.
I think it'd make more sense to have a stance of "current LLMs and image generators should be judged by fair use factors and I believe they'd fail", though I'd still disagree, instead of having machine learning models subject to a different set of rules than humans and traditional algorithms.
If that was the distinction to be made, using ChatGPT as a classifier would be acceptable while using it to write new spam (see the "I am sorry" amazon listings of the other day) would be unacceptable.
If two different uses of a tool allow for both infringing and non-infringing uses (are photocopiers allowed to make copies(!) of copyrighted works?) it has generally been the case that the tool is allowed and the person with agency to either use the copyrighted work in an infringing or a non-infringing way is the one to come under scrutiny.
I believe that if it is found that OpenAI is found to have committed copyright infringement in training the model, then an argument that training a model on spam be considered to be copyright infringement could be reasonably constructed.
If, on the other hand, OpenAI is found to have sufficiently transformative in its creation of the model and some uses are infringing, then it is the person who did the infringing (as with a photocopier or a printer printing off a copy of a comic from the web) that should be have legal consequences.
The four pronged test in US case law:
- the purpose and character of use (is a machine doing this different in purpose and character? many would say yes. is "ripping-off-this-artist-as-a-service" different than an isolated work that builds upon another artist's art?)
- the nature of the copyrighted work
- the amount and substantiality of the portion taken (can this be substantially different with AI?)
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for the original work (might mechanization of reproducing a given style have a larger impact than an individual artist inspired by it?)
These are well balanced tests, allowing me as a classroom teacher to duplicate articles nearly freely but preventing me from duplicating books en masse for profit (different purpose; different portion taken; different impact on market).
And just to be clear, this post does not constitute legal advice.
I hate the desire to meta-comment about the site rather than argue on the merits.
We obviously don't know so much about how courts will interpret copyright with LLMs. There's a lot of arguments on all sides, and we're only going to know in several years after a whole lot of case law solidifies. There are so many questions, (fair use, originality, can weights be copyrighted? when can model output be copyrighted? etc etc etc). Not to mention that the legislative branch may weigh in.
This discourse by citizens who are informed about technology is essential for technology to be regulated well, even if not all participants in the conversation are as legally informed as you'd wish. Today's well-meaning intuition about what deserves copyright and why inform tomorrow's case law and legislation.
This sounds so detached from human experience that I am tempted to ask if you are a human or just a disembodied spirit that haunts the internet.
When the first neanderthal drew a deer on the walls of a cave, where did they get inspiration?
When a little child draws a tree for the first time, where do they draw inspiration? Do you think they were reviewing works of Picasso?
When the firm man made an axe, chopped a tree, made a bed, sown some clothes, discovered fire, where did they draw inspiration?
Do you not have eyes, ears, do you not perceive and get inspiration from the natural world around you?
We do know one thing for sure - that for AI it’s 0%
Once upon a time it was a contentious idea that humans had significant authorship in photographs, which merely mechanically captured the world. What % is the camera's independent inspiration?
Here, we have humans guiding what's often a quite involved process of synthesis of past human (and machine) creation.
The person using the AI doesn't matter in the equation. They aren't an artist, they're a monkey with a typewriter.
We're talking about the AI here, because it can generate the same images no matter which monkey with a typewriter is typing the prompts.
That's an opinion.
Does your opinion hold in all circumstances? If I spend 20 hours with an AI, iterating prompts, erasing portions of output and asking it to repaint and blend, and combining scenes-- did I do anything creative?
No matter how great the AI is, a monkey with an AI will never generate anything useful.
Is the result a copy, or perhaps a derivative work of the art in the training set?
Does the person using the model have authorship of the result?
Was it even okay to use the art to train the model and then share the resulting weights?
Are the resultant weights protected by copyright themselves?
I suspect the actual answers we'll come to on these topics will be full of nuance.
Are we going to discount the hundreds to thousands of artistic pictures children are exposed to? Or how about the teacher sitting up front demonstrating to the class how to draw a tree?
> Do you not have eyes, ears, do you not perceive and get inspiration from the natural world around you?
Learning to see as an artist is a distinct skill. Being able to take the super compressed simplified world view that mind sees and put something recognizable on paper is a specialized skill that has to be developed. That skill is developed by doing it over and over again, often by copying the style of an artist that someone enjoys.
Or to put it another way, go to any period in history prior to the mid 20th century and art in a given region starts to share the same style, dramatically so, because people were inspired by each other, almost to a comical extent. (Financial reasons also had something to do with it as well of course, Artists paint/carve/engrave/etc what sells!)
Do you think art was there before humans? Or humans made art?
If you believe the 1st proposition… please tell me about your very unique religion!
If not… you've answered your own question.
Logically, the answer to this is (almost certainly) yes, so you’ll need to discount this argument.
If the answer were no, then either an infinite number of humans have lived (such that there was always a previous artist to learn from), or it was true in the past but false in the present, which seems unlikely given humans brains have generally become more and not less sophisticated over time.
I presume what you’re missing here is that the brain can be inspired from other sources than human art. For example: nature; life experience; conversation.
Not making any other comment about what machines can or can’t do, just wanted to point out this argument is invalid as it comes up a lot and is probably grounded in ignorance around the artistic process. It’s such a strange idea to suggest that the artist process is ingesting lots of art to make more art. That’s such a weird world view. It’s like insisting every artist is making art the way Quentin Tarantino makes films.
I’ve spent a lot of time with artists, I’ve worked with them, I’ve been in relationships with artists, and I can tell you the great ones see the world differently. There’s something about their brains that would cause them to create art even if born on a desert island without other human contact. Some of them don’t even take an interest in other art.
In fact, those artists that _do_ make art heavily based on other artists’ work as suggested are often derided as “derivative” and “unoriginal”.
Do you feel the same way about tools like Google Translate?
Translate operates at a large-chunk resolution, and one of the insights in solving the problem was the idea that you can often get a pretty-good-enough translation by swapping a whole sentence for another whole sentence. So they ingest vast amounts of pre-translated content (the UN publications are a great source, because they have to be published in the language of every member nation), align it for sentence- and paragraph-match, and feed the translation engine at that level.
It's created an uncanny amount of accuracy in the result, and it's basically fed wholesale by the diligent work of translators who were not asked their consent to feed that beast. Almost nobody bats an eye about this because the value (letting people using different languages communicate with each other) grossly outstrips the opportunity cost of lost human translator work, and even the translators are, in general, in favor of it; they aren't going to be displaced because (a) it doesn't really work in realtime (yet), (b) it can't handle any of the deeper signal (body language, tone, nuance) of face-to-face negotiation, and (c) languages are living things that constantly evolve, and human translators handle novel constructs way better than the machines do (so in high-touch political environments, they matter; the machines have replaced translators in roles like "rewriting instruction manuals" that were always pretty under-served in the first place).
If you can do the correction when reading, it seems reasonable to assume the reader in the opposite direction has the same correction capability.
I would expect the chance of confusion to be identical. The only difference is a matter of perspective, where in one case you are the reader and in one case you are the author.
It's better for me to receive a text in the original language and translate it myself than to try to decipher something translated automatically.
That’s is not the case for art, vast majority of art used by midjourney is not public domain.
Is that true? How did you establish that?
>what about if we eventually robot labourers that is trained on observing human labourers?
Interesting point, but by that point in time I don't think generative art will even be in the top 10 ethical dilemmas to solve for "sentient" robots.
As it is now, robots aren't the ones at the helm grabbing data for themselves. Humans give orders (scripts) and provide data and what/where to obtain that data.
What's killing art is this idea by a vocal minority of "artists" that they need to mass produce their work, enter the market, and attempt to make millions of dollars by selling and distributing it to millions.
That's not art. That's capitalism. That's competing to produce something that customers will want to buy more than what your competitors offer.
If you want to compete on the capitalistic marketplace, then compete on the capitalistic marketplace. But if you want to be an artist, be an artist.
Art is still alive and well and always will be. Every day I see people singing because they love singing, making pottery because they love making pottery, writing because they love writing. Whether other people love or enjoy their art, the artist may or may not care. Whether they can profit from their art, the artist may or may not care. But many billions of artists will keep creating, crafting, and designing day after day, and they will never be stopped by AI or anything else.
Do you know what a job does? What a company does? It contributes to society! It produces something that someone else values. That they value so much they're willing to pay for it. Being part of this isn't a bad thing. It's what makes society work.
A job/company entertains. It keeps things clean. It transports people to where they need to go. It produces. It gives people things they want. It creates tools, and paints, and nails, and shirts. I look out my window, and I see people delivering furniture, chefs cooking food and selling it out of trucks, keepers maintaining grounds, people walking dogs.
Being useful to the fellow members of your society for 40 hours a week is not "soul crushing."
Too mid to understand your point.
Find the intersection of something that people increasingly value, that you enjoy, and that you can compete at.
The best proof that people value something is that they're spending money for it. If people aren't spending money, they don't value it, and you probably don't want to go into it. If people aren't spending more and more money on it every year, then it's not increasing in value, and you probably don't want to go into it.
The best proof that you enjoy something is that you enjoyed it in the past. Things you liked as a kid, activities that excited you as a young adult, etc., are often the best candidates.
Look for intersections of the two things above. Do some Googling, do some research.
Finally, you need to be able to compete at it. If you do something worse than everyone else does it, then no one will pick you, because you're probably not being helpful. The simple answer to this is to practice to make yourself better. But most people don't want to do that. A better answer to this is to be more unique, so you can avoid the competition. Don't do a job that has a title, a college major, and millions of talented applicants. It's not that helpful to society to do something a hundred million other people can already do, which is why there's more competition and lower wages.
When you find the intersection of what's valued and what you enjoy, call up some people in those fields and ask what's rare. What in their area is needed. What are they missing. What is no one else doing.
Or just start your own company. That's the easiest way to be unique. But it's hard.
Finally, if you feel you're too "mid," then make sure your standards aren't crazy. Don't let society tell you that you need to be a millionaire with a yacht and designer clothes to be happy. Get a normal 9 to 5 with some purpose in it, that you can be proud of, that others appreciate. Live within your means and don't stress yourself out financially. Spend your free time doing things you like. Take care of your health, find good relationships, and treasure them. That's a happy life at any income. I know a bunch of miserable depressed rich people who are very good at making money and very bad at health/relationships/etc., which is the real stuff that life is made out of.
This is an interesting example because even in the $100 case you are still talking about machine-augmentation. You can have a seamstress or a tailor customize patterns, using off the shelf textiles, for that order of magnitude price - but if you want to use custom built, exotic materials or many kinds combined, the cost is on the orders of thousands not hundreds. Also there is a large industry of just printing designs on stock-shirts, that has a different point effort-scale equilibria.
Thinking about how how automation disintermediates is very important. For animation, often productions have key-frame artists in the animation pipeline that define scenes, and then others that take though to flush out all the details of that scene. GenAI can potentially automate that process. You could still have the artist producing a keyframe, and can render that into a video.
Another big factor is style. One hypothesized reason that more impressionism, absurdism or abstract art all become styles is photography. Once cheap machine-produced photography became available, there is less need for a portrait artist. But further, it also is no longer high-status and others push trends alternative directions.
All the experiments and innovation going right now will definitely settle into a different set of roles for artists, and trends that they will seek to satisfy. Art-style itself will change as a result of both what is technically possible and also what is _not_ easily automatable in order to gain prestige.
Because in this case the art is still necessary for the machine to work. You don't need horse buggies to make a car, nor existing books to make a printing press. You DO need artist's art to make these generative AI tools work.
If these worked purely off of open source art or from true scratch, I wouldn't personally have an issue.
>Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models,
We don't need to kill it. Just pay your dang labor. But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it.
Maybe in the 2010's tech would have the goodwill to pull this off in PR, but the 2020's have drained that goodwill and then some. Tech's made so many promises to make lives easier and now they joined the very corporations they claimed to fight against.
>Nobody can really answer these questions.
Well it's in courts, so someone is going to answer it soon-ish
> But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it.
That's just it, nobody looking to get paid by OpenAI actually did any labor for OpenAI. They did labor for other reasons, and were happy with it.
OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet benefits by learning from the images of their fellow artists. OpenAI just uses technology to do it much more efficiently.
This has never been considered labor in the past. We've never asked artists to "properly compensate" each other for learning/inspiration in the past. I don't know why it should be considered labor or proper compensation now.
But we shall see what the courts decide!
True, sadly most of those copyright are probably owned by other megacorp. So they either collude to surppess the entire industry or eat each other alive in legal clashes. The latter is happening as we speak (the writers for NYT are probably long retired, but NYT still owns the words) so I guess we'll see how that goes.
>OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet benefits by learning from the images of their fellow artists.
If we treat AI like humans, art historically has an equally thin line between inspiration and plagiarism. There are simply more objective metrics to measure now because we can indeed go inside an AI's proverbial brain. So the metaphor is pretty apt, except with more scrutiny able to be applied.
When discussing our work, we can name them.
When one of our influences comes out with a new body of work, we can gush about it to our own fans.
When we find ourselves in a position of authority, we can offer work to our influences. No animation studio is really complete without someone old enough to be a grandfather hanging out helping to teach the new kids the ropes in between doing an amazing job on their own scenes, and maybe putting together a few pitches, for instance.
We can draw fan art and send it to them.
None of these are mandatory, but artists tend to do this, because we are humans, and we recognize that we exist in a community of other artists, and these all just feel like normal human things to do for your community.
And if an artist suddenly starts wholesale swiping another artist's style without crediting them, their peers get angry. [1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy
OpenAI isn't gonna tell you that it was going for a Cat & Girl kind of feel in this drawing. OpenAI isn't gonna offer Dorothy Gambrell a job. OpenAI isn't going to tell you that she just came out with a new collection and she's still at the top of her game, and that you should buy it. OpenAI's not going to send her a painting of Cat & Girl that it did for fun. OpenAI isn't going to do anything for her unless the courts force it to, because OpenAI is a corporation who has found a way to make money by strip-mining the stuff people post publicly on the Internet because they want other humans to be able to see it.
How many of those words do you remember learning? How many can you confidently say you remember the person or the book that taught you the word? 5? 10? Maybe 100?
That's how brains work. We ingest vast amounts of information that other people put out into the world. We consume and it incorporate it and start using it on our own work. And we forget where we even got it. My brain works this way. Your brain works this way. Artists' brains work this way. GPT-4 works this way.
The idea that a visual artist can somehow recall where they first saw many of the billions of images stored in their brain -- the photos, movies, architecture, paintings, and real-life scenes that play out every second of every day -- is laughable. Almost all of that goes uncredited, and always will.
This is what it is to learn.
There is a strong correlation between how copyrightable a concept is and how well you can point to where you learned it.
To take it to an extreme, you obviously can't just use one of the available neural net lossless compression algorithms to circumvent copyright law or citation rules (e.g., distributing a local LLM that helpfully displays the entirety of some particular book when you ask it to), you can't just tweak it to make it a little lossy by changing one letter, or a little more lossy than that, etc., while on the other hand, any LLM that performs exactly the same as a markov model would presumably be fine, so there is a line somewhere.
A company builds an AI tool. That AI tool is trained on a ton of artists' work over the years. The company opens up the AI tool and asks it to draw, "X but in the style of Y," where Y is come copyrighted artwork. The company then prints the result and puts it on their packaging.
What's the difference?
I'd argue there isn't one. The copyright infringement isn't the ability of the artist or the AI tool to make a copy. It's the act of actually using it to make a copy, and then putting that out into the world.
Again, take it back to basics: do you believe it is permissible to share a model itself (not the model output, the model), either directly or via API, that can trivially reproduce entire copyrighted works?
So yeah, of course imo it should be permissible to share a model that can reproduce copyrighted works. Being "capable of being used" to violate a law is not the same thing as violating a law.
A ton of software on my computer can copy-paste others' work, both images and words. It can trivially break copyright. Hell, there are even programs out there than can auto-generate code for me, code that various companies have patent claims for. Do I think distributing any of this software should be illegal? No. But I think using that software to infringe on someone's copyright should be.
(Note: This is different than if the program distributed came with a folder that included bunch of copyrighted works. To me, sharing something like that would be a copyright violation.)
> It is clearly not the same as your mind, because your mind can and, assuming you want to stay in good standing, will provide credit for influence
I forgot to respond to this, but it's not true. Your mind is incapable of providing credit for 99.9% of its influence and inspiration, even when you want it to. You simply don't remember where you've learned most of the things you've learned. And when you have a seemingly novel idea, you can't always be aware of every single influential example of another person's work/art that combined to generate that new idea.
Compression and the output from LLMs are cousins. The model tries to predict what continuations are likely, given context. Indeed, it takes a lot of effort to make LLMs less willing to just output training data verbatim. And conversely, you can get compression algorithms to do things similar to what LLMs do (poorly).
Whether this also describes most of human cognitive process, is subject to debate.
Ultimately, only high courts in each jurisdiction can decide. I can imagine a case where some highly advanced nations decide different interpretations that cause conflict. Then, we need an amendment to the widely accepted international copyright rules, the Berne Convention. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
Nobody working on a new cancer drug actually did any work for me. They did labour for other reasons, and were happy with it.
There it is okay for me to steal their recipe and sell their cancer drug.
They were happy until their copyright got stolen, I guess. Then got unhappy.
LLMs are collections of GPUs crunching numbers. "Inspiration" doesn't really apply to them.
A better analogy is sampling, and musicians remixing music are very much required to pay for the samples they use.
If I sample a track and play it in my home I don't properly compensate anyone.
If I ask GPT to create a cool new comic based on the article and then delete or use it privately it, same applies.
To me this is a strong point in favor of the idea that OpenAI has no business using their work. How can you even think it's ok for OpenAI to use work that was not done for them without paying some kind of license? They aren't entitled to the free labor of everyone on the internet!
At the risk of answering a rhetorical question: because copyright covers four rights: copying, distribution, creation of derivative works, and public performance, and LLM training doesn't fit cleanly into any of these, which is why many think copying-for-the-purpose-of-training might be fair use (courts have yet to rule here).
I think the most sane outcome would be to find that:
- Training is fair use
- Direct, automated output of AI models cannot be copyrighted (I think this has already been ruled on[0] in the US).
- Use of an genAI to create works that would otherwise be considered a "derivative work" under copyright law can still be challenged under copyright.
The end result here would be that AI can continue to be a useful tool, but artists still have legal teeth to come after folks using the tool to create infringing works.
Of course, determining whether a work is similar enough to be considered infringing remains a horribly difficult challenge, but that's nothing new[1], and will continue to hinge on how courts assess the four factors that govern fair use[2].
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receiv...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176881182/supreme-court-side...
[2]: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
I hate making analogies, but if we make humans plant rows of potatoes, should that command a higher price and seen more valuable than planting potatoes by tractor 20 rows wide?
No, we should absolutely be giving bias to humanity. Flesh and blood humans matter, their lives matter, their thoughts matter and their work matters.
Machines are tools for them to use not entities given the same rights and same consideration.
I reject your whole premise.
People have the choice to continue making stories and they'll have a fanbase for it and always will, because that's ultimately apart of freedom and choice. Many are less what I'll call purists here, and don't care about how it came to be, they just want a quality story.
What you're loosely proposing is art being a protected class of output, when we have tools that can match and soon with the potential to surpass. Is that not a terrific way to stunt what you're trying to defend?
For transparency, I am an advocate for human made art, but I am against stunting tooling that can otherwise match said creativity. I see that as an artform in itself.
If you believe AI tooling is an artform then you categorically are advocating against human made art as far as I am concerned.
You are free to think so, but it really doesn't make you an artist any more than wearing a medal you bought second hand makes you a war hero.
Something else did the work and you're just claiming credit. It's honestly kind of sad.
prompting a search engine to stitch images together on your behalf might result in an image you can call art, but imo all the art generated wholecloth like this sucks. necessarily derivative. put into the world without thought.
My favorite critique of LLM work: "why would I bother to read a story that no one bothered to write"
It’s very easy to make bad art quickly with powerful tools. It’s also possible to carefully craft prompts which generate amazing results that win awards. Source: I’ve done this. You should see the reactions when people have heaped flowery accords on a drawing and then find out it’s Dall-e. The irony of the transition from “art is rebellion” to pearl-clutching is almost the best part.
That critique says more about your understanding than it does about the work.
I think AI art will by definition never surpass human art. Humans can be inspired by things other than the art of others.
Well ok, that was 300 years ago and views have changed dramatically since then.
AIs are not magic. They are tools. They are not alive, they do not have agency. They do not do things by themselves. Humans do things, some humans use AI to do those things. Agency always rests with a combination of the tool's creator and operator, never the tool itself.
Is there really a difference between a human flooding the market using AI and a human flooding the market using a printing press?
Even if human's can't compete (An obviously untrue premise from my perspective, but lets assume it for the sake of argument), is that a bad thing? The human endeavor is not meant to be a make work project. Humans should not be forced to pointlessly toil out of protectionism when they could be turning their attention to something that can't be automated.
A magnitude of difference, yes. Even a printing press will be limited by natural resources, which require humans to procure.
A computer server can do a lot more with a lot less. And is much easier to scale than a printing press.
>Even if human's can't compete (An obviously untrue premise from my perspective, but lets assume it for the sake of argument), is that a bad thing?
When the AI can be argued to be stealing human's work, yes. A printing press didn't need to copy Shakespeare to be useful. And it'd benefit Shakespeare anyways because more people get to read about his works.
So far I don't see how AI benefits artists. Optimistically:
-an artist can make their own market? Doubtful, they will be outgunned by SEO optimized ads from corporations.
- they can make commissions faster? To begin with commissions aren't a sustainable business. Even if they 5x the labor and somehow kept the same prices they aren't living well. But in reality, they will get less business as people will AI their "good enough" art and probably won't pay as much for something not fully hand drawn
- okay, they can make bigger commissions? There's a drama about spending 50k on a 3 minute AMV, imagine if that could be done by a single artist in a day now!... Well, give it another 10 years. Lot of gen Ai is static assets. Rigging or animating is still far from acceptable quality, and a much harder problem space. I also wouldn't be surprised if by then any AI models has its own phase of enshittification and you end up blowing hundreds, thousands anyway.
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>Humans should not be forced to pointlessly toil out of protectionism when they could be turning their attention to something that can't be automated.
Until someone conceptualizes a proper UBI scheme, pointlessly toiling is how most of the non-elite live. I have yet to hear of a real alternative for these misplaced artists to move towards.
So what? So we all just become managers in meetings in 30 years?
AI runs on some of the most power hungry and expensive silicon on the planet. Comparing a GPU cluster and a printing press then staring the GPU cluster not limited by natural resources is just silly. Where does the materials come from to make the processors?
> When the AI can be argued to be stealing human's work, yes. A printing press didn't need to copy Shakespeare to be useful. And it'd benefit Shakespeare anyways because more people get to read about his works.
The same can be true for AI as well. I could see a picture and then ask AI whose style it is. Then I could go look up more work by that artist, increasing their visibility.
- they can make commissions faster? To begin with commissions aren't a sustainable business. Even if they 5x the labor and somehow kept the same prices they aren't living well. But in reality, they will get less business as people will AI their "good enough" art and probably won't pay as much for something not fully hand drawn
Is this a complaint that something got cheaper to make? This one affects more than just artists. For instance, code quality output from LLM is quite high. So, wages across the board will decrease yet capabilities will increase. This is a problem external to AI.
> Until someone conceptualizes a proper UBI scheme, pointlessly toiling is how most of the non-elite live. I have yet to hear of a real alternative for these misplaced artists to move towards.
Again, not just artists and the path forward is the same as it’s always been with technological advancements, increase your skill level to above the median created by the new technology.
Probably mined from 3rd world country slaves (in the literal "owning people" sense). But still, these servers already exist and scale up way more than a tree.
>well. I could see a picture and then ask AI whose style it is. Then I could go look up more work by that artist, increasing their visibility.
Sure, and you can use p2p to download perfectly legal software. We know how the story ends.
>Is this a complaint that something got cheaper to make... not just artists and the path forward is the same as it’s always been with technological advancements, increase your skill level to above the median created by the new technology.
It's a complaint that people even woth more efficiency still can't make a living. While the millionaires become billionaires. I'm not even concerned about software wages. Some Principal SWE going from 400k to 200k will still live fine.
Artists going from 40k to 40k (but now working more efficiently) is exactly how we ended up with wages stagnating for 30 years. And yes, it is affecting everyone even pre-AI. The median is barely a living wage anymore, which is what "minimum wage" used to be.
If we lived in a work optional world I don't think many would care. But we don't and recklessly taking jobs to feed the billionaires is just going to cause societal collapse if left unchecked.
Why do you think the device you're using to make this comment is better than a GPU?
Was your comment written by some new flamebait AI? You say so many arguments that fall apart under the slightest examination
>Was your comment written by some new flamebait AI
IIRC AI focuses on formal language and discourages slang. Either way:
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I think the post is making reference to the "thing" which made Google stand out in a sea of existing search engines.
"Using the idea of relevancy, they built Google in a way that - in comparison to other search engines at the time - was simply better at connecting users with more pertinent results.
"A query typed in Google provided more utility and relevancy than did Excite, Yahoo and other search engines.
"To put it simply, Google had a superior product.
https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/125-why-google-won.h....
Yes. A printing press only floods the market with copies. An AI floods the market with new derivative works.
A human producing a single creative work and then flooding the market with copies leaves lots of room for other humans to produce their own novel work. An AI flooding the market with new derivative works leaves no such room.
I work with DNNs a lot professionally and remain a proponent of the technology, but what OpenAI et al are doing is highly exploitative and scummy. It’s also damaging their social licence and may end up setting the field back.
Now that we can finally have lots of amazing things almost for free, should we create artificial scarcity to protect the existing business models?
Is it realy about volume?
The question is about someone/something writing a book _influenced_ by Harry Potter -- do they owe JK Rowling royalties?
It could be argued quite convincingly that stories like Brooks's Shannara and Eddings's Belgariad are LOTR with the serial numbers filed off — but there is more than enough difference in how various pieces work for those series to make them unique creations that do not infringe on the properties or cover too much the story. (Although I cringe at putting the execrable Belgariad books in any class with either LOTR or Shannara.)
The "best" modern example of this is the 50 Shades series. These are Twilight fan fiction (it is acknowledged as such) with the vampire bits filed off. They are inspired by Twilight, but they are not identifiably Twilight in the end. It might be hard to tell the quality of writing from that which an LLM can produce, and frankly Anne Rice did it all better decades before (both vampires and BSDM).
Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. They can produce statistically approximated mishmashes of the original works themselves, but there is no act or spark of creation, insight, or influence going on that makes the sort of question you’re asking silly. LLMs are just math. Humans may be just chemistry, but there’s qualia that LLMs do not have any more than `fortune` does.
I'm with all your other arguments ... but not this point. What is the special magic property that machine-generated art doesn't have? Both human and machine generated art can be banal, can be crap. And I think there is plenty of machine generated art this a quite beautiful, and if well prompted even very insightful. Non-GenAI can be this way, Conway's game of life has a quality of beauty to it that rivals of forms of modern art. If you wanted to argue that there still is the need for a human to provide some initial inspiration as input, or programming before something of value can be generated, then I would agree, at least for now, though there is meta-argument about asking LLMs to generate their own prompts that makes this an increasingly gray area.
But I don't think the stochastic parrot argument holds water. Most of _human_ creations is derivative. Unique mixes of pre-existing approaches, techniques, substance, often _is_ the creative act. True innovation with no tie to existing materials seems vanishingly rare to me and is really high bar, beyond which most humans ever achieve.
This is literally wrong, LLMs are influenced by their users. And people can input new ideas, facts and explore new directions by choosing how they interact with the LLM.
A LLM writing a book all on its own start to finish would be a different story, the output would be derived 100% from its training set. A LLM being prompted with a book chapter would risk borrowing too much.
But if you prompt a LLM without copy pasting protected content in the prompt, then you are the main influence. And LLMs can explore outside their training distribution in this way, helped by humans.
Many people think a trained LLM is frozen, but they do in-context-learning, they can even acquire new concepts/words and properly use them in the same session. They don't keep the memory of this until retraining, but that doesn't mean they are locked up. There is plenty of space in the buffer you can use to add new material after training.
This kind of thinking is like saying you can't drive a nail unless you own a licensed hammer, if someone is using his shoe to drive a nail will be in infringement. Maybe the shoe is also a hammer if the user so says.
How closely is this the case? What blind spots exist? How do you measure this? What is the capacity for original idea generation does the human mind have and how does it inspire a unique spin to it?
This is one of those areas where 'thought experiments' are never going to pass muster against genuine experiments with metrics, trial, and robist scientific research.
But with the stakes as they are, I dont have faith there exists a good faith dialogue in this arena.
First, the law is pretty clear that yes if your story is too similar to another work, they have rights. Second, it's not at all obvious we can or should generalize from "what a human can do" and "what a bunch of computers can do" in areas like this.
If openai would pay usage fees for the training material per user its generating content for - it would never be profitable - artist would be fine off. But even all the shares are owned by people who have given this system none of it‘s knowledge.
In that case, good? I thought if nothing else, these past year or two would teach companies about sinking money into unsustainable businesses and then price gauging later (i know it won't, the moment interest rates fall we are back to square one). If it isn't profitable, scale down the means of production (which may include paying C class executives one less yatch per year, tragic), charge more upfront to the customers, or work out better deals with your 3rd parties (which is artists in this case).
I also find some scheudenfredre in that these companies are trying to sell "less enployees" to other companies but would also benefit from said scaling down as they throw out defenses of "we can't afford to pay every copyright" .
But it's also going to be affected by the teachers you had in pre-school, the people you hang around with, your relatives, films you've seen, adverts you watched, good memories and bad memories of events. You bring your lived experience to your story, and not just a mish-mash of stories in a particular genre, but everything.
Whereas when you train a model, you know the exact input, and that exact input may be 100% copyright material.
However, AI models require copying and reproducing copyrighted works, whereas when I read I book I’m not copying it and I’ve secured some sort of license to use it.
The collection, mass copying, and redistribution of work to create these models seems quite obviously to be a violation on IP laws.
Have you noticed that authors and artists love sharing their inspirations? Let's say you're an up-and-coming author. In an interview, you list your sources of inspiration.
Using your logic, why does the creative community celebrate you and your inspirations instead of crying foul like they are with LLMs?
Can you explain what you mean by "qualifies as free use?" I've never heard that term before.
[1] https://library.ulethbridge.ca/copyright/fairdealing/#s-lib-... [2] https://www.ippt.eu/legal-texts/copyright-information-societ...
I don't think this is as cut-and-dry and you make it out here. If I train a model on, say, every one of New York Times' and release it for free and it finds use as a way of circumventing their paywall I have difficulty justifying that as fair use/fair dealing. The purpose/character of the model should indeed be a factor but certainly not nearly as dispositive a one as I think you're suggesting.
To the extent that training the model serves a research purpose I think that the general use / public release of the trained model does not in general serve the same research purpose and ought to have substantially lower protection on the basis of, e.g., the effect on the original work(s) in the market.
These technical distinctions like these probably will matter in whatever form regulation eventually ends up becoming.
> if you use that data as general background knowledge to synthesize aggregative works such a history of the vietnam war, or trends in musical theatre in the 1980s relative the 1970s, or shifts in the language usage of formal honorifics, then that seems to me to be clearly fair-use categories
I don't think this is clear. If someone were to train a model on several books about the Vietnam War and then publish my own model-created book on history of the Vietnam War, I would be inclined to say that that is infringement. And if they changed the dataset to include a plurality of additional books which happen to not be about Vietnam, I don't think that changes the analysis substantially.
I think it is hard to earnestly claim that in that instance the output (setting aside the model itself, which is also a consideration) is transformative, and so I would think, absent more specific facts, that all four fair use factors are against it.
I think the question is if it changes analysis if the dataset DOES include a bunch of books and articles related to Vietnam beyond your specific book.
In the first cast where it just rewriting a single books content, the unfairness is clear.
But in case where it is producing a new synthesis and analysis of the data, derived in part, but not regurgitating the source material, is that unfair?
The latter isn't clear to me.
Existing copyright precedent serves this use-case poorly, and so the question is far more philosophical than legal; there's a good case to be made that there's no law clearly governing this kind of machine, only loose-fit analogies that degenerate badly upon further scrutiny.
Ah, just like humans who train against the output of other humans. AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard, only scope, and even that isn't perfectly obvious to me a priori.
Artists will learn to not trust the web, if they haven't already. The greatest time to train a model was yesterday, eventually no novel ideas, expressions, art will prosper on the "open" web. Just a regurgitation of some statistical idea of words, and pixels.
That doesn't mean that courts will meaningfully enforce it for them.
ML models have a long way to go before comparisons to humans make any kind of sense.
Maybe they release it for free, possibly supported by ads, at least to get some recognition and a job if it is perceived well.
It's the same thing with GitHub's copilot.
A book publisher would seize everything I have, and shot me at a back alley if I do 0.0001% of this.
Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. strongly disagrees with you on that (the "Google Books case").
I interpret the comment I was replying to as basically saying "We let humans do it, so therefore we should let machines do it." And my response is basically, "we let humans do it because it provides benefits to an actual living being that deserves them".
When Midjourney serves up an image, it does not collect a paycheck that enables it to feed its family. It doesn't go home and sleep well at night with the satisfaction that it has created a piece of art that meant something to others.
It may be the case that the executives and engineers who own Midjourney feel some of that, but I think the experience of making a machine to make X is fundamentally different from making an X.
It may also be the cast that the person who wrote a prompt to ask Midjourney to produce an image generates some value from that and feels good about it. I get that. But I think the amount of creative effort they put into doing that and the amount of value in the result that is derived from uncompensated other artists is profoundly different from sitting down and actually drawing a picture.
A large enough difference in degree is a difference in kind.
The first thing is the output of a mathematical function as computed by a computer, while the second is an expression of numan creativity. AI models are not alive. They are not creative. They do not have emotion. These things are not even in the same ballpark, let alone similar or the same.
Maybe someday AI will be sophisticated enough to be considered alive, to have emotion, and to be deserving of the same rights and protections that humans have. And I hope if and when that day comes, humanity recognizes that and doesn't try to turn AI into an enslaved underclass. But we are far, far from that point now, and the current computer programs generating text and images and video are not exhibiting creativity, and do not deserve these kinds of protections. The people creating the art that is used to feed the inputs and outputs of these computer programs... those are the people that should have their rights protected.
The mathematical function is the expression of human creativity. It consumes other expressions of human creativity, a creativity act in an off itself, to output a different expression of human creativity. Other humans consume the output of the system and the system alike to generate further creative works. An AI model is a higher order creative process, much like humans, and is fundamentally predicated on the creative involvement of humans.
Consider the seminal work _Designing Programmes_ by Karl Gerstner if you'd like further consideration of optimizing creative output via self imposed, systematized restrictions and permutations (design programs as meta art). Or alternatively, consider aleatoric music or Toshiko Takaezu for the incorporation of _chance_ into art.
There really isn't anything too new here in my book (AI) - just increased scope and fruition.
> They do not have emotion.
Art does not require an input or output of emotion nor an emotional affect.
Have you ever tried to "train a human"?
They don't work that way, not unless your "training" involves so weird torture stuff you probably shouldn't be boasting about.
Maybe try ask some teachers (of both adults and children) how it works with people...
Yeah, and creating derivative work without permission is against the law.
>AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard
[citation needed]
Of course they are fundamentally different. They don't get to decide what to absorb.
Humans that make those decisions, correspondingly, should pay the price.
There's a hell lot of money to be made from this belief so of course the HN crowd will hold it.
Some of us here who have been around the copyright hustle for a little longer laugh at this bitterly and pray that the courts and/or Doctorow's activism saves us. But there's so much money to be made from automatized plagiarism and the forces against are so weak, the hope is not much.
The world will be a much, much poorer place once all the artists this view exploits will stop making art because they need to make a living.
See https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1744422377113501998 and https://i.imgur.com/zOOcPCi.jpg
The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings, it just enabled more people to have control over what was on their walls.
Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work.
If it's "just a tool" in and of itself, then there's no problem keeping it away from other people's art.
>The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings
Because the copyright laws were extended to include photographic reproduction of art as something you need to obtain a permission (and a license) for.
The same needs to happen for generative AI.
A photocopy machine is just a tool too. So is the printing press.
So does a human brain.
Which brings us to the other side of the reasoning is that tools like Midjourney and OpenAI enable idiots (when it comes to drawing/animating ... that includes me) to create engaging artwork.
Recently generating artwork like that went from almost impossible to "great, but easily recognizeable as AI artwork". Frankly, I expect the discussion will end when it stops being recognizeable.
I hate Andreesen Horowitz' reasoning, but they're right about one thing: once we have virtual artists that are not easy to distinguish from "real" ones, the discussion will end. It does not really matter what anyone's opinion on the matter is as it will not make a difference in the end.
A major difference between a human training himself by looking at art, and a computer doing it, is that the human ends up working for himself, the computer is owned by some billionaire.
One enhances the creative potential of humanity as a whole, the other consolidates it in the hands of the already-powerful.
Another major difference is that a human can't use that knowledge to mass-produce that art at a scale that will put other artists in the poorhouse. The computer can.
Copyright exists to benefit humanity as a whole... And frankly, I see no reason for why a neural network's output should be protected by copyright. Only humans can produce copyrightable works, and a prompt is not a sufficient creative input.
Whether an artist pays for a subscription to openAI or buys paint pots on Amazon.com money is going to a billionaire, it is not a difference between ai and other art.
You are also ignoring the existence of non-commercial open source AI, they exist.
Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.
An LLM takes a prompt and produces a painting. No sane person would say that I 'drew' the painting in question, even if I provided the prompt.
> Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.
We copyright things that require creative input. A list of facts or definitions did not require creative input, and is therefore not copyrightable.
Using an LLM does not meet the bar for creative input.
That sounds like a kinder restatement of the opinion at the top of the thread: "Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too."
Artists might not like the phrasing, but scratch the surface and there's a degree of truth there. It's an argument from self-interest, at core.
(spoiler: bootstrapping yourself up the tech tree gets progressively harder)
Your brain is a neural network, just FYI.
Utterly ridiculous.
Where is the line? It’s ok for humans to learn from others work but not a machine?
Yes.
The machine doesn't get to make its own choices. Once it does, we'll have a different conversations.
Presently, humans decide what goes into the training set, and what comes out. Those humans are the ones that we need to regulate.
Hot take: The LLM is learning as much as a ZIP file is learning.
That is a pretty unfair response when you're skipping the part about how commercializing should not be fair use.
These models were not trained on just the cartoonist in question, nor just their inspirations. The intent was to train on all images and styles. The expression of the idea using these models is not going to match the expression of the idea of all images, even those conforming to a certain bounded prompt.
For the life of me I can't get DALL-E or Stable Diffusion to produce anything like Cat and Girl nor anything coherent for the above mentioned inspirations. DALL-E flat out refuses to create things in the style of the above and Stable Diffusion has insane looking outputs, overwhelmed by Herring.
Most importantly, copyright is concerned with specific works that specifically infringe and whose damages are either statute or based on quantifiable earnings from infringement. Copyright does not cover all works, especially when again, the intent is to learn all styles that rarely, if at all, reproduces direct expressions.
The only point at which these images are directly copied are when in the machine's memory, which has already has case law for allowance, followed by back propagation that begins the process of modifying the direct copies for the underlaying formal qualities.
It seems like a lot of people are going to be upset when the courts rule eventually rule in favor of the training and use of these models, if not only because the defendant has a lot of resources to throw at a legal team.
I get that there's case law on copying in memory on the input side not being infringing but can't for the life of me understand how they get away with not paying for it. At least libraries buy the books before loaning them out, OpenAI and midjourney presumably pirated the works or otherwise ignored the license of published works and just say "if we found it on the internet it's fair game"
1. Google's unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Google's commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use.
2. Google's provision of digitized copies to the libraries that supplied the books, on the understanding that the libraries will use the copies in a manner consistent with the copyright law, also does not constitute infringement. Nor, on this record, is Google a contributory infringer.
Focus on the protected aspects of the originals. This would be their expressions. Unless an LLM is reproducing the exact expression and not merely the idea, then there is no market substitute. The market substitute for a Picasso painting is the facsimile of one of Picasso's actual paintings, not just some other cubist artwork.
Or maybe you cannot copyright style, and all those apps do fall on legal ground?
Entire industries exist dedicated to such things. News aggregators. TV parody shows. Standup comedians. Fan fiction. Biography writers. Art critics. Movie critics. Sometimes the derivative work even outsells the original, especially when the original was horrible or unappreciated. I have never played Among Us or the new Call of Duty, but I do enjoy watching NeebsGaming do their youtube parodies of them.
Google is displaying the exact content and a link to the source, and is functioning as a search engine.
Copying music (or whatever), and then outputting music based on the copied music is not the same thing as a search engine, it's outputting a new "art" that is competing with the original.
Another way to put it, is that you can't use a search engine to copy something in any meaningful way, but copying music to produce more music is actually copying something.
> Does copyright law say you can ingest copyrighted work at very large scale and sell derivates of those works to gain massive profit / massive market capitalizations
The reasons as to why I don't think training on copyrighted data are stated in my other comments replying to people who have made arguments about its immorality.
If you search for a Disney movie on Google search, it does not try to sell you a film derived from the movie.
I can also get Disney coloring book pages directly from Google's cache on Google images: https://www.google.com/search?q=disney+princess+coloring+boo...
Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. determined that Google's wholesale scanning and uploading of books is allowed under the first sale doctrine because the University of Michigan library they borrowed the books to scan from paid for them (or a donor paid for them, at some point). Here's a book of bedtime stories available in its entirety: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Picnics_in_the_Wood_and...
Also, Google can and will delist stuff that is violating copyright if you report it: https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/overview
The Google Books thing is a lot more interesting I think. I guess the idea is that Google is acting as a Library, and they are lending you the book? I'm not sure how I feel about this and I would need to do a lot more research on it before having a strong opinion.
The other big difference here is that you can't use the content linked from Google search as if it were your own. If you Google search "nes emulator in javascript", and you get a link to a Github repo, you can't copy paste the code as if it were your own, and even basing your code on what you have saw could be risky depending on the license of the repo. LLMs are acting as a sort of search engine, pretty similar to how Google search does, but people are using the output from the "search" as if it were their own work that they have full rights to!
> Does copyright law say you can ingest copyrighted work at very large scale and sell derivates of those works
In that case the OP should have never posed this irrelevant question because access to the expression isn't giving access to a derivative work.
My main point is that OpenAI is generating an incredible amount of value all hinging on other people's work at a massive scale, without paying for their materials. Take all the non-public domain work off Netflix and Netflix doesn't have the same value they have today, so Netflix must pay for content it uses. Same goes for OpenAI imho.
How would this compensation work? Let's say a portion of profits from LLMs that were trained on copyrighted work should be sent to the copyright holders.
How would we allocate which portion of the profits go to which creators? The only "fair" way here would be if we could trace how much a specific work influenced a specific output but this is currently impossible and will likely remain impossible for quite some time.
The big question is where "training an AI on this corpus of works and then either distributing the weights or performing the work via API" fall? Should the weights be considered derivative works? I personally don't think so and although the weights can be used to produce obviously infringing works I don't think this meets the bar of being a redistribution of the work via a funny lossy compression algo like some are claiming. But who knows? Copyright is more political than logical so I think the bend is really gonna be a balance of the tangible IRL harms artists can demonstrate vs. the desires of unrelated industries who wish to leverage this technology and are better for having all this data available.
I'd feel a lot better about that argument if we had sane copyright laws and anything older than 7-10 years was automatically in the public domain. Suddenly, netflix is looking a lot more valuable with just public domain works and there'd be a ton of public domain art to train AI models with. I suspect that the technology would still leave a lot of artists concerned in that situation though, because even once the issue of copyright is largely solved the fact remains that AI enables people who aren't artists to create art.
It feels similar to the ye olden debates on police surveillance. Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with. Collating your behavior across every website and device you own from a data broker is fundamentally the same thing as a single phone’s wiretap, but it obviously feels way grosser and more unethical because it scales way past the point of what you’d imagine as being acceptable.
> Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with.
If acquiring a warrant is the basic action being scaled, I'd be okay with that ethically if it was done under, what I define as, reasonable pretenses. Regardless of how it scales, I still think it would be the right thing to do assuming the pretenses for the first action could be applied to everyone wiretapped. Now if I thought the base action was morally wrong (someone was tailed or wiretapped without proper pretenses), I'd think it's wrong regardless of the scale. The number of people it affected might impact how wrong I saw it, but not whether it was right or wrong to.
Well, not exactly. Certain uses are fair. The question is does OpenAI's use count as fair. I don't think your immediate response comes close to addressing that question despite your conviction it does otherwise.
Also, clothing designs are copyrightable. The conviction expressed by some participants in this debate is exhausting in light of their familiarity with actual copyright law.
It's entirely legal for me to leave the pub every time it comes up to my round. It's legal for me to get into a lift and press all the buttons.
It's not unreasonable I think for people to be surprised at what is now possible. I'm personally shocked at the progress in the last few years - I'd not have guessed five years ago that putting a picture online might result in my style being easily recreated by anyone for the benefit mostly of a profitable company.
This artist doesn't complain about work similar to their own being generated, and their artwork is very clearly not clothing.
So? Why does the author's opinion even enter into the equation? Authors cannot claim ownership beyond the bounds of copyright. If what AI is doing qualifies as fair use, the artist cannot do anything about it. I'm sure that lots of artists would not want anyone to lampoon or criticize their work. They cannot stop such things. I'm sure lots of artists would never want anyone to ever create anything in any way similar to their work. They cannot do that either.
Replace "use" with "copy". No one may copy the work to make a profit. Fair Use has long been an exemption to copyright, with Learning an example of Fair Use. But no one expected AIs to learn so quickly. I don't think it is clear either way, and will end up in SCOTUS.
Free and redistribute the material
Agreed: in the end, courts will make the decision.
The proper construction is that copyright is an exemption from the freedom of speech. Fair use is a partial description of freedom of speech, a description to narrow the limits of copyright rather than to broaden the already limitless bounds of freedom of speech.
The default for expression is that it is allowed except if copyrighted, as opposed to copyrighted except when covered by fair use.
We are not talking about the eons old human practice of creative artistic endeavor, which yes, is clearly derivative in some fashion, but which we have well established practices around.
We are discussing a new phenomenon of mass replication or derivation by machine at a scale impossible for a single individual to achieve by manual effort.
Further, artists tend to either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge their priors in secondary or even primary material, much like one cites work in an academic context.
Also, the claim:
>But if I take your work and compare it to millions of other people's work...
Is ridiculous. A. you haven't, nor will you ever actual do this. B. This is never how the system of artistic practice up to this point has worked precisely because this sort of activity is beyond the scale of human effort.
In addition, plagiarism exists and is bad. There's no reason that concept can be extended and expanded to include stochastic reproduction at scale.
If you feel artists shouldn't have a say and a future in which capital concentrates even further into the hands of a few technological elite who make their money off of flouting existing laws and the labor of thousands, by all means. But this argument that somehow by analogy to human behavior companies should not be responsible for the vast use of material without permission is absolutely preposterous. These are machines owned by companies. They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do. You may want to consider a distinction in the rules that adequately reflects this distinction in participatory status in a social system.
> They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do
I don't think this adds anything to the argument besides you using this as a reason analogies with humans can't be used to compare the specific concept of inspired works? I don't think this holds up.
Algorithms participating in social systems has nothing to do with whether inspired works have a moral claim to existence for some. The fact that your ethics system values the biological classification of the originator of inspired works is something that can't be reconciled into a general argument. I could make the claim that the prompt engineer is the artist in this case.
> capital concentrates even further into the hands of a few technological elite who make their money off of flouting existing laws
That can be said by the development of any technology. Fear of capital concentration is more a critique on capitalism than it is on technological development.
Technology does not exist in a vacuum. All of the utility and relevance of technology to humans is dependent on the social and economic conditions in which that technology is developed and deployed. One cannot possibly critique technology without also critiquing a social system, and typically a critique of technology is precisely a critique about its potential abuses in a given social system. And yes, that's what I'm attempting to do here.
> I don't think this adds anything to the argument besides you using this as a reason analogies with humans can't be used to compare the specific concept of inspired works? I don't think this holds up.
This is a fair point. One could argue that an LLM, properly considered, is just another tool in the artist's toolbox. I think a major distinction though, between and LLM and, say, a paintbrush or even a text-editor, or photoshop, is that these tools do not have content baked into them. An LLM is in a different class insofar as it is not simply a tool, but is also partially the content.
The use of two different LLMs by the same artist, with a the same prompt, will produce different results regardless of the intent of the so called artist/user. The use of a different paintbrush, by the same artist, with the same pictorial intention may produce slightly different results due to material conditions, but the artist is able to consciously and partially deterministically constrain the result. In the LLLM case, the tool itself is a partial realization of the output already and that output is trained on masses of works of unknown individuals.
I think this is a key difference in the "AI as art tool" case. A traditional tool does not harbor intentionality, or digital information. It may constrain the type of work you can produce with it, but it does not have inherent, specific forms that it produces regardless of user intent. LLMs are a different beast in this sense.
Law is a realization of the societal values we want to uphold. Just as we can't in principle claim that training of LLMs on scores of existing work is wrong solely due to the technical function of LLMs, we cannot claim that this process shouldn't be subject to constraints and laws due to the technical function of LLMs and/or human beings, which is precisely what the arguments by analogy try to do. They boil down to "well it can't be illegal since humans basically do the same thing" which is a hyper-reductive viewpoint that ignores both the complexities and novelty of the situation and the role of law in shaping willful societal structure, and not just "adhering" to natural facts.
Your original quote was not using the impact of the technology, it was disparaging the algorithmic source of the inspired work (by saying it does not participate in social systems the way humans do).
> I think a major distinction though, between and LLM and, say, a paintbrush or even a text-editor, or photoshop, is that these tools do not have content baked into them
LLMs, despite being able to reproduce content in the case of overtraining, do not store the content they are trained from. Also, the usage of "content" here is ambiguous so I assumed you meant the storage of training data.
To me, the content of an LLM is its algorithm and weights. If the weights can reproduce large swaths of content to a verifiable metric of closeness (and to an amount that's covered by current law) I can understand the desire to legally enforce current policies. The problem I have is against the frequent argument to ban generative algorithms altogether.
> The use of a different paintbrush, by the same artist, with the same pictorial intention may produce slightly different results due to material conditions, but the artist is able to consciously and partially deterministically constrain the result.
I would counter this by saying the prompts constrain the result. How deterministically depends on how well one understands the semantic meaning of the weights and what the model was trained on. Also, as a disclaimer, I don't think that makes prompts proprietary (for various different reasons).
> I think this is a key difference in the "AI as art tool" case. A traditional tool does not harbor intentionality, or digital information
Assigning "intent" is an anthropomorphism of the algorithm in my opinion as they don't have any intent.
I do agree with your last paragraph though, one (or even a group of) individual's feelings don't make something legal or illegal. I can make a moral claim as to why I don't think it should be subject to constraints and laws, but of course that doesn't change what the law actually is.
The analogies are trying to make this appeal in an effort to influence those who try to make the laws overly restrictive. There are many laws that don't make sense and logic can't change their enforcement. The idea is to make a logical appeal to those who may have inconsistencies in their value system to try and prevent more non-sensical laws from being developed.
I think this is the central issue and is not limited to just AI generated art. Wealth concentrates to the few from each technological development. When robots replaced factory workers, the surplus profit went to the capital holders, not the workers who lost their jobs. AI generated art will be no different but I don't think it will replace the creative art that people will want to make, just the art that people are making to pay the bills.
It's important to consider in any legalistic argument over copyright that, unlike conventional property rights which are to some degree prehistoric, copyright is a recent legal construct that was developed for a particular economic purpose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#History
The existing standards of fair use are what they are because copyright was developed with supporting the art industry as an intentional goal, not because it was handed down from the heavens or follows a basic human instinct. Ancient playwrights clipped each others' ideas liberally; late medieval economists observed that restricting this behavior seemed to encourage more creativity. Copyright law is a creation of humans, for humans, and is subordinate to moral and economic reasoning, not prior to it.
Also, with computers being functional copyright has become a tool of social control; any function in a physical object can be taken away from you at a whim with no recourse so long as a computer can be inserted into the object. Absent a major change in how society sees copyright I envision a very bleak totalitarian future arising from this trend.
That is, does the amount of creative/economic output dissuaded by allowing AI (preventing people who would not be able to or not want to create art if they couldn't get paid) exceed the creative/economic output of letting people develop and use such AIs?
If that's the case, then novels, news articles, digital images, etc. are things that copyright absolutely makes sense for. If you think that they have a "low cost of production", you are sadly misinformed about the artistic process.
Some of these have vanishingly low marginal costs when it comes to reproduction, but in light of their high fixed cost of production, I don't see how that matters.
100% agree. But even then it's not very good. Abolish copyright, severely limit patents, and leave trademarks as they are. The IP paradigm needs an overhaul.
If OpenAI is allowed to be ignorant of copyright, then the rest of us should be allowed, too.
The problem is that OpenAI (alongside a handful of other very large corporations) gets exclusive rights to that ignorance. They get to monopolize the un-monopoly. That's even worse than the problem we started with.
Do you think it's reasonable for me to want some legal framework that allows me to explicitly deny that use of my work? Because I do.
I presume there are people working on research relating to how to prevent output of raw training data, what is the state of the art in this area? Would it be sufficient to prevent output of the training data or should the models be required to have no significant internal copies of training examples?
People keep saying this but it's actually much more complicated, and in many cases you can't view copyrighted content.
An example, MicroSoft employees are not permitted to view or learn from an open source (GPL-2) terminal emulator:
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm...
Another example is proprietary software that may have it's source available, either intentionally or not. If you view this and then work on something related to it, like WINE for example, you are definitely at risk of being successfully sued.
If you worked at MicroSoft and worked on Windows, you would not be able to participate in WINE development at all without violating copyright.
If you viewed leaked Windows source code you also would not be able to participate in WINE development.
An interesting question that I have, is whether training on proprietary, non-trade-secret sources would be allowed. Something like unreal engine, where you can view the source but it's still proprietary.
Another question is whether training on leaked sources of proprietary and private but non-trade-secret code, like source dumps of Windows is legal.
The way this works is they way many of us are arguing that AI and copyright should work.
Vieiwing (or training on) copyrighted work isn't copyright infringement.
What can be copyright infringement is using an employee who has viewed (or a model that was trained on) copyrighted work to create a duplication of that work.
In most of the examples of infringing output that I've seen, the prompt is pretty explicit in its request to duplicate copyrighted material.
Models that produce copyrighted content when not explicitly asked for will have trouble getting traction among users who are concerned about the risk of infringement (such the examples you listed.)
I also see this approach opening an opportunity for models that acquire specific licenses for the content they train on that would grant licenses to the users of the model to duplicate some or all of the copyrighted works.
The responsibility for how a model is used should rest primarily on the user, not the model trainers.
Just like the rest of AI, if your argument is "humans can already do this by hand, why is it a problem to let machines do it?", its because you are incorrectly valuing the labor that goes into doing it by hand. If doing X that has potentially negative side effect Y, then the human labor to accomplish X is the principle barrier to Y, which can be mitigated via existing structures. Remove the labor barrier, and the existing mitigation structures cease to be effective. The fact that we never deliberately established those barriers is irrelevant to the fact that our society expects them to be there.
Clothes are inherently consumable goods. If you use them, they will wear out. If you do not use them, they still age over time. You cannot "copy" a piece of clothing without a truly astonishing amount of effort. Both the processes, and the materials, may be difficult or impossible to imitate without a very large investment of effort.
Compare this to digital art: You can copy it literally for free. Before AI, at least you had to copy it mostly verbatim (modulo some relatively boring transforms, like up/down-scaling, etc.). That limited artist's incomes, but not their future works. But in a post-AI world, you can suck in an artist's life's work, and generate an unlimited number of copycats. Right now, the quality of those might be insufficient to be true replacements, but it's not hard to imagine we'll be in a world not so far off when it will be sufficient, and then artists will be truly screwed.
Sure you can. There's a whole industry making knockoffs.
I'd say that it still qualifies as a "truly astonishing amount of effort" when compared to the right-clicking and pressing save method of copying digital art.
Now, i am worried about companies like OpenAI monopolizing technology through making their technology proprietary. I think their output should be public domain and copyright should only apply to human authors if they should be at all.
and like, what, do you think they're trying their damnedest to keep datasets clean and to not store any images in the process? how do you think they retrain on datasets over and over? it's really simple - by storing terabytes of copyrighted content. for ease of use, of course - why download something over and over, if you can just download it and keep it. and if they really wanted to steer clear of copyright infringement, if there's truly "no good solution" (which is bullshit for compute, oh, they can compute everything but not that part) - why can't they just refrain from recklessly scraping everything, if something were to just 'slip in'? like, if you know it's kinda bad, just don't do the thing, right? well, maybe copyright infringement is just acceptable to them. if not the actual goal.
what they generate is kinda irrelevant - there's plenty of copyright infringement happening even before any training were to be done. assembling of datasets and bad datasets containing copyrighted content are the start and the core of the copyright problems.
there's a really banal thing at the core of this, and it's just a multi-TB storage filled with pirated works.
In theory: sure
In practice: not really, especially when you're small and the other side is big and has lots of lawyers and/or lawmakers in their pockets.
Disney ("In 1989, for instance, the company even threatened to sue three Florida daycare centers unless they removed murals featuring some of its characters") and Deutsche Telekom[1][2] ("the company's actions just smack of corporate bully tactics, where legions of lawyers attempt to hog natural resources — in this case a primary color — that rightfully belong to everyone") are just two examples that spring to mind.
[0] https://hls.harvard.edu/today/harvard-law-i-p-expert-explain... [1] https://www.dw.com/en/court-confirms-deutsche-telekoms-right... [2] https://futurism.com/the-byte/tmobile-legal-rights-obnoxious...
Most every fashion company has a legal team that reviews print and pattern, as well as certain other aspects of design, relative to any source of inspiration. My husband works in the industry and has to send everything he does for review in this way. I’m not sure where you got the idea that there are no IP protections for fashion, but this is untrue.
> [A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticise, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy.
Most use of LLMs and image generation models do not produce criticism of their training data. The most common use is to produce similar works. You can find this very common “trick” to get a specific style of output to add “in style of <artist>”. Is this a direct way "to supersede the use of the original work”?
You can certainly see how other factors more or less put gen ai output into the grey zone.
The fact that clothing doesn’t qualify for copyright doesn’t mean text and images don’t. Or if you advocate that they don’t then you pretty much advocate for abolishment of copyright because those are the major areas of copyright applicability at the moment. Which is a stance to have but you’d probably be better to actually say that because saying that copyright applies to some images and text but not others is a much harder position to defend.
You'd have to argue the entirety, everything about copyright law being ethical, to make your version of the argument.
I see it differently. To me, if you post your work online as an artist, it's really there for everyone to view and be inspired by. As long as nobody copies it verbatim, don't think you've been hurt by any other usage. If another artist views it, and is inspired by it... so be it. If an AI views it, and is inspired by it, again, no harm done.
I would be careful in asserting that it's proven until the evidence is heard in court and we have all the data.
Of course, just like a human artist, it could probably closely approximate the source material if it wanted to, but it would still be its own approximation, not an exact duplicate. As for plagiarism, we all have to be careful to rephrase things we've read elsewhere, and perhaps AI's need to be trained to do this a bit better... but it doesn't change the underlying fact that they're learning from the text they read, not storing a verbatim copy (at least, no more so than a human reader with a good memory)
Well i'll leave it to the legal system to decide if that's true.
But in any case, that's no different from a human with a photographic memory doing the same thing after reading a paragraph. We don't blame them for their superior memory, or being inspired by the knowledge. We don't claim they've violated copyright because their memory contains an exact copy of what they read.
We may still demand that they avoid reproducing the exact words they've read, even though they are capable of it -- which is fine. We can demand the same of AI's. All I object to, is the idea that a smart AI, with a great memory is guilty of something just by reading or viewing content that was willingingly shared online.
But to be honest, I don't really care one way or the other, since it doesn't get to the heart of the matter as I see it. To my mind, it's no different than a human with a good memory doing the same thing.
Specifically, it isn't the consumption of the media that is the problem, or even remembering it very well. Rather, it is the public verbatim reproduction of it, which a human might inappropriately do as well. AI's need to be trained to avoid unfair use of source material, but I don't think that means they should be prohibited from consuming public material.
I think the term "AI" is one of the most loaded and misleading to come up in recent discourse. We don't say that relational databases "pack and ship" data, or web clients "hold a conversation" with each other. But for some reason we can say that LLMs and generative models "get inspired" by the data they ingest. It's all just software.
In my own opinion I don't think the models can copy verbatim except in cases of overfitting, but people like the author of the post have a right to feel that something is very wrong with the current system. It's the same principle of compressing a JPEG of the Mona Lisa to 20% and calling that an original work. I believe the courts don't care that it's just a new set of numbers, but instead want to know where those numbers originated from. It is a color of bits[1] situation.
When software is anthropomorphized, it seems like a lot of criticisms against it are pushed aside. Maybe it is because if you listen to the complaints and stop iterating on something like AI, it's like abandoning your child before their potential is fully realized. You see glimpses of something like yourself within its output and become (parentally?) invested in the software in a way beyond just saying "it's software." I feel as if people are getting attached to this kind of software unlike they would to a database, for example.
A thought experiment I have is whenever the term "AI" appears, mentally replace it with the term "advanced technology." The seeming intent behind many headlines changes with this replacement. "Advanced developments in technology will displace jobs." The AI itself isn't the one coming for people.
My own perspective is that humans do not have an exclusive right to intelligence, or ultimately to personhood. I am not anthropomorphizing when I defend the rights of AI. Instead, I am doing so in the abstract sense, without claiming that the current technology should be rightly classified as AI or not. But since the arguments are being framed against the rights of AI to consume media, I think the defense needs to be framed in the same way.
This extends to music as well, if someone hears a song and is inspired by that in their work, the original artist gets credit.
That's only true in a very narrow set of circumstances. Imagine the case where someone listens to 10,000 songs, and then takes the sum total of that experience and writes their own. There's no credit given to the inspiration that each of those 10,000 songs gave. And that is in fact much closer to what AI is currently doing.
https://www.ajschwartzlaw.com/can-i-use-that-part-2-remix-cu...
But all of this, doesn't have much to do with whether an AI should be allowed to consume public media -- even if we agree they need to do a better job about avoiding verbatim reconstruction when prompted.
Edit: I wasn't able to find the Lawrence Lessig talk I wanted to link, but here's a quite old one that makes some of the same points:
I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty certain that’s not actually how things work.
You had me till that^ line. In your example if "inspired" human start competing with you, then there is harm. If the inspired human is replaced by an AI, then it also harms. By harm I am referring to competition.
So instead of saying "no harm done", then maybe its more accurate to say "same harm as a other humans being inspired by your work".
I don't disagree with you. But then that is a completely different issue, and has nothing specifically to do with AI, but rather the tradeoff between the benefits of releasing your work to the public, and the potential competition it might inspire.
There's such thing as consent, I hope you've heard of it.
No artist whose work was used to train the AIs consented to such use.
Particularly if they released their work online before generative AI was a possibility.
>it's really there for everyone to view and be inspired by
Generative AI model is not "everyone". It's a model, a combination of data that goes into it.
It's a thing. A product. A derivative work, to be specific, made by the person who trained it.
>If an AI views it, and is inspired by it, again, no harm done.
Such a romantic notion!
But the same metric, a photocopy machine is an auteur that gets inspired by the work that it happens to stumble into to produce its own original art.
No.
The AI doesn't "view" the work, it has no agency. The human that trains the model does.
And that human is the one that is ripping the artist off.
The AI, as many people said, is just a tool. It doesn't suddenly turn into a person for copyright purposes.
It still remains a tool for people who train the models. A tool to rip off others' intellectual property, in the case we're discussing.
When you release something into the world, you have to accept that things beyond your control will engage with it. When you walk outside, down the street, you consent to being in public, and being recorded by video cameras, whether you like it or not. Even if a new 3D camera you don't know about exists and is recording you in ways you don't understand.
And in the same way, when you release something on the internet, it is there essentially forever. If you imagine that you get a "do-over" when the world changes in ways you didn't anticipate -- you're wrong. Nobody should feel entitled to such a reset.
> And that human is the one that is ripping the artist off.
Nobody is being ripped off.
> The AI, as many people said, is just a tool
People said the same thing about slaves. They aren't real people, worthy of rights. They were compared to animals, the same way you compared AI to a photocopier. Someday, this human self-obsession and self-importance against silicon based lives, will be seen in the same light, and artificial intelligences will be granted personhood. We should start protecting their rights in law today. Please don't be a bigot.
Yes, and those laws will be very useful as soon as any actual artificial intelligence will crop up. Blindly applying them to DALL-E or ChatGPT because they are marketed as AI would be... short-sighted.
>Nobody should feel entitled to such a reset.
>Please don't be a bigot.
Please don't project.
>We should start protecting their rights in law today.
LOL.
You can't have it both ways:
-AI is just a tool, work produced with AI is original work of the user
-AI is an intelligence that gets "inspired" by data it's trained on
Anyway. I don't want to regulate the AI.
I want to regulate the humans that make the choice of which data goes into training an AI.
This is not really how copyright works.
> an AI views it, and is inspired by it,
This is a misleading anthropomorphization of how AI works.
I hope I never have to live in a world where such a thing exists.
As in: we will change the world, all that is required is that we throw away all previous protections! The ends justify the means!
I do see a much more beneficial trajectory for LLMs vs cryptocurrencies, but yeah, this is gross and unfair.
Note: as the days go on, I continue to realize the pitfalls of Utilariansim. I do miss the simplicity, but nope.
Couldn't we say the same thing about search engines?
What value would google have without content to search for?
Is the conclusion we should make search engines pay royalities? That seems unfeasible at google scale. Should google just be straight up illegal? That also seems like a bad outcome; i like search engines i am glad they exist.
I guess i'm left with - i don't like this argument because of what it would imply for other projects if you follow the logic to its natural conclusion.
In a search engine, it's used to direct traffic to the original author. In Midjourney, it's used to create an alternative to the original author.
These many AI lawsuits will likely settle whether training LLMs falls under fair use.
Wrong. Here's Google's cache of an entire paywalled article currently on the front page of HN: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:c-xOMj...
You can get these by clicking the three dots next to any search result, expanding the options in the pop-over, and then clicking "cached."
And also not really what this is about. If AI was just another libgenisis it would be a lot less controversial.
The output of a search engine is nothing like the output of generative AI.
Use my content, to get people to me. Google's snippets kinda broke that deal and people have indeed complained about that, but otoh you can still technically opt out of being indexed.
It's not clear how you opt out of LLMs.
However, Google does get a lot of criticism when they do slurp up content and serve it back without sending traffic back to the websites! Yelp and others have testified to Congress complaining about this!
But they are free to use the fruits of the model, same as anyone else. I suppose the difference is they don't care; they already have the talent to transform their labor into visual art, so what use do they have for a visual-art-generation machine?
I find strong parallels in the building of web crawlers and search indexers, except... Perhaps the indexers provided more universal, symmetrical value. It's hard to make the case that someone crawled and added to a search index doesn't derive value from that strong, healthy index being searchable (even librarians and news reporters thrive on having data indexed and reachable; the index is a force-multiplier, it's not "stealing their labor" by crawling their sub-indexing work and agglomerating it into a bigger index, nor is it cheapening the value of their information-sorting-and-sifting skills when the machine sorts and sifts).
So perhaps there is a dimension of symmetry here where the give-and-take aspect of what is created breaks. Much like the rich don't have to care whether it's legal to sleep under a bridge, artists don't have to care whether a machine can do 60% of the work of getting to a reasonable visual representation of an idea. No, more than that: it's harmful to them if it's legal to sleep under the bridge.
They'd be landlords in this analogy, crying to the city that because people can sleep under bridges the value of the houses they maintain has dropped.
Landlords would lose income left and right.
The relevant question is: would society stop the building of these free houses to protect the interest of the landlords?
(Now, take that analogy and throw it in the trash. ;) Housing is essential; art is fundamentally a luxury good. If we want to, we can have a society that protects profit-making on luxury goods and profit-making on necessities differently. "Someone is losing income, therefore this change is bad" is too simple a rule to build a healthy society upon, but a reasonable person can conclude "Artists are losing their livelihoods, therefore this change is bad").
Money is just paper. And now with cashless systems, it's now only bits on some computers. But no one sane wants to maximize everyone accounts or print cash to hand out. Art takes hours, days, even years or human labor to produce. Copyright laws set an artificial scarcity, because if it can be replicated at no cost, there's no way for the author to recoup the cost of production.
In the analogy you provided, you'd still have to deal with land scarcity and environmental impact.
Well, depending on whether one considers the output of one of the AI image diffusion algorithms "art"... Not anymore, right? That's rather the point of the debate? That we've gone over a few decades from a world of "This wall is blank. Maybe I'll go to the art show and find a piece someone made, or commission a piece based on an idea in my head" to "This wall is blank. Maybe I'll spend two hours futzing with DALL-E and send the result off to a local print-shop, then pop it over to Michael's and frame it?"
"A new for-profit subsidiary would be formed, capable of issuing equity to raise capital and hire world class talent, but still at the direction of the Nonprofit. Employees working on for-profit initiatives were transitioned over to the new subsidiary."
Wrong way to evaluate and you're missing the complaint from the artists. It doesn't matter what the company makes or loses, it matters if people end up with money in their pockets. I don't know ML counts as derivative or not, but I don't think that's important here. Regardless it is a fact that an artist does work, that work isn't paid for, and then that work is used by someone else in some way to sell a product. The complaint is specifically that they have no control over deciding if their work can be used in that way or not.
At the end of the day, everyone working at OpenAI ends up with lots of money in their pockets. Regardless of the company profits or revenue, this money is connected to the work that these artists do, who do not make any or any substantial amounts of money. That's the underlying issue and we must read between the lines a bit to understand the difference between a specific point and the general thesis.
Also, remember Stability does have revenue as well. OpenAI is being pointed at because they are top dog, but it's not like there aren't others doing the same thing. So even a very specific justification may not refute the original complaint.
We've seen zero evidence that the non-profit side of OpenAI meaningfully constrains the for-profit side in any way, and have seen direct evidence that when the non-profit and for-profit groups disagree with each other, the for-profit side wins.
When is AI good enough that the contents it contains can be comparable to human brain content, copyright wise?
And conversely, now that we can read signals from neurons in a human brain, and create images from dreams and audio from thoughts, would not that also break the copyright of the content?
The fact is, the majority of people do not want to steal others work for profit, and for those bottom feeders that do, there are lass to discourage such behavior and to protect the original producer.
If these models were trained on creative commons licensed material only, then you'd have a leg to stand on.
I even had to pay for my tuition, and textbook material. Even if some portion of my knowledge comes from osmosis, I have still contributed at some stage to access training material.
When I was 16, I wanted to learn to code, do you know what I did? I went and purchased coding books because even at 16, I understood that it was the right thing to do. To pay the author for the privilege of accessing their work.
How basic can one get?
Would you like it if I broke into your house and used your things without asking you? Because that's about what's happening her for professionals.
But the business model emerged and delivered value to us while enough that we didn’t consider asking for money for our content. We like being searched and linked to. Less so Google snippets presented to users without the users landing on our site. Even less so generated without any interaction. But it’s all still all our content.
I don't know yet exactly how this compares, I’m trying to think it all through.
AI has different levels - output can be loosely inspired by, style cloning, or near exact reproductions of specific work.
As to the question of worth, obviously OpenAI's models have value without the training data. Just having a collection of images does not make a trained AI. But the total value of the system is a combination of that model and the training data.
* People won't notice, or the majority will forget (doesn't seem to be happening). * Raise enough money that you can smash anyone who complains in court. * Make a model good enough that can generate synthetic data and then claim new models aren't trained on anyone's data. * All of the above.
Anyway, I 100% agree with you, the value is in the content that everyone has produced for , they're repackaging and reselling it in a different format.
Seriously the audacity of these so called artists.. just because I sang a song one day does not mean I am entitled to own it and force people to pay me to be allowed to sing it. That’s absolutely insane.
If you remove all knowledge gained from learning from or copying others works, what value do you provide?
Nothing on this planet can learn without copying something else. So if we open the can of worms for AI, we should do the same for humans and require paying royalties to those who taught you.
(text commentary below the comic, in case your OS has decided to conceal the scroll bar from you and you didn't notice the page is longer)
That doesn't mean they arent stolen and that doesn't mean they are fine cuisine.
Boy does that ring true.
> Meta: We stole so much stuff that, actually, we didn't steal any stuff
> Google: If things were different, things would be totally different
> Andreeson Horowitz: But we already spent so much money
> Microsoft: Think about how this would hurt the little guys, like us
> Anthropic: Fucking shut up about it
> Hugging Face: It's super legal but honestly it might not be idk
> StabilityAI: It's legal in places that aren't here
It's worth noting that, back when it suddenly became technically feasible to copy all songs for free, the response from the rightsholders of music was, essentially, to demand that we all collectively pretend it isn't. It might make sense for the rightsholders of training data to try to do the same, if they could speak with one voice and if they had lobbyists, but I guess the fact that they can't and don't settles that.
To me, training a model is less like redistribution and more like reading something and having it influence your thoughts. You may be able to reproduce certain memorable sections of things you've read verbatim (common with poetry, for example) and you may well be able to reproduce a 'style', but you don't have the entirety of the source material memorized in a way that it could be redistributed in full (but if you did, that may be well an infringement at such a time).
If Steve the megarapist is writing articles about the latest popular injustice, does that make Steve virtuous?
If he applied his approach to Python coding, he'd be one of those folks who isn't happy until their entire program is a single `do()` method that executes by using decorators to synthesize classes and metaclasses out of thin air, that themselves generate the Python code as strings, that itself gets `eval()`'d to execute the intended program.
It's not for you.
(this is a reference to an ancient Penny Arcade bit: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24/the-adventures...)
> (this is a reference to an ancient Penny Arcade bit: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24/the-adventures...)
Thank you for posting this. I remember it, had forgotten it, and re-reading it after completely forgetting about it is almost as good as reading it for the first time. It still holds up 20 years later!
I for one really appreciate seeing language being used so artistically. (Though if I was reading a technical spec, product description, legal contract, etc... absolutely not.)
Perhaps if you read Gabe's post you could have saved yourself the trouble of making this comment.
Seems lazy to call a genAI model "intelligence" without providing any substance as to why one should believe that, but OK.
The model isn't an "intelligence" because it's not making a choice about which data you train on and be "inspired by", as people here say.
The humans that operate those models do. It's those humans that are exploiting the artists.
The AI, as many have said here, is just a tool.
Funny how it's "just a tool" when a human uses it to create art, but it's "intelligence" that gets "inspired" by art when a human uses it to create a software product.
There’s no evidence any of us are making choices either. I don’t think LLMs are intelligences in the way most people mean the word (I think that would be vastly overestimating their abilities) but appealing to choice when it’s so poorly understood — as poorly understood as intelligence, even — is not useful.
There is very clear evidence that the humans that operate the computers make the choice on which data the model gets trained on.
The discussion is about those choices.
We don’t understand what it means to be intelligent in the way people generally mean, and we don’t understand (scientifically) what it means to choose. So we can’t use choice to usefully define intelligence.
"I'm sorry, your honor, there is no scientific way to demonstrate that I have made a choice to shoot the victim dead. Therefore, I am not guilty!"
The way that an AI gets a data set to be trained on is via a choice made by humans. You can't reason your way out of the fact that a choice is made, that it's not made by the AI, and that it has consequences.
But sure, let's pretend the conversation is about intelligence of an algorithm that has no agency and no say in the matter.
Being obtuse on purpose is fun!
This is a very poor definition of intelligence and is not convincing of deserving training data
Models aren't capable of existing without humans in the loop making the choice of which data they get trained on.
Consequently, those humans and their choices need to be regulated.
One might ask: Under what circumstances would AI art be acceptable then?
For example, does it really matter if these models are created by large corporations? I don't see what the legal or ethical difference would be if it was an individual who created such a model.
Is it relevant whether their artworks were used in the training data? Well, what if a new model that is trained only on public domain photos, videos and artworks turns out to be just as capable? What if a future model is able to imitate an art style after seeing merely one or two examples of it?
It might just be a matter of time until such a model is developed. Would it be alright then? If not, why?
(Personally, I think it's the responsibility of the AI model user to use the AI art legally and ethically, as if the user made the image themselves.)
It's currently fair use to give an artist paintings and say I want something like this but different in these ways.
You can tell a script writer to watch Star Wars and write something similar.
Questions of copyright will depend on if the output is sufficiently transformative, not if copyrighted work was used as inspiration
Easy!
Under the circumstances where the artists whose art was used to train the model explicitly consented to that (without coercion), licensed their art for such use, and were fairly compensated for that.
Plenty of artists would gladly paint for AI to learn from — just like stock photographers, or clip art designers, or music sample makers.
Somehow, "paying for art" isn't an idea that has entered the minds of those who use the art.
Perhaps because it wasn't asked enough.
Information wants to be free, and you shouldn't need consent to reuse information. Furthermore, this isn't coercion -- I could just as easily make the case that artists are trying to use coercion (government power via copy-restriction laws) to impose restrictions on AI trainers.
I would say the better approach is to try and pirate the large models as much as possible -- using them to train smaller, open models, so we aren't forced to use commercial AI as much.
This is not a good argument to not pay people. Minimum wage and labour laws make it harder to compete, but they are still a good thing for society.
We don’t let companies use unpaid labour of non consenting others in different cases just to make it easier to compete.
For the former, once the contributors have been paid, all of the capitalist-related issues that come with AI will still happen, just worse. More generally, the issues of artificial scarcity get worse as well, since now the models are no longer an abundant resource, but one controlled and restricted for profit.
Unless the answer is just "I don't care if future people get screwed over, I just want to be paid once/receive pennies in royalty".
Using your analogy, it's like minimum wage laws prevented open source software from existing because contributors need to be paid minimum wage.
I'd say it's different, either you work directly on an open source project and you know the license your work is under, or you license your own work to be/not be allowed to be used by for-profit companies.
>More generally, the issues of artificial scarcity get worse as well, since now the models are no longer an abundant resource, but one controlled and restricted for profit.
Sure but that should be done on a higher level, that takes on copyright largely instead of just letting artists and writers be screwed over. We are currently in a situation that only benefits one party anyway.
No. This only forces open, non-profit models to think a bit harder about incentives to provide artists for contributing their work into the training set.
What you exhibit here is a failure of imagination.
I hate to make a sort-of standard Internet retort but artists (and "society") don't have any obligation to reserve some space for AI art to be OK within culture. Maybe such a possibility exists and maybe it doesn't. But given that present AI is something like a complex but semi-literal average of the art works various largish companies could find, it seems reasonable to respond to people's objections to that.
Like leaded gas, the government can make regulations to deal with anything should they choose to.
Why do you think it's okay for massive companies to freely profit off the work of others?
If only saying it would make it so.
Unfortunately, it's not easy to make this legal argument given how copyright law only protects fixed, tangible expressions, not ideas, concepts, principles, etc. and has a gaping hole called 'fair use.'
1. Models are trained with 100% uncopyrighted or properly licensed input data
2. Every output of the ML model is evaluated to make sure it's not too close to training data
3. Copyright law is changed to have a specific cutout for AI
#1 is the approach taken by Adobe, although it generally is harder or more expensive to do.
#2 destroys most AI business models
#3 has been done in some countries, but seems likely that if done in the US it would still have some limits.
For example, I could train a model on a single image, song, or piece of written text/code. Then I run inference, and get out an exact copy of that image, song, or text. If there are no limits around AI and copyright, then we've got a loophole around all of copyright law. I don't think that the US would be up for devaluing intellectual property like that.
4. A ruling comes down that enshrines what all the big companies have been doing (with the blessings of their armies of expensive, talented, and conservative legal teams) as legitimate fair use
https://twitter.com/Rahll/status/1739003201221718466
It's frankly impressive how well this image is embedded in the weights of their model, down to tufts of hair. And it's far from the only one.
You are forgetting the massive asterisk that you need to provide multiple paragraphs of the original article in order to get verbatim output from chatgpt. In what world are people doing that to avoid paying the NYT?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/ny-times-sues-op...
And this is a screenshot of their session whith copilot
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Scree...
Its funny that the behavior was patched if OpenAI believes it isn't copyright infringement.
It supports an argument that GPT shouldnt produce outputs that are extremely similar, not that the content can not be used as an input.
as well as all the output it ever generated
Does that mean that models that can not produce copies of X length ARE fair use?
not necessarily
"sufficient but not necessary" I believe is the term
it is a fringe case that rarely occurs, and only with a lot of user prompting.
legal discovery could almost certainly compel the LLM host to provide access to the output of the weights themselves without the "gatekeeper" present
If there is a case to be made, I think it has to be around the original use of the works, the transcription process. Not the weights, or the output
If the archive can't produce the original work, it's not infringing.
If you printed the binary of Harry Potter and sold it as a painting, that would be fair use. It doesn't matter if the data is encoded in it, if it is not used for extraction.
Think of Andy warhol's Campbell Soup. Nobody is going to confuse the art for a can of soup and try to eat it. That's not being sold as a label for other soups. However, the original Campbell Soup data is absolutely encoded there.
However, if other artists are inspired by this style of comic, and it influences their work - that is simply fair use. If that artist is some rando using a tool like Midjourney - that is inspired by the art but doesn't reproduce it - it is not at all clear to me that this is not also fair use.
That already clearly means that they couldn't publish the model directly even if they wanted to, since they don't have the right to distribute copies of those works, even if they are represented in a weird lossy encoding. Whether it's legal for them to give access to the model through an API that prevents returning copyrighted content is a much more complex legal topic.
or… it is possibly a transformative work of the all the works that went into it's training, which would lead to a strong fair use argument. Given how permissive the courts have been with transformative work, this seems like an easier argument to make.
Human artists can also create copies when instructed to.
That doesn't mean that the rest of their work isn't transformative, or that the process of leading isn't fair use.
Similarly, the law doesn't bar artists from learning, but provides recourse, when and if artists create and sell copes.
Of course. The model isn't making a decision as to what may be used as training data. The humans training it do.
>If someone uses Midjourney to produce someone else's IP, that user (not Midjourney) would be in violation of copyright
That's like saying that if a user unpacks the dune _full_movie.zip I'm sharing online, it's them who have produced the copyrighted work. And me, the human who put the movie Dune into that zip file, is doing no wrong. Clearly, there is no compression algorithm that can launder IP, right?
>However, if other artists are inspired by this style of comic, and it influences their work - that is simply fair use
The AI isn't inspired by anything. It's not a sentient being, it's not making decisions, and its behavior isn't regulated by laws because it does not have a behavior of its own. Humans decide what goes into an AI model, and what goes out. And humans who train AI models on art don't get "inspired". They transform it into a derivative work — the AI model.
One that has been shown to be awfully close to dune_full_movie.zip if you use the right unpacking tools. But even that isn't necessary. Using work of others in your own work without permission and credit usually goes by less inspiring words: plagiarism, theft, ripping off.
Regardless of whether you reproduce the work 1:1, and whether you can be punished by law for it.
>tool like Midjourney - that is inspired by the art but doesn't reproduce it
Never in the history of humanity has the word inspired meant something that a tool can do. If it's "inspired" (which is something only sentient beings can do), then we should be crying out about human right abuses the way the AI models are trained and treated.
If it's just a tool, it's not "inspired".
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either pay your computer minimum wage for working for you, or stop saying that it can get "inspired" by art (whether it's training an AI model or creating a zip file).
> The firm said payment for all of the copyrighted material already used in LLMs would cost the companies that built them "tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in royalty payments."
https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-horowitz-ai-...
Watching the superstars of venture capital whine that copyright is unfair is quite something, though.
It seems like the only people that will be impacted are the abusive auto-generated spammer accounts with thousands of garbage tracks uploaded garnering 1200 streams a year by people accidentally playing them via Google Home misinterpretations etc.
So yes an individual song might be $3 per year but that just shows how poor their royalties are to begin with. And tries to obscure the fact that artists don’t just release one song ever.
There’s thousands of artists who maybe even were somewhat successful at some point in their career but would have a lot of songs in their back catalog that don’t get that many streams annually. Suddenly they’ve gone from not making enough per stream from Spotify, to just getting paid nothing at all.
The fact that "research, technological advancement, and construction would proceed much more quickly" without copyright is exactly why abolishing copyright is the just and correct thing to do.
I am not sure where the “unnatural restriction” quote comes from, could you illuminate me?
As far as what the constitution says about copyright, it seems only to say that it is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”
which, as an involuntary donor, is exactly what I want
- slavers, probably.
Of course slavery != AI, but the argument that we should protect companies from their expenses to enable their bad business model is very entitled and presumptuous.
Thousands of companies have failed because their businesses models didn’t work, and thousands more will.
AI will be fine. It probably won’t be as stupidly lucrative as the current model, but we’ll find a way.
Yes, I know Adobe said so. No, I don't trust them.
Facts:
1. Adobe Firefly is trained with Adobe Stock assets. [1]
2. Anyone can submit to Adobe Stock.
3. Adobe Stock already has AI-generated assets that are not correctly tagged so. [2]
4. It's hard to remove an image from a trained model.
Unless Adobe carefully scrutinize every image in the training set, the logical conclusion is Adobe Firefly already contains at least second-handed unauthorized images (e.g. those generated by Stable Diffusion). It's just "not Adobe's fault".
[1] https://www.adobe.com/products/firefly.html : "The current Firefly generative AI model is trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired."
[2] Famous example: https://twitter.com/destiny_thememe/status/17448423657672255...
It's actually just "anyone making models". If you train a model with other people's art (without their permission) and then distribute the model or output for free, your still stealing their work, even if you make zero profit.
I would love to know why not.
LLM text and images aren't.
OpenAI has one asset: GPT.
>Commercial use does not automatically make the use copyright infringement, but it is an important deciding factor.
https://saltiellawgroup.com/2021/10/%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8Bcan-yo...
If it's an infringement when OpenAI does it, it would be an infringement when a company with 1/1000th the value did it.
https://saltiellawgroup.com/2021/10/%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8Bcan-yo...
In almost all cases I'd guess that artists whose style is being copied by many genAI users are getting way more exposure than in some alternate universe where midjourney didn't exist. But nobody looks at it that way, they just see somebody else making profit and think they deserve some.
if it was parody or commentary or otherwise found a new market, it might be allowed under fair use, but the fourth factor of fair use concerns the effect on the market value of the original
That said it is unclear if the connection is strong enough between a given artist and their replacement.
If I can make a voice over that sounds like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, why would I pay him to make the voice over for me? If I can make artwork in the style of X why would I commission X to make that artwork instead? Nobody cares if it actually was made by them as long as people think it was made by them. So "them" gets screwed because nobody will use them. We're obviously talking in very strict ones and zeros here with "nobody". Except for the nobody caring what you think you sound like
All content will be behind a subscription and the algorithm will say "you like Janis Joplin? Let's autoplay some close-enough AI artists that don't exist that we won't have to pay any royalties to!" You'll get an offer to upgrade to Double Pro+ for a special introductory rate to skip those tracks.
This discussion makes people immediately place themselves under the boot of technology and display active helplessness almost entirely because they can't handle the mentality that it's now a commodity to get what they consider a "unique artstyle". That you can be "unique" if you consistently draw a line in thicker shades around borders and use flashy colors in a way no one has decided to try yet, and that this style "belongs" to you being extrapolated to the point of your artistic hobby becoming the only reflection of your identity as a person. Sad for those who staked their lives around capitalistic ideals.
My children's children are going to have a few classic books that were illustrated by humans, but anything new or reissued won't be.
Magazines, articles, and covers that might have featured human illustration will be gone. It'll be too easy to throw pennies for "draw something topical to article title in the style of artist that appeals to target demographic".
Everything else is a derivative work which falls outside of copyright claims
How would you like the law to change? That’s part of the equation too
Of course there are models trained only on licensed materials already, which reaches the same result of the material creators obsolescence
It's not fair use because you want it to be, and it's not at all legally clear if this defence is valid in the case of AI training. But it's not clear it isn't, either.
This is basically what all the noise and PR money is about, currently, in hope that shaping the narrative will shape the legal decisions.
It's a bit of a quibble to differentiate between allowable infringement or exception, here, so i've edited original.
[note: 0xcde4c3db points out correctly that it does actually show up since 1976, but in a way the defers much of the definition back to case law, so same effect]
Even this is a bit murky though, as a district court has argued it goes beyond that.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-...
There are complications, but google can use thumbnails because essentailly they are used to "review" the website.
Has google sampled and hosted the whole image on their own website and made more iamges in the style of say mickey mouse, they would have been taken to town by the owners.
This is why there are no commercial movies on youtube (without an explicit agreement) and why DCMA takedowns exist.
One only needs to read the Supreme Court decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith. In this case, it was found to not be fair use, but with a forceful dissent from Elena Kagan. And this is just a straight-up use of a photograph / art-piece. Add technology to the mix and things get really messy quickly.
"Years later, Goldsmith granted a limited license to Vanity Fair for use of one of her Prince photos as an “artist reference for an illustration.” The terms of the license included that the use would be for “one time” only. Vanity Fair hired Warhol to create the illustration, and Warhol used Goldsmith’s photo to create a purple silkscreen portrait of Prince, which appeared with an article about Prince in Vanity Fair’s November 1984 issue. "
In both cases, we're relying on copyright. The companies are saying that you can access the models under a license. It's not too hard to circumvent that license or get access through a third party or separate service: but doing so would obviously be seen as deliberate circumvention. We can easily compare that to an artist putting up a click-through in front of a gallery that says that by clicking 'agree' you agree not to use their work for training. And in fact, it's literally the same restriction in both cases: OpenAI maintains that they can use copyright to enforce that people accessing their model avoid using their model to train AIs. Paradoxically, they also maintain that artists can not use copyright to block people accessing their images from using those images to train AIs.
Facebook has released model weights with licenses that restrict how those model weights are used. But I can get those models without clicking 'agree' on that license agreement. They're mirrored all over the place. We'll see what courts say, but Facebook's public argument is that their license doesn't stop applying if I download their software from a mirror. So I find it hard to believe that Facebook honestly believes in a fair use argument if they also claim that the same fair use argument doesn't apply to their own copyrighted material that they've released online (assuming that model weights can even be copyrighted in the first place).
This is one of my biggest issues with the fair use argument -- it's not that there's nothing convincing about it, in a vacuum I'd very likely agree with it. I don't think that licenses should allow completely arbitrary restrictions. But I also can't ignore that the vast majority of companies making this argument are making it extremely inconsistently. They know that their business models literally don't work if competitors figure out ways to use their services to rapidly produce competing models. If another company comes up with a training method to rapidly replicate model weights or to augment existing models using their output, none of these companies will be OK with that.
None of these companies believe that fair use invalidates license terms when it comes to their own IP.
And we should be pushing hard for the entire package (not to say that you're not, more just pointing out that this is a package deal) -- I am not a copyright maximalist, but I especially don't want a model where only artists and individuals are subject to copyright restrictions. I'm of the opinion that it is good for these companies to take a credibility hit for their hypocrisy and for us to make it clear that the fair use argument has to be something that applies to everybody. I hope that this hypocrisy is something that comes up in court if these lawsuits go through, and ideally I'd like it to become a sticking point where trying to have their cake and eat it too does hurt these companies' legal arguments.
I want limited copyright across the board, but a system with maximum fair use for companies like OpenAI and minimal fair use for consumers and individuals is worse than a system with expansive copyright for everyone. I think it's a good thing for companies like OpenAI to be unable to make selective arguments. We shouldn't treat their end goals as irrelevant.
It's also very true that there are open models that take a permissive approach, but those models are in my experience usually not the primary target of most criticism (outside of the "open models are dangerous" FUD). The linked comic explicitly calls out "profit-making companies that own the most-used channels of communication." I'm not sure the artist would phrase it this way, but I think reading between the lines the artist is very likely coupling together ownership with their complaint -- they are talking about the injustice of having their work appropriated into a form that is locked down and controlled and that exists for the benefit of the profit-making companies who want to own yet another channel of communication (in this case artistic communication itself). I suspect that part of that feeling of injustice does directly come from an understanding that as an individual anyone would be sued into oblivion if they tried to make the same arguments in the opposite direction.
Does that get rid of the fair use argument? No. But it is impossible to actually talk about the fair use debate in a useful way while ignoring the context of that debate. To just mention fair use and nothing else is leaving out a ton of context about why artists are mad, and about why this feels unjust to so many people, and about the regular inconsistencies in how these arguments are often applied. We don't have to get rid of fair use arguments, but I personally think it's more responsible to include that context. I worry that leaving that context out is playing directly into the hands of companies that are trying to create an outcome of selective enforcement for IP.
----
It's a bit of a sidenote, but on the subject of truly open models, I will say that it is great that those models are licensed the way that they're licensed, but I'd still rather have legal recognition that algorithmically generated weights are not subject to copyright at all. It's nice when companies are permissive, but it also subtly implies that they have a choice whether to be permissive. As someone who favors expanding fair use, I would prefer that they not have that choice. I disagree with the application of any license to model weights, permissive or not. I think at best those model weights could be subject to a database license, maybe, but I'm honestly a little skeptical of even that: I think that model weights are a factual and reproducible artifact of training, not a creative work.
In this case it would be 'yes, I used this copyrighted work in a way that would be infringement were it not a fair use, but here's why it's fair-use.'
The generative AI that is changing the world today was built off the work of three groups - software developers, Reddit comment writers, and digital artists. The Reddit comment writers released their rights long ago and do not care. We are left with software developers and digital artists.
In general, the software developers were richly paid, the digital artists were not. The software developers released their work open to modification; the artists did not. Perhaps most importantly, software developers created the generative AIs, so in a way it is a creation of our own; cannibalizing your own profession is a much different feeling than having yours devoured by another alien group.
If Washington must burn, let it be the British and not the Martians. How might we have reacted if what has been done was not by our own hand?
The technology seems indecipherable to a non-techie.
The law seems indecipherable to a layman.
The ethics seem indecipherable to everyone.
With so much confusion, to feel that one has been treated justly it might not be enough to participate in a class-action lawsuit resolving what happened. It would help with public trust if there were available for example protocols or sites for connecting people who want to sue companies. - Just something that shows that society does support values of equality and justice.
1. Don't do things to people that they don't want to be done to them. 2. Do as you would be done by.
It really is that simple.
One one hand I want better AI that can generate whatever image that comes to my mind.
On the other hand I don’t want it to blatantly copy someone else’s style that they spent years making.
US is pretty fucked since it has very little safety net compared to other modern countries if AI really started replacing humans.
This is people’s livelihoods we are talking about.
Will AI cause people to commit suicide? Yeah if it starts replacing them and they lose meaning in life.
So ask permission. Do you want to have our model ingest your work? Y/N
Permission isn't the end-all-be-all. I don't ask for your permission to exist or walk down the street, for example. You could try to make the case that people need to ask for permission first, on a balanced-harms argument, but it's not self-evident to be true.
"It's also not inherently unethical to do things that someone doesn't want, because not all wants are valid or reasonable. A child may not want to have the candy put away, but it is still done anyway." - ronsor
Absence of "no" is not the same as "yes".
There is a very narrow window where you can argue about the proportionality of state's monopoly on violence to coerce someone. There you can argue about the competing ethical needs to keep society safe vs a criminal's lack of consent to be imprisoned.
But that's not what we're discussing. Should a large company be able to ignore consent in order to create a product for profit?
No.
On the other hand, copyright proponents are the ones trying to coerce other people, restricting them from using what they already have access to via the use of copyright laws, backed by state violence. We do not consent to copyright laws.
Of course, the copyright of corporations producing AI is protected by state violence as well. But I do not regard that as legitimate either, so people should try and make that more open (pirating the models) instead of trying to close down their own works.
Unfortunately, we live in a world governed by laws and society. For 300 years copyright has been the law of the land (in varying degrees). It was bought about, in part, because people feel that someone mis-using their property is undesirable.
You cannot tell people that their feels are invalid. Lots of these artists feel aggrieved that their art is being misused. They think the law has been broken and a social contract has been violated. What argument do you have against that other than "you're wrong to feel that way"?
> It was bought about, in part, because people feel that someone mis-using their property is undesirable.
Really? Wasn't it to promote the progress of the arts and sciences? The whole point of IP laws is to, ultimately, benefit the public domain. Feelings by themselves aren't a really good argument either, when talking about a law that does harm to the general public.
How do you ask permission? <img permission="yes"> ? How do you know the original author of the image is the one posting this?
It's also not inherently unethical to do things that someone doesn't want, because not all wants are valid or reasonable. A child may not want to have the candy put away, but it is still done anyway.
This situation is not an exception. There is no compelling reason to force people to have their work ingested by an AI. Unless you believe that large companies have the inherent right to disregard the rights of individuals?
Do I have the right to not let {MINORITY} ingest my work? The right to not allow my words to be quoted? To say you cannot rip my mp3s from CD and must buy it twice if you want to listen on your ipod? To prevent it from entering public domain or to ban fair use transformations like parody?
Was it unethical of Emily Dickinson's family to publish her work posthumously and without consent, and, separately, is it unethical for me to read it today? Was it wrong to translate The Art of War, given that Sun Tzu wanted it to give the Chinese an advantage over their enemies?
I (obviously) don't believe that large companies can disregard human rights. I do believe that ASI is a necessary precondition to a post-scarcity utopia and that every day it is delayed is a day that a billion people will suffer unnecessarily, and I admit that probably biases me against people in the first world who are doing their damnedest to delay it anyway because they want money. I do recognize that the possibility that OpenAI et al don't get us any closer to ASI or the possibility that ASI destroys rather than enriches humanity are valid critiques of that.
Ultimately, I'm strongly confident that people don't have unlimited rights to what is done with their works, weakly confident that one such limit is on the right to prevent their use as training data, and very strongly confident that this is a complicated ethical question.
Ban private large models trained on public data, require them to be public weights.
If a company wants to train large private model, they can do it with their own data.
To draw a parallel in software, we have MIT licenses that allow for-profit, private use of source code in the public. The copyleft license might be more aligned to what you are envisioning?
You can't ban it for open source either.
Real world policy is rarely black and white, all or nothing. An inability to prevent every instance of something is not a reason to forgo any action
Just because country X has slavery, doesnt mean the US can't ban it. There may be some consequences, and disadvantages to doing so, but that is a trade off, not a show stopper.
Same thing with open source. There is lots of illegal and bootlegged content that is shared on the internet, and cant be eradicated. That doesnt mean it can all be freely bought at Walmart.
They would be better off if you did it the other way around - ban large public models.
But it seems unfair that a company can own such a model. It's not their work, it's a codified expression of basically our entire cultural output as a species. We should all own it.
Maybe, just maybe better to ask artist, who should own it?
We can fix it. Lets create "for-ai-training" tag. With default value "false", so, when tag is absent you can't use text and images for ai training.
The issue here is models generating copy written work verbatim.
People claiming that training on copyrighted work is a violation of copyright (its not) have no legal legs to stand on. They are purposelessly muddying concepts though to make it seem like it is. However any competent judge is going to see right through this.
And I am in favor of more stringent licenses than that: you must pay me to use my data.
One might think that tools like mid journey are much within the same category, but I think there is a key difference. The system of reproduction up to this point has largely been centered on successful and renowned artists—the only way you'd make money is by reproducing something that already had a lot of value to people, and it was also incredibly clear that it was a reproduction. In this case, things have changed. Now, the vast works of largely obscure artists are partially reproduced, and in a fashion that further occludes their source. These artists rightly feel robbed as they endure the treatment of a van gogh without the riches of fame or the palliative of death before fame.
https://catandgirl.com/heroes-and-villains/
The universe, I’m sometimes convinced, has a dark sense of humour.
I don’t currently have a MJ subscription or I’d try it.
Lesson being: give yourself a name as an artist that cannot be used easily in an AI prompt.
I think some musicians did this with artist names and track names that meant they couldn't easily be represented as MP3s, but could easily be printed on the tracklisting on the CD inlay.
No it's not. It's being sour that you live in an interconnected world where others might find a way to benefit as a side effect of your own efforts.
Their struggle to subsist has literally nothing to do with this other party's profits.
By their own admission, their struggle to subsist was a choice. It was a choice they made before these social media companies even existed. And they deliberately chose to continue with the same poorly-performing model that didn't make money, because they preferred doing it that way.
And now they are sad that others have not made that same choice, and are making money.
If you think the work is so great. charge for it. let the market decide. i think twitter/x does this now somewhat.
how is this not similar to thinking google owes me money because my tweet appeared in their search results?
which is really not dissimilar to what midjourney is giving you which is a result from an array of public(?) works if i understand (not an AI/ML expert)
My impression of generative AI is that yes, it is not any one specific result, which is in some ways even worse because artists cannot get any credit or compensation whatsoever despite the end result depending at least partially on their work.
I get it, though I had the day GitHub CoPilot came out and I wanted them to take a long walk off a short pier. (And I still do.)
Yeah, no, you don't get it. Sorry.
The other complaints are mostly about how it has become hard to not share to social media, but that's mostly a complaint about how people are.
He can still just post on a website, it's not really the fault of social media companies that people prefer that.
Their complaint is not being able to post art for its own sake because it will be hoovered up into datasets to train more AI: They are forced to submit to helping train AI or not post their art.
You cannot copyright a style. A person is perfectly within their right to copy your art style when they produce their own work. So, I think "duplicate the style of" and "taking inspiration from" are the same thing in this context.
Also, the pool of people that can imitate a skilled artist is much smaller than those who can prompt "in the style of Picasso...".
http://www.dorktower.com/2024/01/05/putting-the-ai-into-aiee...
Artists own a copyright to their actual works. Not to a "style". Besides, all artists learned from other artists and borrowed lots of ideas from predecessors.
Why should we hold AI to a higher standard than we hold human artists to?
Why hold it to human standards at all? It cannot be argued with, jailed, or shot. The only vaguely human thing it can do is draw kinda good.
Art has been democratized. It's not going back in the bottle. A kid with a laptop anywhere on the planet will be able to compete with the largest Hollywood studio in the near future.
The same can be said for enforcing intellectual property rights, and we do enforce IP in western countries despite other countries not respecting those rights. We could end up where models can only be legally trained with public domain IP, enforced by regulation, royalties, private causes of action, etc.
You may like things the way they are, but it's false that "nothing" can be done to change it.
Ah yes, the Nirvana Falacy. [0]
Microsoft, Google, etc are corporations that operate within a legal framework. You can quite readily claw back some of their profits from such ill-gotten gains and redistribute them to the creators who they currently intend to put out of work.
"Oh, but some pirate will do it! Oh, but China will do it! So why not let those poor megacorporations do it, too!"
So what. The megaorporations who nominally answer to and respect the rule of law are the lion's share of this problem. They can be made to stop. Solve them and you're 90% there, don't get bogged down in the other 10%.
Make the decisions that suit your current needs, including deciding if it is time to go away for good. If you risk too many times but can't reach any relevant material success in a context that is unfavorable. Where you need to be an entrepreneur to make serious money.
Sometimes deciding to give up can be the only way to see. I'm not endorsing suicide to anyone, but it can be part of everyone's life just once, and then it is finished. 'No suffering' can be now or surely later, and you will most likely "rejoin" in the next chapter of an infinite book of human lives depending on your beliefs in this life because nobody knows the truth behind that.
The same reason that photorealism as an artistic movement still exists despite photography existing.
The same reason people still learn to play the piano.
Why do people do anything that has an arguably better and more efficient option available?
Thousands of people do and produce wonderful works of art. Even before the AI craze, not everyone embraced even "plain old" digital art. The physicality of feeling a graphite pencil scratching a blank page is gratifying and cannot be reproduced by typing a prompt somewhere online.
The other day I saw a skilled artist on social media saying that it feels pointless after AI, and I found it really sad.
Knowing any non-prompt skill just becomes a frustration, you know the machine can make the finished product in 5 seconds yet you have to spend the 20 hours it used to take when the output will just be judged against how many promptings could be done in those hours.
It’s like a musket against the A10 gatling gun
I’d never advise anyone to bother learning anything that’s promptable.
Just embrace it because honestly everything else is over.
What is the pinnacle of human achievement? I guess anything you say, someone else will claim that's not it either.
What is the pinnacle of human achievement?
Clearly not art if we measure it by how easy it is to automate. Is that why artists took pride in themselves? Because they thought they couldn't be automated? Because some one said that art was important because of feelings?
I dunno, you introduced this line of questioning. You're the one who talked about assumptions. Isn't it up to you to answer it?
> Clearly not art if we measure it by how easy it is to automate
No, "clearly" nothing. I'm disagreeing with you here.
> Because some one said that art was important because of feelings?
Is anything that humans do important to you? If so, why? If not, why not?
I'm going to show all my cards here: I think the nihilistic view that nothing ultimately matters so why worry about anything at all, and let's concede all battles, is antithetical to human existence. You're not outright espousing this nihilistic worldview, but you're coming quite close in my opinion.
If you don't care about art, then pick something you do care about. If you don't care about anything enough, then all debate will be fruitless.
> Why would a kid want to spend thousands of hours practicing with pencil and paper, when they can get a much more impressive result by typing a couple of words on a web site?
No I did not introduce this line of questioning.
Anyway, it seems like a lot of "meaning" people get out of thing is actually completely based on pride and if there is something out there that can do it better it's not worth doing because their sense of pride is destroyed.
In essence, humans reject the potential for a scarcity free paradise because of lack of "meaning" (aka pride). It's almost biblical.
Edit: so you don't care about meaning? It's one of the fundamental human traits, I think. Just existing isn't enough for a lot of people, and I disagree there's something biblical about this.
I didnt introduce this line of questioning. Learn to reread and maybe tjink a little more deeply about the good outcomes of automating intelligence.
You just have to be a complete moron to think more intelligence in the world is a bad thing.
In whatever direction it takes, art will find what is difficult or obvious for AI to fake and then that will be valued.
Think of it like this, aluminum used to be prized by kings, honored guests would get aluminum cutlery instead of gold. Aluminum got cheap, there are still fancy spoons.
If you paid a bunch of people to just churn out material in the form of text....art....comics....and video and then used it to train you model then is that ethical?
Because plenty of jobs own the intellectual property or copyright if your doing this work on company time....so simply by hiring people to create data for your model bypasses this ethics problem. You could even run a side business publishing articles these employees write.
I think that was exactly their point. And a better one than your.
B: human influenced/inspired by artist's work
In both scenarios (A) and (B), the activity may or may not be commercial.
Why are we so much more worried about (A), when (B) is considered totally fine, even desirable?
Please note neither A nor B involve verbatim copying.
At what point does fair use become unfair, and should that question be considered separately from the context of doing it trillions of times?
And the further context of the resulting computer code being used to make a profit?
The real question is about the scale and how "original" ai works are. Does generative ai enabling this at scale make it different than humans doing it? Is there something special about human authorship?
I personally don't care if my open source code gets trained on by AI, but I'm not sure about the social contract around artistic expression.
We search google then find a spam page repeating our question, then we blame google! LOL
In the old days, if you had an interesting question, you would write down your progress in a draft blog post, you would polish it (or not at all) and present the answer to those looking to do the same or you would leave it to your comment section for others to rage about the problem, sometimes answer it for you, sometimes they would write a post of their own.
If things are good enough someone will link to it... but now? Nothing is ever good enough? If everything is anonymized dumped on on stack overflow no one maintains it. There is no free flow of dialog about the topic. It tries to be all work, no fun. Who wrote this stuff? What else did they do? Why are all these wrong answers on the page?
Anyway, to state the obvious, Google doesn't make websites.
This is naive at best.
Even as a kid, I saw horror stories about how badly artists were exploited.
I watched my parents struggle. I never experienced anything near poverty, but I definitely experienced the fear and anxiety of standing on the precipice of it. I remember taking up the responsibility of helping my profoundly depressed and grieving mother sort through the mail of our family business and seeing how far behind we were. This was a few years before we sold everything to avoid bankruptcy, which was also around the time I left for college.
I'm not complaining about this. I think it was good for me. It bred a cynicism and understanding in me: this world isn't fair. It isn't going to get better. You are going to have to fight for the life you want, and you will probably still lose.
I understand the desire to pass gently over the earth. But this has never been a kind world, and has not become any MORE kind since 1999.
This is, I think, an example of toxic optimism. Many people over-estimate the likelihood of a positive outcome.
Not to make excuses for Midjourney. They should have asked permission from artists to use their work.
Please feel free to include adverts as a means to monetize your work, my first impulse was to disable uBlock on your page.
This is true for everyone. Due to human nature, we will make AI increasingly capable at an exponential pace. Eventually, our efforts to control them will become futile, and humans will no longer be the dominant species.
Luckily, we are uniquely positioned in evolution to prevent this. We must merge with AI.
also the discovery of the list was a strong rebuttal to the (iirc) CEO of Midjourney complaining that finding the source of online images in order to ask permission / offer compensation was just too arduous a task and also that they didn't bother. Well here's a list of thousands of artist styles they bothered to identify.
If all the calligraphers drop dead, the printing press still works. If everyone who hand makes fabrics drops dead, the automatic fabric machines continue to develop.
But midjourney doesn’t work without artists, it depends on them like a parasite depends on its host. Once the host dies, the parasite is doomed.
So it’s value-destroying, more vandalism than capitalism. Or maybe like Viking pillaging. It’s like the people who used to burn millions of penguins alive to convert their fat into oil.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21501-boiled-to-death...
If all artists drop dead, MidJourney still has a trained model that will continue to work.... it relied on artists to become operational (just like the printing press and automatic looms relied on their respective artisans success) but it is not dependent on them to continue to function.
Without artists, midjourney will never learn a new style. It is not capable of advancing.
soon.
I know I'm being unfair but I think it's important to say the quiet part out loud so we can all be aware of which way the wind blows, because I can't be alone in this feeling. If the class action lawsuit presents the justices with a bunch of soyboys clamoring about AI stealing their "hard work" I have a hard time imagining them ruling against AI.
GPL 4 here we come. Training a model with such code will require the model to be open source.
However, in every single conversation about fair use, two followup questions need to be asked:
1. If you're making the argument that AI's "learning" from existing pieces is just like a human learning from existing pieces, then you're indirectly comparing that AI to a human being. So let's be consistent about that analogy: commissioning or working with a human artist to produce a piece of art does not grant you copyright over that art.
To people who are saying that AIs training are just like humans learning from art, do you support the idea that AI-generated works can not be copyrighted? Because that's the consistent view of AI as analogues for human training: commissioning humans doesn't grant you copyright.
2. If we're viewing AI training as fair use, then is it fair use to circumvent the licenses on these models in order to train other models on them? The majority of these commercial tools have explicit clauses in their terms of service to prevent their use when training other AIs. Is it fair use to circumvent that TOS?
If the TOS is in a different category that somehow magically gets rid of the fair use question, then if an artist puts up a TOS in front of viewing a piece of artwork that says it may not be used to train AIs, does training on that art stop being fair use?
It doesn't make sense that one shrinkwrap license would be OK and one wouldn't be. If Midjourney has a legal case that circumventing its TOS and gaining access isn't fair use, then artists should be able to put up a click-through in front of images that includes an agreement not to train and that should be legally enforceable.
If artists can't do that, if artists can't legally enforce terms of use in front of artwork about how that artwork can be used, then commercial companies building these models shouldn't be able to either.
----
It's not that the fair use argument doesn't hold any water, it's that people tend to be very selective about how they want that argument applied. And I think that's revealing. Taking a step back from those questions:
It's somewhat frustrating to have debates on this because the debates are very abstract and are disconnected from the completely bad-faith way in which these arguments are often proposed. You're forced to debate in a very dry way, and what you really want to do is step back and say, "none of these companies actually believe in open culture, all of them are copyright maximalists when it's convenient, none of them care about accessibility of art tools, they just want to plunder the culture and insert themselves as middlepeople between art and the people who make art."
We all know this is a grift. We know what these companies actually believe, but we have to pretend we're having some kind of emotionless conversation about "Open" models and to look at their uses as if the primary intended audience is people using image generators to make printouts for their local D&D campaigns.
But come on, that's not the reality that's ever going to happen.
That kind of indie, low-cost usage and Open access can't exist in the long-term if these models are intended to be the commercial powerhouses that companies want. Monetization of their output and access necessarily requires restriction of their output and access. The truth that we all kind of know deep down is that these models are about inserting a monetary layer between human beings and art, a layer that is owned by private corporations and is deliberately used (regardless of its quality or suitability) to devalue labor and to poison the resources that these models were built on in order to reduce competition and to give gatekeepers more leverage over their workforces and their markets. It's a tragedy of the commons being played out in real time: the creation of a service that just like every other privatized platform will become crappier and worse over time as more control over model use is taken away and as prices increase and as restrictions over usage are increasingly layered on top normal individuals who will increasingly need to ask permission in order to create. At the same time, businesses hope that model usage will shrink and dilute the fields that are necessary to sustain those models, fields that are now treated as competitors, and who's destruction is desirable because the elimination of that resource makes it harder to replicate or compete with established AI models.
As is very often the case, the goal is to get up a ladder and then pull the ladder up.
That doesn't mean that this isn't fair use (although as someone who advocates very strongly for expansion of fair use and heavy reduction of copyright, I will say that fair use and morality are two entirely different subjects). But we can advocate for fair use without pretending that the companies and grifters making these arguments actually believe them. Actual ubiquitous open access to AI art tools would be toxic to a company like Midjourney; Midjourney's entire business model relies on them constructing an artificial moat in front of the production of art that forces creators to give them money. And the existence of that moat relies on Midjourney being able to restrict what people can do with their model, it can not exist without strong legal protections around copyright and licensing agreements. If Midjourney actually believed in free culture and free use, they wouldn't be launching a private model behind Discord with a bunch of ridiculous license terms telling people what does and doesn't count as fair use when using Midjourney. They wouldn't be pretending that model outputs are covered by copyright. As far as I'm concerned, every single "license" in front of model weights or model output is an admission that the companies behind those models don't actually believe in the fair use argument. They're just saying it because it's convenient.
I would love to have a purely intellectual debate about AI as a genuinely open tool that can fit into artists' belts alongside other tools. I would love to ignore the hype cycle and the spammers and the grifters who all couldn't care less about making creation accessible or expanding the scope of what artists create. But unfortunately, I can't; there's a real world that exists alongside that hypothetical debate, and we are allowed to look at that real world for context. And I can be sympathetic to the fair use argument while still recognizing the utter hypocrisy behind how companies actually use that argument, and while still recognizing that the direction that large companies are pushing AI and the way they want to use AI is toxic to real artists.
----
That doesn't mean I'm panicking about it any more than I'm panicking about GPT trying to program. I understand the limitations of these tools as well, and a little bit of perspective goes a long way. But I still understand why artists are upset. I don't always agree with the specific arguments but it's not just them being sore losers or something, they have a legitimate grievance with the AI market even if they don't always perfectly know how to put it into words.
And in a lot of ways, this doesn't really have anything to do with the quality of the output or about what's "better" or "fair" anyway; that's not really what the debate is about. Midjourney would be perfectly happy to live in a world where all art gets kind of crappy and repetitive as long as everybody uses Midjourney to produce it. They don't care, they just want you to pay them every time you generate a picture. So the social dynamics around the market are very different from the technical dynamics or even the philosophical arguments that people make.
Let's say, during hard times when you don't have a job, fans of the game you worked on notice you on twitter and say "hey I loved your work, here's $5 for your patreon." Now you can pay your medical bills this month.
Their livelihood was taken from them. Midjourney is theft.
Not all of us participate in the form of thought control that has been euphemistically pushed as "intellectual property."
But I certainly think that the casting the act of copying bytes from one medium to another as "theft" is propagandistic and dishonest.
Anyway, I don't think there's much I can say to change your mind - talk to other artists, especially those who are artists as their main hustle.
Main gig, although of course the sands are shifting rapidly with regard to what that means, for precisely the reasons this conversation is so stimulating.
> Your new album is a bop.
Jeez man that's a nice thing to say. I'm really proud of it. We worked really hard on it. It has been fascinating to see and hear the responses; the story that I tell is one of "open source" and "traditional" having roughly the same meanings as applied to the intellectual property frameworks surrounding them.
I'm curious to hear what you might think of the album played in this order; I think it gives a darker and more contemplative perspective:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ucmjLc88iZdfKi9zlU5HP
> talk to other artists, especially those who are artists as their main hustle.
As you can see from the ensemble on my record, I've become friendly with a good chunk of the mainstream bluegrass world (which is a fairly tight-knit community). I think that a lot of artists are just very frustrated with the system as it is, where they are pitted against their own fans (or whomever wants to simply download and listen to their music) with the industry acting decidedly as a middle-man.
I am reasonably (but not totally) confident that musicians, and particularly purveyors of what have come to be called "the traditionals", will be among the main forces seeking to dismantle the IP system in the next couple of decades.
It's not theft though
Because . . . they're not creating value with their code. It took them years to learn how to code well. All that effort should be contributed to the world for free.
I mean, there is a plethora of open source work that is actually contributed to the world for free, right?
It was clear to me over 20 years ago when I realized that I wouldn't be able to earn enough in the arts, and ironically due to creative people sharing so much good content for free.
While I feel for people who didn’t realize this, but it’s no surprise if you try to earn your living by adding digital content to the global network of computer systems that something like the current AI trend was bound to happen.
If you love art - paint a painting, make a sculpture, perform in a play, perform live music, dance, etc. Digital is a dead-end goal in and of itself.
Bleh.
Let's make an analogy that more people here will understand. If you built an app for your startup, and OpenAI trained on its source code such that any prompter could produce an app that's virtually identical with no effort - would that be OK with you? Would you claim that copyright is in fact irrelevant and that this doesn't constitute copying?
You can't have it both ways. You can either give stuff away and realize that once you give it away you have no control over what anyone does with it, or you can charge for it and get paid up front (and ultimately still have no control over what happens to it after it leaves your hands).
Are you making art because you want to share your vision or what? If so, then share it and be glad that your vision got out there. If not, charge for your work and make sure you get paid first. Don't whine and cry that you didn't get paid after you decided that getting paid was evil or whatever.
Fortunately you actually can lodge lawsuits in such cases even if you can’t afford it so long as you find either a lawyer who works on contingency in expectation of a settlement or one who believes in something. In this case, almost any lawyer in the field of copyright would be eager to simply make their name with a case that sets precedent in such an important domain.
Fwiw, I make a considerable amount of money, yet also write and contribute to free software. I think it’s unethical and exploitive to take my labor given for free to the community and claim it as your own for your personal enrichment. I think I’m not alone in this specific community on hacker news. So, in theory you’re right. In practice, the libertarian ideal of mad max exploitation of anything you can find not bolted down appeals to a few small number of people, and the rest of us are happy to defend artists and creators from that small population.
> I think it’s unethical and exploitive to take my labor given for free to the community and claim it as your own for your personal enrichment.
Nobody is claiming anything is their own. You gave it away. You did the labor, it will always have been done regardless of what anyone does with it after that.
There is no difference in the effect on you, so why are you mad about it? If you want to lock it in a box so nobody else can ever look at your precious baby, then do that. Don't put it out where anyone can use it and then get mad when they use it. What did you make it for if you didn't want anyone to use it?
Presumably you got something out of making whatever you did, and that was enough reason to make it. If you wanted to keep some exclusive right to it, then you shouldn't have made it publicly available.
Software and source code comes with the most complex licenses and terms of use, but an artist isn’t allowed to make a small request that others don’t profit of her work without people on a software forum saying that is whining and crying…
Fully open source software has probably created more economic value in the past 60 years than anything else in human history. We should be trying to share more knowledge with each other, not come up with new and more complicated ways to restrict it.
I wish too that consumers will grow tired of low-quality stolen/generated content, but that is not the case yet. Take some horrific YouTube Kids content farms that are still churning billions of views for example.
Midjourney is performing the same blending function as regular artists.
It's hard to see why one is any different from the other other than a human is involved.
Hard no. We progress civilization so that we (as humans) may benefit. Progress at any cost is pathological, see universal paperclips as the extreme example.
It was a mistake to accept the validity of Aquinas and Hobbes arguments because we end up with conclusions like this. The concept of intellectual property is a legal fiction, a fabrication invented from whole cloth and somehow we've ended up here where it's assumed part of the natural universe.
When we reverse the direction of laws from being products of human creation to reflecting the laws of the universe we're forgetting the power of their authors and in turn giving up one our agency in drafting laws from myriad possibilities, any number of which, if had been picked by chance, would have been equally erased in authorship and told to us was a natural, universal, unstoppable law.
The reason I said it is unstopable is not because of a philosophical/deterministic argument. It was a figure to speech to verbalize the fact that the incentives are so strong for allowing AI to use copyright data that going against it would be a societal backwards decision. Similar to what avoiding agriculture was for previous societies that don't exist anymore.
Generating images in the style of an artist is not a violation of copyright.
Generating copies of copyrighted images is a violation of copyright.
AI companies only have to address the last point here, which frankly shouldn't be too hard.
Irregarding of whether midjourney is exploiting the authors, the author draws a comparison to instagram. He claims him posting his art there is unlaid labour as instagram profits from it, and hence he is being expliited when he does so. That comparison weakens his case for me, as I do not agree with the above implication.
We say it often as a kind of ward against evil. The zero sum thinking that leads one to feel they're getting gypped in a given deal is almost never actually the case in a free market society. You always have the option to, if a deal provides no value to you, simply leave it on the table and move on with your life.
However, I always mentally add an important word to the beginning: Voluntary trade benefits both parties by definition. Who decides what is considered voluntary? If this market square is the only one in town I can sell in without being beaten up, is selling there voluntary? What if it's just the case that no one wants to go to my random grocery stall in the woods?
I've come to conclude that's ultimately an ethical question, not an economic one. Hence the eternal bickering. So from a certain point of view, I could see why my handy ward against evil could just be seen as another way the capitalistic regime imposes its will. One of the fun things about the internet is all the edge cases it creates along this very boundary.
As far fetched as it might sound for obviuos artists: I'm also an artist when i write code and design systems and architect things.
I hate software patents and if i write a really good system, i'm happy to share how i did it.
I would only be pissed at someone if they just copy paste my work not if they got inspired by it.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1098302916395270235/1...
This comic reads like someone complaining about an imaginary problem, not a real one.
(The images generated here are lovely though)
They also have a UI on their website, not sure if it’s still closed or not.
I eventually got used to it but I don't enjoy it. First time trying to log in it didn't believe I was a human + the way most servers have you add a react emoji to confirm you read the rules and only then do you actually see the channels available to you, not to mention all the alert sounds with no visual indication of what just alerted, something about it just makes me feel old.
#1 Remember, designers, these aren't people who know who or what or when an IRC is.
#2 To even get going, you have to be able to mentally model the chat entry as a command line, and have an intuitive understanding of a slash command.
#3 The conceit was there were 3 laptop stations, one for Dall-E, one for Midjourney, one for Imagen, and they were rotating stations every couple of minutes. Adding time pressure didn't help.
Another way to think about it, real dialogue we had: wait, I'm at a chat app...okay where you chat, you want me to type slash...okay then imagine...wait whoa what was the menu that popped up after slash...wait whoa why did it go away...okay slash, and what do i type after that?...okay, imagine...wait, no space? okay '/imagine'...wait can I just load Dalle-E that was easier?
It’s hard to be sympathetic to someone complaining about something that’s not actually happening to them :/