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Comment by BobaFloutist | Hacker News Reader

Do you think it's reasonable for artists to want a way to forbid major AI corporations from training on their work? Because some people will stop producing/stop making available their work if they don't get access to a different way of doing so.

Much like how some artists are uncomfortable with making high-quality scans of their work available online, because it becomes prohibitively difficult to prevent people from selling prints. Forget the current legal framework, it seems fair to me to say "I don't want that happening to my art" when "that" is a corporation finding a way to monetize it. Even if the AI is using less than a pixel of your work, I think it's fair to ask that it not.

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I get that the concept is upsetting. And, I'm not going to tell people to not be upset or not state their will. Ex: DeviantArt has instated an opt-in checkbox for "It's OK to train on my art" and I think that's great.

But, everything I've heard and learned about how AI works leads me to the conclusion that such a move is almost entirely symbolic. Counter to what our egos would like to believe, the vast majority of the training images and the vast majority of the learning value for AI comes from random, crappy photographs of various things. Without a million photos of dogs and trees, the AI can't make a stylized dog distinguishable from a stylized tree. And, it's turning out that, from that base of crappy photographs, it doesn't take many high-aesthetic images to make a high-aesthetic AI.

Quality aside, art still has copyright for these exact reasons (and photographs are no different, long settled case law). So you can't just say "well no one cares about this blurry dog photo". Courts need more precise language than "care".

If it needs millions of photos of dogs and trees you

1. Take them you self

2. Pay someone with a db of dog and tree photos soem agreed upon amount (Aka someone did the work for you already and you value their work)

3. You scrape only on photos you are sure are CC0 or any other kind of permissive license. I'm sure you can find a few million dog photos this way.

But clearly they value #2 without payment so lawsuits were inevitable. Maybe because #3 took too much time and they decide #2 is worth the legal fees to be first to the race (something else I'd want fixed, but that's another rabbit hole).

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