Adobe is buying videos for $3 per minute to build AI model
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
$3 per minute would be a pretty high price to pay for "man walks outside" video.
Suckers who don’t properly value their time is why BigCo generally wins.
That then takes away your next video. So you got paid a low ball amount only to be ripped off.
Because it restricts you from creating such style videos. Your being paid a pittance for a bot to learn your style.
Why wouldn't you want more money?
Because that style isn't that unique, so the difference is between getting paid nothing and now there is a bot that can do the same thing, or getting paid something and now there is a bot that can do the same thing.
It hasn't even been established that they're required to pay you at all.
Style is how teachers make learning happen. If teachers follow the general generic book mundaneness, you learn far less than of you apply your own style.
Besides, if they were using the content without my permission I should be allowed to seek costs for such.
"You're unique, just like everybody else."
It doesn't matter if the thing is using your exact style or one which is enough of a substitute for it that the difference isn't going to make up the difference between your $50 fee and the $0.01 in electricity it takes to have the AI do it.
> Besides, if they were using the content without my permission I should be allowed to seek costs for such.
On what basis? How is it different than someone teaching their students your style, so the students can make their own original works in the same style? It's directly analogous to classroom use, which is an explicit example of fair use from the copyright statute.
This just shows that anyone is willing to cloned for less than their actual worth which is calculated on their own basis.
If you'd rather be ripped off, having a class taught for $5 from some AI bot from your own teaching style earning a single $3 than yourself teaching and earning $5 from each class, be my guest.
Edit: I'm now post capped, so can't comment/reply on HN for another four hours anyway. Old news.
So now we're speculating on the cost of something that doesn't exist yet, but it's highly likely that hardware is going to get more power efficient over time, so the question then isn't whether "AI can do this for a lower price than humans" will happen, it's just a question of how long before it does.
As some of us like to say, "Fuck it, we'll do it live." As in, that's the only take you get and it goes right to production zero editing and processing. Everything gets set once, fired once, and it gets uploaded immediately.
You shoot it "live" and let the AI deal with the editing and processing for you.
It takes an hour to produce 1 minute of scripted content and fancy graphics for a professional YouTube show.
Even if that were not true, releasing the rights for so little is dumb.
They do not want theatrical productions, they want raw footage of the real world.
There's a good scam if you can automate video generation and pass it to Adobe. Them setting a price of AI training video, may have just set the floor price for buying AI generated video.
As people with more money than me say: arbitrage!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint_Drying?useskin=vector
So I guess Adobe needs to raise their bid before filmmakers can afford the arbitrage!
It'd be like if Uber launched by applying for NY taxi medallions. So this seems like a crazy risk:reward ratio here. Adobe is going to end up with a massive bill, a weak model and the hope that the guys who steal everything will face consequences. We've never seen Silicon Valley face consequences like that in the past so i don't see why you would bet it's going to happen this time.
With Uber, no one's suing individual riders or drivers over an illegal taxi ride.
observationally they’re in an interesting position, balancing their artistic clients and their executive clients. a clean model is the easiest way to hedge their portfolio and reputation.
The courts could find that it isn't possible to sign away these rights. There are many other rights that the law does not permit to be signed away for much more tame reasons than "enables further creations of 'your' work (or in the case of actors, literally 'you') not only without your actual involvement, but even long after your death". I would expect that it at least comes with a time limit. "Artists can sign a license to use these rights but only until their death + 10 years, after that the licensee can't use anything trained on their work. Artists also have an unrevokable right to cancel the license at any time with 90 day notice." might be one possible outcome.
Content licensing is really well established and already allows for licensing for specific use and different royalty structures based on usage. An example of this is streaming vs theater vs syndication.
So, now there is a new venue to take into account and have the lawyers add a few pages to their contracts moving forward.
This is exactly my point. An AI that can replace you, personally, is closer to signing away your identity or freedom than the rights to display a specific already completed work.
*you paid for it.
It's not obvious why that would be.
Artists aren't going to like this technology because it competes with them, but it competes with them regardless of whether it was their work or someone else's in the training data.
This leads to a visceral response where they want to call this "stealing" and hope that the creators of the technology can be sued into non-existence so their competition can be eliminated. But as Adobe is demonstrating, that isn't going to happen anyway. So the question isn't whether the technology will exist, it's if it will be locked up behind the walls of major corporations. The latter doesn't do artists any good but harms the public -- including artists who want to leverage the technology in their art. So why should the law protect Adobe's moat from the public?
It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they? And the answer is actually because they do assign some value to that training data, and there's not an infinite supply and it's actually quite difficult to get large sets of quality data.
I think it's a pretty open question how this will resolve, it could be like stremaing music where companies like spotify are little more than puppets for the major record labels. It could end up like youtube where the model started with "We're going to steal stuff" and ended up "We're going to strongly enforce copyright now we're the encumbent" or some other third way. But I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term.
But the law would probably be DMCA 1201 for circumventing the DRM rather than normal copyright for making the copy, which is much more ambiguous. Also, record companies like to sue people, that doesn't mean they're right and provides no indication of what the law should be. You could just as easily pick some other example, like whether you can rip a music CD or vinyl you bought to put it on your iPod, which the record companies might not like to be allowed, but that doesn't mean that it isn't.
> It's theoretically true that the models could be trained with someone else's training data, but there's a flaw in that argument. If you can train with other data without these legal issues, why don't they?
To which the answer is that they do. A lot of models are trained on arbitrary content from the internet.
As to why Adobe in particular is doing this, think about it. It's because that interpretation benefits them rather than the artists, by creating a moat where companies who already have licenses to bulk stock images etc. are the only ones who can create a model, rather than having lots of competitors because anyone can create one and many of them are free and can be run locally.
> I don't expect the "We're going to take everything with no regard to the existing legal framework" will sustain long term.
Publishing companies don't like public libraries. So anybody can go there and borrow a copy of any book for free? That doesn't mean that libraries are bad or are or should be illegal.
Also, laws are created through the political process, which is not always great. The outcome "individual artists somehow benefit from this" isn't even in the room there. The two most plausible outcomes are that "tech companies" win and anybody can train a model on anything they can get their hands on, and that "content conglomerates" win and then this technology gets locked up as a service from only megacorps and the artists still don't get anything meaningful, but now the world has another abusive cartel imposing arbitrary censorship and using control over this to cement control over adjacent markets etc. Of these, the second is clearly worse.
I see a lot of the first and second parts, but nowhere near as often the third part: The rights holders aren't seeking financial growth, just wants control in perpetuity. I suspect that's the part proving difficult to solve.
...we would be living in post-scarcity and everything would be free. But that doesn't happen in the absence of AGI, what actually happens is that technology replaces some jobs and then people do the remaining jobs, which are now in higher demand because the things done by technology become cheaper and the money that had gone to pay for labor there now gets spent on something else, increasing demand for the other thing.
Technology has been replacing jobs for hundreds of years and we still have low unemployment.
We have more bullshit jobs than ever before in order to maintain that unemployment rate though
Many of the bullshit jobs are, in fact, destroying the cost/efficiency benefit of automation by imposing bureaucratic waste on things that would otherwise have become less expensive. If someone is doing a job which is useless, we could just give them a portion of someone else's productive work to do, have them each work less and reduce prices by the same amount and then average purchasing power would be the same but there would be less busy work and more recreation/creativity/entrepreneurship.
Bullshit jobs are the inverse of this. Some large organization has insufficient competition so it can waste resources without losing business. The law is excessively complicated so everyone in the jurisdiction has to hire compliance bureaucrats. Government contractors and employees doing unnecessary work want to keep their jobs and legislators don't want to lose their votes/money. Then everybody has to pay higher prices because they don't individually have the choice to avoid it.
Lenoardo’s AI tools are even better and the native background removal is just 10x better than Adobe
"The software company is offering its network of photographers and artists $120 to submit videos of people engaged in everyday actions such as walking or expressing emotions including joy and anger, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. The goal is to source assets for artificial intelligence training, the company wrote."
0: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/adobe-is-buying-videos...
I don’t think there’s a subjectively true answer to that question, so we just end up bickering over free will instead of AI.
If you just want to declare humans to be special, I would just go straight to that. Humans are already legally special in all kinds of ways.
The whole point of copyright, is to allow artists to be able to generate a little income with exclusive rights to the works they produce. It's not just there because it's some inherent property of artwork: us humans decided that courts should punish people that threaten the livelihood of artists (in a very narrow scope of ways) via the judicial system.
Of course the "spirit" of the law is meaningless, but I at least don't think understanding copyright law as a purely legal tool, divorced from the human element, is participating in the same conversation artists are having.
Should people that just make art, eat? Early human history the answer was no. Then we advanced to a point where people can specialize in skills, and art made life worth living, so the answer was yes. Now where are we?
In my opinion any attempt at restricting AI training is also restricting people who would use it to create new things. And it will backfire spectacularly, by scanning for derivative works in AI we automatically need to do the same for every work claimed to be created by a human, because we don't know who's using AI secretly.
And it will create a chilling effect, incidental similarity would be too high a risk to take. Even old works will be revealed, their secret influences laid bare for everyone to see. Excessive scrutiny could deter artists from experimenting with new forms of expression, possibly leading to a homogenized art world where innovation is curtailed.
Won't need to rely on any bunk statistical methods that don't work to detect and suppress ai. Supply and demand and cultural rejection will work just fine. I don't have enough toes and fingers to count the number of creators I respect. I can't name a single AI artist.
heheheh, AI art certainly has more than enough duplicated fingers!
But we're also talking about MAKING generative AI models. Not USING generative AI models. Making a model is so far outside of the scope of a single artist it's almost comical. We're talking about a task that, given no bounds, would include the subtask "ingest all human creative output". That's hard to do so therefore it's restricted to the realm of well funded companies.
But even as well off and talented as these companies are, they did very little of the actual work. The total scale of effort that goes into these big lists of coefficients, is beyond human comprehension at this point. We've literally NEVER had to contend with tasks of this magnitude before. Many thousands of centuries of human life hours distilled. Copyright as it's legally inscribed precisely, is ill-prepared to achieve it's end goals in this situation.
But considering:
1) that's kind of cool we can do this
2) it makes interesting things that could better people's lives
3) we still think that humans should be able to make art (ai or not) and not die of starvation ideally
... we need to figure out what to do. Maybe it's not copyright! That was created to solve a specific problem. Now we have new problems. I just think people latch too hard onto the legalese as if it's some magic property of the universe, and NOT a set of systems humans made, for very human goals. I don't want a system where we just say "well look at copyright, it says this is fine, so we will just use everything for free". It's missing the point.
I agree with you that it's asking the hard question of "which artists do we protect". That, I'm not feeling like I have a good answer for right now. I definitely heavily lean towards the talented artists who've honed their craft. That's just more interesting. But I wish more people we're thinking about it, in those terms.
And one poem or a page of text is but a drop in this ocean, an infinitesimal contribution. The model is much smaller than the training set. For example Stable Diffusion packs 5B images in 5GB, that's a compression factor of 100,000:1, about 1 byte per training image, not even a pixel. Taking so little from everyone, I am amazed how strong a reaction it creates. The final model doesn't steal almost anything, it doesn't rely on any training example too much, just a compressed abstraction of the training data. You have to overfit it and also prime it to make it regurgitate some training examples, and most attempts fail, resulting in novel outputs.
If you did that to Disney then you'd be in jail, but since it's the little guys getting fucked I guess it doesn't matter.
Also, as other people have pointed out, this just restricts training to well funded companies. Everybody forgets about the little guys on Huggingface.
Disney, WB,etc etc
That'll show them
Do they care what the content is?!
It's a decent lobbying tactic too - companies like OpenAI claim their technology can only exist with unrestricted scraping, and requiring them to license training data would kill the whole industry in the crib, but Adobe and Getty can point to their own products as existence proofs that it can be done but OpenAI just doesn't want to.
There doesn’t exist a LLM trained only on expressly licensed data that works well enough for the image diffusion conditioning task. So unless they made some kind of huge scientific discovery, which they didn’t, they are using a text model like T5 or CLIP to achieve the “text” part of “text to image”, which of course is trained on not expressly licensed data.
That's basically what happened with Spotify. Artists are getting paid something for streaming, but it's fractions of pennies on the dollars they used to make from music sales.
You create the synthetic data, move it through 10s of entities and then buy it back cheaply from an entity.
Break the law so you can undercut the real producers, and then buy the rights when they're broke and everything works out for you!
I'm not sure a dozen companies (before consultation and licensing) having control of 90-something percent of their world's content is a good idea either
Isn't $3/minute exactly the compensation for creators you're looking for?
It’s going to happen anyway, the tech can either be free to everyone so we all benefit or behind a paywall. Those are your two options there isn’t a 3rd if we’re talking reality not fantasy.
I’m not sure why you and others think that using someone’s work as inspiration for creating some new work requires payment. Are we required to pay someone when sharing a meme, or using a sound for a reel or a TikTok? A lot of these creators are just creating shit they saw someone else create.
What you could do is what some of of the original comic book creators did when they ripped off each others work (Doom Patrol/Xmen, Quicksilver/Flash, etc.) - create an alternative version that was close the original but was different enough that it wasn't a straight up copy. So it wouldn't be Spiderman, but Venom or something, and the suit wouldn't be red/blue but like maybe purple/green or something.
A single network transfer alone is enough to qualify "sharing".
Heck some of the content creators are even arguing that the models are essentially a form of lossy compression, because no one quite knows exactly how they work.
Also the users probably won't be the ones with deep pockets, unless it was a studio. And the lawyers are generally going to after the ones with deep pockets.
But even if you think that’s fine it makes using AI models for your own commercial applications more risky.
I suspect that, if the image in the meme is copyrighted, the answer is "yes."
I haven't come across too many memes with Mickey Mouse, but I do see the occasional Marvel one (I have forwarded these, myself).
It can get nasty.
Satire of the work is allowed, but I don't think using the work, itself, in satire of something else, is allowed.
I think that the example a lot of folks use is the "Pissing Calvin" decal.
Watterson never allowed any commercialization of his characters. Every "Pissing Calvin" decal is actually a copyright violation, but I think that they never enforced it, so it may be considered "OK" to use, as the copyright has been allowed to wither.
But IANAL. Things get sticky, here.
This is more akin to buying multiple books on a topic and then writing a new book on the topic using the aggregate learnings from the original books.