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Humans learn to produce good art largely by learning from existing art. Copying, mimicking, or just generally taking inspiration. We're going to need to get ove

Humans learn to produce good art largely by learning from existing art. Copying, mimicking, or just generally taking inspiration. We're going to need to get over this hang up. Status quo bias is dumb. Especially among people who are otherwise fond of piracy or anti-ip legislation.

simonw 4y ago
Sounds to me like you've decided that AI veganism is not for you! I've thought about this comparison to human artists taking inspiration from each other a bit. The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour. Consider facial recognition technology. At an individual level, empowering people to quickly see all of the photos they have taken of their spouse through running facial recognition against their photos is useful and harmless. Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook is a massively harmful expansion of the surveillance state. I don't think training models against 5bn unlicensed images is in the same scale of harm as running facial recognition against an entire country's worth of people. But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale.
- atemerev 4y ago
  > Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook We should allow _everybody_ to run the exact same technology. Governments are not special. Power to the people.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    I don’t own my own supercomputer to run the same analysis the NSA can, though.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  > Sounds to me like you've decided that AI veganism is not for you! I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker. > I've thought about this comparison to human artists taking inspiration from each other a bit. The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour. A human can mimic something with a single reference. It might not be good, but that can hardly matter for a discussion of ethics. The morality cannot depend on whether or not humans can do something poorly or not. > Consider facial recognition technology. At an individual level, empowering people to quickly see all of the photos they have taken of their spouse through running facial recognition against their photos is useful and harmless. Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook is a massively harmful expansion of the surveillance state. Entirely different issue that happens to utilize a similar tech. > But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale. It does not.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    > I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker. I agree. This would more accurately be called "AI Luddism", opposing a new technology because of fears related to its immense productivity over humans. It has nothing to do with veganism EDIT: that said, vegan is used in the sense of the article as "a really obvious and strong stance that people do not follow even though all the information about how it is bad is readily available"
    - simonw 4y ago
      I think calling it "AI Luddism" would offend people who are opposed to generative AI a lot more than calling it "AI veganism" offends vegans.
      - bowsamic 4y ago
        Why? The argument is very similar to the one that Luddites used: that the increased efficiency is harmful to artists
- bowsamic 4y ago
  > I've thought about this comparison to human artists taking inspiration from each other a bit. The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour. To me this seems to similar to old fashioned luddites. The machines back then that improved the productivity of labourers mostly displaced the societal role of skilled craftsmen. Of course using the machine is different to doing it by hand, but we did have some benefits from improving our productivity using machines, as well as some downsides. The interesting thing is that in this case we are moving from using machines to improve productivity of material objects, into sociocultural objects (art), and it's not clear what that will "do" exactly. > But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale. Right but of course, the words "can be" are there. I don't think anyone is claiming that scaling a given thing up is always harmless, but generally with these kinds of technological developments you really need a super strong, clear, and concrete (for this specific case) argument to stop them. I haven't seen any such arguments, except the traditional luddite one I posted above.
- chrispine 4y ago
  "vegan / not-vegan" is a false and harmful dichotomy "meat-based" vs "plant-based" is a spectrum we are all on; no reason to make it all-or-nothing
- harrylove 4y ago
  > The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour. Can you say more about the scale argument? It reads as if you're saying that an entity that has an advantage shouldn't use that advantage. If you reduce the comparison to human scale, do you still have a problem with the competition? I.e., if one artist has a working memory of 5 inspirational artworks (unlicensed) and another artist has a working memory of 3, is that wrong if they both compete to produce new artwork based on what they know of existing art? If the answer to that question is no, then I don't see how the scale question is applicable.
  - simonw 4y ago
    I'm saying that one artist walking around an art gallery and being inspired by the art they see there (or even visiting hundreds of galleries over a lifetime) is operating at such a minuscule scale compared to an AI that trains itself on 5bn images that the similarities between the two do not necessary mean that if one is OK then the other is OK as well.
    - MattGrommes 4y ago
      Why though? Scale in and of itself isn't a bad thing just because we can't do it with our puny human minds. I'm open to the argument but I don't see it.
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      Computers have scale benefits that no human has. An industrial controller can control all the machines in a factory all at once, and make them move faster than a human can react. A script can send out communications to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of humans at once. A machine controlling door locks in a building can lock every door at once. No human can compete. It's unclear to me why art generation is unique in this regard unless there's a human status-quo bias at play. I'm increasingly inclined to think that it's ennui over the fact that creative work isn't unique anymore and can be automated, a reality that many laborers have already dealt with and accepted. One of the computer's "super powers" is its ability to run at scale.
- enlyth 4y ago
  > A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour. It's just another step on the path towards AI being better than humans at certain activities. We've already gone through this with things like math, chess, imitating voices, translating languages, and lately visual art seems to be coming close to a point where the AI will have an edge over humans. We will have to learn to cope, one way or another, because eventually, AI will be better at everything, as we are limited by our biological bodies. Humanity will create its own synthetic god, and the consequences will be interesting.
- EGreg 4y ago
  Simonw, we are about to have much worse problems from bot swarms. Sleeper bots trained on “get more upvotes” will amass karma points and then be unlesshed as implacable crowds of “people” pushing public opinion around. They will amass capital and social capital to the point where regular humans represent a vashingly small sliver of online capital. This idea of CAPTCHAs and “human only, no bots” networks is only for a decade or two, until bots just become more desirable members of every community, to humans and other bots. What people don’t get is that their individual decisions in their own self interest doom the group. Dad works 10 hours a day to provide for family. Then mom does too. Now they both neglected their kids and each other. Similarly, you choose a bot for its wittier comebacks and impeccably romantic style of talking. Your husband chooses a bot for its better sexual techniques and never complaining. Ultimately, neither of you needs the other and you’re one step away drom NO ONE IN SOCIETY needing you. You would become the Borg. Except why have the drone bodies at all?
- hot_gril 4y ago
  If the AI is looking at 5bn images, that means it's drawing inspiration from individual ones even less than a human would.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    What if the AI was trained entirely on a corpus of artwork in a style you've uniquely developed over decades? The AI did not do any of the legwork or market testing but it would theoretically be making your art form at scale better than you could. Knowing AI would be deployed to rip-off your efforts will you pursue art?
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      People can already do that, and copyright law doesn't really protect it. It's hard to copyright a style. Whoever first painted that multi-colored landscape of a couple walking through a park, it's been copied a million times. Even parodies, which often use a lot of the source material, are explicitly legal. And then there's the Hyundai Genesis. To the last question: No, but I wouldn't pursue art either way.
- spyder 4y ago
  But author of the article says he would be fine with AI trained on licensed images, which could be also on bigger scale than a single human is capable of. Looks like some people doesn't like it because the data it was trained on but others are worried about the technology and its capabilities over humans.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  These problems of scale aren't unique to recent leaps in technology, or even to automation or technology at all. Government intelligent agencies can, given certain goals and management, do a great deal of harmful and disturbing things without using any secret or advanced technology. A team of 1,000 people with, say, basic PC office equipment from the early 2000s, could do a great deal if they were competently trained and managed and told to, say, investigate and attempt to undermine some group that the agency doesn't like for whatever reason. In my opinion the technology has little to do with the problem, even though the potential for harm is unique to the scale of resources dedicated to it, and even though they would be a lot less effectively if they didn't have that technology (i.e. imagine if they no longer had access to personal computers at the office).
- tshaddox 4y ago
  The argument about differences in scale constituting differences in kind is compelling, and yet I'm not sure how to evaluate any particular instance of this type of argument without just deferring to my existing opinion on the topic at hand. For example, it's easy to construct hypothetical scenarios where a difference in scale seem to clearly constitute a difference in kind and where suppression of a new technology seems clearly reasonable. An easy hypothetical (but not implausible) example is some new kind of extremely deadly weapon that would be much easier to build than existing weapons if the "recipe" was made public. But it's also easy to make the same argument for things like, say, the printing press. And indeed there has always been intense opposition from many to the printing press and subsequent technologies that make distributing written language much easier, with opponents often presenting arguments in this same form. Yet it feels wrong to me to apply the argument this way. Is that just because I have existing opinions that generally oppose restrictions in the ability to distribute ideas, but I don't generally oppose restrictions on very deadly weapons? Or is there some other way to distinguish between valid and invalid instances of this form of argument, perhaps by attempting to estimate the overall risk versus reward?
mbreese 4y ago
> Humans learn to produce good art largely by learning from existing art I think you’re wrong on this. Humans learn (anything) from teachers. Yes, you can learn much on your own, but the idea of a solo artist learning from books is exceedingly rare. So in this case, you learn art by doing, critiquing your work and the works of others. You put forth effort. While I am amazed at the generated images and think they truly are amazing, I can’t help but think they all feel a little cheap. Like someone took a shortcut that was never meant to be found. I do think there are real ethical issues behind the training data for both image and code generation. Nothing that can’t be solved, but random images scraped from the web are not meant for training. First - it’s not necessarily a fair-use issue. And second, garbage in, garbage out. I don’t want my auto generated images to come with a Getty watermark. Where I do think there is hope is for the use of these as tools for artists. Where there can still be a human behind the choices and curation, but using the algorithms as a means rather than an end.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  > I think you’re wrong on this. Humans learn (anything) from teachers. Yes, you can learn much on your own, but the idea of a solo artist learning from books is exceedingly rare. If you take an art class where a teacher instructs you and tells you to replicate 12 paintings by Van Gogh, I would argue you've learned more from Van Gogh than the teacher, even if he's showing you some physical techniques.
  - mbreese 4y ago
    You could masterfully copy the Van Gogh stroke for stroke, but without the understanding behind the composition, intent, and meaning behind the work, I’d argue you learned nothing. Except for how to copy. The student/teacher interaction is where you learn. Even if you want to only paint in Van Gogh’s style, the back and forth with the teacher is where you actually learn how to apply that style to new works. To explore the meaning behind the stars, etc. (You could get there solo, but you’d still need to go through the criticism/questioning phase somehow, which is probably best done with an IRL teacher).
leeoniya 4y ago
is this in the same vein as professional Go and Chess players having and existential crisis over AlphaGo/AlphaZero/MuZero attaining superhuman playing ability with zero supervised learning in something like < 72 hours on non-supercomputer hardware. i suppose we'd all feel uneasy when AI eventually becomes better than humans at creative tasks which pay our bills or differentiate us within a profession.
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Buttons840 4y ago
That's fine, until an AI regurgitates a unique page of code I wrote without modification. That's just copying. Although, if the courts want to clarify that straight-up copying a page or two of code is okay, I would be happy. My fear is copilot will be allowed to copy code, but I won't be.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  Just copy the code and claim the AI did it.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  But that's just stupid. You find some code on stack overflow that solves your problem. Are you going to do the refactoring dance until it looks different enough or are you just going to use the code? You find the same code on a non open source github repo. Well what now? You've got a mental model of how to solve the problem. Can't use that knowledge? That knowledge has been locked away as illegal? This is not a reasonable model.
sp332 4y ago
Sure but the output from the AI does not give credit. So I don't know what the inspiration is or where it came from or how to find more of the same kind.
bluehorseray 4y ago
To a certain extent I agree, but another argument would be that at the end of the day, computers are deterministic (even on the incredibly large scale of these image generators, given parameters x, it will produce y). We're still not sure whether humans are deterministic or not. So you can't really equate the human process of art creation to a computers. Humans may still be pulling from some external inspiration that will never be within the reach of computers (I like to think that's the case).
- Verdex 4y ago
  I'm not sure determinism is where you want to draw the line. Just have the computer get a webcam pointed at a lava lamp. It's non-deterministic now. Or maybe you want to still argue that that's ultimately deterministic. Okay, well, just have a person show up to the art computer, look deep within their soul, then type in a completely random, soulful, non-deterministic seed value into the art computer. Bam! Now the computer can create real art.
  - deleted 4y ago
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thomasahle 4y ago
1) Humans learn from existing art, but they mainly draw on their experience and perception of the physical world when creating new art. AI doesn't have access to the real world, so it's art is 100% based on existing work, not just inspired by it. 2) We still don't know exactly how much the models memorise. I'm sure you'll agree that something like Google image search retrieval doesn't qualify as original art, and copyright is still an issue. If you photoshop two images together, you probably also still have to give credit to the original images. We have to draw the line somewhere on the scale from "100% derivative to 100% original". It's not yet clear where AI image generation falls on this.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  > Humans learn from existing art, but they mainly draw on their experience and perception of the physical world when creating new art. AI doesn't have access to the real world, so it's art is 100% based on existing work, not just inspired by it. Ok so let's just feed the ai some dashcam footage and this argument is null. > I'm sure you'll agree that something like Google image search retrieval doesn't qualify as original art, Yes > and copyright is still an issue No
  - tomatotomato37 4y ago
    If the AI researchers actually go through the effort of strapping a bunch of go-pros to people for a year as they experience life and used that as the majority of training data than I'm fine with calling anything it generates original art. But for now when the training set is 100% others work and you can see the AI literally trying to inject a jumbled artist name/trademark into "original" art I can't see it as anything more than extreme photobashing
    - spywaregorilla 4y ago
      Seems like an impressive amount of mental gymnastics to me
  - thomasahle 4y ago
rasz 4y ago
Humans learn, the "AI" (in this case fancy content aware fill) takes a stencil copy of the original copyrighted work, and stores it in its memory.
- simonw 4y ago
  I don't think calling it a stencil copy is the right mental model. These models take 5bn+ images and use them to influence the weights on a giant array of floating point numbers. Each input image has a truly tiny effect on the finished product. The final model is on the order of 4.5GB - the compression ratio is unreal. Nothing of the original images remains. So "stencil copy" doesn't work for me.
  - rasz 4y ago
    and yet its able to generate Getty images watermark
    - simonw 4y ago
      Right - because it's seen thousands of those watermarks, so it's very easy for it to output its own rendition of one.
dahart 4y ago
This blindly steam rolls over some important distinctions. Humans aren’t allowed to sell direct copies of other people’s art (not in the US and many other countries anyway). This isn’t a hang-up, and it’s not status quo bias, it’s well covered law and economic philosophy that is already blending new digital rights ideas into hard fought legal precedents. We have explicitly decided to have the social goal to protect the rights of artistic creative people & businesses without having their work instantly ripped off. Humans also are good at taking inspiration from ideas, where today’s AI is borrowing pixels. The AI is copying in a way that humans don’t, it’s not mimicking and taking inspiration - that is anthropomorphising the software that is trained and programmed to make automated mashups of images. So in part it depends on what we do with AI images. There may be nothing wrong with training on copyrighted material if the resulting inferences are never distributed publicly nor used for commercial purposes. Of course that seems extremely unlikely, which is why it needs to be discussed carefully and debated in good faith, right? Maybe in part it also depends on whether the AI software is guaranteed to produce something very different from any individual training image. If the outputs are guaranteed to be always a mashup, and never indistinguishable from any single input, that seems like it would be an easier pill to swallow. (There appears to be legal precedent along these lines for music sampling.)
- IanCal 4y ago
  > Humans also are good at taking inspiration from ideas, where today’s AI is borrowing pixels. I disagree with this, we don't just hear about ideas we actually see the art. Both are shown pictures.
- karmasimida 4y ago
  > Humans aren’t allowed to sell direct copies of other people’s art Direct copying yes, but stealing ideas? No. Actually it is a well-known practice in the art industry to use several existing works as references, and creating new artwork that is bit of mixture of all of them. That is exactly what DALL-E/StableDiffusion are trying to do. AI isn't borrowing pixels, either. If you read the idea of diffusion models, quite the opposite, what it directly learns is how to destroy an image from what it is into gaussian noise. The trick here is we can reverse this process 'creating' arts from noises. There is no copying pixels, not even in the most simplistic version of how this model works.
akira2501 4y ago
Yes.. but a human can understand what I want and anticipate various outcomes from much shorter conversations that don't involve all this ridiculous prompting. Asking this system for a simple picture like "a dog smoking a cigarette" reveals just how limited this system is. Thinking that this system, with such a small set or data and no natural language processing, is going to replace artists anytime soon, is, I think, incredibly eager to the point of foolishness.
throwaways85989 4y ago
But that is just art. Not great art. Great art comes from stepping away from your peer group after you mastered it, being able to incooperate "unrelated" or "impossible" other concepts into the art. Its a subconscious process, of recombination and filtering. And only some can boldly go, to were no person has gone before. Which makes this the ultimate training goal for AI. Not AGI, but a synthesis AI, capable to produce "breakthrough" candidates for the field it is trained upon, by allowing noise and filtering for the criteria of great break throughs- explanation power, beauty, higher consistency, that puzzle piece fitting all gaps moment. If there is ever a creature out there, doing that, silicon or otherwise, humanity will own its continued existence to its existence.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I wonder what would happen if an artist got their stuff legally removed from the sources, and then you asked the AI to produce something in the style of their main influences.
t0bia_s 4y ago
I don't understand why AI generated images are called as art. Art is not about form. It's about content. Meaning that can be generated and understand only by humans.
- simonw 4y ago
  Artists are using AI models to generate art right now, with an enormous amount of interaction along the way. Watch this video for an example of how involved the process can be: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x0b0rq/img2img_fantasy_art_walkthrough_video/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x0b0rq/img... Would you say that artist did not produce something that could be called art, just because they used an AI model as part of their process?
  - t0bia_s 4y ago
    It's an digital image. Not very interesting to be honest. Art is more deep. Has meaning. It doesn't matter how is it done. I mean... You wouldn't find something like that in art gallery on wall.
    - simonw 4y ago
      That sounds like your personal taste. What if the image that person had drawn really impressed you on its artistic merits before you learned how they had made it?
      - t0bia_s 4y ago
        Impression is one thing, that is for me now, not that important as meaning, story, message... Especially nowadays, when generating beautiful impressive images is easy and overdone (waving on Instagram).

simonw 4y ago

Sounds to me like you've decided that AI veganism is not for you! I've thought about this comparison to human artists taking inspiration from each other a bit. The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour. Consider facial recognition technology. At an individual level, empowering people to quickly see all of the photos they have taken of their spouse through running facial recognition against their photos is useful and harmless. Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook is a massively harmful expansion of the surveillance state. I don't think training models against 5bn unlicensed images is in the same scale of harm as running facial recognition against an entire country's worth of people. But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale.

atemerev 4y ago
> Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook We should allow _everybody_ to run the exact same technology. Governments are not special. Power to the people.
- fragmede 4y ago
  I don’t own my own supercomputer to run the same analysis the NSA can, though.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
> Sounds to me like you've decided that AI veganism is not for you! I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker. > I've thought about this comparison to human artists taking inspiration from each other a bit. The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour. A human can mimic something with a single reference. It might not be good, but that can hardly matter for a discussion of ethics. The morality cannot depend on whether or not humans can do something poorly or not. > Consider facial recognition technology. At an individual level, empowering people to quickly see all of the photos they have taken of their spouse through running facial recognition against their photos is useful and harmless. Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook is a massively harmful expansion of the surveillance state. Entirely different issue that happens to utilize a similar tech. > But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale. It does not.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  > I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker. I agree. This would more accurately be called "AI Luddism", opposing a new technology because of fears related to its immense productivity over humans. It has nothing to do with veganism EDIT: that said, vegan is used in the sense of the article as "a really obvious and strong stance that people do not follow even though all the information about how it is bad is readily available"
  - simonw 4y ago
    I think calling it "AI Luddism" would offend people who are opposed to generative AI a lot more than calling it "AI veganism" offends vegans.
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      Why? The argument is very similar to the one that Luddites used: that the increased efficiency is harmful to artists
bowsamic 4y ago
> I've thought about this comparison to human artists taking inspiration from each other a bit. The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour. To me this seems to similar to old fashioned luddites. The machines back then that improved the productivity of labourers mostly displaced the societal role of skilled craftsmen. Of course using the machine is different to doing it by hand, but we did have some benefits from improving our productivity using machines, as well as some downsides. The interesting thing is that in this case we are moving from using machines to improve productivity of material objects, into sociocultural objects (art), and it's not clear what that will "do" exactly. > But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale. Right but of course, the words "can be" are there. I don't think anyone is claiming that scaling a given thing up is always harmless, but generally with these kinds of technological developments you really need a super strong, clear, and concrete (for this specific case) argument to stop them. I haven't seen any such arguments, except the traditional luddite one I posted above.
chrispine 4y ago
"vegan / not-vegan" is a false and harmful dichotomy "meat-based" vs "plant-based" is a spectrum we are all on; no reason to make it all-or-nothing
harrylove 4y ago
> The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour. Can you say more about the scale argument? It reads as if you're saying that an entity that has an advantage shouldn't use that advantage. If you reduce the comparison to human scale, do you still have a problem with the competition? I.e., if one artist has a working memory of 5 inspirational artworks (unlicensed) and another artist has a working memory of 3, is that wrong if they both compete to produce new artwork based on what they know of existing art? If the answer to that question is no, then I don't see how the scale question is applicable.
- simonw 4y ago
  I'm saying that one artist walking around an art gallery and being inspired by the art they see there (or even visiting hundreds of galleries over a lifetime) is operating at such a minuscule scale compared to an AI that trains itself on 5bn images that the similarities between the two do not necessary mean that if one is OK then the other is OK as well.
  - MattGrommes 4y ago
    Why though? Scale in and of itself isn't a bad thing just because we can't do it with our puny human minds. I'm open to the argument but I don't see it.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Computers have scale benefits that no human has. An industrial controller can control all the machines in a factory all at once, and make them move faster than a human can react. A script can send out communications to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of humans at once. A machine controlling door locks in a building can lock every door at once. No human can compete. It's unclear to me why art generation is unique in this regard unless there's a human status-quo bias at play. I'm increasingly inclined to think that it's ennui over the fact that creative work isn't unique anymore and can be automated, a reality that many laborers have already dealt with and accepted. One of the computer's "super powers" is its ability to run at scale.
enlyth 4y ago
> A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour. It's just another step on the path towards AI being better than humans at certain activities. We've already gone through this with things like math, chess, imitating voices, translating languages, and lately visual art seems to be coming close to a point where the AI will have an edge over humans. We will have to learn to cope, one way or another, because eventually, AI will be better at everything, as we are limited by our biological bodies. Humanity will create its own synthetic god, and the consequences will be interesting.
EGreg 4y ago
Simonw, we are about to have much worse problems from bot swarms. Sleeper bots trained on “get more upvotes” will amass karma points and then be unlesshed as implacable crowds of “people” pushing public opinion around. They will amass capital and social capital to the point where regular humans represent a vashingly small sliver of online capital. This idea of CAPTCHAs and “human only, no bots” networks is only for a decade or two, until bots just become more desirable members of every community, to humans and other bots. What people don’t get is that their individual decisions in their own self interest doom the group. Dad works 10 hours a day to provide for family. Then mom does too. Now they both neglected their kids and each other. Similarly, you choose a bot for its wittier comebacks and impeccably romantic style of talking. Your husband chooses a bot for its better sexual techniques and never complaining. Ultimately, neither of you needs the other and you’re one step away drom NO ONE IN SOCIETY needing you. You would become the Borg. Except why have the drone bodies at all?
hot_gril 4y ago
If the AI is looking at 5bn images, that means it's drawing inspiration from individual ones even less than a human would.
- peteradio 4y ago
  What if the AI was trained entirely on a corpus of artwork in a style you've uniquely developed over decades? The AI did not do any of the legwork or market testing but it would theoretically be making your art form at scale better than you could. Knowing AI would be deployed to rip-off your efforts will you pursue art?
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    People can already do that, and copyright law doesn't really protect it. It's hard to copyright a style. Whoever first painted that multi-colored landscape of a couple walking through a park, it's been copied a million times. Even parodies, which often use a lot of the source material, are explicitly legal. And then there's the Hyundai Genesis. To the last question: No, but I wouldn't pursue art either way.
spyder 4y ago
But author of the article says he would be fine with AI trained on licensed images, which could be also on bigger scale than a single human is capable of. Looks like some people doesn't like it because the data it was trained on but others are worried about the technology and its capabilities over humans.
tshaddox 4y ago
These problems of scale aren't unique to recent leaps in technology, or even to automation or technology at all. Government intelligent agencies can, given certain goals and management, do a great deal of harmful and disturbing things without using any secret or advanced technology. A team of 1,000 people with, say, basic PC office equipment from the early 2000s, could do a great deal if they were competently trained and managed and told to, say, investigate and attempt to undermine some group that the agency doesn't like for whatever reason. In my opinion the technology has little to do with the problem, even though the potential for harm is unique to the scale of resources dedicated to it, and even though they would be a lot less effectively if they didn't have that technology (i.e. imagine if they no longer had access to personal computers at the office).
tshaddox 4y ago
The argument about differences in scale constituting differences in kind is compelling, and yet I'm not sure how to evaluate any particular instance of this type of argument without just deferring to my existing opinion on the topic at hand. For example, it's easy to construct hypothetical scenarios where a difference in scale seem to clearly constitute a difference in kind and where suppression of a new technology seems clearly reasonable. An easy hypothetical (but not implausible) example is some new kind of extremely deadly weapon that would be much easier to build than existing weapons if the "recipe" was made public. But it's also easy to make the same argument for things like, say, the printing press. And indeed there has always been intense opposition from many to the printing press and subsequent technologies that make distributing written language much easier, with opponents often presenting arguments in this same form. Yet it feels wrong to me to apply the argument this way. Is that just because I have existing opinions that generally oppose restrictions in the ability to distribute ideas, but I don't generally oppose restrictions on very deadly weapons? Or is there some other way to distinguish between valid and invalid instances of this form of argument, perhaps by attempting to estimate the overall risk versus reward?

mbreese 4y ago

> Humans learn to produce good art largely by learning from existing art I think you’re wrong on this. Humans learn (anything) from teachers. Yes, you can learn much on your own, but the idea of a solo artist learning from books is exceedingly rare. So in this case, you learn art by doing, critiquing your work and the works of others. You put forth effort. While I am amazed at the generated images and think they truly are amazing, I can’t help but think they all feel a little cheap. Like someone took a shortcut that was never meant to be found. I do think there are real ethical issues behind the training data for both image and code generation. Nothing that can’t be solved, but random images scraped from the web are not meant for training. First - it’s not necessarily a fair-use issue. And second, garbage in, garbage out. I don’t want my auto generated images to come with a Getty watermark. Where I do think there is hope is for the use of these as tools for artists. Where there can still be a human behind the choices and curation, but using the algorithms as a means rather than an end.

spywaregorilla 4y ago
> I think you’re wrong on this. Humans learn (anything) from teachers. Yes, you can learn much on your own, but the idea of a solo artist learning from books is exceedingly rare. If you take an art class where a teacher instructs you and tells you to replicate 12 paintings by Van Gogh, I would argue you've learned more from Van Gogh than the teacher, even if he's showing you some physical techniques.
- mbreese 4y ago
  You could masterfully copy the Van Gogh stroke for stroke, but without the understanding behind the composition, intent, and meaning behind the work, I’d argue you learned nothing. Except for how to copy. The student/teacher interaction is where you learn. Even if you want to only paint in Van Gogh’s style, the back and forth with the teacher is where you actually learn how to apply that style to new works. To explore the meaning behind the stars, etc. (You could get there solo, but you’d still need to go through the criticism/questioning phase somehow, which is probably best done with an IRL teacher).

leeoniya 4y ago

is this in the same vein as professional Go and Chess players having and existential crisis over AlphaGo/AlphaZero/MuZero attaining superhuman playing ability with zero supervised learning in something like < 72 hours on non-supercomputer hardware. i suppose we'd all feel uneasy when AI eventually becomes better than humans at creative tasks which pay our bills or differentiate us within a profession.

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Buttons840 4y ago

That's fine, until an AI regurgitates a unique page of code I wrote without modification. That's just copying. Although, if the courts want to clarify that straight-up copying a page or two of code is okay, I would be happy. My fear is copilot will be allowed to copy code, but I won't be.

hot_gril 4y ago
Just copy the code and claim the AI did it.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
But that's just stupid. You find some code on stack overflow that solves your problem. Are you going to do the refactoring dance until it looks different enough or are you just going to use the code? You find the same code on a non open source github repo. Well what now? You've got a mental model of how to solve the problem. Can't use that knowledge? That knowledge has been locked away as illegal? This is not a reasonable model.

sp332 4y ago

Sure but the output from the AI does not give credit. So I don't know what the inspiration is or where it came from or how to find more of the same kind.

bluehorseray 4y ago

To a certain extent I agree, but another argument would be that at the end of the day, computers are deterministic (even on the incredibly large scale of these image generators, given parameters x, it will produce y). We're still not sure whether humans are deterministic or not. So you can't really equate the human process of art creation to a computers. Humans may still be pulling from some external inspiration that will never be within the reach of computers (I like to think that's the case).

Verdex 4y ago
I'm not sure determinism is where you want to draw the line. Just have the computer get a webcam pointed at a lava lamp. It's non-deterministic now. Or maybe you want to still argue that that's ultimately deterministic. Okay, well, just have a person show up to the art computer, look deep within their soul, then type in a completely random, soulful, non-deterministic seed value into the art computer. Bam! Now the computer can create real art.
- deleted 4y ago
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thomasahle 4y ago

1) Humans learn from existing art, but they mainly draw on their experience and perception of the physical world when creating new art. AI doesn't have access to the real world, so it's art is 100% based on existing work, not just inspired by it. 2) We still don't know exactly how much the models memorise. I'm sure you'll agree that something like Google image search retrieval doesn't qualify as original art, and copyright is still an issue. If you photoshop two images together, you probably also still have to give credit to the original images. We have to draw the line somewhere on the scale from "100% derivative to 100% original". It's not yet clear where AI image generation falls on this.

spywaregorilla 4y ago
> Humans learn from existing art, but they mainly draw on their experience and perception of the physical world when creating new art. AI doesn't have access to the real world, so it's art is 100% based on existing work, not just inspired by it. Ok so let's just feed the ai some dashcam footage and this argument is null. > I'm sure you'll agree that something like Google image search retrieval doesn't qualify as original art, Yes > and copyright is still an issue No
- tomatotomato37 4y ago
  If the AI researchers actually go through the effort of strapping a bunch of go-pros to people for a year as they experience life and used that as the majority of training data than I'm fine with calling anything it generates original art. But for now when the training set is 100% others work and you can see the AI literally trying to inject a jumbled artist name/trademark into "original" art I can't see it as anything more than extreme photobashing
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Seems like an impressive amount of mental gymnastics to me
- thomasahle 4y ago

rasz 4y ago

Humans learn, the "AI" (in this case fancy content aware fill) takes a stencil copy of the original copyrighted work, and stores it in its memory.

simonw 4y ago
I don't think calling it a stencil copy is the right mental model. These models take 5bn+ images and use them to influence the weights on a giant array of floating point numbers. Each input image has a truly tiny effect on the finished product. The final model is on the order of 4.5GB - the compression ratio is unreal. Nothing of the original images remains. So "stencil copy" doesn't work for me.
- rasz 4y ago
  and yet its able to generate Getty images watermark
  - simonw 4y ago
    Right - because it's seen thousands of those watermarks, so it's very easy for it to output its own rendition of one.

dahart 4y ago

This blindly steam rolls over some important distinctions. Humans aren’t allowed to sell direct copies of other people’s art (not in the US and many other countries anyway). This isn’t a hang-up, and it’s not status quo bias, it’s well covered law and economic philosophy that is already blending new digital rights ideas into hard fought legal precedents. We have explicitly decided to have the social goal to protect the rights of artistic creative people & businesses without having their work instantly ripped off. Humans also are good at taking inspiration from ideas, where today’s AI is borrowing pixels. The AI is copying in a way that humans don’t, it’s not mimicking and taking inspiration - that is anthropomorphising the software that is trained and programmed to make automated mashups of images. So in part it depends on what we do with AI images. There may be nothing wrong with training on copyrighted material if the resulting inferences are never distributed publicly nor used for commercial purposes. Of course that seems extremely unlikely, which is why it needs to be discussed carefully and debated in good faith, right? Maybe in part it also depends on whether the AI software is guaranteed to produce something very different from any individual training image. If the outputs are guaranteed to be always a mashup, and never indistinguishable from any single input, that seems like it would be an easier pill to swallow. (There appears to be legal precedent along these lines for music sampling.)

IanCal 4y ago
> Humans also are good at taking inspiration from ideas, where today’s AI is borrowing pixels. I disagree with this, we don't just hear about ideas we actually see the art. Both are shown pictures.
karmasimida 4y ago
> Humans aren’t allowed to sell direct copies of other people’s art Direct copying yes, but stealing ideas? No. Actually it is a well-known practice in the art industry to use several existing works as references, and creating new artwork that is bit of mixture of all of them. That is exactly what DALL-E/StableDiffusion are trying to do. AI isn't borrowing pixels, either. If you read the idea of diffusion models, quite the opposite, what it directly learns is how to destroy an image from what it is into gaussian noise. The trick here is we can reverse this process 'creating' arts from noises. There is no copying pixels, not even in the most simplistic version of how this model works.

akira2501 4y ago

Yes.. but a human can understand what I want and anticipate various outcomes from much shorter conversations that don't involve all this ridiculous prompting. Asking this system for a simple picture like "a dog smoking a cigarette" reveals just how limited this system is. Thinking that this system, with such a small set or data and no natural language processing, is going to replace artists anytime soon, is, I think, incredibly eager to the point of foolishness.

throwaways85989 4y ago

But that is just art. Not great art. Great art comes from stepping away from your peer group after you mastered it, being able to incooperate "unrelated" or "impossible" other concepts into the art. Its a subconscious process, of recombination and filtering. And only some can boldly go, to were no person has gone before. Which makes this the ultimate training goal for AI. Not AGI, but a synthesis AI, capable to produce "breakthrough" candidates for the field it is trained upon, by allowing noise and filtering for the criteria of great break throughs- explanation power, beauty, higher consistency, that puzzle piece fitting all gaps moment. If there is ever a creature out there, doing that, silicon or otherwise, humanity will own its continued existence to its existence.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I wonder what would happen if an artist got their stuff legally removed from the sources, and then you asked the AI to produce something in the style of their main influences.

t0bia_s 4y ago

I don't understand why AI generated images are called as art. Art is not about form. It's about content. Meaning that can be generated and understand only by humans.

simonw 4y ago
Artists are using AI models to generate art right now, with an enormous amount of interaction along the way. Watch this video for an example of how involved the process can be: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x0b0rq/img2img_fantasy_art_walkthrough_video/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/x0b0rq/img... Would you say that artist did not produce something that could be called art, just because they used an AI model as part of their process?
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  It's an digital image. Not very interesting to be honest. Art is more deep. Has meaning. It doesn't matter how is it done. I mean... You wouldn't find something like that in art gallery on wall.
  - simonw 4y ago
    That sounds like your personal taste. What if the image that person had drawn really impressed you on its artistic merits before you learned how they had made it?
    - t0bia_s 4y ago
      Impression is one thing, that is for me now, not that important as meaning, story, message... Especially nowadays, when generating beautiful impressive images is easy and overdone (waving on Instagram).