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For me, this is easy because I consider copyright amoral — that is to say that copyright does not involve morality or immortality, and only its formal legal def

For me, this is easy because I consider copyright amoral — that is to say that copyright does not involve morality or immortality, and only its formal legal definition is meaningful. I am not saying that attribution doesn’t have an ethical dimension. Only that attribution is morally/ethically independent of the legal construct of copyright. Not that I think it matters much because I don’t expect AI art will have much impact as art in the long run…which is not the same as saying it won’t have much impact in the realm of disposable images. The reason I think AI art won’t be terribly important is that there do not appear to be very many intellectually interesting things to say about it as art beyond is-it-art-because-I-hung-it-on-the-wall? And none of this is to say that artists won’t make interesting AI art. Because artists and their processes are intellectually interesting in ways that training sets are not. I mean David Hockney’s iPad art is interesting because of David Hockney not because of iPads. YMMV.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
I consider copyright immoral, but I still struggle with the idea that most of us have to honor copyright but the big companies scraping for image models don't have to. Maybe we could view that as a positive erosion of copyright, but we could also see it as unfair exploitation of artists. Google can scrape from artists but what would happen if one of us tried to take Google's code? I have been playing with Stable Diffusion for a week. I think it is going to have a significant impact. The so-called disposable art probably gives lots of artists their first paid gigs that gives them paid time to practice and build a portfolio, while learning to work with customers. I think a lot of that work will shift to prolific prompt-engineers who know their way around the software. I'm very pro-automaton (I'm a robotics engineer) but I don't like the idea of taking work from a bunch of artists without their consent to build a model that depresses their wages. I would rather these companies worked on sample-efficiency (an important area of research) and stuck to the millions of openly licensed images available on the web, then worked with twitter and instagram to add image license options to the photo widgets so that we can all build up a consent-based model. And artists that want to keep their work for themselves have that choice. I don't think it will happen, but I do wish we actually honored the consent of the artists. I think it's a shame we're not.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

I consider copyright immoral, but I still struggle with the idea that most of us have to honor copyright but the big companies scraping for image models don't have to. Maybe we could view that as a positive erosion of copyright, but we could also see it as unfair exploitation of artists. Google can scrape from artists but what would happen if one of us tried to take Google's code? I have been playing with Stable Diffusion for a week. I think it is going to have a significant impact. The so-called disposable art probably gives lots of artists their first paid gigs that gives them paid time to practice and build a portfolio, while learning to work with customers. I think a lot of that work will shift to prolific prompt-engineers who know their way around the software. I'm very pro-automaton (I'm a robotics engineer) but I don't like the idea of taking work from a bunch of artists without their consent to build a model that depresses their wages. I would rather these companies worked on sample-efficiency (an important area of research) and stuck to the millions of openly licensed images available on the web, then worked with twitter and instagram to add image license options to the photo widgets so that we can all build up a consent-based model. And artists that want to keep their work for themselves have that choice. I don't think it will happen, but I do wish we actually honored the consent of the artists. I think it's a shame we're not.