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I’m a programmer and a songwriter and I am not worried about these tools and I don’t think they are bad for society. What did the photograph do to the portrait

I’m a programmer and a songwriter and I am not worried about these tools and I don’t think they are bad for society. What did the photograph do to the portrait artist? What did the recording do to the live musician? Here’s some highfalutin art theory on the matter, from almost a hundred years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
But this isn’t like photography and portrait artistry. This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. Stable Diffusion has literally been used to create new art by screenshotting someone’s live-streamed art creation process as the seed. While creating derivative work has always been considered art(such as deletion poetry and collage), it’s extremely uncommon and blasé to never attribute the original(s).
- insanitybit 4y ago
  > This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid. If I parody your work, that's my work. If you paint a picture of a building and I go to that spot and take a photograph of that building it is my work. I can derive all sorts of things, things that I own, from things that others have made. Fair use is a thing: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ As for talking about the originals, would an artist credit every piece of inspiration they have ever encountered over a lifetime? Publishing a seed seems fine as a nice thing to do, but pointing at the billion pictures that went into the drawing seems silly.
  - tremon 4y ago
    Fair use is an affirmative defense. Others can still sue you for copying, and you will have to hope a judge agrees with your defense. How do you think Google v. Oracle would have turned out if Google's defense was "no your honor, we didn't copy the Java sources. We just used those sources as input to our creative algorithms, and this is what they independently produced"? If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid "valid", how? You still have to pay royalties to the copyright holder of the original song, and you don't get to claim it as your own.
    - stale2002 4y ago
      Nobody is suing anybody over AI art yet. Until there are a large amount of court cases, the burden of proof is on you to say that this is copyright infringement.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    If you sing over a song you’re adding your own voice. If you photograph a building that’s your own photograph, where decisions like lighting and framing are creative choices. If you paint a picture of a building that’s your own picture. An artist should credit when they are directly taking from another artist. Erasure poems don’t quite work if the poet runs around claiming they created the poem that was being erased. But more importantly SD allows you to take and use existing copyright works and funny-launder them and pass them off as your own, even though you don’t own the rights to that work. This would be more akin to I take a photograph you made and sell it on a t shirt on red bubble. I don’t actually own the IP to do that with.
ghoward 4y ago
Do you know what's different about the photograph or the recording? They are still their own separate works! If a painter paints a person for commission, and then that person also commissions a photographer to take a picture of them, is the photographer infringing on the copyright of the painter? Absolutely not; the works are separate. If a recording artist records a public domain song that another artist performs live, is the recording artist infringing on the live artist? Heavens, no; the works are separate. On the other hand, these "AI's" are taking existing works and reusing them. Say I write a song, and in that song, I use one stanza from the chorus of one of your songs. Verbatim. Would you have a copyright claim against me for that? Of course, you would! That's what these AI's do; they copy portions and mix them. Sometimes they are not substantial portions. Sometimes, they are, with verbatim comments (code), identical structure (also code), watermarks (images), composition (also images), lyrics (songs), or motifs (also songs). In the reverse of your painter and photographer example, we saw US courts hand down judgment against an artist who blatantly copied a photograph. [1] Anyway, that's the difference between the tools of photography (creates a new thing) and sound recording (creates a new thing) versus AI (mixes existing things). And yes, sound mixing can easily stray into copyright infringement. So can other copying of various copyrightable things. I'm not saying humans don't infringe; I'm saying that AI does by construction. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-hears-arguments-andy-warhol-copyright-dispute-2022-10-12/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-hears-argu...
- williamcotton 4y ago
  I'm not sure sure that originality is that different between a human and a neural network. That is to say that what a human artist is doing has always involved a lot of mixing of existing creations. Art needs to have a certain level of familiarity in order to be understood by an audience. I didn't invent 4/4 time or a I-IV-V progression and I certainly wasn't the first person to tackle the rhyme schemes or subject matter of my songs. I wouldn't be surprised if there were fragments from other songs in my lyrics or melodies, either from something I heard a long time ago or perhaps just out of coincidence. There's only so much you can do with a folk song to begin with! BTW, what happened after the photograph is that there were less portrait artists. And after the recording there were less live musicians. There are certainly no less artists nor musicians, though!
snarfy 4y ago
> What did the recording do to the live musician? The recording destroyed the occupation of being a live musician. People still do it for what amounts to tip money, but it used to be a real job that people could make a living off of. If you had a business and wanted to differentiate it by having music, you had to pay people to play it live. It was the only way.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  It also gave birth to the recording artist. It certainly didn’t get rid of musicians.
__alexs 4y ago
> What did the photograph do to the portrait artist? It completely destroyed the jobs of photo realistic portrait artists. You only have stylised portrait painting now and now that is going to be ripped off too.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  It also gave birth to the photographic portrait artist. It certainly did not get rid of portrait artists in general. This was of course a leading question. The point was to get you to think about what artists did in response to the photograph. They changed the way they paint. I'm positive that machine learning will also change the way that people create are and I am positive that it will only add to the rich tapestry of creative possibilities. There are still realistic portrait painters, after all, they're just not as numerous.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago

But this isn’t like photography and portrait artistry. This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. Stable Diffusion has literally been used to create new art by screenshotting someone’s live-streamed art creation process as the seed. While creating derivative work has always been considered art(such as deletion poetry and collage), it’s extremely uncommon and blasé to never attribute the original(s).

insanitybit 4y ago
> This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid. If I parody your work, that's my work. If you paint a picture of a building and I go to that spot and take a photograph of that building it is my work. I can derive all sorts of things, things that I own, from things that others have made. Fair use is a thing: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ As for talking about the originals, would an artist credit every piece of inspiration they have ever encountered over a lifetime? Publishing a seed seems fine as a nice thing to do, but pointing at the billion pictures that went into the drawing seems silly.
- tremon 4y ago
  Fair use is an affirmative defense. Others can still sue you for copying, and you will have to hope a judge agrees with your defense. How do you think Google v. Oracle would have turned out if Google's defense was "no your honor, we didn't copy the Java sources. We just used those sources as input to our creative algorithms, and this is what they independently produced"? If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid "valid", how? You still have to pay royalties to the copyright holder of the original song, and you don't get to claim it as your own.
  - stale2002 4y ago
    Nobody is suing anybody over AI art yet. Until there are a large amount of court cases, the burden of proof is on you to say that this is copyright infringement.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  If you sing over a song you’re adding your own voice. If you photograph a building that’s your own photograph, where decisions like lighting and framing are creative choices. If you paint a picture of a building that’s your own picture. An artist should credit when they are directly taking from another artist. Erasure poems don’t quite work if the poet runs around claiming they created the poem that was being erased. But more importantly SD allows you to take and use existing copyright works and funny-launder them and pass them off as your own, even though you don’t own the rights to that work. This would be more akin to I take a photograph you made and sell it on a t shirt on red bubble. I don’t actually own the IP to do that with.

ghoward 4y ago

Do you know what's different about the photograph or the recording? They are still their own separate works! If a painter paints a person for commission, and then that person also commissions a photographer to take a picture of them, is the photographer infringing on the copyright of the painter? Absolutely not; the works are separate. If a recording artist records a public domain song that another artist performs live, is the recording artist infringing on the live artist? Heavens, no; the works are separate. On the other hand, these "AI's" are taking existing works and reusing them. Say I write a song, and in that song, I use one stanza from the chorus of one of your songs. Verbatim. Would you have a copyright claim against me for that? Of course, you would! That's what these AI's do; they copy portions and mix them. Sometimes they are not substantial portions. Sometimes, they are, with verbatim comments (code), identical structure (also code), watermarks (images), composition (also images), lyrics (songs), or motifs (also songs). In the reverse of your painter and photographer example, we saw US courts hand down judgment against an artist who blatantly copied a photograph. [1] Anyway, that's the difference between the tools of photography (creates a new thing) and sound recording (creates a new thing) versus AI (mixes existing things). And yes, sound mixing can easily stray into copyright infringement. So can other copying of various copyrightable things. I'm not saying humans don't infringe; I'm saying that AI does by construction. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-hears-arguments-andy-warhol-copyright-dispute-2022-10-12/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-hears-argu...

williamcotton 4y ago
I'm not sure sure that originality is that different between a human and a neural network. That is to say that what a human artist is doing has always involved a lot of mixing of existing creations. Art needs to have a certain level of familiarity in order to be understood by an audience. I didn't invent 4/4 time or a I-IV-V progression and I certainly wasn't the first person to tackle the rhyme schemes or subject matter of my songs. I wouldn't be surprised if there were fragments from other songs in my lyrics or melodies, either from something I heard a long time ago or perhaps just out of coincidence. There's only so much you can do with a folk song to begin with! BTW, what happened after the photograph is that there were less portrait artists. And after the recording there were less live musicians. There are certainly no less artists nor musicians, though!

snarfy 4y ago

> What did the recording do to the live musician? The recording destroyed the occupation of being a live musician. People still do it for what amounts to tip money, but it used to be a real job that people could make a living off of. If you had a business and wanted to differentiate it by having music, you had to pay people to play it live. It was the only way.

williamcotton 4y ago
It also gave birth to the recording artist. It certainly didn’t get rid of musicians.

__alexs 4y ago

> What did the photograph do to the portrait artist? It completely destroyed the jobs of photo realistic portrait artists. You only have stylised portrait painting now and now that is going to be ripped off too.

williamcotton 4y ago
It also gave birth to the photographic portrait artist. It certainly did not get rid of portrait artists in general. This was of course a leading question. The point was to get you to think about what artists did in response to the photograph. They changed the way they paint. I'm positive that machine learning will also change the way that people create are and I am positive that it will only add to the rich tapestry of creative possibilities. There are still realistic portrait painters, after all, they're just not as numerous.