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I've said this before, but I often think about what it would be like if the big AI companies actually honored copyright (like the rest of us have to, even thoug

I've said this before, but I often think about what it would be like if the big AI companies actually honored copyright (like the rest of us have to, even though it is a very bad system) and relied on open access images (theres more than 10 million in various collections online) and improvements to sample efficiency to make their AI art generators. Like if they worked with Twitter and Instagram to add image license options, with sticky defaults so users could specify that their image uploads are freely licensed, and encourage users to add alt text so AI algorithms and blind users alike have a better experience. The result would be a better internet, with more openness. Instead, they've tried to just fly under the radar, upsetting a lot of people in the process by scooping up art whether the artist wants them to or not. Anyway, open access image libraries are fantastic! Glad to see this.

kmeisthax 4y ago
Honestly? I think it would result in a smarter image generator. Part of the problem with the "hope-Authors-Guild-v-Google-is-controlling-precedent" approach is that the data set is extremely noisy. In AI, the training set is gospel, and people are almost certainly overfitting their models. DALL-E 2 is suspiciously familiar with how to draw Getty Images watermarks, for example. Man, if I knew how half this training software worked, I'd be downloading the whole image set today and shoving it straight through my poor aging 1080 Ti.
zozbot234 4y ago
> Like if they worked with Twitter and Instagram to add image license options, with sticky defaults so users could specify that their image uploads are freely licensed Flickr has always done this, though not with "sticky defaults" (which you don't actually want; open content licenses work only when they are absolutely irrevocable and non-repudiatable for the licensor, which a "sticky default choice" might not be). Even YT gives users the choice of posting freely licensed videos, though it gets very little use in practice.
- ghaff 4y ago
  A problem is that defaults are so powerful. If you default uploads to MIT-0 or something like that, it comes across like you're hoping people won't notice. And if you default to all rights reserved (which is what Flickr does) relatively few people will opt-in to something more open. And I'd add that I'm not sure how well most of the Creative Commons options work anyway. Unless you add your own watermark--which I don't like doing--to a photo, the attribution and photo get separated unless the user is being meticulous and probably even then a lot of the time. (I try to be careful but images get copied from presentation to presentation etc.) Plus it's very tempting for people to choose non-commercial CC if they choose CC. But there really are very few interesting uses (except maybe education) that are genuinely non-commercial.

kmeisthax 4y ago

Honestly? I think it would result in a smarter image generator. Part of the problem with the "hope-Authors-Guild-v-Google-is-controlling-precedent" approach is that the data set is extremely noisy. In AI, the training set is gospel, and people are almost certainly overfitting their models. DALL-E 2 is suspiciously familiar with how to draw Getty Images watermarks, for example. Man, if I knew how half this training software worked, I'd be downloading the whole image set today and shoving it straight through my poor aging 1080 Ti.

zozbot234 4y ago

> Like if they worked with Twitter and Instagram to add image license options, with sticky defaults so users could specify that their image uploads are freely licensed Flickr has always done this, though not with "sticky defaults" (which you don't actually want; open content licenses work only when they are absolutely irrevocable and non-repudiatable for the licensor, which a "sticky default choice" might not be). Even YT gives users the choice of posting freely licensed videos, though it gets very little use in practice.

ghaff 4y ago
A problem is that defaults are so powerful. If you default uploads to MIT-0 or something like that, it comes across like you're hoping people won't notice. And if you default to all rights reserved (which is what Flickr does) relatively few people will opt-in to something more open. And I'd add that I'm not sure how well most of the Creative Commons options work anyway. Unless you add your own watermark--which I don't like doing--to a photo, the attribution and photo get separated unless the user is being meticulous and probably even then a lot of the time. (I try to be careful but images get copied from presentation to presentation etc.) Plus it's very tempting for people to choose non-commercial CC if they choose CC. But there really are very few interesting uses (except maybe education) that are genuinely non-commercial.