43 ms·

An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model

• tanbog6 4y ago
  Kind of off topic, but it would be a fascinating experiment if you could take all the art that influenced a real artists and train an ai on it an compare to the artist actual output. Do humans have original ideas or are we synthesizers of what we take in?
• rhyn00 4y ago
  Is AI the problem here, or is this story a symptom of a bigger problem? This is a somewhat long comment, but just thought I would share my thoughts. The concern is that someone who has worked hard to create art wants use it to leverage it to obtain security in their life, and they are at risk of losing that leverage with new AI technology. Well, first of all, plenty of people work hard their whole lives for low compensation because their skills are not unique, and often don't have the time/capital/energy to build new skills even if they wanted to. I question the way we live our life, there is a lot of suffering in the world because we are focused on taking from each other (in some cases using violence, in other cases laws). In the first world most people are expected to spend their childhood preparing to work away their adult life to earn minimum compensation enriching someone else, and in the third word most people are in extreme poverty, which the first world is happy to exploit for labor, resource extraction, brain drain, strategic military advantage, ect. Artificial intelligence is about to make a lot of things that required difficult and unique training trivial. Making many more people redundant, and no longer unique/needed even if we do end up creating copyright laws enforcing that nobody can use someone's work to train the AI. Do we really think that we won't become redundant just because it doesn't train on our art/code? So like the artist here, we should all be wondering what is to come. I think reason people are so worried is because we have it in our heads the way to conduct trade, and ourselves is by extracting value from one another. Instead of a culture of giving gifts without guarantee of reward, fostering relationships and caring for and understanding each other, we are trying to take from each other to ensure our needs/wants are met. The ultimate way to achieve security under this way of life is to create a dependence, become the owner of the assets/capital that can be used to take value/labor from others want/depend on what we have. We act like we have only a few choices when it comes to how to live, religion, capitalism, communism, socialism, and so on. But we have the choice to try and understand the people we meet in life, and reach out to those who we don't know. Knowing each others needs/wants we can help each other out. We have the ability to be generous when we can, foster relationships, so that in our time of need we might be helped, by someone that cares (because we're there for them too). It's just that we listen to the advertisements telling us if we want to be happy, to buy more and more things (possibly at determent of our own health/well being), we listen to leaders that would have us go to war with each other, we listen to society telling us to focus on making more money, exchange labor for wealth, and use the wealth to obtain security/happiness. What if instead we believed the most important thing was to live with balance with each other and with nature, and to communicate with each other to see how we can help. We do after all live in this world together, and when there is an imbalance we see the effects like poverty, stress/anxiety, addiction, theft, violence, wars, exploitation, hate, not to mention the obscene amount of time we spend working (40+hr/wk for 40+ years) to enrich someone that doesn't care about us. Are we not living in a backwards way? Most people are dependent on a few, by culture, or by force (think of how this force is created - if you don't obey those with power/authority, someone else who does will threaten you with violence or revoke privileges). If someone breaks a law, or threatens our livelihood, we'll just take away their livelihood (or what little they had to begin with) - how well has this worked out? With the advanced technology to communicate more easily than ever before, and provide what we need/want with much less labor/skill as before, and the wealth of knowledge available, it's time realize, that by giving to each other and helping one another, we will all be better off. Well, maybe not the extremely wealthy and powerful powerful people - but even they don't get to live in peace because someone is always trying to take their spot - think about all the wars fought because one authority is threatened by another, or all the companies trying to hold their grip in the face of more desperate innovate companies. I'm not saying doing something different is easy, or straightforward, but it might be better. I think we don't need to ask anyone's permission to do it, we just start doing it within our own networks - building up each other, making new relationships, looking out for one another. If you want your security to come from laws and by taking instead of giving, how long that will last, just how secure is that anyways?
• allturtles 4y ago
  I think the reason this is creating so much angst is that it's not really just about the future of digital art as a career. It doesn't take much imagination to see this as the vanguard of what will be coming for all jobs that involve manipulating bits on a computer, which is a huge class of jobs these days, including most of the jobs done by participants on this site. The rapid development of AI may mean the near-completion of the hollowing out of the middle class. On one side the capitalists who own the machines and data that can do all the knowledge work, on the other the mass of workers trying to scrape by in menial service jobs. What will remain in the middle will be the craft trades that require dealing with complex real world physical problems and thus are still extremely hard to automate (plumbers, electricians, etc.).
• bugfix-66 4y ago
  Systems like Copilot and Dall-E and so on turn their training data into anonymous common property. Your work becomes my work. This may appeal to naive people (students, hippies, etc.), for whom socialist/communist ideas are attractive, but it's poison in the real world because it eliminates the reward system that motivates most creative work. People work hard for credit or respect, if they're not working for money. Ask yourself, why does the MIT License (https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) contain the following text? Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. These systems are a mechanism that can regurgitate (digest, remix, emit) without attribution all of the world's open code and all of the world's art. With these systems, you're giving everyone the ability to plagiarize everything, effortlessly and unknowingly. No skill, no effort, no time required. No awareness of the sources of the derivative work. My work is now your work. Everyone and his 10-year old brother can "write" my code (and derivatives), without ever knowing I wrote it, without ever knowing I existed. Everyone can use my hard work, regurgitated anonymously, stripped of all credit, stripped of all attribution, stripped of all identity and ancestry and citation. It's a new kind of use not known (or imagined?) when the copyright laws were written. Training must be opt in, not opt out. Every artist, every creative individual, must EXPLICITLY OPT IN to having their hard work regurgitated anonymously by Copilot or Dall-E or whatever. If you want to donate your code or your painting or your music so it can easily be "written" or "painted", in whole or in part, by everyone else, without attribution, then go ahead and opt in. Most people aren't so totally selfless. But if an author or artist does not EXPLICITLY OPT IN, you can't use their creative work to train these systems. All these code/art washing systems, that absorb and mix and regurgitate the hard work of creative people must be strictly opt in. I say this as a person who writes deep-learning parallel linear algebra kernels professionally. We've crossed a line here.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • gpderetta 4y ago
    Exactly, any coder and artist should learn from scratch without absolutely any exposure to existing code, work of art or even idea. Anything else is outright STEALING! Excuse me when I make an apple pie from scratch.
• djoldman 4y ago
  It's interesting to think about all the controversy surrounding machine-generated images in contrast with a scenario where the same images were generated/drawn/created directly by a human. In this specific scenario, what would the artist think if 1000 people started drawing in her style and released those images?
  • burkaman 4y ago
    It's ok to have different standards for humans and computers. Even if you think that a machine learning model is conceptually doing the same thing as a human artist, just a trillion times faster and infinitely replicable, there's no reason we can't say that it's ok for humans to do this, but not for computers. Computers are not people. It's not unfair or unethical to put an artificial limitation on an artificial object.
    • dymk 4y ago
      Seems like putting a limitation on what someone can do with their own computer on their own time with their own money.
      • burkaman 4y ago
        Yes, sort of like disallowing someone to DDoS a server using their own computer on their own time with their own money. This is not about one person playing around in private, it's about thousands of people (potentially millions) instantaneously generating art expressly intended to copy someone's specific style and publicly releasing the results.
        • googlryas 4y ago
          If you're ddosing someone's server you necessarily aren't playing around in private.
          • burkaman 4y ago
            If people were only playing around with Stable Diffusion in private then this article wouldn't exist and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
• VBprogrammer 4y ago
  I don't really have a stance on the moral or ethical points but some of the results in the illustrations included here are amazing. If you mixed them up and asked me to identify those which were originals and those which where AI generated I would fail miserably. That in amazing in my book.
  • nicbou 4y ago
    AI is still pure magic to me. It's the first time something makes me feel like I'm part of the "before" era. I thought it would be cool, like someone seeing the space race. Instead, I find it terrifying, like the nuclear race.
• spicyusername 4y ago
  It really does feel like the headline for 1970 - 2070 is going to be "Technology desperately tries, but fails, to make the world a better place". What technology has _really_ improved what it is like to be a human being, around other human beings, and to lead a fulfilling life? Every "disrupted" industry feels like it just has been replaced by a less-human, more unequal, and more dystopian version of itself over the past 50 years. Those who can survive tech jobs seem to have turned out to be the least equipped people to properly navigate us towards utopia.
  • JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
    My Roomba is one of the few pieces of technology I own with no downsides to my life. I often think of it as an example of technology done right.
    • wlesieutre 4y ago
      There's been lots of great technological advancements in household stuff. Cordless tools come to mind as another. I think it's when you put a screen on anything that it starts the downhill slide.
      • ls15 4y ago
        I am trying to replace most electric tools with hand-cranked cordless tools and I am especially excited to find a barely used 40 y/o tool where I know that it will last me easily another 40 years. Helps me to stay in shape, to have a resilient toolbox and to lower my energy bill. I also dislike the noises of many electric tools. My battery-powered drill stays with me though, as it is just too helpful.
        • wlesieutre 4y ago
          The bell system 2101A is a fun bit of history too, our original copper phone/internet infrastructure was built with those
    • 4y ago
• btilly 4y ago
  It is worth asking, what legal rights of the author's may have been violated here? Glancing at https://cyber.harvard.edu/property/library/moralprimer.html https://cyber.harvard.edu/property/library/moralprimer.html the following ending sentence seems particularly applicable: If a person uses the identity of an author, or the works of the author, for her own benefit without the author's permission, then she may have violated the author's right of publicity or may be guilty of misappropriation of the author's work. And the previous line is nearly applicable: If authorship of a work is attributed to an author against her will, or misattributed, the author may have a state action for defamation against the person responsible for the attribution. Of course "moral rights" are particularly weak in the USA. I'm sure that there would be a much better case in the EU. Of course this gets directly to the question of what happens when laws conflict with technology. People in technology generally think that technology should win. People who benefit from the laws think that the laws should win. Both popular opinion and real world results generally wind up somewhere between.
  • polotics 4y ago
    The legal right that's been violated is copyright: copies of her work were taken and fed into the ML model. This was done without the picture owner's approval. Moral right may be weak in the USA, but copyright ain't. Most likely making the owners whole is going to be an expensive proposition at some point.
    • i_like_apis 4y ago
      Training on copyrighted material is legal, and rightly so.
      • polotics 4y ago
        Are you sure? Has this been tested in court? As you write: "rightly so", may I ask if you are a judge, lawyer? Has this decision of yours been appealed, gone to a higher court? Does the word "training" as applied to a computing system not simply mean "copying"? Who decides this?
• asciimov 4y ago
  I think it's interesting that for the past 50+ years we have been having an ongoing philosophical debate about the ethics of genetic manipulation. The warning stories are abound in sci-fi, and though we have the tools to do so, we use extreme restraint in their research. Yet we haven't had such discussions in computer science about the use of AI. While other fields wrestle with the ethics of doing things, we have had no such discussions. (Due to the nature of our education we are blind to the demands of ethics.) We have made the tools so easy to use, and so accessible, that even if we should discuss the implications of said tools the cat is already out of the bag. Lately, I've been thinking about that poem "First they came..." by Martin Niemöller and wondering if now is the time to heed it's warning. First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
  • izzydata 4y ago
    There are a lot of science fiction stories warning about AI. Although, they are about actual AI and not machine learning. Personally I think it is actually literally impossible to make AI built from conventional computer hardware. Anything you could ever do as a computer scientist can only ever result in more sophisticated, but not sentient algorithms.
    • asciimov 4y ago
      True, we do have warnings about human level AI... but we never really cover the Machine Learning is gonna take all y'all's jobs.
  • m3047 4y ago
    I've been musing for several years that there doesn't seem to be an organized "philosophy of computer science".
    • asciimov 4y ago
• qull 4y ago
  So she is claiming the flat corprate style, but with more saturation, as her own? Thats ballsy. It's a style for sure, but one based on looking oversimplified and generic imo. No suprise its easy to emulate, and a common averaging result. Its not as likely an actually distinct style, unless massively popular, would have this issue. That said, the greater question is no less valid; what elemens of style do we own, and how will ownership manifest moving forward when many new works use ai images as a starting poit, which are then based on other artists work, some of them being ai generated. Will it become a feedback loop sooner, or later, and what will that look like?
  • burkaman 4y ago
    DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are very good at replicating the distinctive styles of famous artists like Van Gogh or Seurat or anyone else you can think of, as well as other living artists: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/16/1059598/this-artist-is-dominating-ai-generated-art-and-hes-not-happy-about-it/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/16/1059598/this-art... This is not just about styles that you personally don't like. It will work for any style with a lot of available existing work, popularity is irrelevant.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • jalk 4y ago
    That’s was not my takeaway: >… the rendering, brushstrokes, and colors are the most surface-level area of art. I think what people will ultimately connect to in art is a lovable, relatable character. And I’m seeing AI struggling with that.” So she doesn’t want her name associated with, in her eyes, bland illustration that copy the the style she has used for some big well known clients.
  • simonw 4y ago
    Go take a look at her portfolio: https://holliemengert.com/ https://holliemengert.com/ It's clear to me that she has a very distinctive style of her own. It's not "flat corporate style" at all.
  • ROTMetro 4y ago
• gdubs 4y ago
  Feels like there's a difference between artists as drops in a vast ocean of training data, vs explicitly creating a model on one person's work. And I think the conversation would benefit from not conflating the two. I'm sort of a copyright 'moderate' I suppose. I think people should get paid for their work, and trying to just rip-off a single person's style (and I'm not at all saying this particular example was nefarious in intent) just feels gross. But I also think too much baggage and we stifle new ideas an innovations. However, I also think that most of the conversation around large models like StableDiffusion lack an understanding of how these models actually work. There's this misconception that they're a kind of 'collage machine'. The contribution of individual artists in these base models are like drops in a vast vast ocean. [edit: I repeat myself; recovering from Covid, forgive me.] They take this incredibly large set of digitized human creativity, and in turn we all get this amazing tool: a synthesizer for imagination. Anyway, just my personal opinion. It's become a very 'us vs them', lines-in-the-sand argument these days, and it'd be great if the conversation could be less heated and more philosophical.
  • yieldcrv 4y ago
    > Feels like there's a difference between artists as drops in a vast ocean of training data, vs explicitly creating a model on one person's work. I don't. Stability.ai did the big training sets and it is coincidence that it remembers the names and categories accurately. If you want to leverage this tool more fine tuned then you add these modules with more accurate naming. I would be for some way to compensate artists, like if the use of a module gave them a royalty, but I don't think it is an ethical, legal, or social norm to enforce. If it happens in a uncircumventable way, I would be for it. If it doesn't, I'm for that too.
  • ROTMetro 4y ago
    Hey, we want to use machines to steal people's creative work, take away their jobs in the future, and create more algorithm generated garbage since it worked so well for news sites and promoting videos/posts/social media. We also want to pretend that computer generated graphics are created by an 'artist' for the sole purpose of being able to assign copyright to our machine works, but be able to ignore artists and copyright in every other way. Why do people seem to have a strong opinion against this? It's just stealing the most intimate thing humans create (art) so that we can create soulless algorithmic versions of it for our own uses because evil artists won't let us just do what we want with their works and won't let us profit on their work. Artists are jerks.
• Imnimo 4y ago
  I feel like there are three issues at play here: -Using her name to describe/advertise the fine-tuned model. -Using her illustrations to fine-tune the model. -Using a larger body of potentially unlicensed images to train the base model. For the first, if we had decided that the other steps were fair use or whatever, would it be better or worse if the fine-tuned model had been made available with no mention of the identity of the author of the training images? I'm not sure. For the second, there is surely a limit after which this sort of thing becomes unambiguously unacceptable. Suppose you fine-tune so aggressively on a small dataset that eventually the model simply reproduces exactly the training images. Now you're obviously violating copyright. But where exactly is line before that? If I have a base model that was trained on fully licensed images, and I make one single gradient descent step using a copyrighted image, making imperceptible changes to the model's output, surely the resulting images not suddenly in violation. It seems to me that the standard should be that if a human were to draw the output by hand after looking at the training images, would we consider it a violation of copyright? As a thought experiment, imagine someone who lacks the ability to draw but can instead hand-write the weights of a neural network to produce the desired output - it shouldn't matter which process they use. For the third, what if I spent a long time prompt engineering on a model trained entirely on properly licensed data and was able to generate a prompt format that produced the outputs we see from this fine-tuned model? In other words, for any generative model, there is a space of reachable outputs, and it's not so clear that these images did not already lie in that space before fine-tuning.
  • theptip 4y ago
    I think this is the right way of chopping the problem space. In this case, the artist expressed a preference to not have her name used, which seems reasonable, and the author renamed the repo to accommodate that. One could easily imagine the opposite scenario, where the artist objects to not being credited. We are in a weird stage where the indexes into this style space are quite weird and ad-hoc; look at all the prompt engineering black magic. It’s worth noting though that this problem only showed up because there weren’t many examples of this style in the data set; when every frame of every Disney animation is in there, it won’t need you to refer to one artist’s name. I do wonder if a PR and UI improvement would be to layer a language model on top to build the prompt, or perhaps even bake this into the model itself, so you can use more generic (and possibly iterative) style descriptions instead of having to refer to an artist by name. Basically use AI to solve the prompt engineering problem too.
• savant_penguin 4y ago
  Maybe I'm oversimplifying but the question is: "does an artist _own_ a style?" To me the answer is no.
  • theptip 4y ago
    I agree with your answer, but not that your question is the question. Some that I think are closer: Does an artist own their name? Yes. I can’t publish a work of art and say “authored by savant_penguin”. Can I sell art with product name “in the style of savant_penguin”? I think this varies by jurisdiction; it’s not going to be legal in the EU I think. It might well be in the US. Edit: fleshed out more thoroughly by someone else already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33423857 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33423857
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  Reading all of that, the biggest issue was just the art style naming. One of the key features of Stable Diffusion is adding "in the style of <artist name>" to the prompt. This just has a contemporary/living artist and actually lets an individual train Stable Diffusion for anyone to add that style to their own Stable Diffusion instance, instead of waiting for Stability.ai to release another dataset. He has since renamed the style, but he should just say "inspired by <artist name>" It is so similar to what someone inspired by a particular artist would do that I can't make a separate standard. Basically the pushback comes from the level of discipline that was once required in the past (2 months ago) compared to now. That level of discipline is no longer required.
• throwaway12245 4y ago
  Thing I don't get is people post on public internet and then somehow expect that that information is somehow protected from uses that they don't want. If you don't want your data mis-used, don't post it on the internet.
  • ketzo 4y ago
    Well, this is a weird argument. There are lots of things that are posted on the internet that are illegal to re-post elsewhere without attribution/payment. That's, like... all of internet copyright law.
  • ljf 4y ago
    Where did she post the images she created?
• i_like_apis 4y ago
  This Hollie Mengert’s style is (nice, but) not at all original. There are thousands of cartoons that look exactly like this. You could never even tell that anything like this is similar to “her” style. But, even if she did have a distinctive style, there is nothing illegal or unethical about learning that style and producing your own similar artwork, whether you call it “in the style of”, or not.
  • rosywoozlechan 4y ago
    > not at all original. > But, even if she did have a distinctive style This is some rough criticism of an artist who's dedicated their profession and life to art. > is (nice, but) This made it all OK!
    • stavros 4y ago
      I don't know this specific artist, but the fact that someone dedicated their profession and life to art doesn't mean they're necessarily good.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Or they could dedicate years and be good (or great!) and still not unique. In fact, the better they get the less likely they are to be unique as more people will imitate their style.
      • jfk13 4y ago
        Does whether they're good or not actually have any bearing on the legality or morality of copying their work?
      • rosywoozlechan 4y ago
        I didn't make this claim that someone would be good just because of the amount of time spent, the claim I made that is harsh criticism to make when they have. For example if you just started strength training, have been at it for just a few weeks and someone said "you're not very strong" that's not harsh criticism because you just started, but if you've been strength training for 10-20 years and someone said "you're not very strong" that criticism hits different right? Does it make sense what I am saying now? This artist will probably read these HN comments, and I'm struck by how cruel the comments are to someone who's just out there creating wonderful content, didn't ask for any of this, so many of you here do not care about how she feels. I also call into question the ability of these HN commenter's competence at critiquing art.
• cmovq 4y ago
  I know this website is not a hivemind, but it's interesting every time an article like this gets posted the majority opinion seems to be that training diffusion models on copyrighted work is totally fine. In contrast when talking about training code generation models there are multiple comments mentioning this is not ok if licenses weren't respected. For anyone who holds both of these opinions, why do you think it's ok to train diffusion models on copyrighted work, but not co-pilot on GPL code?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • benlivengood 4y ago
    Humans used to learn to code from copyrighted works (textbooks) without much reference to OSS or Free Software. Similarly, teaching ML models to code from copyrighted works isn't going to violate copyright more frequently than a human might; and detecting exact copies should be pretty easy by comparing with the corpus used to train it. Software houses already have to worry about infringement of snippets, and things like Codex are just one more potential source.
    • ipaddr 4y ago
      Those books were purchased and a license granted for such use.
      • lmm 4y ago
        > Those books were purchased Sometimes. People also borrowed them, read them in libraries, or in later years looked at free textbooks online. > and a license granted for such use I never heard of such a thing, and it was never seen as necessary. No student checked the licenses on their textbooks before deciding whether they could read them.
  • firefoxkekw 4y ago
    Cognitive dissonance, different persons, hypocrisy.
• mring33621 4y ago
  this whole argument is bullshit artists are no more a protected class than programmers learn to use the automation to further your own goals/career or move out of the way At some point, some non-artist, non-director, non-screenwriter will make a brilliant movie using these ML-assisted technologies. After few iterations of this success, most people will shut up and learn to harness the benefits.
• vanadium1st 4y ago
  I am a graphic artist. In the recent months I've read dozens of articles and threads like this. I still can't see what the big deal is. Graphic artists don't have trade secrets or unique impossible techniques. If someone can see your picture, he can copy its style. It becomes publicly available as soon as you publish it. For the vast majority of graphic styles, if one author can do it, then hundreds of his colleagues can do it too, often just as well. If one author becomes popular and expensive - then his less popular colleagues can copy his style for cheaper. The market for this is enormous and this was the case for probably hundreds of years. I personally am a non-brand artist like that. More often then not clients come to me with a reference not from my portfolio and ask me to produce something similar. I will do it, probably five times cheaper than the artist or studio who did the original. It may not be exactly as good, but it won't be five times worse. Some clients are happy to pay extra for the name brand, and will pay. Some want to spend less, and will settle for a non-brand copy. The clients that are willing to pay for the name brand will still be there for the same reason they are now, and the existence of Stable Diffusion changes nothing to them. And the ones that just want the cheap copy would never contact the big name artist in the first place. The copy market will shift, but the big name artist doesn't even have to be aware of it.
  • xena 4y ago
    The main thing people are worried about is the fact that food costs money and you need to eat in order to live. People are afraid that their illustration jobs are at risk because of AI illustrations being _good enough_.
    • passion__desire 4y ago
      If that is the main issue, why are artists hiding behind the pique that "when I create art, it is full of soul, experience, blood and sweat" Just say that you need a way to make money and these models are replacing us.
      • hypertele-Xii 4y ago
        Because that argument is as old as the written word, and it works exactly as well now as every time in the past (not at all). Every job being automated requires its own "we're unique" pitch to get any pity points.
• mwlp 4y ago
  In sophomore year of college, I came across a Japanese illustrator who sold sticker packs for messenger apps. I liked their art style a lot, to the point where I themed my entire computer setup (wallpaper/terminal/editor) around their work. Some friends and I worked on a project for an information retrieval class and their art continued to be a centerpiece for the website's theme, and we even jokingly snuck an image into our final paper. As much as I loved their style, it seemed they rarely put out new content. A few weeks ago I trained a SD embedding on their work-- it was the coolest thing ever. I thought back to the class project, how I "stole" one of their artworks to use as the favicon. "Nobody outside this class will see this", I thought. But a pixel art anime girl wearing headphones was perfect branding for the app. "If I ever decide to publish this project, maybe I'll commission the artist for an official logo", I thought at the time. Now I wonder if I'd just use the SD embedding...
  • KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
    Curious who the illustrator is?
    • mwlp 4y ago
      https://twitter.com/mhug_ https://twitter.com/mhug_ https://mhug.tumblr.com/ https://mhug.tumblr.com/
  • kwhitefoot 4y ago
    And after all those words you still haven't credited the illustrator.
    • mwlp 4y ago
      I'm sure with a bit of scrolling you can find it. Just a few more words.
• makz 4y ago
  Call me Luddite but this has gone too far, please stop it already.
  • irrational 4y ago
    How can it be stopped? Seriously, is there any way to put the open source genie back into the bottle?
• swordsmith 4y ago
  So with these generative models running rampant, what's to even motivate aspiring artists to develop and hone their craft, if their years of work can be copied so easily? Maybe it doesn't practically matter, because some art style generative model can be developed and feed into the diffusion model so it can generate art of new styles.
  • wilsonnb3 4y ago
    > So with these generative models running rampant, what's to even motivate aspiring artists to develop and hone their craft, if their years of work can be copied so easily? …because they like to make art? The idea of making a living as an artist has only been possible for a very small fraction of human history, yet we have always had art. We are in the process of reverting to the norm. The world will never again be like it was in the post industrialization and pre information era.
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  Does anyone else feel painfully unsure of their opinion on all of this? I honestly don't recall the last major thing I've felt this completely uncertain about. All my opinions generally lean in one direction at least a little bit. On one hand, I think it might be ridiculous for an artist to get to "own" a "style" of art. In the first example on this page, none of the art looks plagiarized. It looks like what every artist has done: been inspired by or borrowed ideas from other sources. But on the other hand, if left unchecked, this will further harm our creative industries. We're going to be starving out our artists because robots can generate art _far_ more easily than they can. If this continues, it disincentivizes anyone from trying the already very uphill battle of making a living by creating art. One might say, "capitalism, baby! we don't need those artists, because we have AI and look at what it can do in seconds!" But I think that even if AI can "discover" new art styles and trends, there's something lost by humans not doing it. I don't think AI will be able to replace human creativity for discovering new paradigms as fast as it will replace human application of existing paradigms. And by doing the latter really well with AI, we're killing our ability to do the former. We'll end up with a sterile art trajectory. I guess my uncertainty is: something about this _feels wrong_ and yet I cannot point to any one moral/ethical thing that feels wrong about it.
  • shadowgovt 4y ago
    Oh, agreed. This is Brave New World territory. My suggestion is to accept it as a thing that will be here and tune our expectations appropriately. Because if it is made illegal, it will be one of those things that's illegal-but-omnipresent, like sharing music on BitTorrent... The Western copyright regime doesn't blanket the world, and the advantages of these tools are so big that places it doesn't reach will just use them. The fact that this story is about a Nigerian engineer in Canada using software developed in San Francisco running on some computers in Northern Virginia to ape the artistic style of an artist from LA, none of these parties having ever met each other, indicates how empty the bottle is the genie used to live in.
  • Invictus0 4y ago
    It will change the landscape of the art market, but it won't destroy it. Digital art will be less valuable, canvases and sculptures will become more valuable.
• s1artibartfast 4y ago
  The Supreme Court of the US is currently deciding if Andy Warhol's orange prince[1] violates copyright. It is essentially a cropped photo, defeatured, plus the color orange. This could be done easily without the help of AI at all, just cropping and filtering. The case is very interesting and grapples with the same questions.I highly recommended listening to the oral arguments.[2] I doubt the Andy Warhol Foundation will prevail, but it raises all these same questions, without the AI: What constitutes a transformative use of prior work? Can you imbue existing art with new ideas and make it your own? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Prince_(1984) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Prince_(1984) https://www.oyez.org/cases/2022/21-869 https://www.oyez.org/cases/2022/21-869
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  My dad once told me about when he was a kid, some Christmas specials would only be played a few times on CBC right before Christmas. If you missed them, you had to wait a year. He said that became a tradition. When he went to share his tradition with us, he was a bit bothered by the idea of "get it on VHS!" He actually protested the idea. "I didn't want you watching it at any time. It should be a tradition." And indeed it became a tradition for my brothers and I. My kids are 3 and 5 and "Nightmare Before Christmas" was a huge hit last Halloween. My kids wanted to watch it 3 or 4 times that Halloween week. It's available for streaming so that was easy. But then they watched it in November. And January. And a bunch in the spring and summer. ...And they never asked for it this year. There's a quality bestowed through scarcity. When you have it all the time, on-demand, there is no scarcity. When you can generate art instantly, in any style, of anything, I think it stops being exciting. For example, I don't think the concept of "ahahaha look, it's the Avengers but as Muppets!" or "It's me, but as a Simpson's character!" will have any amusement value by next year. Maybe I should be asking Gene Roddenberry but I'll ask all of you: do you think there's something lost by eliminating scarcity?
  • AlgorithmicTime 4y ago
    Certainly something is lost by removing scarcity... at the same time, once that scarcity is gone, it can't be restored short of civilizational collapse. There's no way to put the streaming genie back in the bottle, nor the Stable Diffusion genie.
    • Waterluvian 4y ago
      Yeah, I think you're 100% right. There is no "should we do this?" question here. Like every technology ever invented, it's now here.
      • bugfix-66 4y ago
        It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was founded by Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker, and Hugo Sáez Contreras. As the software became popular, the company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement. It ceased operations in 2001 after losing a wave of lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002. Use of the output of systems like Copilot or Stable Diffusion becomes a violation of copyright. The weight tensors are illegal to possess, just like it's illegal to possess leaked Intel source code. If you use the art in your product, on your website, etc., you risk legal action. The companies that train these systems can't distribute them without risking legal action. So they won't do it. It's expensive to train these models. It will always exist in the black-market underground, but the civilized world makes it illegal. That's where this is going, I hope. Best case scenario.
• r_murphey 4y ago
  I have been a member of a local musicians union for more decades than I care to admit. If someone was offering to replace me with an AI after a career of dedication to the art, I would worry there is a real risk of incidents of devastating loss of income if there is no financial cushion. Even if I had not lost any gigs yet, I would call a couple of the local union board members to discuss it, and I believe this is a concrete situation which the local board would take up for discussion. I'm sure there are good things to come out of AI in the arts, especially if it becomes a tool for the artist. But offering to put a financially struggling artist out of work with low effort, even temporarily, is a nightmare for the artist. Guilds and unions [0] [1] have talented artists on boards of directors and lawyers on staff who can help them codify some of the issues into their standard contract used by member artists. I have seen bands fired with no notice when they had used a standard union contract. The contract and access to the Union's attorney is the only thing that protected them from loss work and not making rent that month. [0] https://graphicartistsguild.org/ https://graphicartistsguild.org/ [1] https://www.usa829.org/About-Our-Union/Categories-Crafts#Scenic-Artist https://www.usa829.org/About-Our-Union/Categories-Crafts#Sce...
• Yizahi 4y ago
  I foresee super quick closure of almost all graphic artists in a closed and heavily moderated pay per view/use communities. Or they will simply starve. This so called A"I" producing a ton a derivative art will mess up a lot of industries.
  • ronsor 4y ago
    If they stay in a closed pay-per-view environment, I have a feeling most of them will definitely starve then. Technology has messed up industries before. Everyone's not going to die.
    • TMWNN 4y ago
      I believe Yizahi is talking about pornographic furries art, which is (from what I understand) a very lucrative market for artists (regardless of their personal disgust of the subject).
    • Yizahi 4y ago
      We are observing a live example in the OP right now. If you are an artist working in some specific style, then even a small dataset (just 30 images in the OP) will render future works much less desired. Of course big companies have compliance rules, reputation and so on, so they won't use "gray" art in the production. But the is definitely not enough bigcorp contracts for every artist, so smaller less known ones would compete basically with themselves. Imagine someone choosing between paying for original art X thousands of dollars, or generating 80% similar in quality art for "free". PS: after posting my comment above I've realised that by idea won't work. Art will become public sooner or later, just scan physical medium, or rip drm off the digital one and you will get the dataset for NN generator. Well, it will be a huge mess. We will see how it will turn out.
  • PuddleCheese 4y ago
    I mean, the alternative is arguably that artists become indentured servants to scraping/training models that benefit the people who are doing the scraping/training, at the arguable expense of the artist.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• randyrand 4y ago
  A great artist can take these same prompts, look at the same input images, and produce the same or even better results. No one would call that stealing. Copying, yes. Stealing, No. A great artist can copy other artist's style's expertly. A large part of being an art student is learning how to do exactly this. Stable Diffusion is just a truly great artist.
  • doublerabbit 4y ago
    The difference is that the great artist would spend time studying, learning and researching the style. Which could take days, months or even years. That would be impressive. AI can produce the same result in seconds allowing the content to be ripped-off quicker than an great artist trying to achieve the same result. Isn't that unfair?
    • wvenable 4y ago
      The reason we are creating Artificial Intelligence is so that we can get results in seconds rather than days, months, or years.
    • stale2002 4y ago
      > Isn't that unfair? No? Doing something better and faster does not change the fact that it is the same thing. If an artist is allowed to copy styles, then other people should be allowed to do so as well. Whether or not you have wasted year of your life, learning these skills, should have nothing to do with that.
  • noobermin 4y ago
    Github co-pilot is therefore too a great tenured professor at Texas A&M.
    • randyrand 4y ago
      AI for code-gen is not nearly as developed or impressive as image-gen. So, no, I wouldn't say that...yet.
  • 4y ago
• bergenty 4y ago
  So? It’s not a copy of her work, just her style. I see no problems here.
  • PuddleCheese 4y ago
    1. I like this style of work. I cannot make this style of work. I will pay this artist to produce this style of work. 2. I like this style of work. I cannot make this style of work. I will not pay the artist. I will instead take copyrighted material, and process it into a result using a machine that is not able to ethically refuse. 2.1. I like this style of work. I cannot make this style of work. I will not pay the artist. I will use this model someone else made to produce this style of work.
  • randyrand 4y ago
    Calling it "her" style is part of the problem. "The style she uses" would be more appropriate. ofc that takes longer to say so it will never happen.
• yuzuquat 4y ago
  There's already a lot of discussion on the legal/moral arguments here so I'd like to comment on something more concrete. As I understand it, an illustration for a magazine like the New York Times might net anywhere from $100 to $1000 and require 8 hours of work. An illustrator working for someone like the new york times or magic the gathering would likely consider this the pinnacle of a stable job. Many, including my comic books teacher, spent years moonlighting a service job before making it and publishing (Kikuo Johnson). With the advent of generative AI art, it seems immoral from a fiduciary responsibility point of a view that an art director doesn't train an AI model on their illustrator's art before laying them off. I have no doubt that generative AI will continue to push forward irrespective of the legal arguments being made. I'm fearful for the frictional unemployment that comes. Having come from art school (and luckily working in tech), my illustration peers are creative but such creativity doesn't necessarily translate into creative use of tooling, business-savyness or marketing. All I can say is that I empathize with a lot of the fear and hope for the best.
  • baq 4y ago
    It’s a quite dystopian technology for sure, but maybe it isn’t all that bad. the artists just (cough) have to pivot from delivering images to delivering style sheets for generative models…
  • t-writescode 4y ago
    Where do you get $100-1000 in cost for a major publication? The artists I know easily charge in that range, and that's for private commissions that they retain the rights over. I could not imagine the custom work done that helps sell publications, *especially MTG or similar* only net $1000 per piece. Certainly they have some sort of royalties contract, at the very least.
    • yuzuquat 4y ago
      This is pretty anecdotal (6 years back) but I've had one professor tell me they were paid $800 for a NYT illustration and $400 for a smaller publication. I might be off with the specific numbers but these are the general ballpark numbers I remember. Nothing about MTG, etc that I can give concrete numbers for.
• godelski 4y ago
  I'm an AI researcher working on generative modeling, so I want to note my bias upfront. But I'm also a musician/artist and so I find some of these conversations odd. The problem with them I see is that they are oversimplified. To get better at drawing I often copy other works. Or I'll play a piece exactly as intended. Then I get more advanced and learn a style of someone I admire and appreciate. Then after that comes my own flair. So I ask, what is different between me doing it and a machine? The specific images being shown in this article shows that Hollie is doing the same process as me and the machine. Their work is in fact derivative. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that either. They say a good artist copies but a great artist steals. I don't think these generators are great artists, but they sure are good ones. I learn by looking at a lot of art and styles. I learn by copying. I am able to be more efficient than the machine because I can understand nuance and theory, but the machine is able to do the former much better than I can. It can practice its drawings a hundred or thousand times an hour. Now there are highly unethical stuff that is actually going on and I don't want the conversation getting distracted from. Just today a twitter account posted a demo of their work and actively demonstrated that one can remove watermarks with their tool[0]. This is bold and borderline illegal (promoting theft). There are also people presenting AI generated work as human digital paintings (we need to be honest about the tools we use). People presenting work in ways that it was not actually created is unethical. But there are other generative ethical concerns. Now there are concerns about photographer's/artist's rights. If I take someone else's work and post it as my own, that is straight up theft. Even celebrities can't post photos of themselves that were taken by others[1]. This gets muddled if I make minor changes but it's been held up in court that the intention matters and it needs to be clear that the changes were new in an artistic manner and not a means of circumventing ownership rights. These are some of the bigger issues we're running into. A problem with these generative models is interpretation. How do you know if the image you produced actually exists in the wild or if it is new and unique? There's been papers that show that there are privacy concerns[2] and that you can pull ground truth images out of the generator. I'd argue that this question is easier to answer the more explicit the density your model calculates. Meaning that this is very hard for implicit density models (such as GANs), moderately difficult for approximate density models (such as diffusion and VAEs), but not too bad when pulling from explicit density models (such as Autoregressive or Flow based models). This is a concern that is implicit by articles such as this, but fail to actually quantify the problem here: "How do we meaningfully differentiate generated images from those made by real people?" I'm a strong advocate for the study and research for explicit density models, but a good chunk of the community is against be (they aren't currently anywhere near as powerful, but there's nothing theoretically in the way. I'd argue it is that few people are researching and understanding these models. There is a higher barrier to entry). So I'd argue that the training methods aren't the major concern, but what is actually produced. While the generators learn in a similar fashion to me it is clear that I'd get in trouble if I was passing off a fake Picasso as a legitimate one. But it is also fine for me to paint something in that same style as long as I'm honest about it. The nuance here really matters and I think we need to not lose sight of that. This is a complex topic and I would like to hear other views. But I'm not interested in mic drops or unmovable positions. I don't think anyone has the right answer here and to solve it we must get a lot of different view points. So do you agree or disagree with me? I especially want to hear from the latter. [0] https://twitter.com/ai_fast_track/status/1587475575479959559 https://twitter.com/ai_fast_track/status/1587475575479959559 [1] https://collenip.com/taylor-swift-entitled-say-photographers-rights-belong/ https://collenip.com/taylor-swift-entitled-say-photographers... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06018 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06018
• irrational 4y ago
  Why would I want to spend years developing my own art style if I know that it can be copied and used by one of these AI engines in a few hours? Are we going to end up with less human created artwork?
  • deadbeeves 4y ago
    Artistic expression is, I would say, an inherent feature of the human brain. It is also a consequence of the available tools. Even if I grant that people are simply going to stop drawing and painting (which I find highly unlikely), what would happen in that instance is that new techniques will arise to harness these new tools in novel ways. "Okay, I can get the computer to more or less generate anything I want. How can I compose and combine this tool into giving me something unique and interesting?"
  • throwaway675309 4y ago
    You're missing the point of artistic expression which for a lot of us is purely an individual pursuit. It's like if a band wants to make music purely for the sake of make money - it's just a foolish endeavor.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lurquer 4y ago
  One way to consider copyright: when the concept gained traction 16th and 17th centuries, the doctrine existed to protect the author’s ability to get someone to finance the printing of his work. That is reproduction was costly and required an investment by a printer. The printer faced more economic harm than the author if he spent $20,000 typesetting and printing a thousand copies of something only to find a competitor beat him to the market. To be clear, the copyright attaches to the author, but it is only valuable because it enables the author to induce a printer to publish his work. Now, as the costs of publishing have dropped to zero, the concept is beginning to make less sense.
• detritus 4y ago
  It managed that from just 32 example illustrations? Irrespective of everything else here, I find that alone hugely impressive. ed - for 'hugely impressive' also insert 'slightly terrifying'.
  • wnkrshm 4y ago
    The 'rules' of making a picture are codified in the large pre-trained model, the 32 examples are just guidance on top.
    • detritus 4y ago
      So the artist has been trained in the ways of the brush, but was only exposed to 32 examples of another's work to copy it specifically henceforth? I'm still impressed/terrified.
• jarrell_mark 4y ago
  Artist using Disney trademarks without their permission has style taken without their permission
  • thrown_22 4y ago
    She specifically said those images were commissioned by Disney and she doesn't own the copyright on them.
• 6stringmerc 4y ago
  How completely unsurprising - a person who grew up in a country most famous for chop yo dolla gives two fucks about the context of achieving his personal desires at the expense of those actually willing to do the work. It’s his own goddamn narrative. I hope Disney bankrupts him as a consequence to his ignorant and selfish actions.
• fleddr 4y ago
  I'm thinking a little bit of empathy doesn't hurt. Reason from Hollie's point of view. She didn't ask for this and was working on cool stuff: https://holliemengert.com/ https://holliemengert.com/ Next, somebody grabs her work (copyrighted by the clients she works for), without permission. Then goes on to try and create an AI version of her style. When confronted, the guy's like: "meh, ah well". Doesn't matter if it's legal or not, it's careless and plain rude. Meanwhile, Hollie is quite cool-headed and reasonable about it. Not aggressive, not threatening to sue, just expressing civilized dislike, which is as reasonable as it gets. Next, she gets to see her name on the orange site, reading things like "style is bad and too generic", a wide series of cold-hearted legal arguments and "get out of the way of progress". How wonderful. Maybe consider that there's a human being on the other end? Here she is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWiwZLJVwi4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWiwZLJVwi4 A kind and creative soul, which apparently is now worth 2 hours of GPU time. I too believe AI art is inevitable and cannot be stopped at this point. Doesn't mean we have to be so ruthless about it.
  • toss1 4y ago
    Indeed! And another important point that's buried, is that most of the art used to train the model is actually owned by her clients such as Disney. So, she could not, even if she wanted to, give permission to use that content. IOW, the person training the model was just fine with stealing the artwork. While the artist seems to not be litigious, it'll be interesting to see if the major rights-holders like Disney start going after the AI model companies and/or the people that train the models, if they find that there is output of their properties. This automated generation of code, text, art, etc., is really nothing more than sophisticated sampling/mashup, and when you use snippets in your work output, it should be credited and properly compensated. This is rapidly amounting to automated creation theft engines. Worse yet, thinking ahead a bit, once they've all been trained on the available works, and all the writers, artists, & coders have been put out of work, progress will stagnate, because the "AI"s will generate nothing new, only continuously regurgitating bits and mashups of what is now old stuff.
  • Siira 4y ago
    The empowerment of man is more important his ego. Pay UBI, subsidize creators with the tax payer’s money, demolish all copyright.
• zasdffaa 4y ago
  You can't copyright a style. And this is automation, which put lots of people out of work a while back eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite amongst other protests (people like Hollie, too). But Disney right now is a soulless factory as much as any other and they'll be onto this tech like a shot, and Hollie... I don't know. I wish her well.
• spoonjim 4y ago
  This is so clearly a copyright violation that I am hoping for a big lawsuit soon so the courts can confirm it.
• snapcaster 4y ago
  I feel for her, this is a new frontier we don't have the legal framework or the cultural norms to handle this appropriately yet. As a developer, i can see doing something like this because "its cool" and not considering the impact to other people
• sensanaty 4y ago
  This is going to be a somewhat disjointed and nonsensical comment as I'm finding it difficult to find the proper words to put down regarding this whole issue. Never in my life did I expect myself to become somewhat of a luddite when it comes to AI, especially considering how much I love the concept in general. Something about the way it seems to be working out in the real world has me questioning my opinions, though. I think more than anything I'm fearful for the future and what advanced versions of these tools will mean for everyone. Will the world simply become overflooded with these A"I"s for every little thing imaginable? Will every billboard I see and every sound that comes out of a speaker be some weird, uncanny computer-generated thing engineered for the maximum possible user engagement? Will anything anyone ever touches be examined by a dozen different AIs, all looking for ways to cheaply and efficiently replicate it en-masse? Will we all just become a meat shell of fried dopamine receptors, with various AIs and algorithms dictating every facet of our lives? A lot of people call the recent and probably future AI explosion some sort of progress, but from where I'm sitting it barely feels like progress at all, considering it's already being used in the ways I've just described albeit at a less effective scale. Seeing my partner use TikTok to my dismay, and the efficacy of its algorithms and just how good it is at sucking countless hours out is just going to get worse once every single platform we interact with starts doing similar things. It's strange, because AI could truly go in any number of possible directions, but so far what I'm seeing is it's going to lead us to ruin, and a lot of people seem to dismiss it or are even accepting of it (even in this very thread) simply in the name of so-called "progress".
  • EarthLaunch 4y ago
    > Will we all just become a meat shell of fried dopamine receptors, with various AIs and algorithms dictating every facet of our lives? I've been thinking about this lately, in terms of dopaminergic activities like advertising, drugs, sex, gambling, bright colors, etc. When someone is too susceptible to addiction by one of these, their life is destroyed by it. Pursuing dopamine, purely for the feeling of dopamine, results in this evolutionary dead end. So, every time modern society optimizes a product to produce more dopamine response, anyone susceptible is selected against, evolutionarily. Your description is poignant. I can only see this going a couple of ways: 1. A society of people with fried dopamine receptors, too uninterested in food to grow it or eat it (Idiocracy). This collapses, and less dopamine-advanced people inherit the earth (until they do the same thing). Or 2. a society of people who can control, by whatever means, their dopamine urges.
• honkycat 4y ago
  Won't recordings of music put live performers out of business? ...I say this facetiously, but I think the comparison is fair. at this point: it is so cheap and easy and useful to do it feels impossible to stop. $2 and an internet connection. When you are at that point, the game is lost.
• Cypher 4y ago
  They'll be AI's that generate new styles eventually.
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  Can styles be copyrighted? So for example, if a human artist makes a novel work in the style of another artist, is there any legal grounds for claiming copyright? Assume that the specific characters, names, etc aren’t being used. Think cartoon in the style of Disney, but not Mickey Mouse.
• bagels 4y ago
  Software is next.
• zmmmmm 4y ago
  Interestingly, she doesn't mind the fact a model was created so much as the commandeering of her name and identity associated to it. Literally everything it produces is associated to her ... whether it's beautiful pictures or CSAM. In this respect I'm curious what right people have in general to object if someone falsely associates your name with something. It's not even an AI question really. If I create a different kind of morally objectionable software under the name "Elon Musk" and represent that it embodies his style and personality, can he object to that? If I run a brothel under his name? At what point are natural names effectively implicit trademarks where the person inherits some kind of legal right to control or object about how it's used?
• whateveracct 4y ago
  I think people are being to extreme in their thinking around AI art. Yes, it's legal to learn from and imitate art styles. Sure, AI doing the same thing is the same thing. But if I actually copy someone's IP (e.g. characters), I am infringing. You can do that with AI. And if anything, it's easier to accidentally infringe due to how the AI works. So I think AI will end up coming with more required diligence. This doesn't even touch on how art will still be driven by taste and skill. No matter how much tech types wish art wasn't actually a skill (is it out of envy? idk. But there's a strong HN voice acting like art skill isn't actual skill).
• protomyth 4y ago
  I get the feeling the ruling on Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith will point how the Supreme Court will see this. I'm starting to think that the entity who owns the data used for training should own the output.
• sexy_seedbox 4y ago
  Not a single mention of Greg Rutkowski in this thread?
• komali2 4y ago
  > Aside from the IP issues, it’s absolutely going to be used by bad actors: models fine-tuned on images of exes, co-workers, and, of course, popular targets of online harassment campaigns. Combining those with any of the emerging NSFW models trained on large corpuses of porn is a disturbing inevitability. I'm wondering when the destruction of the traditional internet and trust networks, ala Neal Stephenson's "Fall, or, Dodge in Hell" is brought about. In the book (spoilers I suppose), an engineer develops a set of tools to cheaply and easily generate an internet hoax, the example the engineer uses to demonstrate the technology being a fake nuking of a town in if I remember correctly Ohio. Through sockpuppeting and a few choice hiring of actors (and just a teensy bit of image and video manipulation), he's able to convince the world for about a day that the USA has lost a remote town to a nuclear strike, and in fact it remains a conspiracy for decades after whether the town actually was nuked or not. The point that I'm thinking about now though is the engineer develops these tools a bit further, then, after (with consent) targeting them wholesale on a single person, releases them to the world, which basically completely destroys the modern internet as misinformation and information become perfectly interchangeable. A lot of reviews leave out how important this plot point was for the development of the various technologies that feed the main plot of the novel, that being an mind-upload scifi, namely technology around anonymous distributed ledger identification based on traits only AI can accurately tie to a person (i imagined it as like, millions of subtle characteristics such as how someone used their mouse, the pauses between typing certain characters, etc). Long story short it become impossible to trust anything viewed directly on the internet without extensive editor (in the publication sense of the word) support.
• lucasfcosta 4y ago
  I feel for her, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with this and there is no going back. These are original derivatives. In the same way a human is inspired by other arts and may mimic their style, machines can too, they’re just way more efficient. What are they going to do? It feels unfair to punish the machine simply for being more efficient than humans. Instead, artists need to find a novel way to generate revenue by leveraging their uniqueness. Perhaps using Stable Diffusion themselves and turning their creations into NFTs to prove their authenticity.
• sussmannbaka 4y ago
  Read the thread. Hell, read THIS thread. It’s one thing to steal somebody’s lifework and point towards ongoing legal cases that will make it ok because the practice will benefit big companies. It’s another thing to be an asshole about it. If it was “wow love her style”, sure, still can’t pay her bills with that but it’s actually “mid style, fuck you also go away”. If ML people continue to treat the sole source of their models like this, they shouldn’t be surprised to be treated in a similar fashion.
  • tommek4077 4y ago
    Except there was nothing stolen. The artist stills own all her work.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  I think the only disputable thing is using a person's name in the model name. If model's name would have been Funny Cartoon Creator instead of X Y, then there wouldn't be any reason for outrage and vitriolic articles.
• hoseja 4y ago
  The journo just can't help itself and leads with hostile language right from the start. Hopefully it will soon be made obsolete.
• taylorius 4y ago
  Just to imagine how some good might come out of this for Hollie. Lots of famous artists' original works are very valuable, even though they have a lot of imitators. No matter how many hours of GPU time you have, you can't produce an original work by Hollie Mengert. Maybe the AI content firehose could act to enhance her reputation? Maybe artists will start training their own AI replacements. At least then they'll control it in some sense, and perhaps they could rent it out to people.
  • wnkrshm 4y ago
    She already has a great reputation, since she does works for Disney. That's basically commercial artist endgame.
• bfung 4y ago
  Before this article, I had no idea that a Hollie Mengert existed. In a different light, this could be a new market of people the artist can cater to. A flesh & blood original could hold sentimental value, with the AI being an ok sneak preview.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• rendall 4y ago
  Training data should absolutely be under control of the creator / owner of the IP, and AI trained with stolen IP should itself be considered stolen. The lack of clarity here is only because of the newness of the technology, but this will be as clear to our future selves as "warez" are now known to be stolen work.
• chmod775 4y ago
  It fascinates me how this AI generated art looks good on first glance, but turns into absolute nightmare fuel the longer you look at it. Contorted faces, impossible limbs, mushed hands, surreal cityscape. They look like something a madman pretending to be sane would draw, glimpses of his twisted mind showing through cracks in the facade. https://i.imgur.com/EXQlxtF.png https://i.imgur.com/EXQlxtF.png https://i.imgur.com/F1IzpR0.png https://i.imgur.com/F1IzpR0.png https://i.imgur.com/2KvkNnu.png https://i.imgur.com/2KvkNnu.png
  • rahidz 4y ago
    Very dreamlike to me, like how a dream makes sense to you usually, but if you focus at your face or hand or clock, it becomes odd and distorted.
  • ShamelessC 4y ago
    Looks like you’re not using the stock 512 px resolution. Artifacts are more likely as the network was has only seen 512 px images during training.
    • chmod775 4y ago
      Those are cropped directly from images in the article. I think they're stock res.
• ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
  It's simple: if you don't respect other's intellectual property, expect that no one respects yours, and if you give away for free what others sell for a living just because you have another source of income, expect the latter to be taken away from you too. Truly it's a sad and ugly state of affairs these days.
• jdthedisciple 4y ago
  In this case the AI guy made public which images he used. However, if someone wants, they can simply never publicize what the training set was, copy other artists and always plausibly deny they used any unlicensed input data, were they to get into legal trouble. I don't really see a way around this tbh.
• ChoGGi 4y ago
  Is it just me, or does her style look like Disney's style? Yes I do see that she has drawn Disney characters.
• SilverBirch 4y ago
  I think one of the things that really isn't being picked up about this, is that this isn't just about copying. Hollie Mengert isn't only objecting to her work being stolen. She's objecting to having her name associated with it - and she's objects because she doesn't think it's good. And she's absolutely right. People really aren't engaging much with that as a problem for this tool. I'd put a simple test to you - sit and look for 1 minute at each of the images she created and the machine created. There's a very simple way of telling who did what. The longer you look at Hollie's images the more you notice. The longer you look at the generated images the less it makes sense. The perfect example of this is the image of the woman in the middle of the party - there is so much more going on it that single image than all of the generated images together - the focus and composition, and the interaction of the different characters are features basically missing from most of the generated images. I do wonder if a large blind spot of the engineers who are working on this is that they don't actually understand art and therefore don't understand what they're missing.