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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://holliemen

• 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.
• Kye 4y ago
  I like how her style has a storybook thing going on. She has a knack for expressions. edit: That's because she is a storybook illustrator! I should have checked the video too.
• bugfix-66 4y ago
  There's nothing inevitable about it. Laws exist to protect people. It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists. Remember the naive rallying cry among those who thought everyone should have the right to all music, without any compensation for the artist? "Information wants to be free!" (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/24/napster-music-free-file-sharing https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/24/napster-music-...) Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. ... 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. The weights are like distilled intellectual property. You're distributing an enormous body of other people's work, to enable derivative work without attribution? Huge harm to society, make it illegal. If you use the art in your product, on your website, etc., you risk legal action. Just like if I publish your album on my website. Illegal. 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. When it's illegal, the criminals will have to pay for the GPU time. 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.
  • franciscop 4y ago
    How do you exactly define a single person's style vs a genre? While any artist might specialize, as is the case here, in a single style and distill it and create a large body of work in the specific style, do you think no one before created a similar work of art in the same style? Naming a recognizable artist is the current "lazy" way of doing this instead of naming every possible visual style; and sure we could ban name and surname, but should an artist own "dreamy flat pastel colored illustrations of cities of characters with high contrast, no lines, children illustrations" for perpetuity? Definitely not, for the style itself there's likely hundreds of artists that have done something similar before and after.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Maybe not ruthless enough. Society needs to evolve past this notion that people have control over data and information just because they created it. The faster this happens, the better. Are we seriously gonna have to put up with the good old copyright industry forever? They keep destroying perfectly good technology just because it threatens their existence. I say let them disappear.
  • Kye 4y ago
    What is a "copyright industry"? This is one human trying to make a living by making kids smile.
    • matheusmoreira 4y ago
      > her work (copyrighted by the clients she works for) There you go.
      • PuddleCheese 4y ago
        If the artist is posting personal work, then it is covered by copyright automatically per the Berne Convention. Copyright exists to incentivize authors, artists, scientists, etc. to create original works by providing a temporary monopoly. If an artist works with a client, the legal stipulations are going to be different for each commissioned work, generally. Depending on the client, they may be better able to protect an artists work than the artist themselves, and with credit...
        • matheusmoreira 4y ago
          > temporary monopoly What a joke. That "temporary" monopoly lasts centuries and gets extended whenever some rich company's imaginary property is about to enter the public domain. Copyright duration is functionally infinite, you will be long dead before your culture is returned to you.
          • PuddleCheese 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• scotty79 4y ago
  I know it doesn't sound nice but harm to the artists is similar to the harm you do to hole diggers when they see you bringing excavator to your plot instead of hiring them. Art is not digging holes. But some of it is and more of it will become it in the future.
  • CapsAdmin 4y ago
    As you allude to, this analogy works if you're creating art purely because there is a demand for it and you only put in the effort required by the customer. But that is generally not the case with illustrators, and certainly not in this case. Also creating a new model is dependent on artists (at least right now!) while excavators are not dependent on hole diggers.
  • nicbou 4y ago
    It's hardly comparable. The excavator does not owe its creative influence to the hole diggers. The quality of its work does not result from someone else's intellectual labor. It's 100% the digger doing the digging.
    • UweSchmidt 4y ago
      It's technology putting people out of work. We care a lot about Copilot, we care somewhat about artists, we care little about manual workers, and less so if they are in another country.
      • nicbou 4y ago
        Not quite. It still relies on their inputs. It doesn't just put them out of work, it feeds off them. I'm not sure of what I'd call this relationship, but parasitic is close to it.
        • Siira 4y ago
          It’s a teacher-student relationship, except the teachers don’t do anything specifically for the students. Let our jobs be taken by Copilot. Are you that afraid?
• Gigachad 4y ago
  I think the problem is ethics models kind of fall apart here. You can trivially make an argument both for and against this on the grounds of ethics. Legally it seems pretty clear nothing wrong is being done here. A human can train on a particular artists style and lift it just fine. Which they regularly do. We just made it way way easier now. So sure, we can empathize with someone feeling kind of off about the situation. But at the same time its kind of eh, that's how the world is.
  • yoz-y 4y ago
    > Legally it seems pretty clear nothing wrong is being done here. It most certainly doesn’t. Just because a human can eyeball an art style and copy it eventually, does not translate into “I can take your copyrighted work and feed it to a machine”. Ethically you may argue one way or the other, but legally you are using somebody’s else’s work without permission.
    • LordDragonfang 4y ago
      The machine in question is the human brain. And besides, there's nothing illegal about "using" a copyrighted work without permission (for example, if artist wanted to use the pixel values in an image for a color pallet, that's totally fine), only reproducing it - which no image generation model does.
• hahahGetbent 4y ago
• suby 4y ago
  I very much sympathize with her because it isn't fair, but I do find it slightly hypocritical that when looking at the work on her website, much of it is drawing other copyrighted work. I suspect the only acceptable answer here is to disallow AI training of copyrighted material, but this only delays the models supplanting the actual artists (because people will contribute to and build up a pool of copyright-free training material), it doesn't prevent the ultimate issue of people being replaced by AI.
  • randyrand 4y ago
    I believe Disney paid her for those.
    • fennecfoxy 4y ago
      But her style is still defined/drawn from Disney/Nick/other cartoons anyway. At the end of the day she said that she didn't see herself in the AI images and felt distanced from it - isn't that good enough? Her art still has value to her and her clients as long as the human in the loop still has something to offer buyers (ie being able to have a conversation/work on the design for something tailor made). When the AI is smart enough to generate art from an ongoing conversation about a piece, making adjustments etc then she will have to draw art for herself and those that appreciate it, in the same way that there are still some blacksmiths around and people buy their works because they love that it was handmade/a piece of history.
• hnusersarelame 4y ago
• cageface 4y ago
  This may only be the case right now but I find current AI art sits in the uncanny valley. At first glance it looks impressive but after you spend a few hours looking at the output of current algorithms you start to recognize the same quirks and shortcomings in every image. At this point if I needed art for a project I really cared about I'd still spend the money for a human artist.
• dclowd9901 4y ago
  I just think the law hasn’t caught up with tech again here. This is derivative work, essentially by definition, and just because the styles are being created without “patching together existing IP,” doesn’t mean they are in the clear. We can trust that a human creator who apes the style of another human creator will do so with a preponderance of flaws such that their works are distinguishable. AI doesn’t operate like that and the case can’t be made that somehow both the AI and the person spontaneously landed on a certain style like it could with two human beings. As the commenters say in the article, the AI couldn’t generate anything without the original works. Apropos of nothing, her art style really isn’t that original. Her style itself clearly apes illustration styles of the 40s and 50s. I guess copying never goes out of style.
  • Siira 4y ago
    > AI doesn’t operate like that Wrong. Various regularization schemes are used in AI models which essentially introduce “flaws” and noise into the process. The flaws are more optimal than what the brain does, but they are there.
• causi 4y ago
  Doesn't matter if it's legal or not See I don't understand this. Training an AI using this content is legal, but how is copying it in the first place to use not illegal? This is what I never understand about these AI cases. If I copy a Youtube video I'm breaking the law, but if I then use my illegal copy to train an AI it retroactively makes my copying legal?
  • edanm 4y ago
    I think you're using the word "copy" incorrectly. What does it mean to "copy" a Youtube video? You are literally making a copy of it on your computer as you watch it, that's what watching a video is. You're also making a "copy" of it in your brain.
    • causi 4y ago
      Right, but you don't train a model by pointing a camera at a screen. You download the video file. You deliberately bypass the copy protection. I'm not saying it should be illegal, I'm saying it is.
      • edanm 4y ago
        Hmm, is that how it works? We're mostly talking about images in the op, not video, and her images are freely available to view / download from her website. I'm not sure about literally downloading YouTube videos, you might be right about that.
        • causi 4y ago
          and her images are freely available to view / download from her website. At least under US law, the person downloading the images has to be the same one who trains the model, because giving them to another person is copyright-violating distribution. To be clear, I'm just sick of corporations being free and clear to do things that would get the rest of us stomped.
          • 4y ago
• Aerroon 4y ago
  >Next, somebody grabs her work (copyrighted by the clients she works for), without permission. Isn't this what a lot of these AI models use though? Pretty much anything trained on data from the internet is going to be largely copyrighted, no?
  • ehnto 4y ago
    When it's using a lot of different types of work from different creators I think the output is more a sum of it's parts, it's a little bit more of a gray area. When it's specifically trying to copy one persons style, that's very personal, and very real to the person being copied. I think it's made weirder by how low effort the copy is. Someone learning your art style and painting it is a bit different to just making a computer do it. My second thought on this, is that it reminds me of the attitude I saw rampant for data collection back when I was getting into tech. The casual attitude towards consuming other peoples information, be it private data or in this case, work they've labored over, has lead us down the path of exploitation and profiteering. I'm sure it will be no different here. It's all fun and games when it's free and open and we're all just having making toys, but the commercialization has already begun, and these precedents will end up being profiteered by companies who are willing to profit off of things that others had too strong of a morale compass to do.
• amelius 4y ago
  The guy should have tried to use his tool on Disney.
  • nickthegreek 4y ago
    https://huggingface.co/nitrosocke/mo-di-diffusion https://huggingface.co/nitrosocke/mo-di-diffusion
• gsatic 4y ago
  No difference at all with how Disney a giant corporate machine has treated artists and art over the last few decades. This is just the next stage in the mindless machines evolutions. Artists have had less and less influence on anything beyond mindless consumption during our generation. So no surprise where the story goes. Without influence you can't control what the machine does.
• powerapple 4y ago
  It should be illegal (if not already) to use other people's work to train AI models. In the future, all artworks will have a license attached to it, some fair usage clause.
  • antifa 4y ago
    Won't this lead to issues like secretly trained models and proving artwork is not AI generated?
• kurtreed 4y ago
  If a human looked at her art and then made new illustrations in the same style would that be ok? If so, why is it not ok for a computer to do it?
  • lukasb 4y ago
    If a human artist sold work created by copying her style, they would definitely get called out by other artists.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    I'm not a moral philosophist, but I'd say the difference is effort. I mean no shade on the illustrator herself, but her style looks derived itself from other styles. Anyway, another illustrator would need to put in the effort to learn the style, and then X hours to create each piece. An AI, once trained, can churn out thousands of artworks in that style per second (with enough computing power); it makes the illustrator obsolete, and like mass production of low cost knockoff products, it forges competition and cheapens the brand / style. Is that good or not? I don't know, again I'm not a moral philosophist.
  • maegul 4y ago
    I appreciate the argument. It made me think that we might have a “photographs steal your soul” kind of moment here with new technology. Nonetheless, the difference is pretty clear here I think. An AI makes the artists style infinitely reproducible by all. A single artist copying an artist’s style is basically what copyright is all about, including the relative straightforwardness of enforcement through ordinary litigation. Whether copyright is or is not being breached by the AI, there’s a paradigm shifting difference in the nature of said AI, perhaps not unlike downloadable digital music on the internet compared physical media.
• elif 4y ago
  If your art style can be ripped off by an AI looking at 32 images, your art style is too pop to be considered "yours" imo. To take that criticism further, the original artist took Disney art subjects and applied a nickelodeon animation style to it. Hopefully the artist can appreciate the irony of claiming that it is _her_ style being ripped off when everything in the examples shown is clearly pop art, categorically defined by predominant social influences, and not something which came from her artistic perspective.
  • bleuarff 4y ago
    Is there any artist whose style cannot be imitated by an AI given selected images? I'm pretty sure an AI can correctly mimic Picasso if you give it 32 blue period paintings. Does that mean Picasso has no artistic value?
    • Xymist 4y ago
      No, but it probably means that Picasso is also insufficiently unique/inscrutable to expect not to have his style imitated.
• SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  Jaron Lanier's 'Data dignity' idea really seems like the best solve here. Her work was indispensable to whatever value this algorithm produces in the future - it would make sense if she got partial ownership of some kind. It's what share of ownership she should have that we get hung up on. In some sense she's already won, she'll definitely get more traffic to her own site now, because she was part of an interesting story about the early days of artistic AI. But we intuit that for every Hollie Mengert or Metallica out there who benefits from the attention sluice, there are a number of other artists who don't get those benefits, and by definition, we don't know who those artists are. In an ecosystem we might say 'fit data is what makes it into the next generation no matter the species'. In a 20th century economy, we might say 'the creator should benefit from her work'. But we're not in either of those. We care more about the Hollie Mengerts of the world than their impact on the future evolution of art. Or more precisely, we care more about the right incentives being present for Hollie Mengert than how those incentives play out in this individual case. But that influence on future art is also undeniably part of the incentive structure for an artist today. This seems like a classic wicked problem - does anyone know of a group engaging with it?