5 ms·

Artists are no different than all the people who tried to destroy the cotton gin or the automated loom. We're all going to have to live in a world where these

by ta8645 4y ago

Artists are no different than all the people who tried to destroy the cotton gin or the automated loom. We're all going to have to live in a world where these technologies exist, and find a way to live a fulfilling life regardless. Just as chess players today enjoy the game even though computers have surpassed our chess abilities. It seems odd to complain that computers are using human's artwork to inspire their own creations. Every human artist has done the exact same thing in their lifetime; it's unavoidable.

echelon 4y ago
> It seems odd to complain that computers are using human's artwork to inspire their own creations. Every human artist has done the exact same thing in their lifetime; it's unavoidable. Agree. But you also have to treat code the same way. We shouldn't be suing Open AI and Microsoft over copilot being trained on open source code. It's no different than models trained on art. Besides, if Microsoft loses, they actually win. I expect they're one of the few companies with enough code to train the model on completely proprietary data. If they lose the case, they'll still be able to build the tool. The rest of us will be locked out of easy training data and won't be able to compete.
- b112 4y ago
  The rest of us will be locked out of easy training data and won't be able to compete. There's loads of BSD code, and to share, all that is required is a link to attributation. It seems to me, there is money to be made, in getting model data colinked with "saw first" references. Then, for example, after a github style codebot writes the code for you, it can show a link to "where it learned to help you today!". There is no technical reason the can't be done, only a business model reason. That said, I find the comments in this thread strange. Discussion about how tech moves on, and looms and such. That arg was lost, when people could cut up songs, and slap them together, or cut up 100 textbooks into one. This is settled by endless laws, and caselaw. It isn't a new argument. Microsoft will lose.
bugfix-66 4y ago
These systems aggregate and interpolate human work. Interpolation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation It's like a very complicated form of linear interpolation: a*x + (1-a)*y These systems do not "think". Today I spent all day mulling an idea, experimenting with variations, feeling frustrated or excited, imagining it, simulating it, making mistakes, following paths of reasoning, deducing facts, revisiting dead-ends with new insight, daydreaming, talking to my wife about it, etc. That's human thought. These models do not "think" like a human, they do not dream or imagine or feel. They run a feed-forward system of linear equations (matrix multiplications). They INTERPOLATE HUMAN WORK. They don't exist without training data (huge amounts of intellectual property) aggregated and interpolated in a monstrous perversion of "fair use": https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304facc51cdacbba3f99654652bf428 https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304fa... Starve the machine. Without your work, it's got nothing.
- jjcon 4y ago
  > Starve the machine, it doesn't exist without having your work to interpolate. But again… aren’t people the same way? Noone exists in isolation. The Sir Isaac Newton quote comes to mine: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” Edit: to be clear - these algorithms are specifically non-linear and are a far cry from ‘linear interpolation’. Yes they do involve matrix multiplication that does not make them interpolaters unless you want to water down the meaning of interpolation to be so generic it loses its meaning. Having said all that - the sophistication of the algorithm is beyond the point here as long as what they are generating is substantially transformative (which >99% of the possible outputs are legally speaking).
  - bugfix-66 4y ago
    Are you foolishly suggesting that Sir Isaac Newton was just aggregating and interpolating others' work? Like a feed-forward chain of matrix multiplications, trained to predict its training data? No, of course you weren't. That would be FUCKING RIDICULOUS.
ThePadawan 4y ago
> It seems odd to complain that computers are using human's artwork to inspire their own creations. Every human artist has done the exact same thing in their lifetime; it's unavoidable. I don't find it odd to complain that publishing an artwork on DeviantArt has gone from "I intend humans to look at this" to "I (opt-out!) agree that a corporation may use this to generate new artwork for profit." I would not complain if a painting of mine were exhibited in a museum and someone came in to look at it and draw something inspired by it. I would complain if I handed over a painting of mine to that same museum to be exhibited, they scanned it in at high resolution, handed it over to a class of copy artists, who then produced artwork in order to compete with mine, before finally putting it up in a gallery. Does that still seem odd?
greenthrow 4y ago
It's not even remotely comparable to the cotton gin or the dishwasher or any kind of normal labor that has been automated. We are talking about creative works being shuffled together and remixed as a legal protection for theft. That's all it is. There is ample evidence that these algorithms merely regurgitate what goes in and cannot create something entirely new. Which, is of coursw what you'd expect if you understand what is going on under the hood. But it is not what is being sold.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  This is basically what the majority of artists do already. They pull in a bunch of reference images and blend them together in to a single piece.
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    They don’t do it on industrial scale.
heavyset_go 4y ago
> Artists are no different than all the people who tried to destroy the cotton gin or the automated loom. I feel like this post by an HN user is pertinent[1]. > Have you ever done any reading on the Luddites? They weren't the anti technology, anti progress social force people think they were. > They were highly skilled laborers who knew how to operate complex looms. When auto looms came along, factory owners decided they didn't want highly trained, knowledgeable workers they wanted highly disposable workers. The Luddites were happy to operate the new looms, they just wanted to realize some of the profit from the savings in labor along with the factory owners. When the factory owners said no, the Luddites smashed the new looms. The Luddites went from middle class business owners and craftsmen to utter destitution. Many of the Luddites were tried for machine breaking and were either executed by the state, or exiled to penal colonies. They risked literally everything, because everything was at stake. I bring this up because people like to pretend the Luddites were some cult of ignorant technophobes, but the reality is that many of us are in the same situation the Luddites were in, as highly skilled workers that operate complex machinery with comfortable middle class lives, before owners cut them out and their families starved in the streets. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33230262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33230262
varnaud 4y ago
>Artists are no different than all the people who tried to destroy the cotton gin or the automated loom. Yes. They are angry that their labor was used to create something new and arguably more efficient, but they don't get a appropriate compensation for it.
Gigachad 4y ago
Chess is competitive so you can regain enjoyment by just banning AI from competitions. Drawing is more outcome based, I can see it becoming somewhat obsolete like how photography removed portrait and landscape painters from jobs. On the plus side. I can imagine this tech empowering artists to create more stuff they previously couldn’t. I’m imagining a single person producing a whole animation which previously was only accessible to companies and teams.
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
The automated loom was possible without the manual loom operators. Generative models are not possible without artists. It’s not remotely the same.
schroeding 4y ago
> Just as chess players today enjoy the game even though computers have surpassed our chess abilities. The "product" that chess players produce is not replaceable by ML systems. The game itself, the "fight" of two minds (or one mind against the machine, in the past) is the "product". Watching two chess AIs play against each other can't replace that. For artists, the product is their output, the art itself. An approximation of that art can also be produced by a ML system now, making artists an unnecessary cost factor[1] for e.g. simple illustrations. They are not comparable, IMO. Chess players are not replaced by ML systems, artists will be. > it's unavoidable. It really isn't. Of course it would be possible to just outlaw the use of things like "the pile", which includes gigabytes of random texts with unknown copyright status. The same goes for any training set that uses images scraped of the web, ignoring any copyright. Yes, people would still do it, but it would have the same status that piracy has. You can't build a US multi-billion dollar company on piracy (for long), and you wouldn't be able to do so with ML systems that were trained on random stuff from the internet. I don't think this, in such broad strokes, would be a good thing, to be clear. Such datasets are great for research! But I have a really hard time understanding this defeatism that there is "nothing we can do". [1] from the perspective of some customers e.g. magazines or ad companies - I don't agree with this
- jjcon 4y ago
  There is so much art that is creative commons and public domain I’m sure a worse ‘pile’ could be conjured up to start things out. Then just as we have seen with other architectures, as they refine, their need for data can drop and eventually we are back in the same place, maybe a few more years removed but back in the same place nonetheless. That is my take at least. Personally, I don’t think it is likely that copyright laws will change to protect against algorithmic usage (too much precedent in more general reuse cases and for what is considered transformative). Having said that I also don’t think this will be the death of artists by any stretch, some industries will need to change or evolve but it will be just another tool in an artists belt IMO.
  - schroeding 4y ago
    True, but make even one classification mistake (and people upload stuff they don't own with the wrong license all the time) and you have to retrain your whole system for each mistake you make, as people trickle in and want their (wrongly classified as CC or public domain) stuff removed from your dataset. It would chill the whole ML space significantly for decades, IMO, as the only truly safe data would be synthetic or licensed. This can work for some applications (e.g. Microsoft used synthetic data for facial landmark recognition[1]), but it would kill DALL-E 2 et al. [1] https://microsoft.github.io/DenseLandmarks/ https://microsoft.github.io/DenseLandmarks/
friend_and_foe 4y ago
While I generally agree with you, they have some good points you're missing. It isn't "inspiration". These machine models aren't actually intelligent. There's no expressive element here, with regard to the machine producing the art. What it really is is just a new tool for producing art. The sculptor had his chisel, the painter had a paintbrush, the photographer had a camera, the graphic designer had Photoshop or whatever, and now you can make art by being skillful in coming up with a prompt. It still requires skill, skill with the tool, just like anything else. The difference is that this new tool (probably) doesn't enable the creation of anything truly novel.

by ta8645 4y ago

echelon 4y ago

> It seems odd to complain that computers are using human's artwork to inspire their own creations. Every human artist has done the exact same thing in their lifetime; it's unavoidable. Agree. But you also have to treat code the same way. We shouldn't be suing Open AI and Microsoft over copilot being trained on open source code. It's no different than models trained on art. Besides, if Microsoft loses, they actually win. I expect they're one of the few companies with enough code to train the model on completely proprietary data. If they lose the case, they'll still be able to build the tool. The rest of us will be locked out of easy training data and won't be able to compete.

b112 4y ago
The rest of us will be locked out of easy training data and won't be able to compete. There's loads of BSD code, and to share, all that is required is a link to attributation. It seems to me, there is money to be made, in getting model data colinked with "saw first" references. Then, for example, after a github style codebot writes the code for you, it can show a link to "where it learned to help you today!". There is no technical reason the can't be done, only a business model reason. That said, I find the comments in this thread strange. Discussion about how tech moves on, and looms and such. That arg was lost, when people could cut up songs, and slap them together, or cut up 100 textbooks into one. This is settled by endless laws, and caselaw. It isn't a new argument. Microsoft will lose.

bugfix-66 4y ago

These systems aggregate and interpolate human work. Interpolation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation It's like a very complicated form of linear interpolation: a*x + (1-a)*y These systems do not "think". Today I spent all day mulling an idea, experimenting with variations, feeling frustrated or excited, imagining it, simulating it, making mistakes, following paths of reasoning, deducing facts, revisiting dead-ends with new insight, daydreaming, talking to my wife about it, etc. That's human thought. These models do not "think" like a human, they do not dream or imagine or feel. They run a feed-forward system of linear equations (matrix multiplications). They INTERPOLATE HUMAN WORK. They don't exist without training data (huge amounts of intellectual property) aggregated and interpolated in a monstrous perversion of "fair use": https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304facc51cdacbba3f99654652bf428 https://bugfix-66.com/7a82559a13b39c7fa404320c14f47ce0c304fa... Starve the machine. Without your work, it's got nothing.

jjcon 4y ago
> Starve the machine, it doesn't exist without having your work to interpolate. But again… aren’t people the same way? Noone exists in isolation. The Sir Isaac Newton quote comes to mine: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” Edit: to be clear - these algorithms are specifically non-linear and are a far cry from ‘linear interpolation’. Yes they do involve matrix multiplication that does not make them interpolaters unless you want to water down the meaning of interpolation to be so generic it loses its meaning. Having said all that - the sophistication of the algorithm is beyond the point here as long as what they are generating is substantially transformative (which >99% of the possible outputs are legally speaking).
- bugfix-66 4y ago
  Are you foolishly suggesting that Sir Isaac Newton was just aggregating and interpolating others' work? Like a feed-forward chain of matrix multiplications, trained to predict its training data? No, of course you weren't. That would be FUCKING RIDICULOUS.

ThePadawan 4y ago

> It seems odd to complain that computers are using human's artwork to inspire their own creations. Every human artist has done the exact same thing in their lifetime; it's unavoidable. I don't find it odd to complain that publishing an artwork on DeviantArt has gone from "I intend humans to look at this" to "I (opt-out!) agree that a corporation may use this to generate new artwork for profit." I would not complain if a painting of mine were exhibited in a museum and someone came in to look at it and draw something inspired by it. I would complain if I handed over a painting of mine to that same museum to be exhibited, they scanned it in at high resolution, handed it over to a class of copy artists, who then produced artwork in order to compete with mine, before finally putting it up in a gallery. Does that still seem odd?

greenthrow 4y ago

It's not even remotely comparable to the cotton gin or the dishwasher or any kind of normal labor that has been automated. We are talking about creative works being shuffled together and remixed as a legal protection for theft. That's all it is. There is ample evidence that these algorithms merely regurgitate what goes in and cannot create something entirely new. Which, is of coursw what you'd expect if you understand what is going on under the hood. But it is not what is being sold.

Gigachad 4y ago
This is basically what the majority of artists do already. They pull in a bunch of reference images and blend them together in to a single piece.
- wiseowise 4y ago
  They don’t do it on industrial scale.

heavyset_go 4y ago

> Artists are no different than all the people who tried to destroy the cotton gin or the automated loom. I feel like this post by an HN user is pertinent[1]. > Have you ever done any reading on the Luddites? They weren't the anti technology, anti progress social force people think they were. > They were highly skilled laborers who knew how to operate complex looms. When auto looms came along, factory owners decided they didn't want highly trained, knowledgeable workers they wanted highly disposable workers. The Luddites were happy to operate the new looms, they just wanted to realize some of the profit from the savings in labor along with the factory owners. When the factory owners said no, the Luddites smashed the new looms. The Luddites went from middle class business owners and craftsmen to utter destitution. Many of the Luddites were tried for machine breaking and were either executed by the state, or exiled to penal colonies. They risked literally everything, because everything was at stake. I bring this up because people like to pretend the Luddites were some cult of ignorant technophobes, but the reality is that many of us are in the same situation the Luddites were in, as highly skilled workers that operate complex machinery with comfortable middle class lives, before owners cut them out and their families starved in the streets. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33230262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33230262

varnaud 4y ago

>Artists are no different than all the people who tried to destroy the cotton gin or the automated loom. Yes. They are angry that their labor was used to create something new and arguably more efficient, but they don't get a appropriate compensation for it.

Gigachad 4y ago

Chess is competitive so you can regain enjoyment by just banning AI from competitions. Drawing is more outcome based, I can see it becoming somewhat obsolete like how photography removed portrait and landscape painters from jobs. On the plus side. I can imagine this tech empowering artists to create more stuff they previously couldn’t. I’m imagining a single person producing a whole animation which previously was only accessible to companies and teams.

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

The automated loom was possible without the manual loom operators. Generative models are not possible without artists. It’s not remotely the same.

schroeding 4y ago

> Just as chess players today enjoy the game even though computers have surpassed our chess abilities. The "product" that chess players produce is not replaceable by ML systems. The game itself, the "fight" of two minds (or one mind against the machine, in the past) is the "product". Watching two chess AIs play against each other can't replace that. For artists, the product is their output, the art itself. An approximation of that art can also be produced by a ML system now, making artists an unnecessary cost factor[1] for e.g. simple illustrations. They are not comparable, IMO. Chess players are not replaced by ML systems, artists will be. > it's unavoidable. It really isn't. Of course it would be possible to just outlaw the use of things like "the pile", which includes gigabytes of random texts with unknown copyright status. The same goes for any training set that uses images scraped of the web, ignoring any copyright. Yes, people would still do it, but it would have the same status that piracy has. You can't build a US multi-billion dollar company on piracy (for long), and you wouldn't be able to do so with ML systems that were trained on random stuff from the internet. I don't think this, in such broad strokes, would be a good thing, to be clear. Such datasets are great for research! But I have a really hard time understanding this defeatism that there is "nothing we can do". [1] from the perspective of some customers e.g. magazines or ad companies - I don't agree with this

jjcon 4y ago
There is so much art that is creative commons and public domain I’m sure a worse ‘pile’ could be conjured up to start things out. Then just as we have seen with other architectures, as they refine, their need for data can drop and eventually we are back in the same place, maybe a few more years removed but back in the same place nonetheless. That is my take at least. Personally, I don’t think it is likely that copyright laws will change to protect against algorithmic usage (too much precedent in more general reuse cases and for what is considered transformative). Having said that I also don’t think this will be the death of artists by any stretch, some industries will need to change or evolve but it will be just another tool in an artists belt IMO.
- schroeding 4y ago
  True, but make even one classification mistake (and people upload stuff they don't own with the wrong license all the time) and you have to retrain your whole system for each mistake you make, as people trickle in and want their (wrongly classified as CC or public domain) stuff removed from your dataset. It would chill the whole ML space significantly for decades, IMO, as the only truly safe data would be synthetic or licensed. This can work for some applications (e.g. Microsoft used synthetic data for facial landmark recognition[1]), but it would kill DALL-E 2 et al. [1] https://microsoft.github.io/DenseLandmarks/ https://microsoft.github.io/DenseLandmarks/

friend_and_foe 4y ago

While I generally agree with you, they have some good points you're missing. It isn't "inspiration". These machine models aren't actually intelligent. There's no expressive element here, with regard to the machine producing the art. What it really is is just a new tool for producing art. The sculptor had his chisel, the painter had a paintbrush, the photographer had a camera, the graphic designer had Photoshop or whatever, and now you can make art by being skillful in coming up with a prompt. It still requires skill, skill with the tool, just like anything else. The difference is that this new tool (probably) doesn't enable the creation of anything truly novel.