9 ms·

Surely, if the next Stable Diffusion had to be trained from a dataset that has been purged of images that were not under a permissive license, this would at mos

by 4bpp 4y ago

Surely, if the next Stable Diffusion had to be trained from a dataset that has been purged of images that were not under a permissive license, this would at most be a minor setback on AI's road to obsoleting painting that is more craft than art. Do artists not realise this (perhaps because they have some kind of conceit along the lines of "it only can produce good-looking images because it is rearranging pieces of some Real Artists' works it was trained on"), are they hoping to inspire overshoot legislation (perhaps something following the music industry model in several countries: AI-generated images assumed pirated until proven otherwise, with protection money to be paid to an artists' guild?), or is this just a desperate rearguard action?

Tepix 4y ago
Imagine you are an artist and you have developed your unique style. Would you mind if AI starts creating art like yours? What if your clients tell you they bought the AI generated art instead of yours?
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Would you mind if there was another person who copied your style? What if your clients...? Yeah, sure you'd mind. However, we have decided as a society that "style" is not protected.
  - wruza 4y ago
    “We” decide on today’s issues, not on all future possibilities. The reason for that decision in the past was to allow many creators to create without being too held back by “private property” signs everywhere. The current situation allows AI to create but demotivates creators. Now it’s time to think what will we do when AI wouldn’t pick a new style and there are not enough creators anymore who can or want to do that, whether it is a near future problem or maybe not a problem at all, and what should we decide again. Simply hiding in an obsolete technicality is sure a wrong way to handle it.
    - concordDance 4y ago
      By the time we're tired of the existing styles I suspect we'll have AGI and the entire question will be moot.
    - oneoff786 4y ago
      Style is entirely subjective and impossible to define. Van Gogh had a style. Are we going to say that we would want a society where only Van Gogh is allowed to make Impressionist paintings? Who decides if your painting is similar enough to Van Gogh that it’s illegal? What if your style is simplistic. Are you going to need to compare your art to all published art to make sure a court couldn’t find it “too similar”? What if we make a painting with AI that is a mix of Picasso and Van Gogh? Style? It’s a stupid concept. It would never work. Even the visualizations we see that are explicitly attempting to copy another artist’s style are often still clearly not exactly the same.
      - wruza 4y ago
        I don’t think style will be a subject here at all. Maybe we’ll settle on that AI user must take an exicit permission before training on someone’s content and humans must not.
        oneoff786 4y ago
        I’ll use the models trained in China then
        FeepingCreature 4y ago
        Sure, we can do that. My argument is just, and has always been, that this is a novel right that is not covered by existing legislation.
- Brushfire 4y ago
  Imagine you are a startup business owner and you have developed a unique product or service. And then someone comes along and competes with you? — No one is bothered by competition in markets. Why do we have more or less empathy of this type for some professions?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - onetrickwolf 4y ago
    To quote another comment but "Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits." I think this isn't just a simple discussion on competition and copyright, I think it's a much larger question on humanity. It just seems like potentially a bleak future if enjoyable and creative pursuits are buried and even surpassed by automation.
    - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      Some people enjoy looking at images more than creating them.
      - onetrickwolf 4y ago
        Yeah maybe, but I think we also already have a problem with overconsumption of media though. I am not sure this is helping. It seems inevitable and I don't think we can stop it, but I just am kind of worried about the collective mental health of humanity. What does a world look like where people have no jobs and even creative outlets are dominated by AI? Are people really just happy only consuming? What even is the point of humanity existing at that point?
        BeFlatXIII 4y ago
        People could always work on higher-order creation: stitch together AI paintings into collages, try styles the AI has not mastered, etc…
- astrange 4y ago
  Sure, artists don't like having competition, but that doesn't mean their competitors should listen to them.
- CyanBird 4y ago
  The big issue is precisely this, yeah, living* artists are upset that an ai can take their own names as input and output their artistic styles, that's the big thorn with these ml systems There is a secondary issue on that there is other people being able to craft high quality images with strong compositions without spending the "effort/training" that artists had to use over years to produce them, so they are bitter about that too, but that's generally a minor cross-section of the publicvoutcry tho they are quite vitriolic Photobashing, tracing, etc there have always been a layer of purists whom look down on anyone that doesn't "put the effort in" yet get great results in a timely manner, these purists will always exist, just like how it was when digital painting was starting, people were looked down by oil painters for not putting the effort in, even when oil painters themselves used tricks like projectors to the empty blank canvas to get perspective perfect images, but that's just human nature to a degree, trying to put down other people while yourself doing tricks to speed up processes
- sdiupIGPWEfh 4y ago
  > Would you mind if AI starts creating art like yours? The law isn't there to protect my feelings, so whether I mind or not is irrelevant. Artists have had to deal with shifting art markets for as long as art has been a profession. > What if your clients tell you they bought the AI generated art instead of yours? I'd be sad and out of a source of income. Much the same way I would be if my clients hired another similar but cheaper artist. The law doesn't guarantee me a livelihood.
- 4bpp 4y ago
  The idea that the AI will compete with you by copying your unique style seems like exactly the sort of short-sighted conceit that I alluded to in my post above. As an artist, would you be much happier if, rather than the AI copying your style, the AI generated infinitudes of pictures in a style that the overwhelming majority of humans prefers to yours, so that you couldn't hope to ever create anything that people outside of a handful of hipsters and personal friends will value?
  - deelly 4y ago
    > The idea that the AI will compete with you by copying your unique style seems like exactly the sort of short-sighted Could you please elaborate, why its "short-sighted"? > As an artist, would you be much happier if, rather than the AI copying your style, the AI generated infinitudes of pictures in a style that the overwhelming majority of humans prefers to yours, so that you couldn't hope to ever create anything that people outside of a handful of hipsters and personal friends will value? You mean that any artist should be just happy that his work is used by other people / rich corporation / AI without consent? Cool, cool.
    - 4bpp 4y ago
      > Could you please elaborate, why its "short-sighted"? Because it's barely been a year since we've gone from people confidently asserting that AI won't be able to produce visual art on the level of human professionals at all to the current situation. Predictions on ways in which AI performance will not catch up to or overtake human performance have a bad track record at the moment, and it has not been long enough to even suspect that the current increase in performance might be plateauing. Cutting-edge image generation AI appears to often imitate human artists in obvious ways now, but it seems quite plausible that the gap between this and being "original"/as non-obvious in your imitation of other humans as those high-performing human artists that are considered to be original is merely quantitative and will be closed soon enough. > You mean that any artist should be just happy that his work is used by other people / rich corporation / AI without consent? Cool, cool. I don't know how you get that out of what I said. Rather, I'm claiming that artists will have enough to be unhappy about being obsoleted, and the current direction of their ire at being "copied" by AI may be a misdirection of effort, much as if makers of horse-drawn carriages had tried to forestall the demise of their profession by complaining that the design of the Ford Model T was ripped off of theirs (instead of, I don't know, lobbying to ban combustion engines altogether, or sponsoring Amish proselytism).
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  Would they mind if another artist would create the same art-style independent of them? Or something 99% alike? 95%? How many art-styles are even possible without overlapping too much?
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Many skilled and talented programmers work on open source software for the explicit purpose of allowing it to be copied and extended in any fashion.
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    > in any fashion. Several open source licenses do not agree with this (they enforce restrictions on how it is to be shared).
    - mtrower 4y ago
      This is true, and many bitter wars are fought over ISS licensing. I’m not sure it derails his point - there’s an awful lot of BSD, MIT etc licensed code out there.
  - Tepix 4y ago
    Right. That is their choice. But most of those artists didn't choose to make their art public domain.
- Nadya 4y ago
  I still don't see how this isn't the "Realistic Portrait/Scenic Painters vs Photography" argument rehashed. Imagine you are a painter and you have developed your expertise in photorealistic painting over your entire lifetime. Would you mind if someone snaps a photograph of the same subject you just painted? What if your commissioners tell you they decided to buy a photograph instead of your painting because it looked more realistic? Every argument I've seen against AI art is an appeal to (human) ego or an appeal to humanity. I don't find either argument compelling. Take this video [0] for example and half of the counterarguments are an appeal to ego - and one argument tries to paint the "capped profit" as a shady dealing of circumventing laws without realizing (1) it's been done before, OpenAI just tried slapping a label on it and (2) nonprofits owning for-profit subdivisions is commonplace. Mozilla is both a nonprofit organization (the Foundation) and a for-profit company (the Corporation). E: I'm going to start a series of photographs that are intentionally bad and poorly taken. Poor framing, poor lighting, poor composition. Boring to look at, poor white balance, and undersaturated photos like the kind taken on overcast days. With no discernable subjects or points of interest. I will call the photos art - things captured solely with the press of a button by pointing my camera in a direction seemingly at random. I'm afraid many won't understand the point I am making but if I am making a point it does make the photographs art - does it not? I'm pretty sure that is how modern art works. I will call the collection "Hypocrisy". E2: The first photo of the collection to set the mood - a picture of the curtain in my office: https://kimiwo.aishitei.ru/i/mUjQ5jTdeqrY3Vn0.jpg https://kimiwo.aishitei.ru/i/mUjQ5jTdeqrY3Vn0.jpg Chosen because it is grey and boring. The light is not captured by the fabric in any sort of interesting manner - the fabric itself is quite boring. There is no pattern or design - just a bland color. There is nothing to frame - a section of the curtain was taken at random. The photo isn't even aligned with the curtain - being tilted some 40 odd degrees. Nor is the curtain ever properly in focus. A perfect start for a collection of boring, bland photos. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss&feature=youtu.be
  - mtrower 4y ago
    Your art is fascinating; how can I donate to the cause?
  - Nadya 4y ago
wruza 4y ago
There’s only one way to figure it out - train on a properly licensed content and show them that. Your line of reasoning sounds like “ah, we already won so your protest doesn’t matter anyway”, but did you already win actually? Do you really not need all their development to draw on the same level? Just show that.
- 4bpp 4y ago
  I'm not in AI and my GPU barely runs games from 10 years ago, so I'll pass. To be more precise, though, I think that it _seems_ that their protest won't matter, but the one way in which I see that it may (the second out of three options) leads to an outcome that I would just consider bad in the short term (for society, and for artists that are not established enough to benefit from any emerging redistribution system; we observe cases in Germany every so often where pseudonymous musicians are essentially forced to charge for their own performances and redirect proceeds to rent-seekers and musicians that are not them, because they can't prove ownership of their own work to GEMA's satisfaction).
- chrisco255 4y ago
  But human beings themselves are influenced by licensed content. And remix it just the same as AI.
  - gedy 4y ago
    But they're Artists and makes the same approach all better /s
    - wruza 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33998736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33998736
  - spookie 4y ago
    Humans aren't the product of a commercial entity
gpderetta 4y ago
Also if a theoretical purged-dataset SD were released, it would still be easy and cheap for users to extend it to imitate any art style the want. As they wouldn't be redistributing the model and presumably they would use art they have already licensed the copyright issue would be further muddled. I think attempting to prevent this is a losing battle.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I’m not too sure how it works but someone commented that you can take the model and “resume training” it on the extra dataset you want to add. Given most of the heavy lifting is already done, this seems like a pretty easy thing for anyone to do.
  - gpderetta 4y ago
    https://dreambooth.github.io/ https://dreambooth.github.io/ edit: the examples are all about objects, but my understanding is that it is capable of style transfers as well.
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    It is called fine-tuning or transfer learning, and you usually train the last layer. Here is an example for keras (a popular ML framework). https://keras.io/guides/transfer_learning/ https://keras.io/guides/transfer_learning/
nwoli 4y ago
I’m sure artists realise that. They also realise the power of these things and I see this more as a fight against survival. They’re up against the wall and they know it, and they’re incredibly well connected and have invested their lives up to now into this so they won’t just lie down without a fight (trying anything).
orbifold 4y ago
I think this drastically overestimates what current AI algorithms are actually capable of, there is little to no hint of genuine creativity in them. They are currently severely limited by the amount of high quality training data not the model size. They are really mostly copying whatever they were trained on, but on a scale that it appears indistinguishable from intelligent creation. As humans we don't have to agree that our collective creative output can be harvested and used to train our replacements. The benefits of allowing this will be had by a very small group of corporations and individuals, while everyone else will lose out if this continues as is. This will and can turn into an existential threat to humanity, so it is different from workers destroying mechanical looms during the industrial revolution. Our existence is at stake here.
- idlehand 4y ago
  This has been a line of argument from every Luddite since the start of the industrial revolution. But it is not true. Almost all the productivity gains of the last 250 years have been dispersed into the population. A few early movers have managed to capture some fraction of the value created by new technology, the vast majority has gone to improve people's quality of life, which is why we live longer and richer lives than any generation before us. Some will lose their jobs and that is fine because human demand for goods and services is infinite, there will always be jobs to do. I really doubt that AI will somehow be our successors. Machines and AI need microprocessors so complex that it took us 70 years of exponential growth and multiple trillion-dollar tech companies to train even these frankly quite unimpressive models. These AI are entirely dependent on our globalized value chains with capital costs so high that there are multiple points of failure. A human needs just food, clean water, a warm environment and some books to carry civilization forward.
  - orbifold 4y ago
    There is a significant contingent of influential people that disagree. "Why the future doesn't need us" (https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/ https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/), Ray Kurzweil etc. This is qualitatively different than what the Luddites faced, it concerns all of us and touches the essence of what makes us human. This isn't the kind of technology that has the potential to make our lives better in the long run, it will almost surely be used for more harm than good. Not only are these models trained on the collectively created output of humanity, the key application areas are to subjugate, control and manipulate us. I agree with you that this will not happen immediately, because of the very real complexities of physical manufacturing, but if this part of the process isn't stopped in its tracks, the resulting progress is unlikely to be curtailed. I at least fundamentally think that the use of all of our data and output to train these models is unethical, especially if the output is not freely shared and made available.
Tao3300 4y ago
None of the above. They don't like it being trained on and occasionally regurgitating their work.

by 4bpp 4y ago

Tepix 4y ago

Imagine you are an artist and you have developed your unique style. Would you mind if AI starts creating art like yours? What if your clients tell you they bought the AI generated art instead of yours?

FeepingCreature 4y ago
Would you mind if there was another person who copied your style? What if your clients...? Yeah, sure you'd mind. However, we have decided as a society that "style" is not protected.
- wruza 4y ago
  “We” decide on today’s issues, not on all future possibilities. The reason for that decision in the past was to allow many creators to create without being too held back by “private property” signs everywhere. The current situation allows AI to create but demotivates creators. Now it’s time to think what will we do when AI wouldn’t pick a new style and there are not enough creators anymore who can or want to do that, whether it is a near future problem or maybe not a problem at all, and what should we decide again. Simply hiding in an obsolete technicality is sure a wrong way to handle it.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    By the time we're tired of the existing styles I suspect we'll have AGI and the entire question will be moot.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    Style is entirely subjective and impossible to define. Van Gogh had a style. Are we going to say that we would want a society where only Van Gogh is allowed to make Impressionist paintings? Who decides if your painting is similar enough to Van Gogh that it’s illegal? What if your style is simplistic. Are you going to need to compare your art to all published art to make sure a court couldn’t find it “too similar”? What if we make a painting with AI that is a mix of Picasso and Van Gogh? Style? It’s a stupid concept. It would never work. Even the visualizations we see that are explicitly attempting to copy another artist’s style are often still clearly not exactly the same.
    - wruza 4y ago
      I don’t think style will be a subject here at all. Maybe we’ll settle on that AI user must take an exicit permission before training on someone’s content and humans must not.
      - oneoff786 4y ago
        I’ll use the models trained in China then
      - FeepingCreature 4y ago
        Sure, we can do that. My argument is just, and has always been, that this is a novel right that is not covered by existing legislation.
Brushfire 4y ago
Imagine you are a startup business owner and you have developed a unique product or service. And then someone comes along and competes with you? — No one is bothered by competition in markets. Why do we have more or less empathy of this type for some professions?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- onetrickwolf 4y ago
  To quote another comment but "Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we’re actually automating enjoyable pursuits." I think this isn't just a simple discussion on competition and copyright, I think it's a much larger question on humanity. It just seems like potentially a bleak future if enjoyable and creative pursuits are buried and even surpassed by automation.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    Some people enjoy looking at images more than creating them.
    - onetrickwolf 4y ago
      Yeah maybe, but I think we also already have a problem with overconsumption of media though. I am not sure this is helping. It seems inevitable and I don't think we can stop it, but I just am kind of worried about the collective mental health of humanity. What does a world look like where people have no jobs and even creative outlets are dominated by AI? Are people really just happy only consuming? What even is the point of humanity existing at that point?
      - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
        People could always work on higher-order creation: stitch together AI paintings into collages, try styles the AI has not mastered, etc…
astrange 4y ago
Sure, artists don't like having competition, but that doesn't mean their competitors should listen to them.
CyanBird 4y ago
The big issue is precisely this, yeah, living* artists are upset that an ai can take their own names as input and output their artistic styles, that's the big thorn with these ml systems There is a secondary issue on that there is other people being able to craft high quality images with strong compositions without spending the "effort/training" that artists had to use over years to produce them, so they are bitter about that too, but that's generally a minor cross-section of the publicvoutcry tho they are quite vitriolic Photobashing, tracing, etc there have always been a layer of purists whom look down on anyone that doesn't "put the effort in" yet get great results in a timely manner, these purists will always exist, just like how it was when digital painting was starting, people were looked down by oil painters for not putting the effort in, even when oil painters themselves used tricks like projectors to the empty blank canvas to get perspective perfect images, but that's just human nature to a degree, trying to put down other people while yourself doing tricks to speed up processes
sdiupIGPWEfh 4y ago
> Would you mind if AI starts creating art like yours? The law isn't there to protect my feelings, so whether I mind or not is irrelevant. Artists have had to deal with shifting art markets for as long as art has been a profession. > What if your clients tell you they bought the AI generated art instead of yours? I'd be sad and out of a source of income. Much the same way I would be if my clients hired another similar but cheaper artist. The law doesn't guarantee me a livelihood.
4bpp 4y ago
The idea that the AI will compete with you by copying your unique style seems like exactly the sort of short-sighted conceit that I alluded to in my post above. As an artist, would you be much happier if, rather than the AI copying your style, the AI generated infinitudes of pictures in a style that the overwhelming majority of humans prefers to yours, so that you couldn't hope to ever create anything that people outside of a handful of hipsters and personal friends will value?
- deelly 4y ago
  > The idea that the AI will compete with you by copying your unique style seems like exactly the sort of short-sighted Could you please elaborate, why its "short-sighted"? > As an artist, would you be much happier if, rather than the AI copying your style, the AI generated infinitudes of pictures in a style that the overwhelming majority of humans prefers to yours, so that you couldn't hope to ever create anything that people outside of a handful of hipsters and personal friends will value? You mean that any artist should be just happy that his work is used by other people / rich corporation / AI without consent? Cool, cool.
  - 4bpp 4y ago
    > Could you please elaborate, why its "short-sighted"? Because it's barely been a year since we've gone from people confidently asserting that AI won't be able to produce visual art on the level of human professionals at all to the current situation. Predictions on ways in which AI performance will not catch up to or overtake human performance have a bad track record at the moment, and it has not been long enough to even suspect that the current increase in performance might be plateauing. Cutting-edge image generation AI appears to often imitate human artists in obvious ways now, but it seems quite plausible that the gap between this and being "original"/as non-obvious in your imitation of other humans as those high-performing human artists that are considered to be original is merely quantitative and will be closed soon enough. > You mean that any artist should be just happy that his work is used by other people / rich corporation / AI without consent? Cool, cool. I don't know how you get that out of what I said. Rather, I'm claiming that artists will have enough to be unhappy about being obsoleted, and the current direction of their ire at being "copied" by AI may be a misdirection of effort, much as if makers of horse-drawn carriages had tried to forestall the demise of their profession by complaining that the design of the Ford Model T was ripped off of theirs (instead of, I don't know, lobbying to ban combustion engines altogether, or sponsoring Amish proselytism).
PurpleRamen 4y ago
Would they mind if another artist would create the same art-style independent of them? Or something 99% alike? 95%? How many art-styles are even possible without overlapping too much?
chrisco255 4y ago
Many skilled and talented programmers work on open source software for the explicit purpose of allowing it to be copied and extended in any fashion.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  > in any fashion. Several open source licenses do not agree with this (they enforce restrictions on how it is to be shared).
  - mtrower 4y ago
    This is true, and many bitter wars are fought over ISS licensing. I’m not sure it derails his point - there’s an awful lot of BSD, MIT etc licensed code out there.
- Tepix 4y ago
  Right. That is their choice. But most of those artists didn't choose to make their art public domain.
Nadya 4y ago
I still don't see how this isn't the "Realistic Portrait/Scenic Painters vs Photography" argument rehashed. Imagine you are a painter and you have developed your expertise in photorealistic painting over your entire lifetime. Would you mind if someone snaps a photograph of the same subject you just painted? What if your commissioners tell you they decided to buy a photograph instead of your painting because it looked more realistic? Every argument I've seen against AI art is an appeal to (human) ego or an appeal to humanity. I don't find either argument compelling. Take this video [0] for example and half of the counterarguments are an appeal to ego - and one argument tries to paint the "capped profit" as a shady dealing of circumventing laws without realizing (1) it's been done before, OpenAI just tried slapping a label on it and (2) nonprofits owning for-profit subdivisions is commonplace. Mozilla is both a nonprofit organization (the Foundation) and a for-profit company (the Corporation). E: I'm going to start a series of photographs that are intentionally bad and poorly taken. Poor framing, poor lighting, poor composition. Boring to look at, poor white balance, and undersaturated photos like the kind taken on overcast days. With no discernable subjects or points of interest. I will call the photos art - things captured solely with the press of a button by pointing my camera in a direction seemingly at random. I'm afraid many won't understand the point I am making but if I am making a point it does make the photographs art - does it not? I'm pretty sure that is how modern art works. I will call the collection "Hypocrisy". E2: The first photo of the collection to set the mood - a picture of the curtain in my office: https://kimiwo.aishitei.ru/i/mUjQ5jTdeqrY3Vn0.jpg https://kimiwo.aishitei.ru/i/mUjQ5jTdeqrY3Vn0.jpg Chosen because it is grey and boring. The light is not captured by the fabric in any sort of interesting manner - the fabric itself is quite boring. There is no pattern or design - just a bland color. There is nothing to frame - a section of the curtain was taken at random. The photo isn't even aligned with the curtain - being tilted some 40 odd degrees. Nor is the curtain ever properly in focus. A perfect start for a collection of boring, bland photos. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss&feature=youtu.be
- mtrower 4y ago
  Your art is fascinating; how can I donate to the cause?
- Nadya 4y ago

wruza 4y ago

There’s only one way to figure it out - train on a properly licensed content and show them that. Your line of reasoning sounds like “ah, we already won so your protest doesn’t matter anyway”, but did you already win actually? Do you really not need all their development to draw on the same level? Just show that.

4bpp 4y ago
I'm not in AI and my GPU barely runs games from 10 years ago, so I'll pass. To be more precise, though, I think that it _seems_ that their protest won't matter, but the one way in which I see that it may (the second out of three options) leads to an outcome that I would just consider bad in the short term (for society, and for artists that are not established enough to benefit from any emerging redistribution system; we observe cases in Germany every so often where pseudonymous musicians are essentially forced to charge for their own performances and redirect proceeds to rent-seekers and musicians that are not them, because they can't prove ownership of their own work to GEMA's satisfaction).
chrisco255 4y ago
But human beings themselves are influenced by licensed content. And remix it just the same as AI.
- gedy 4y ago
  But they're Artists and makes the same approach all better /s
  - wruza 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33998736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33998736
- spookie 4y ago
  Humans aren't the product of a commercial entity

gpderetta 4y ago

Also if a theoretical purged-dataset SD were released, it would still be easy and cheap for users to extend it to imitate any art style the want. As they wouldn't be redistributing the model and presumably they would use art they have already licensed the copyright issue would be further muddled. I think attempting to prevent this is a losing battle.

Gigachad 4y ago
I’m not too sure how it works but someone commented that you can take the model and “resume training” it on the extra dataset you want to add. Given most of the heavy lifting is already done, this seems like a pretty easy thing for anyone to do.
- gpderetta 4y ago
  https://dreambooth.github.io/ https://dreambooth.github.io/ edit: the examples are all about objects, but my understanding is that it is capable of style transfers as well.
- mejutoco 4y ago
  It is called fine-tuning or transfer learning, and you usually train the last layer. Here is an example for keras (a popular ML framework). https://keras.io/guides/transfer_learning/ https://keras.io/guides/transfer_learning/

nwoli 4y ago

I’m sure artists realise that. They also realise the power of these things and I see this more as a fight against survival. They’re up against the wall and they know it, and they’re incredibly well connected and have invested their lives up to now into this so they won’t just lie down without a fight (trying anything).

orbifold 4y ago

I think this drastically overestimates what current AI algorithms are actually capable of, there is little to no hint of genuine creativity in them. They are currently severely limited by the amount of high quality training data not the model size. They are really mostly copying whatever they were trained on, but on a scale that it appears indistinguishable from intelligent creation. As humans we don't have to agree that our collective creative output can be harvested and used to train our replacements. The benefits of allowing this will be had by a very small group of corporations and individuals, while everyone else will lose out if this continues as is. This will and can turn into an existential threat to humanity, so it is different from workers destroying mechanical looms during the industrial revolution. Our existence is at stake here.

idlehand 4y ago
This has been a line of argument from every Luddite since the start of the industrial revolution. But it is not true. Almost all the productivity gains of the last 250 years have been dispersed into the population. A few early movers have managed to capture some fraction of the value created by new technology, the vast majority has gone to improve people's quality of life, which is why we live longer and richer lives than any generation before us. Some will lose their jobs and that is fine because human demand for goods and services is infinite, there will always be jobs to do. I really doubt that AI will somehow be our successors. Machines and AI need microprocessors so complex that it took us 70 years of exponential growth and multiple trillion-dollar tech companies to train even these frankly quite unimpressive models. These AI are entirely dependent on our globalized value chains with capital costs so high that there are multiple points of failure. A human needs just food, clean water, a warm environment and some books to carry civilization forward.
- orbifold 4y ago
  There is a significant contingent of influential people that disagree. "Why the future doesn't need us" (https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/ https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/), Ray Kurzweil etc. This is qualitatively different than what the Luddites faced, it concerns all of us and touches the essence of what makes us human. This isn't the kind of technology that has the potential to make our lives better in the long run, it will almost surely be used for more harm than good. Not only are these models trained on the collectively created output of humanity, the key application areas are to subjugate, control and manipulate us. I agree with you that this will not happen immediately, because of the very real complexities of physical manufacturing, but if this part of the process isn't stopped in its tracks, the resulting progress is unlikely to be curtailed. I at least fundamentally think that the use of all of our data and output to train these models is unethical, especially if the output is not freely shared and made available.

Tao3300 4y ago

None of the above. They don't like it being trained on and occasionally regurgitating their work.