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Artists have all my sympathy. I'm also a hobbyist painter. But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this tiresome moral panic (a small amount of a

Artists have all my sympathy. I'm also a hobbyist painter. But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this tiresome moral panic (a small amount of actual artists, whatever the word "artist" means), because I think that: a) the panic is entirely misguided and based on two wrong assumptions. The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy; the field will just become more and more complex and technically involved, just like 3D CGI did, because if you don't use every trick available, you're missing out. The second wrong assumption is that it's going to replace anyone, instead of making many people re-learn a new tool and produce what was previously unfeasible due to the amount of mechanistic work involved. This second assumption stems from the fundamental misunderstanding of the value artists provide, which is conceptualization, even in a seemingly routine job. b) the panic is entirely blown out of proportion by the social media. Most people have neither time nor desire to actually dive into this tech and find out what works and what doesn't. They just believe that a magical machine steals their works to replace them, because that's what everyone reposts on Twitter endlessly.

thordenmark 4y ago
You are demonstrating that lack of empathy. Artist's works are being stolen and used to train AI, that then produces work that will affect that artist's career. The advancement of this tech in the past 6 months, if it maintains this trajectory, demonstrates this.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Permit 4y ago
  > Artist's works are being stolen It has been fascinating to watch “copyright infringement is not theft” morph into “actually yes it’s stealing” over the last few years. It used to be incredibly rare to find copyright maximalists on HackerNews, but with GitHub Co-pilot and StableDiffusion it seems to have created a new generation of them.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    "copyright infringement is not theft" is not an especially common view among artists or musicians, since copyright infringement threatens their livelihood. I don't think there's anything inconsistent about this. Yes, techies tend to hold the opposite view. Personally, I think "copyright infringement is not theft" but I also think that using artists' work without their permission for profit is never OK, and that's what's happening here.
    - sdiupIGPWEfh 4y ago
      > I don't think there's anything inconsistent about this. It amounts to saying that anything that benefits me is good and anything to my detriment is bad. Sure, there's a consistency to that. However, if that's the foundation of one's positions, it leads to all manner of other logical inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
  - blamestross 4y ago
    Individual humans copying corporate products vs corporations copying the work of individual humans they didn't pay. The confusion is that “copyright infringement is not theft” really was about being against corporate abuse of individuals. It's still the same situation here.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      So it’s okay to infringe on copyright against a group of people getting paid by a corporation. But not individual artists and you should definitely not break open source copyright rules?
      - blamestross 4y ago
        "group of people getting paid by a corporation" they are not involved at all. Corporations are their own person's, remember. It's almost like the real problem is asymmetry and abuse of power.
- pfisch 4y ago
  So I employ quite a few artists, and I don't see the problem. This whole thing basically seems more like a filter on photoshop then something that will take a persons job. If artists I employ want to incorporate this stuff into their workflow, that sounds great. They can get more done. There won't be less artists on payroll, just more and better art will be produced. I don't even think it is at the point of incorporating it into a workflow yet though, so this really seems like a nothing burger to me. At least github copilot is useful. This stuff is really not useful in a professional context, and the idea that it is going to take artists jobs really doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, if there aren't any artists then who exactly do I have that is using these AI tools to make new designs? If you think the answer to that is just some intern, then you really don't know what you're talking about.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    With respect, you need to pay more attention to how and why these networks are used. People write complex prompts containing things like "trending on artstation" or "<skilled artist's name>" then use unmodified AI output in places like blog articles, profile headers, etc where you normally would have put art made by an artist. Yes, artists can also utilize AI as a photoshop filter, and some artists have started using it to fill in backgrounds in drawings, etc. Inpainting can also be used to do unimportant textures for 3d models. But that doesn't mean that AI art is no threat to artists' livelihoods, especially for scenarios like "I need a dozen illustrations to go with these articles" where quality isn't so important to the commissioner that they are willing to spend an extra few hundred bucks instead of spending 15 minutes in midjourney or stable diffusion. As long as these networks continue being trained on artists' work without permission or compensation, they will continue to improve in output quality and muscle the actual artists out of work.
    - pfisch 4y ago
      If you are looking for a bunch of low quality art there are tons of free sources for that already. If this is what you mean when you say "putting artists out of work" you are really talking about less than 1% of where artist money is spent.
- _0ffh 4y ago
  So who's that mythical artist that hasn't seen and learned from the works of other artists? After all, these works will have left an imprint in their neural connections, so by the same argument their works are just as derivative, or "stolen".
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    These are not artists being inspired by the works of other artists, these are programmers taking the work of artists and then claiming to create original works when in fact they are automatically generated derivatives. Try telling one of the programmers to produce a work of art based on a review of all of the works that went into training the models and see how it works out.
    - brian_cloutier 4y ago
      What distinguishes a derivative from an original work? What is it about AI-generated art which makes it so clearly derivative, in your mind?
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        That the process is automated. That is one of the important tests of originality, that something is not created in a mechanical fashion.
        bigiain 4y ago
        > that something is not created in a mechanical fashion. I wonder if the nerds have shot themselves in the foot here with terminology? I suspect the nerd’s lawyers would have been much happier if the entire field was named “automated mechanical creativity” instead of “artificial intelligence”. It’d be kinda amusing to see the whole field of study lose in court because of their own persistent claims that what they’re doing is not just “creating in a mechanical fashion” but creating “intelligence” which can therefore be held to account for copyright infringement. Shades of Al Capone getting busted for taxes…
- blincoln 4y ago
  As someone who's shifted careers twice because disruptive technologies made some other options impractical, I can definitely appreciate that some artists are very upset about the idea of maybe having to change their plans for the future (or maybe not, depending on the kind of art they make), but all art is built on art that came before. How is training AI on imagery from the internet without permission different than decades of film and game artists borrowing H. R. Giger's style for alien technology?[1] How is it different from decades of professional and amateur artists using the characteristic big-eyed manga/anime look without getting permission from Osamu Tezuka? Copyright law doesn't cover general "style". Try to imagine the minefield that would exist if it were changed to work that way. [1] No, I don't mean Alien, or other works that actually involved Giger himself.
  - bigiain 4y ago
    > Copyright law doesn't cover general "style". Try to imagine the minefield that would exist if it were changed to work that way. We don’t need to “try to imagine”, we just need to wait a bit and watch Walt’s reanimated corpse and army of undead lawyers come out swinging for those “mice in the general style of Mickey Mouse”.
    - tidenly 4y ago
      Intellectual property and copyright are entirely different, and you'd be come after by Disney for making those kinds of images with or without AI. I wish people in the fight against AI would stop trotting this argument out, it muddies stronger arguments against it.
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        Copyright is a subset of intellectual property. Intellectual property generally includes copyright, patents, trademark, and trade secrets, though there are broader claims such as likeness, celebrity rights, moral rights (e.g., droit d'auteur in French/EU law), and probably a few others since I began writing this comment (the scope seems to be increasing, generally). I suspect you intended to distinguish trademark and copyright.
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  Is 'looking at something' equivalent to stealing it? The use by all these diffusion networks is pretty much the definition of transformative. If a person was doing this it wouldn't even be interesting enough to talk about it. When a machine does it somehow that is morally distinct?
- berniedurfee 4y ago
  Existing art trains the neural nets in human artists as well. All art is derivative. No art is wholly unique. Will human artists be able to compete with artificial artists commercially? If not, is that bad or is it progress, like Photoshop or Autotune?
- NL807 4y ago
  > stolen Is it though? What if I were to look at your art style and replicate that style manually in my own works? I see no difference whether it's done by a machine, or done by hand. The reality is that every art is a derivative of some other art. Interestingly, the music industry has been doing this for years. Ever since samplers became a thing, musicians spliced and diced loops into their own tracks for donkeys years, and created an explosion of new genres and sound. Hip-hop, techno, dark ambient, EDM, ..., all fall into the same category. Machine learning is just another new tool to create something.
  - melagonster 4y ago
    last time this happened on human, people are so angry. the guy who copy other artwork even got cancelled by company. but actually not in music region, you are right.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    I'd say it's more similar to an artist drawing influence from another artist, and there is a difference in that the machines can do it much more efficiently. Personally, I'm all for AI training and using human artwork. I think telling it not to prevents progress/innovation, and that innovation is going to happen somewhere. If it happens somewhere, humans who live in that somewhere will just use those tools to launder the AI-generated artwork, and companies will hire those offshore humans and reap the benefits, all the while, the effect on local artists' wages is even more negative because now they don't have access to the tools to compete in this ar(tificial intelligence)ms race.
  - randombits0 4y ago
    It’s not stolen. If I create a work mimicking the style of whomever, I’ve not taken anything from them besides an idea. Ideas are not protected. Ideas are the point. If you don’t want to share your ideas, feel free not to. Most people do not understand the purpose of copyright. Copyright is a bargain between society and the creator. The creator receives limited protection of the work for a limited time. Why is this the deal? The purpose of copyright is to advance the progress of science and the useful arts. It is to benefit humanity as a whole. AI takes nothing more than an idea. It does not take a “creative expression fixed in a tangible media”.
dtn 4y ago
> But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this tiresome moral panic (a small amount of actual artists, whatever the word "artist" means) > A small amount of actual artists It's extremely funny that you say this, because taking a look at the Trending on Artstation page tells a different story. https://www.artstation.com/?sort_by=trending https://www.artstation.com/?sort_by=trending
- orbital-decay 4y ago
  That's what the b) was about, yes. And ironically, the overwhelming majority of knowledge used by these models to produce pictures that superficially look like their work (usually not at all), is not coming from any artworks at all. It's as simple as that. They are mostly trained on photos which constitute the bulk of models' knowledge about the real world. They are the main source of coherency. Artist names and keywords like "trending on artstation" are just easily discoverable and very rough handles for pieces of the memory of the models.
  - dtn 4y ago
    I don't think the fact that photos are making up the vast majority of the training set is of any particular significance. Can SD create artistic renderings without actual art being incorporated? Just from photos alone? I don't believe so, unless someone shows me evidence to the contrary. Hence, SD necessitates having artwork in it's training corpus in order to emulate style, no matter how little it's represented in the training data.
    - orbital-decay 4y ago
      SD has several separate parts. In the most simplistic sense (not entirely accurate to how it functions), one translates English into a semantic address inside the "main memory", and another one extracts the contents of the memory that the address refers to. If you prevent the first one (CLIP) from understanding artists names by removing the correspondence between names and addresses, the data will still be there and can be addressed in any other way, for example custom trained embeddings. Even if you remove artworks from the dataset entirely, you can easily finetune it on anything you want using various techniques, because the bulk of the training ($$$!) has already been done for you, and the coherency, knowledge of how things look in general, shapes, lighting, poses, etc is already there. You only need to skew it towards your desired style a bit. Style transfer combined with the overall coherency of pre-trained models is the real power of these. "Country house in the style of Picasso" is generally not how you use this at full power, because "Picasso" is a poor descriptor for particular memory coordinates. You type "Country house" (a generic descriptor it knows very well) and provide your own embedding or any kind of finetuned addon to precisely lean the result towards the desired style, whether constructed by you or anyone else. So, if anyone believes that this thing would drive the artists out of their jobs, then removing their works from the training set will change very little as it will still be able to generate anything given a few examples, on a consumer GPU. And that's only the current generation of such models and tools. (which admittedly doesn't pass the quality/controllability threshold required for serious work, just yet)
jacquesm 4y ago
That's exactly that lack of empathy the OP was on about: if you don't see that there is something wrong by a bunch of programmers feeding everybody's work into the meatgrinder and then to start spitting out stuff that they claim is original work when they probably couldn't draw a stick figure themselves then it is clear that something isn't quite right. At least, to me.
- Nursie 4y ago
  As someone who has always had a huge gap between what I can imagine and what I can manifest, outside of text anyway, I find the whole thing amazing and massively enabling. And I think it is possible to come up with original images, even though the styles are usually derivative. At the same time I recognise that this is a massive threat to artists, both low-visibility folks who throw out concepts and logos for companies, and people who may sell their art to the public. Because I can spend a couple of dollars and half an hour to come up with an image I’d be happy to put on my wall. I’m not sure what the answer is here, but I don’t think a sort of “human origin art” Puritanism is going to hold back the flood, though it may secure a niche like handmade craft goods and organic food…
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    What will happen is exactly the same thing that happened when email made mass mailings possible: a torrent of very low quality art will begin to drown out the better stuff because there is no skill required to produce a flood of trash whereas to produce original work takes talent and time. As the price of a bit dropped the quality of the comms dropped. It is inevitable that the price of the creation of (crappy) art will do the same thing if only because it will drag down the average.
    - tremon 4y ago
      a torrent of very low quality art will begin to drown out the better stuff because there is no skill required to produce a flood of trash Case in point: https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy > This trust is broken when users copy and paste information into answers without validating that the answer provided by GPT is correct, ensuring that the sources used in the answer are properly cited (a service GPT does not provide), and verifying that the answer provided by GPT clearly and concisely answers the question asked.
slimebot80 4y ago
> "The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute." This is the first wave of half decent AI. But more importantly, you are vastly underestimating the millions of small jobs out there that artists use as a stepping stone. Think of the millions of managers who would happily be presented with a choice of 10 artistic interpretations, and pick one for the sake of getting a quick job done. No way on earth this isn't going to make a major impact. Empathy absolutely required.
- dmix 4y ago
  So empathy as in being considerate they are losing their jobs right? Not that AI art generation is inherently a bad thing? Or that they or I can doing anything about it?
- chrischen 4y ago
  If small pointless jobs able to be done by machines are so great then lets get rid of computers, power tools, and automation so we can get those unemployment numbers down… why can’t we find a solution that doesn’t hamper progress? At the end of the day progress saves lives.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    This is very black and white thinking. One can see AI tools as progress here while also recognising that this is likely to have a huge impact on a lot of lives.
    - chrischen 4y ago
      Actually all progress will definitely will have a huge impact on a lot of lives—otherwise it is not progress. By definition it will impact many, by displacing those who were doing it the old way by doing it better and faster. The trouble is when people hold back progress just to prevent the impact. No one should be disagreeing that the impact shouldn't be prevented, but it should not be at the cost of progress.
vl 4y ago
>Artists have all my sympathy. Humans have my sympathy. We are literally at the brink of the multiple major industries being wiped out. What was only theoretical for the last 10-15 years started to happen right now. In few short years most humans will not be able to find any employment because machine will be more efficient and cheaper. Society will transform beyond any previous transformations in history. Most likely it's going to be very rough. But we just argue that of course our specific jobs are going to stay.
- gwbrooks 4y ago
  If we take your vision at face value, what do you think should be done?
  - vl 4y ago
    Honestly, I don't know. I spent last few days thinking about all this more seriously than in the last 20 years. Essentially we are going to get away from market economy, money, private property. The problem is that once these things go personal freedom goes as well. So either accept the inevitable totalitarian society, or something else? But what?
    - Nursie 4y ago
      This sort of thing was thought about 20 years ago in the story “manna” by Marshall Brain - https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 I have no idea how well it holds up to modern reading, but I found it interesting at the time. He posits two outcomes - in the fictionalised US the ownership class owns more and more of everything, because automation and intelligence remove the need for workers and even most technicians over time. Everyone else is basically a prisoner given the minimum needed to maintain life. Or we can become “socialist” in a sort of techno-utopian way, realising that the economy and our laws should work for us and that a post-labor society should be one in which humans are free from dependence on work rather than defined by it. Does this latter one imply a total lack of freedom? It certainly implies dependence on the state, but for most people (more or less by definition) an equal share would be a better share than they can get now, and they would be free to pursue art or learning or just leisure.
dubya 4y ago
> The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy Some artists just do the descriptive part though, right? The name I can think of is Sol LeWitt, but I'm sure there are others. A lot of it looks like it could be programmed, but might be tricky.

thordenmark 4y ago

You are demonstrating that lack of empathy. Artist's works are being stolen and used to train AI, that then produces work that will affect that artist's career. The advancement of this tech in the past 6 months, if it maintains this trajectory, demonstrates this.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Permit 4y ago
> Artist's works are being stolen It has been fascinating to watch “copyright infringement is not theft” morph into “actually yes it’s stealing” over the last few years. It used to be incredibly rare to find copyright maximalists on HackerNews, but with GitHub Co-pilot and StableDiffusion it seems to have created a new generation of them.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  "copyright infringement is not theft" is not an especially common view among artists or musicians, since copyright infringement threatens their livelihood. I don't think there's anything inconsistent about this. Yes, techies tend to hold the opposite view. Personally, I think "copyright infringement is not theft" but I also think that using artists' work without their permission for profit is never OK, and that's what's happening here.
  - sdiupIGPWEfh 4y ago
    > I don't think there's anything inconsistent about this. It amounts to saying that anything that benefits me is good and anything to my detriment is bad. Sure, there's a consistency to that. However, if that's the foundation of one's positions, it leads to all manner of other logical inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
- blamestross 4y ago
  Individual humans copying corporate products vs corporations copying the work of individual humans they didn't pay. The confusion is that “copyright infringement is not theft” really was about being against corporate abuse of individuals. It's still the same situation here.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So it’s okay to infringe on copyright against a group of people getting paid by a corporation. But not individual artists and you should definitely not break open source copyright rules?
    - blamestross 4y ago
      "group of people getting paid by a corporation" they are not involved at all. Corporations are their own person's, remember. It's almost like the real problem is asymmetry and abuse of power.
pfisch 4y ago
So I employ quite a few artists, and I don't see the problem. This whole thing basically seems more like a filter on photoshop then something that will take a persons job. If artists I employ want to incorporate this stuff into their workflow, that sounds great. They can get more done. There won't be less artists on payroll, just more and better art will be produced. I don't even think it is at the point of incorporating it into a workflow yet though, so this really seems like a nothing burger to me. At least github copilot is useful. This stuff is really not useful in a professional context, and the idea that it is going to take artists jobs really doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, if there aren't any artists then who exactly do I have that is using these AI tools to make new designs? If you think the answer to that is just some intern, then you really don't know what you're talking about.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  With respect, you need to pay more attention to how and why these networks are used. People write complex prompts containing things like "trending on artstation" or "<skilled artist's name>" then use unmodified AI output in places like blog articles, profile headers, etc where you normally would have put art made by an artist. Yes, artists can also utilize AI as a photoshop filter, and some artists have started using it to fill in backgrounds in drawings, etc. Inpainting can also be used to do unimportant textures for 3d models. But that doesn't mean that AI art is no threat to artists' livelihoods, especially for scenarios like "I need a dozen illustrations to go with these articles" where quality isn't so important to the commissioner that they are willing to spend an extra few hundred bucks instead of spending 15 minutes in midjourney or stable diffusion. As long as these networks continue being trained on artists' work without permission or compensation, they will continue to improve in output quality and muscle the actual artists out of work.
  - pfisch 4y ago
    If you are looking for a bunch of low quality art there are tons of free sources for that already. If this is what you mean when you say "putting artists out of work" you are really talking about less than 1% of where artist money is spent.
_0ffh 4y ago
So who's that mythical artist that hasn't seen and learned from the works of other artists? After all, these works will have left an imprint in their neural connections, so by the same argument their works are just as derivative, or "stolen".
- jacquesm 4y ago
  These are not artists being inspired by the works of other artists, these are programmers taking the work of artists and then claiming to create original works when in fact they are automatically generated derivatives. Try telling one of the programmers to produce a work of art based on a review of all of the works that went into training the models and see how it works out.
  - brian_cloutier 4y ago
    What distinguishes a derivative from an original work? What is it about AI-generated art which makes it so clearly derivative, in your mind?
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      That the process is automated. That is one of the important tests of originality, that something is not created in a mechanical fashion.
      - bigiain 4y ago
        > that something is not created in a mechanical fashion. I wonder if the nerds have shot themselves in the foot here with terminology? I suspect the nerd’s lawyers would have been much happier if the entire field was named “automated mechanical creativity” instead of “artificial intelligence”. It’d be kinda amusing to see the whole field of study lose in court because of their own persistent claims that what they’re doing is not just “creating in a mechanical fashion” but creating “intelligence” which can therefore be held to account for copyright infringement. Shades of Al Capone getting busted for taxes…
blincoln 4y ago
As someone who's shifted careers twice because disruptive technologies made some other options impractical, I can definitely appreciate that some artists are very upset about the idea of maybe having to change their plans for the future (or maybe not, depending on the kind of art they make), but all art is built on art that came before. How is training AI on imagery from the internet without permission different than decades of film and game artists borrowing H. R. Giger's style for alien technology?[1] How is it different from decades of professional and amateur artists using the characteristic big-eyed manga/anime look without getting permission from Osamu Tezuka? Copyright law doesn't cover general "style". Try to imagine the minefield that would exist if it were changed to work that way. [1] No, I don't mean Alien, or other works that actually involved Giger himself.
- bigiain 4y ago
  > Copyright law doesn't cover general "style". Try to imagine the minefield that would exist if it were changed to work that way. We don’t need to “try to imagine”, we just need to wait a bit and watch Walt’s reanimated corpse and army of undead lawyers come out swinging for those “mice in the general style of Mickey Mouse”.
  - tidenly 4y ago
    Intellectual property and copyright are entirely different, and you'd be come after by Disney for making those kinds of images with or without AI. I wish people in the fight against AI would stop trotting this argument out, it muddies stronger arguments against it.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Copyright is a subset of intellectual property. Intellectual property generally includes copyright, patents, trademark, and trade secrets, though there are broader claims such as likeness, celebrity rights, moral rights (e.g., droit d'auteur in French/EU law), and probably a few others since I began writing this comment (the scope seems to be increasing, generally). I suspect you intended to distinguish trademark and copyright.
idiotsecant 4y ago
Is 'looking at something' equivalent to stealing it? The use by all these diffusion networks is pretty much the definition of transformative. If a person was doing this it wouldn't even be interesting enough to talk about it. When a machine does it somehow that is morally distinct?
berniedurfee 4y ago
Existing art trains the neural nets in human artists as well. All art is derivative. No art is wholly unique. Will human artists be able to compete with artificial artists commercially? If not, is that bad or is it progress, like Photoshop or Autotune?
NL807 4y ago
> stolen Is it though? What if I were to look at your art style and replicate that style manually in my own works? I see no difference whether it's done by a machine, or done by hand. The reality is that every art is a derivative of some other art. Interestingly, the music industry has been doing this for years. Ever since samplers became a thing, musicians spliced and diced loops into their own tracks for donkeys years, and created an explosion of new genres and sound. Hip-hop, techno, dark ambient, EDM, ..., all fall into the same category. Machine learning is just another new tool to create something.
- melagonster 4y ago
  last time this happened on human, people are so angry. the guy who copy other artwork even got cancelled by company. but actually not in music region, you are right.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  I'd say it's more similar to an artist drawing influence from another artist, and there is a difference in that the machines can do it much more efficiently. Personally, I'm all for AI training and using human artwork. I think telling it not to prevents progress/innovation, and that innovation is going to happen somewhere. If it happens somewhere, humans who live in that somewhere will just use those tools to launder the AI-generated artwork, and companies will hire those offshore humans and reap the benefits, all the while, the effect on local artists' wages is even more negative because now they don't have access to the tools to compete in this ar(tificial intelligence)ms race.
- randombits0 4y ago
  It’s not stolen. If I create a work mimicking the style of whomever, I’ve not taken anything from them besides an idea. Ideas are not protected. Ideas are the point. If you don’t want to share your ideas, feel free not to. Most people do not understand the purpose of copyright. Copyright is a bargain between society and the creator. The creator receives limited protection of the work for a limited time. Why is this the deal? The purpose of copyright is to advance the progress of science and the useful arts. It is to benefit humanity as a whole. AI takes nothing more than an idea. It does not take a “creative expression fixed in a tangible media”.

dtn 4y ago

> But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this tiresome moral panic (a small amount of actual artists, whatever the word "artist" means) > A small amount of actual artists It's extremely funny that you say this, because taking a look at the Trending on Artstation page tells a different story. https://www.artstation.com/?sort_by=trending https://www.artstation.com/?sort_by=trending

orbital-decay 4y ago
That's what the b) was about, yes. And ironically, the overwhelming majority of knowledge used by these models to produce pictures that superficially look like their work (usually not at all), is not coming from any artworks at all. It's as simple as that. They are mostly trained on photos which constitute the bulk of models' knowledge about the real world. They are the main source of coherency. Artist names and keywords like "trending on artstation" are just easily discoverable and very rough handles for pieces of the memory of the models.
- dtn 4y ago
  I don't think the fact that photos are making up the vast majority of the training set is of any particular significance. Can SD create artistic renderings without actual art being incorporated? Just from photos alone? I don't believe so, unless someone shows me evidence to the contrary. Hence, SD necessitates having artwork in it's training corpus in order to emulate style, no matter how little it's represented in the training data.
  - orbital-decay 4y ago
    SD has several separate parts. In the most simplistic sense (not entirely accurate to how it functions), one translates English into a semantic address inside the "main memory", and another one extracts the contents of the memory that the address refers to. If you prevent the first one (CLIP) from understanding artists names by removing the correspondence between names and addresses, the data will still be there and can be addressed in any other way, for example custom trained embeddings. Even if you remove artworks from the dataset entirely, you can easily finetune it on anything you want using various techniques, because the bulk of the training ($$$!) has already been done for you, and the coherency, knowledge of how things look in general, shapes, lighting, poses, etc is already there. You only need to skew it towards your desired style a bit. Style transfer combined with the overall coherency of pre-trained models is the real power of these. "Country house in the style of Picasso" is generally not how you use this at full power, because "Picasso" is a poor descriptor for particular memory coordinates. You type "Country house" (a generic descriptor it knows very well) and provide your own embedding or any kind of finetuned addon to precisely lean the result towards the desired style, whether constructed by you or anyone else. So, if anyone believes that this thing would drive the artists out of their jobs, then removing their works from the training set will change very little as it will still be able to generate anything given a few examples, on a consumer GPU. And that's only the current generation of such models and tools. (which admittedly doesn't pass the quality/controllability threshold required for serious work, just yet)

jacquesm 4y ago

That's exactly that lack of empathy the OP was on about: if you don't see that there is something wrong by a bunch of programmers feeding everybody's work into the meatgrinder and then to start spitting out stuff that they claim is original work when they probably couldn't draw a stick figure themselves then it is clear that something isn't quite right. At least, to me.

Nursie 4y ago
As someone who has always had a huge gap between what I can imagine and what I can manifest, outside of text anyway, I find the whole thing amazing and massively enabling. And I think it is possible to come up with original images, even though the styles are usually derivative. At the same time I recognise that this is a massive threat to artists, both low-visibility folks who throw out concepts and logos for companies, and people who may sell their art to the public. Because I can spend a couple of dollars and half an hour to come up with an image I’d be happy to put on my wall. I’m not sure what the answer is here, but I don’t think a sort of “human origin art” Puritanism is going to hold back the flood, though it may secure a niche like handmade craft goods and organic food…
- jacquesm 4y ago
  What will happen is exactly the same thing that happened when email made mass mailings possible: a torrent of very low quality art will begin to drown out the better stuff because there is no skill required to produce a flood of trash whereas to produce original work takes talent and time. As the price of a bit dropped the quality of the comms dropped. It is inevitable that the price of the creation of (crappy) art will do the same thing if only because it will drag down the average.
  - tremon 4y ago
    a torrent of very low quality art will begin to drown out the better stuff because there is no skill required to produce a flood of trash Case in point: https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy > This trust is broken when users copy and paste information into answers without validating that the answer provided by GPT is correct, ensuring that the sources used in the answer are properly cited (a service GPT does not provide), and verifying that the answer provided by GPT clearly and concisely answers the question asked.

slimebot80 4y ago

> "The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute." This is the first wave of half decent AI. But more importantly, you are vastly underestimating the millions of small jobs out there that artists use as a stepping stone. Think of the millions of managers who would happily be presented with a choice of 10 artistic interpretations, and pick one for the sake of getting a quick job done. No way on earth this isn't going to make a major impact. Empathy absolutely required.

dmix 4y ago
So empathy as in being considerate they are losing their jobs right? Not that AI art generation is inherently a bad thing? Or that they or I can doing anything about it?
chrischen 4y ago
If small pointless jobs able to be done by machines are so great then lets get rid of computers, power tools, and automation so we can get those unemployment numbers down… why can’t we find a solution that doesn’t hamper progress? At the end of the day progress saves lives.
- Nursie 4y ago
  This is very black and white thinking. One can see AI tools as progress here while also recognising that this is likely to have a huge impact on a lot of lives.
  - chrischen 4y ago
    Actually all progress will definitely will have a huge impact on a lot of lives—otherwise it is not progress. By definition it will impact many, by displacing those who were doing it the old way by doing it better and faster. The trouble is when people hold back progress just to prevent the impact. No one should be disagreeing that the impact shouldn't be prevented, but it should not be at the cost of progress.

vl 4y ago

>Artists have all my sympathy. Humans have my sympathy. We are literally at the brink of the multiple major industries being wiped out. What was only theoretical for the last 10-15 years started to happen right now. In few short years most humans will not be able to find any employment because machine will be more efficient and cheaper. Society will transform beyond any previous transformations in history. Most likely it's going to be very rough. But we just argue that of course our specific jobs are going to stay.

gwbrooks 4y ago
If we take your vision at face value, what do you think should be done?
- vl 4y ago
  Honestly, I don't know. I spent last few days thinking about all this more seriously than in the last 20 years. Essentially we are going to get away from market economy, money, private property. The problem is that once these things go personal freedom goes as well. So either accept the inevitable totalitarian society, or something else? But what?
  - Nursie 4y ago
    This sort of thing was thought about 20 years ago in the story “manna” by Marshall Brain - https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 I have no idea how well it holds up to modern reading, but I found it interesting at the time. He posits two outcomes - in the fictionalised US the ownership class owns more and more of everything, because automation and intelligence remove the need for workers and even most technicians over time. Everyone else is basically a prisoner given the minimum needed to maintain life. Or we can become “socialist” in a sort of techno-utopian way, realising that the economy and our laws should work for us and that a post-labor society should be one in which humans are free from dependence on work rather than defined by it. Does this latter one imply a total lack of freedom? It certainly implies dependence on the state, but for most people (more or less by definition) an equal share would be a better share than they can get now, and they would be free to pursue art or learning or just leisure.

dubya 4y ago

> The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy Some artists just do the descriptive part though, right? The name I can think of is Sol LeWitt, but I'm sure there are others. A lot of it looks like it could be programmed, but might be tricky.