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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.

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.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Who is being “abused” by you not having access to other people’s content in the way you want?
        blamestross 4y ago
        I think we miscommunicated somewhere. I was being sarcastic when I said cooperations were people. If we had a model of capitalism dominated by collective employee ownership I think your ethical argument might work. We don't.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Copyright should not exist, but artists do need support somehow and doing away with copyright without other radical changes to economy/society leaves them high and dry. Copyright not existing should pair with other forms of support such as UBI or worker councilization, instead of ridding it while clutching capitalist pearls and ultimately only accelerating capitalism at their expense
- blincoln 4y ago
  But it's not even copyright. Copyright does not protect general styles. It protects specific works, or specific designs (e.g. Mickey Mouse). It doesn't allow someone to claim ownership over a general concept like "a painting of a knight with a castle and a dragon in the background". Are there any documented cases where copyright law didn't seem to offer sufficient protection against something that really did seem like copyright infringement but done using AI tooling? I started looking for some a few weeks ago because of this debate and still haven't seen anything conclusive.
  - weq 4y ago
    The problem with "AI" here is that it copies like no other. It copies everything and learns everything like a master because it is fed off a us.
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”.

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.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Who is being “abused” by you not having access to other people’s content in the way you want?
      - blamestross 4y ago
        I think we miscommunicated somewhere. I was being sarcastic when I said cooperations were people. If we had a model of capitalism dominated by collective employee ownership I think your ethical argument might work. We don't.
wahnfrieden 4y ago
Copyright should not exist, but artists do need support somehow and doing away with copyright without other radical changes to economy/society leaves them high and dry. Copyright not existing should pair with other forms of support such as UBI or worker councilization, instead of ridding it while clutching capitalist pearls and ultimately only accelerating capitalism at their expense
blincoln 4y ago
But it's not even copyright. Copyright does not protect general styles. It protects specific works, or specific designs (e.g. Mickey Mouse). It doesn't allow someone to claim ownership over a general concept like "a painting of a knight with a castle and a dragon in the background". Are there any documented cases where copyright law didn't seem to offer sufficient protection against something that really did seem like copyright infringement but done using AI tooling? I started looking for some a few weeks ago because of this debate and still haven't seen anything conclusive.
- weq 4y ago
  The problem with "AI" here is that it copies like no other. It copies everything and learns everything like a master because it is fed off a us.

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”.