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Cancelling this campaign is Kickstarter working exactly as it was designed. Kickstarter has always been about getting money to artists to make stuff. They also

Cancelling this campaign is Kickstarter working exactly as it was designed. Kickstarter has always been about getting money to artists to make stuff. They also happen to be synonymous with "crowdfunding" because they were the first to make it work, once that took off as a concept and KS to see a lot of gadget campaigns they started cracking down on those because that wasn't what the people running Kickstarter wanted to bring into the world. Eventually Kickstarter came to a point where they decided to make this explicit in the rules of the company, rather than become a heartless corporate machine motivated solely by whatever increases shareholder profit in the coming financial quarter: "Kickstarter’s mission is to help bring creative projects to life. We measure our success as a company by how well we achieve that mission, not by the size of our profits. That’s why we reincorporated Kickstarter as a Benefit Corporation in 2015." - https://www.kickstarter.com/charter https://www.kickstarter.com/charter Deciding to kill this campaign is right in line with point 1D of their charter: "Kickstarter will engage beyond its walls with the greater issues and conversations affecting artists and creators." And with 4a: "Kickstarter will always support, serve, and champion artists and creators, especially those working in less commercial areas." Kickstarter's a machine made to fill the gap in public art funding left by the gutting of the NEA, not an "objective and neutral platform" that will happily help you build obviously evil things as long as they get their cut of the money.

Nadya 4y ago
This all operates under the assumption that both AI-generated and AI-assisted art is not art and does not come from an artist nor will it help artists. As a photographer, I disagree on all those fronts. As a photographer who likes to edit their photos with surrealist elements that can't be photographed - such as portals to another dimension, aliens, or anime characters - I'm doubly mad that the art I'm creating is suddenly not considered art because I'm using an AI to generate art instead of stealing the art. In the digital mashup scene stealing art for digitally editing is quite common and nobody really bats an eye as long as the digital editing is 99% of the work. Copyright is constantly ignored by the scene for the last 20 or so years that I've been a part of it. (renders, C4Ds, fractals, stock photography, etc.) Think early 2000s forum signatures. Almost all of the graphic art from that era was made using stolen art to digitally mash together and few people cared it was violating copyrights to not use exclusively permissive CC licensed works.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Kickstarter apparently got a lot of artists saying exactly what you disagree with about this project.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  photographers literally sued google into entirely removing the view image button and link to theft/infringement in that case was far more tentative than unstable diffusion promising to scrape portfolio sites and re-add artists who opted out of SD 3.0 in their funding pitch. pedants can piss on us and tell us that 'the molecular structure of piss and rain is basically the exact same thing why are you mad lmao' but the effects of this unapologetic data scraping are already becoming clear. professional artists are simply removing their works from the public facing web. communities based around collaboration and shared knowledge are darkening at an alarming rate.
dotnet00 4y ago
So, if someone started a Kickstarter campaign to hire artists to make the dataset to train a diffusion model, with appropriate licensing provisions (such as standard stuff like signing over the copyright to the entity running the project), is that an attack on artists because the resulting model would take away work from them or supporting them because it would create a bunch of work for some artists?
- egypturnash 4y ago
  I'd say it's supporting artists! They're being compensated for training a dataset, instead of having their work grabbed for "fair use", which is a thing I feel needs to be redefined when you can scrape the entire Internet and do this kind of thing.
  - nickthegreek 4y ago
    But Kickstarter still wouldn’t allow it under the new rules I believe.

Nadya 4y ago

This all operates under the assumption that both AI-generated and AI-assisted art is not art and does not come from an artist nor will it help artists. As a photographer, I disagree on all those fronts. As a photographer who likes to edit their photos with surrealist elements that can't be photographed - such as portals to another dimension, aliens, or anime characters - I'm doubly mad that the art I'm creating is suddenly not considered art because I'm using an AI to generate art instead of stealing the art. In the digital mashup scene stealing art for digitally editing is quite common and nobody really bats an eye as long as the digital editing is 99% of the work. Copyright is constantly ignored by the scene for the last 20 or so years that I've been a part of it. (renders, C4Ds, fractals, stock photography, etc.) Think early 2000s forum signatures. Almost all of the graphic art from that era was made using stolen art to digitally mash together and few people cared it was violating copyrights to not use exclusively permissive CC licensed works.

egypturnash 4y ago
Kickstarter apparently got a lot of artists saying exactly what you disagree with about this project.
odessacubbage 4y ago
photographers literally sued google into entirely removing the view image button and link to theft/infringement in that case was far more tentative than unstable diffusion promising to scrape portfolio sites and re-add artists who opted out of SD 3.0 in their funding pitch. pedants can piss on us and tell us that 'the molecular structure of piss and rain is basically the exact same thing why are you mad lmao' but the effects of this unapologetic data scraping are already becoming clear. professional artists are simply removing their works from the public facing web. communities based around collaboration and shared knowledge are darkening at an alarming rate.

dotnet00 4y ago

So, if someone started a Kickstarter campaign to hire artists to make the dataset to train a diffusion model, with appropriate licensing provisions (such as standard stuff like signing over the copyright to the entity running the project), is that an attack on artists because the resulting model would take away work from them or supporting them because it would create a bunch of work for some artists?

egypturnash 4y ago
I'd say it's supporting artists! They're being compensated for training a dataset, instead of having their work grabbed for "fair use", which is a thing I feel needs to be redefined when you can scrape the entire Internet and do this kind of thing.
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  But Kickstarter still wouldn’t allow it under the new rules I believe.