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Would your opinion change if these models were trained exclusively on works in the public domain? Do you consider it to be infringement if new and novel art is

Would your opinion change if these models were trained exclusively on works in the public domain? Do you consider it to be infringement if new and novel art is created simply in the style of other artists? If so, how should we treat art students when they try to recreate a previous work? It's also worth noting that producing new art is only a subset of possible use cases. So how should we treat new and novel photo-realistic images? Is that infringement too?

smrtinsert 4y ago
Silence and ableism are what we get from artists. We're still in the kneejerk reaction phase. "Having to do it yourself" is an awful precondition for art and expression.
- Guvante 4y ago
  The concept of AI art is fine. The implementation by scraping copyrighted work and claiming that their magic algorithm makes they immune to the consequences is where the complaints are.
  - Filligree 4y ago
    With the current length of copyright, there is no possible way to build it otherwise. Saying that AI needs to only train on public-domain works, is equivalent to saying that it shouldn't exist. Of course, if it didn't exist, I wouldn't be buying art from artists instead. I'd simply go back to my stories not being illustrated at all. So from my perspective, this story is all about artists wanting to tear the ability out of my hands.
    - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
      Nonsense, the claim made by those that say the end of knowledge work is nigh is that an AGI is coming that is superior to human intelligence. Humans do not need to train and read / consume gigabytes and terabytes of past solutions to produce new work and they do it at a trivial fraction of the amount of watts.
    - Guvante 4y ago
      I mean piracy is a thing and if that is your jive then, cool? You aren't exactly making a convincing argument saying that you don't have to pay an artist this way. And honestly if you don't think this style of low effort content creation isn't coming for books...
      - concordDance 4y ago
        Feels convincing to me...
    - jononor 4y ago
      One could procure the necessary rights from the copyright owners / artists for all the training data. Sure, it would be quite costly and take a long time - but it is possible.
      - concordDance 4y ago
        No, it isn't possible. Tracing copyrights for many things is literally impossible. Might be owned by defunct company X that died out several decades ago and had records destroyed in a fire.
        jononor 4y ago
        One does not need every single copyrighted object in the world, just a large, diverse and representative set. One would have to skip the cases where rights cannot be secured. This is possible, see for example Spotify.
  - jkeisling 4y ago
    From my perspective, our magic algorithm does indeed make us immune to the “consequences” of scraping copyrighted work. Legally, diffusion models learn from work rather than copying any specific piece, and copyright does not protect a style or give artists the right to retroactively restrict learning from open content. Ethically, our society accepts legally automating people out of jobs, and there’s no good reason that art is different - simply social prestige and classism. Current models, even fine-tuned ones on specific artists, are not wrong, however sad or harmful for the artist they may be. There are winners and losers, that’s capitalism, for better or worse. I am sorry for artists and think we should probably have a subsidy for human creativity. But for me, Twitter’s bad-faith arguments about “stealing” or “copyright violation”, and maximalist demands for bans on AI art, make compromise undesirable and probably impossible.
    - Guvante 4y ago
      > Legally, diffusion models learn from work rather than copying any specific piece, and copyright does not protect a style or give artists the right to retroactively restrict learning from open content. Unless you are a lawyer you are just pulling reasoning out of thin air. All aspects of Copyright with human's have been decided by decades of court cases. Assuming you understand the underlying theory enough to guess how a court case would go is presumptuous. > Ethically, our society accepts legally automating people out of jobs And society accepts paying people for their work. > There are winners and losers, that’s capitalism, for better or worse. Capitalism is all about avoiding paying for what you did in order to artificially increase your profits, I agree there. > I am sorry for artists and think we should probably have a subsidy for human creativity I mean if the AI models just... Trained on purchased or free materials there wouldn't be a problem. Other media figured out how to handle when a "purchase" isn't a purchase in the traditional fashion: see streaming services. AI art is just the latest version of piracy. "It is just bytes" yet again.
      - concordDance 4y ago
        You keep thinking ML models are copying your work but I think this comes from ignorance about how they work. They're not copying, they're doing the equivalent of looking at thousands of paintings and from that figuring out what paintings are supposed to look like. If you were asked to draw something in the style of Picasso and did so, would your new art work be a copyright violation? Is every painting you've ever seen public domain? Have you ever got an idea or influence from a non public domain artwork?
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  Ableism? Isn’t that a bit much? That this taking the victimization nonsense to a level even I didn’t think was fathomable.
  - slater- 4y ago
    I'm with you. "Oh no look at that ableist piece of shit Andres Segovia with his ten fingers" give me a break. Chuck Close painted his giant portraits with what, one finger? sorry if anyone is disabled and i hope they're able to get the support they need, but equating DIY with ableism only makes sense if your disability is "lazy and kind of a moron." and to be fair, i know plenty of people that suffer from this chronic condition, their art is pretty unnecessary, and they're often trying to ally themselves with whichever new protected class in order to garner kudos in ways other than being remarkable on their own merits. i love this dumb premise, though. i'm going to continue thinking about it. damn, "thinking," how ableist of me... there are people in comas who can't think!
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  >ableism unironically skill issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDLoleIfAro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDLoleIfAro not to mention the blatant disregard for the many disabled people who rely on art as our only means to make a living. i've seen far too many singularity nutcases saying artists are regressive luddites who should be crushed under the noble wheel of progress from once side of their mouth while crying about gatekeeping and '''ableism''' from the other.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    I was divided on this issue, but now, I agree. The noble wheel of progress will continue to turn. They only have the choice to get out of the way or be crushed under it
Guvante 4y ago
Why are you dismissing their point because the technology could be used in a different way? It isn't being used as you hypothesized.
egypturnash 4y ago
For a model trained exclusively on the public domain, I would still be unhappy about the prospect of a world where a lot of low-level gigs that keep artists alive have been replaced by spending a half hour fucking with prompts. It would however be free of the "this corporation abused fair use to create a training model which it is selling to people" problem. And no, it's not infringement if you work in someone's style - but it's also not professional to do this for too long, especially with a living artist. One piece in someone else's style is a homage, several years of pieces in their style starts to get you labeled a "clone" or a "style thief". Unless you are their assistant, in which case "working in their style" is exactly what you are being paid to do. If you would like an example of this happening, read the 'controversy' section of Kieth Giffen's Wikipedia page, which sketches out the way fans and fellow artists took Kieth Giffen to task for doing a complete style swipe from José Muñoz' shadow-drenched crime comics for several years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy
odessacubbage 4y ago
>Would your opinion change if these models were trained exclusively on works in the public domain? this would be the ideal

smrtinsert 4y ago

Silence and ableism are what we get from artists. We're still in the kneejerk reaction phase. "Having to do it yourself" is an awful precondition for art and expression.

Guvante 4y ago
The concept of AI art is fine. The implementation by scraping copyrighted work and claiming that their magic algorithm makes they immune to the consequences is where the complaints are.
- Filligree 4y ago
  With the current length of copyright, there is no possible way to build it otherwise. Saying that AI needs to only train on public-domain works, is equivalent to saying that it shouldn't exist. Of course, if it didn't exist, I wouldn't be buying art from artists instead. I'd simply go back to my stories not being illustrated at all. So from my perspective, this story is all about artists wanting to tear the ability out of my hands.
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    Nonsense, the claim made by those that say the end of knowledge work is nigh is that an AGI is coming that is superior to human intelligence. Humans do not need to train and read / consume gigabytes and terabytes of past solutions to produce new work and they do it at a trivial fraction of the amount of watts.
  - Guvante 4y ago
    I mean piracy is a thing and if that is your jive then, cool? You aren't exactly making a convincing argument saying that you don't have to pay an artist this way. And honestly if you don't think this style of low effort content creation isn't coming for books...
    - concordDance 4y ago
      Feels convincing to me...
  - jononor 4y ago
    One could procure the necessary rights from the copyright owners / artists for all the training data. Sure, it would be quite costly and take a long time - but it is possible.
    - concordDance 4y ago
      No, it isn't possible. Tracing copyrights for many things is literally impossible. Might be owned by defunct company X that died out several decades ago and had records destroyed in a fire.
      - jononor 4y ago
        One does not need every single copyrighted object in the world, just a large, diverse and representative set. One would have to skip the cases where rights cannot be secured. This is possible, see for example Spotify.
- jkeisling 4y ago
  From my perspective, our magic algorithm does indeed make us immune to the “consequences” of scraping copyrighted work. Legally, diffusion models learn from work rather than copying any specific piece, and copyright does not protect a style or give artists the right to retroactively restrict learning from open content. Ethically, our society accepts legally automating people out of jobs, and there’s no good reason that art is different - simply social prestige and classism. Current models, even fine-tuned ones on specific artists, are not wrong, however sad or harmful for the artist they may be. There are winners and losers, that’s capitalism, for better or worse. I am sorry for artists and think we should probably have a subsidy for human creativity. But for me, Twitter’s bad-faith arguments about “stealing” or “copyright violation”, and maximalist demands for bans on AI art, make compromise undesirable and probably impossible.
  - Guvante 4y ago
    > Legally, diffusion models learn from work rather than copying any specific piece, and copyright does not protect a style or give artists the right to retroactively restrict learning from open content. Unless you are a lawyer you are just pulling reasoning out of thin air. All aspects of Copyright with human's have been decided by decades of court cases. Assuming you understand the underlying theory enough to guess how a court case would go is presumptuous. > Ethically, our society accepts legally automating people out of jobs And society accepts paying people for their work. > There are winners and losers, that’s capitalism, for better or worse. Capitalism is all about avoiding paying for what you did in order to artificially increase your profits, I agree there. > I am sorry for artists and think we should probably have a subsidy for human creativity I mean if the AI models just... Trained on purchased or free materials there wouldn't be a problem. Other media figured out how to handle when a "purchase" isn't a purchase in the traditional fashion: see streaming services. AI art is just the latest version of piracy. "It is just bytes" yet again.
    - concordDance 4y ago
      You keep thinking ML models are copying your work but I think this comes from ignorance about how they work. They're not copying, they're doing the equivalent of looking at thousands of paintings and from that figuring out what paintings are supposed to look like. If you were asked to draw something in the style of Picasso and did so, would your new art work be a copyright violation? Is every painting you've ever seen public domain? Have you ever got an idea or influence from a non public domain artwork?
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
Ableism? Isn’t that a bit much? That this taking the victimization nonsense to a level even I didn’t think was fathomable.
- slater- 4y ago
  I'm with you. "Oh no look at that ableist piece of shit Andres Segovia with his ten fingers" give me a break. Chuck Close painted his giant portraits with what, one finger? sorry if anyone is disabled and i hope they're able to get the support they need, but equating DIY with ableism only makes sense if your disability is "lazy and kind of a moron." and to be fair, i know plenty of people that suffer from this chronic condition, their art is pretty unnecessary, and they're often trying to ally themselves with whichever new protected class in order to garner kudos in ways other than being remarkable on their own merits. i love this dumb premise, though. i'm going to continue thinking about it. damn, "thinking," how ableist of me... there are people in comas who can't think!
odessacubbage 4y ago
>ableism unironically skill issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDLoleIfAro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDLoleIfAro not to mention the blatant disregard for the many disabled people who rely on art as our only means to make a living. i've seen far too many singularity nutcases saying artists are regressive luddites who should be crushed under the noble wheel of progress from once side of their mouth while crying about gatekeeping and '''ableism''' from the other.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  I was divided on this issue, but now, I agree. The noble wheel of progress will continue to turn. They only have the choice to get out of the way or be crushed under it

Guvante 4y ago

Why are you dismissing their point because the technology could be used in a different way? It isn't being used as you hypothesized.

egypturnash 4y ago

For a model trained exclusively on the public domain, I would still be unhappy about the prospect of a world where a lot of low-level gigs that keep artists alive have been replaced by spending a half hour fucking with prompts. It would however be free of the "this corporation abused fair use to create a training model which it is selling to people" problem. And no, it's not infringement if you work in someone's style - but it's also not professional to do this for too long, especially with a living artist. One piece in someone else's style is a homage, several years of pieces in their style starts to get you labeled a "clone" or a "style thief". Unless you are their assistant, in which case "working in their style" is exactly what you are being paid to do. If you would like an example of this happening, read the 'controversy' section of Kieth Giffen's Wikipedia page, which sketches out the way fans and fellow artists took Kieth Giffen to task for doing a complete style swipe from José Muñoz' shadow-drenched crime comics for several years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy

odessacubbage 4y ago

>Would your opinion change if these models were trained exclusively on works in the public domain? this would be the ideal