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The hilarious irony is that the AI is quite possibly copying the authors older work if it was published on an image sharing site like Reddit or deviant art. La

The hilarious irony is that the AI is quite possibly copying the authors older work if it was published on an image sharing site like Reddit or deviant art. Lawsuits need to destroy these models stolen from the public.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
While we're at it we should publicly flog anyone who's ever done any art in the style of anyone else before them, because they also stole ideas from the public.
- Auracle 4y ago
  I guess we’re back to crude cave paintings. Tear down all the statues and burn the museums.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    > Tear down all the statues and burn the museums. No need. Soon there will be so much AI generated "art" that human-made art will largely be pushed out of popular consciousness.
    - danogentili 4y ago
      Looking at recent online discussion, this is an easy conclusion to come to, but it's really just a huge bubble. People won't stop creating just because there's a cheaper alternative. The analogy with manual labor automation simply doesn't hold, first because people actually like creating stuff, but perhaps most importantly because there is no supply problem to solve. Taking the analogy with automation in the car industry, automation drastically lowered prices, making each individual copy of a product accessible to anyone. It costs virtually 0$ to copy a movie, a picture, a song and display it on every device on the planet. The cost of creating a audiovisual product is amortized across all users, dividing the costs by the number of users instead of multiplying it. Sure, one day we may have models capable of generating full 3d animated movies from just a prompt, paying for just the electricity used to run the GPUs, but how much cheaper can you get compared to 9$/month to compete with a traditional streaming subscription with human-made content? Assuming the world even comes to the point where AI streaming services contain virtually infinite amounts of meaningless autogenerated content, and assuming people actually like that content (which may be the case for the chunk of people already watching statistics-driven garbage on Netflix), nothing will stop creatives fired from previously-human studios from creating their own studios, producing hand-crafted, human works at the same price as always (9$/month). An analogy can be made with handcrafted cars like Lamborghinis may cost millions, with the difference that with audiovisual content, a work can be shared by (and the price amortized by) billions.
      - danogentili 4y ago
        We are already seeing something similar in the western animation industry vs the anime industry. Given the alternative of cheaper, semiautomated 2d animation, anime studios prefer handcrafting every single frame, instead, because some people really like drawing, and a large amount of people also likes watching handcrafted, high-quality animation with wonderful stories and visuals.
        techdragon 4y ago
        Hate to break it to you … but the “industry” that is the “anime industry” has been quietly adopting the latest technology for years. There are notable exceptions like Ghibli but for the most part, Japanese animation studios have been pioneering the state of the art in cell shading, lighting and post processing, adjustable “cartoon physics” style automated physics tweening and basically everything else in 3d computer graphics that will allow them to make the most of their artistic efforts. They’ve still got a vibrant story boarding process helped by the obvious intersection of anime with the vibrant drawing culture that produces the manga so many are based on… but beyond the storyboards they have been relentlessly trying to eliminate the need to tediously draw anything unnecessarily. There are entire 2D (not 3d!) animation tools that serve the professional 2D “cartoon” market that have widespread adoption. The 3d market is no different, the first cell shaded graphics code I read was all written with Japanese comments… “anime studios” (except Ghibli) don’t “prefer handcrafting every single frame” they use whatever tools are available and usable by them, that are capable of executing the artistic vision of the art director of that project/show/movie. They care about the outcome not the process. They care that it looks how they want it to look, that it conveys what they want it to convey. This is artistic pragmatism at its finest. They will composite hand drawn graphics/animation, 2D computer graphics/animation, and 3D computer graphics/animation… it’s the final results that matter. I absolutely expect that once the tooling gets better at frame-to-frame consistency, once it is good enough AI/ML based animation tools will be widely adopted by the “anime industry” and it will be praised because it will do things like let small manga creators produce short OVA or movies or YouTube style content directly whenever they want without having to spend ages working with an animation studio and the fans will love it because they love the content and for the most part that love is not dependent on how the content was made.
    - BitwiseFool 4y ago
      I'm not trying to be glib, but I wonder if people had a similar speculations in the past when photography was first invented. I could certainly see people thinking drawing and painting was doomed because photographs can produce an exact capture in a fraction of the time it would take for an artist to merely depict the likeness of the subject.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Why is the most common counter-argument that we should treat AI models the same way we treat human learning? The two are not the same - neither mechanically, nor morally.
- danogentili 4y ago
  This stupid argument gets thrown around so much it's become really annoying, what really matters in art is the process, not the result; intent, not content. A model randomly remixing human works to reach an approximated result that matches a few words inserted by a human cannot be put on the same plane as a human expressing a concept or inner feelings using knowledge he acquired by looking at other works. When I look at art (be it paintings, stories, animation, or any other medium) I always think about the people behind it, what stories are they trying to tell, what life lessons and ideals are they trying to bring across the screen. A text prompt absolutely cannot convey the same amount of meaning as a work of art that takes actual time to make and refine, and however amazing the output may look, it is inherently meaningless, with no human intent behind it to make something great and original.
  - MrNeon 4y ago
    > what really matters in art is the process You don't get to define what is art. Art can and does move people who have absolutely no idea of what the process to create it was. You have your way to experience art, it isn't the only way. In fact you have a limited ability to learn about the process, how much of it are you making up in your head?
    - tines 4y ago
      When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold, Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold; And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?" - Rudyard Kipling
      - drdaeman 4y ago
        "Hey, anything's art if you do it in a black sweater". - Mr. Wiggles This said, according to the renown authorities on the matter, it's definitely about the process. :-)
    - danogentili 4y ago
- shlubbert 4y ago
  I mean, if you fully clone the style of another artist and promote it as your own you will get derided by most art communities.
cyborgx7 4y ago
Once again, artists trying to stake a claim of personal ownership of a section of human expression standing in the way of technological and cultural progress.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  I would argue we're on the precipice of a cultural regress - where "content" on the internet goes from 95% junk to 99.5% junk since junk is getting so much easier to generate. Consider "Elsa-gate" on YouTube a few years ago for an example of this in action.
  - cyborgx7 4y ago
    I don't think limiting and gate-keeping are good for cultural progress. The way to deal with the amount of content is building better systems (not necessarily technological in nature) for curation. Building artificial barriers to what and how things can be created will only harm "cultural progress" (put in quotes because I am not sure I like all the implications of the concept).
- danogentili 4y ago
  I am horrified by the amount of people on the internet that value so lowly creative intent, the most important quality a human being has to offer to society.
  - cyborgx7 4y ago
    My comment is not an expression of a low valuation of creative intent. It is an expression of my deep concern for creative intent due to the limits placed upon it by a rigid system of ownership.
jcq3 4y ago
"A good artist copy, a better artist steal". AI is influenced by artists work like artists are influenced by artists.
DethNinja 4y ago
This is a common misconception. AI is not copying anything. It is studying the images in a similar way that humans do. Entire size of the stable diffusion model is around 6gb, with pruning it goes down to 3gb. Training set is in terabytes. So it is common sense that no copying is done. I think artists need to be fair about AI, is there any artist that created their style without ever studying other artists? That is high improbable because humans need to observe to create art. There is even a saying that "Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal".
- habibur 4y ago
  Trained on 5 billion images to create a 6 GB model. Every image contributed no more than a few bits of information.
  - numpad0 4y ago
    Billion and Giga is both 10^9, so about 6/5 or 1.2 byte or 10 bits, and somehow enough to regurgitate examples from training set[0]. Oh how convincing “AI is just learning as humans do” arguments are. 0: https://twitter.com/kortizart/status/1588915427018559490 https://twitter.com/kortizart/status/1588915427018559490
    - jjcon 4y ago
      Well I TIL humans are incapable of copying another piece of art even when asked to do so
      - numpad0 4y ago
        It's never too late to learn to draw!
        jjcon 4y ago
        I could learn to mine pigments and create paints too but we have better options now
MrNeon 4y ago
Nothing is being stolen, get a grip.
alar44 4y ago
Nothing is being copied. If you understand how AI models work you'd realize that's impossible considering the model is a few GB. How could every piece of artwork be in there? It's not a database lookup.
- jfk13 4y ago
  But can you seriously deny that everything the model generates is a derivative of the inputs? And if it's a derived work, it might not constitute "fair use" of the input materials. That depends on.... well, I'm not a copyright lawyer, so I won't attempt to specify, but I don't think we have any clear answers yet.
  - alar44 4y ago
    Everything is a derivative of everything. What is art school? They derive their skills from other well known artists.
erk__ 4y ago
It is curious how different the sentiment is in this thread compared to the other thread currently on the front page regarding GitHub Copilot. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274326
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  I think the big difference is that artists seem to freak out about AI because it will supposedly replace them, while programmers freak out because it's allegedly violating their copyrights. Obviously this is a generalization and not true in all cases, but those really are different concerns.
  - krapp 4y ago
    Artists are freaking out out of fear that AI will replace them (it has already begun doing so) and because their copyrights are being violated, and with a general disgust at the quality of the content. Programmers are only freaking out about copyright because they naively believe AI can never automate them out of a job, whereas everyone else (artists included) deserves what's coming to them. It's the same concern in both cases, but different interpretations of the stakes involved.
    - yesco 4y ago
      > Programmers are only freaking out about copyright because they naively believe AI can never automate them out of a job That's the crazy thing, programmers have already automated their job away but no one has realized yet! Behind our backs they just input a description of what they want into their "compilers" and the friggin thing spits out a ready to go program that does exactly what they asked! The prompt usually needs a bit of fiddling to make it work correctly, but anyone could do that right?
- nprateem 4y ago
  I think the big difference is this is a tech forum. Of course it's ok for tech to put artists out of work, but not our precious selves.
humanizersequel 4y ago
Lots of people in here making arguments about the fact that the way these image models learn is roughly analogous to how people learn, the fact that these relatively tiny models simply don't have enough bits to grok anything except the most popular (and therefore recurrent in the training data) images, etc. What about the fact that these models aren't just randomly spitting out and taking credit for random images? This seems the most salient point to me — if I used a paintbrush to create a copyright-violating clone of some notable artwork or IP and tried to pass it off as my own, I'd be breaking the law. We wouldn't try to ban paint and canvas and the human arm because it has the potential to create something that infringes on copyright, we'd enforce the actual act. If these models make this kind of infringement easy, then they are bad products and their users will run the risk of going to court. The whole thing seems like a non-issue.
- shlubbert 4y ago
  Stable Diffusion 2.0 has already made changes to make infringement harder by removing names of artists and celebrities from the dataset, which is probably the right move -- now if you want to emulate e.g. Greg Rutkowski you actually have to figure out how to describe his style in the prompt, teaching you a little about what makes his art special and making it easier to create your own style along the way.
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    Or get a bunch of Greg Rutkowski paintings and perform textual inversion to get an embedding of his style, which is what people are actually doing, and go back to square 1.
    - humanizersequel 4y ago
      If the result of this is an image that infringes on his copyright — I'd imagine this would have to be a pretty 1-1 copy, since his style appears to very generic — then the burden should still be on the person who produced the image and published it.
  - 4y ago

CuriouslyC 4y ago

While we're at it we should publicly flog anyone who's ever done any art in the style of anyone else before them, because they also stole ideas from the public.

Auracle 4y ago
I guess we’re back to crude cave paintings. Tear down all the statues and burn the museums.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > Tear down all the statues and burn the museums. No need. Soon there will be so much AI generated "art" that human-made art will largely be pushed out of popular consciousness.
  - danogentili 4y ago
    Looking at recent online discussion, this is an easy conclusion to come to, but it's really just a huge bubble. People won't stop creating just because there's a cheaper alternative. The analogy with manual labor automation simply doesn't hold, first because people actually like creating stuff, but perhaps most importantly because there is no supply problem to solve. Taking the analogy with automation in the car industry, automation drastically lowered prices, making each individual copy of a product accessible to anyone. It costs virtually 0$ to copy a movie, a picture, a song and display it on every device on the planet. The cost of creating a audiovisual product is amortized across all users, dividing the costs by the number of users instead of multiplying it. Sure, one day we may have models capable of generating full 3d animated movies from just a prompt, paying for just the electricity used to run the GPUs, but how much cheaper can you get compared to 9$/month to compete with a traditional streaming subscription with human-made content? Assuming the world even comes to the point where AI streaming services contain virtually infinite amounts of meaningless autogenerated content, and assuming people actually like that content (which may be the case for the chunk of people already watching statistics-driven garbage on Netflix), nothing will stop creatives fired from previously-human studios from creating their own studios, producing hand-crafted, human works at the same price as always (9$/month). An analogy can be made with handcrafted cars like Lamborghinis may cost millions, with the difference that with audiovisual content, a work can be shared by (and the price amortized by) billions.
    - danogentili 4y ago
      We are already seeing something similar in the western animation industry vs the anime industry. Given the alternative of cheaper, semiautomated 2d animation, anime studios prefer handcrafting every single frame, instead, because some people really like drawing, and a large amount of people also likes watching handcrafted, high-quality animation with wonderful stories and visuals.
      - techdragon 4y ago
        Hate to break it to you … but the “industry” that is the “anime industry” has been quietly adopting the latest technology for years. There are notable exceptions like Ghibli but for the most part, Japanese animation studios have been pioneering the state of the art in cell shading, lighting and post processing, adjustable “cartoon physics” style automated physics tweening and basically everything else in 3d computer graphics that will allow them to make the most of their artistic efforts. They’ve still got a vibrant story boarding process helped by the obvious intersection of anime with the vibrant drawing culture that produces the manga so many are based on… but beyond the storyboards they have been relentlessly trying to eliminate the need to tediously draw anything unnecessarily. There are entire 2D (not 3d!) animation tools that serve the professional 2D “cartoon” market that have widespread adoption. The 3d market is no different, the first cell shaded graphics code I read was all written with Japanese comments… “anime studios” (except Ghibli) don’t “prefer handcrafting every single frame” they use whatever tools are available and usable by them, that are capable of executing the artistic vision of the art director of that project/show/movie. They care about the outcome not the process. They care that it looks how they want it to look, that it conveys what they want it to convey. This is artistic pragmatism at its finest. They will composite hand drawn graphics/animation, 2D computer graphics/animation, and 3D computer graphics/animation… it’s the final results that matter. I absolutely expect that once the tooling gets better at frame-to-frame consistency, once it is good enough AI/ML based animation tools will be widely adopted by the “anime industry” and it will be praised because it will do things like let small manga creators produce short OVA or movies or YouTube style content directly whenever they want without having to spend ages working with an animation studio and the fans will love it because they love the content and for the most part that love is not dependent on how the content was made.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    I'm not trying to be glib, but I wonder if people had a similar speculations in the past when photography was first invented. I could certainly see people thinking drawing and painting was doomed because photographs can produce an exact capture in a fraction of the time it would take for an artist to merely depict the likeness of the subject.
AlexandrB 4y ago
Why is the most common counter-argument that we should treat AI models the same way we treat human learning? The two are not the same - neither mechanically, nor morally.
danogentili 4y ago
This stupid argument gets thrown around so much it's become really annoying, what really matters in art is the process, not the result; intent, not content. A model randomly remixing human works to reach an approximated result that matches a few words inserted by a human cannot be put on the same plane as a human expressing a concept or inner feelings using knowledge he acquired by looking at other works. When I look at art (be it paintings, stories, animation, or any other medium) I always think about the people behind it, what stories are they trying to tell, what life lessons and ideals are they trying to bring across the screen. A text prompt absolutely cannot convey the same amount of meaning as a work of art that takes actual time to make and refine, and however amazing the output may look, it is inherently meaningless, with no human intent behind it to make something great and original.
- MrNeon 4y ago
  > what really matters in art is the process You don't get to define what is art. Art can and does move people who have absolutely no idea of what the process to create it was. You have your way to experience art, it isn't the only way. In fact you have a limited ability to learn about the process, how much of it are you making up in your head?
  - tines 4y ago
    When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold, Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold; And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?" - Rudyard Kipling
    - drdaeman 4y ago
      "Hey, anything's art if you do it in a black sweater". - Mr. Wiggles This said, according to the renown authorities on the matter, it's definitely about the process. :-)
  - danogentili 4y ago
shlubbert 4y ago
I mean, if you fully clone the style of another artist and promote it as your own you will get derided by most art communities.

cyborgx7 4y ago

Once again, artists trying to stake a claim of personal ownership of a section of human expression standing in the way of technological and cultural progress.

AlexandrB 4y ago
I would argue we're on the precipice of a cultural regress - where "content" on the internet goes from 95% junk to 99.5% junk since junk is getting so much easier to generate. Consider "Elsa-gate" on YouTube a few years ago for an example of this in action.
- cyborgx7 4y ago
  I don't think limiting and gate-keeping are good for cultural progress. The way to deal with the amount of content is building better systems (not necessarily technological in nature) for curation. Building artificial barriers to what and how things can be created will only harm "cultural progress" (put in quotes because I am not sure I like all the implications of the concept).
danogentili 4y ago
I am horrified by the amount of people on the internet that value so lowly creative intent, the most important quality a human being has to offer to society.
- cyborgx7 4y ago
  My comment is not an expression of a low valuation of creative intent. It is an expression of my deep concern for creative intent due to the limits placed upon it by a rigid system of ownership.

jcq3 4y ago

"A good artist copy, a better artist steal". AI is influenced by artists work like artists are influenced by artists.

DethNinja 4y ago

This is a common misconception. AI is not copying anything. It is studying the images in a similar way that humans do. Entire size of the stable diffusion model is around 6gb, with pruning it goes down to 3gb. Training set is in terabytes. So it is common sense that no copying is done. I think artists need to be fair about AI, is there any artist that created their style without ever studying other artists? That is high improbable because humans need to observe to create art. There is even a saying that "Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal".

habibur 4y ago
Trained on 5 billion images to create a 6 GB model. Every image contributed no more than a few bits of information.
- numpad0 4y ago
  Billion and Giga is both 10^9, so about 6/5 or 1.2 byte or 10 bits, and somehow enough to regurgitate examples from training set[0]. Oh how convincing “AI is just learning as humans do” arguments are. 0: https://twitter.com/kortizart/status/1588915427018559490 https://twitter.com/kortizart/status/1588915427018559490
  - jjcon 4y ago
    Well I TIL humans are incapable of copying another piece of art even when asked to do so
    - numpad0 4y ago
      It's never too late to learn to draw!
      - jjcon 4y ago
        I could learn to mine pigments and create paints too but we have better options now

MrNeon 4y ago

Nothing is being stolen, get a grip.

alar44 4y ago

Nothing is being copied. If you understand how AI models work you'd realize that's impossible considering the model is a few GB. How could every piece of artwork be in there? It's not a database lookup.

jfk13 4y ago
But can you seriously deny that everything the model generates is a derivative of the inputs? And if it's a derived work, it might not constitute "fair use" of the input materials. That depends on.... well, I'm not a copyright lawyer, so I won't attempt to specify, but I don't think we have any clear answers yet.
- alar44 4y ago
  Everything is a derivative of everything. What is art school? They derive their skills from other well known artists.

erk__ 4y ago

It is curious how different the sentiment is in this thread compared to the other thread currently on the front page regarding GitHub Copilot. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274326

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
I think the big difference is that artists seem to freak out about AI because it will supposedly replace them, while programmers freak out because it's allegedly violating their copyrights. Obviously this is a generalization and not true in all cases, but those really are different concerns.
- krapp 4y ago
  Artists are freaking out out of fear that AI will replace them (it has already begun doing so) and because their copyrights are being violated, and with a general disgust at the quality of the content. Programmers are only freaking out about copyright because they naively believe AI can never automate them out of a job, whereas everyone else (artists included) deserves what's coming to them. It's the same concern in both cases, but different interpretations of the stakes involved.
  - yesco 4y ago
    > Programmers are only freaking out about copyright because they naively believe AI can never automate them out of a job That's the crazy thing, programmers have already automated their job away but no one has realized yet! Behind our backs they just input a description of what they want into their "compilers" and the friggin thing spits out a ready to go program that does exactly what they asked! The prompt usually needs a bit of fiddling to make it work correctly, but anyone could do that right?
nprateem 4y ago
I think the big difference is this is a tech forum. Of course it's ok for tech to put artists out of work, but not our precious selves.

humanizersequel 4y ago

Lots of people in here making arguments about the fact that the way these image models learn is roughly analogous to how people learn, the fact that these relatively tiny models simply don't have enough bits to grok anything except the most popular (and therefore recurrent in the training data) images, etc. What about the fact that these models aren't just randomly spitting out and taking credit for random images? This seems the most salient point to me — if I used a paintbrush to create a copyright-violating clone of some notable artwork or IP and tried to pass it off as my own, I'd be breaking the law. We wouldn't try to ban paint and canvas and the human arm because it has the potential to create something that infringes on copyright, we'd enforce the actual act. If these models make this kind of infringement easy, then they are bad products and their users will run the risk of going to court. The whole thing seems like a non-issue.

shlubbert 4y ago
Stable Diffusion 2.0 has already made changes to make infringement harder by removing names of artists and celebrities from the dataset, which is probably the right move -- now if you want to emulate e.g. Greg Rutkowski you actually have to figure out how to describe his style in the prompt, teaching you a little about what makes his art special and making it easier to create your own style along the way.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Or get a bunch of Greg Rutkowski paintings and perform textual inversion to get an embedding of his style, which is what people are actually doing, and go back to square 1.
  - humanizersequel 4y ago
    If the result of this is an image that infringes on his copyright — I'd imagine this would have to be a pretty 1-1 copy, since his style appears to very generic — then the burden should still be on the person who produced the image and published it.
- 4y ago