7 ms·

The discussion over novelty is useless, all these legal structures like copyrights patents royalties and licenses are about creating business structures to allo

• mikeg8 4y ago
  I never thought of it from that perspective before, thanks for sparking that thought experiment.
• gitfan86 4y ago
  This is no different than professional calligraphers losing their jobs because of the printing press and then later due to customizable fonts on printers. I have a ton of respect for calligraphers and believe they are artists, but at the same time I don't think that the millions of people who create custom fonts or use custom fonts are doing a bad thing.
  • mrtksn 4y ago
    Artist function is not limited to the act of producing the creation. Their value comes from creating the methods of exploring ideas or feelings and not from the output itself. Guernica is not invaluable because no one else can draw it and Picasso is not infamous because drew the best lines. Just to be clear, I think art made with AI also can have value because it's a tool after all. My concern is, it breaks the business for the people that feeds on and that's not OK.
    • bioemerl 4y ago
      > My concern is, it breaks the business for the people that feeds on and that's not OK. Why not? This is a website that's filled with programmers, almost all of our wealth is built on the skulls of jobs that once existed, and those programs were built without the consent of the people whose jobs were automated away, often through observing and rewriting the processes they used to do. The standard, this has been going on for decades, the only reason it's getting backlash is because this is a group of people who never expected to have this happen to them.
      • mrtksn 4y ago
        We automate people's jobs, not taking their intellectual properties and build machines that can churn endless versions of it. The people put out of work by computers no longer work and they were paid in full for the work they did, unlike the people who developed intellectual property on their own dime hoping to be compensated later only to find out that their work was copied and distributed by the computer people.
        • ForestCritter 4y ago
          Automated jobs do the physical work. Here the computer is redistributing the physical work made by the artists, however much diluted. AI cannot make art on its own, it needs to be fed physical art and then be told what it is and what to do with it. It is not automation, it is simply a data manipulating tool.
          • sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
            to me it's less about the process and jobs lost and more about some feeling loss related to the excitement about removing expression and experience from a domain for honestly very little real benefit continuing to transform things which in part centered around exploration, discovery and experimentation into something cold and kind of dumb like we will make some interesting things but it's the general trend of modern society that upsets people everything just getting easier/worse faster
  • friedman23 4y ago
    It's completely different. The customizable fonts did not violate copyright.
    • hansihe 4y ago
      We have no idea if images by Stable Diffusion violates copyright, there is no legal precedent.
      • bioemerl 4y ago
        Technically we do have examples of stable diffusion violating copyright, it will generate some exact clone images if you give it the right prompt and that image exists a few hundred times in the training data.
        • yosame 4y ago
          Just because stable diffusion can be used to violate copyright doesn't mean it only does.
        • MacsHeadroom 4y ago
          For something like 11 images which were accidentally repeated hundreds of times in the training data this is true. They're more the exception that proves the rule.
    • coastermug 4y ago
      Incidentally, copyright law etc on fonts is very interesting. Many places license their fonts via in-page JavaScript. However, I believe that such a protection against the font designer doesn’t necessarily apply if for instance you use the font to create a logo. ( I’m sure I’ve missed some nuance here.)
    • josephg 4y ago
      That’s a sloppy answer. Right and wrong isn’t defined by how copyright law is written right now. That’s kind of the whole point of this debate. Should we change the laws and if so, how?
• josephg 4y ago
  The core of your concern (& argument) seems to be the problem of existing business models becoming disrupted by this technology. But the point of good law isn’t to protect an established business model. If that were the case, we would have outlawed the loom because it displaced weavers, and the camera (sorry portrait painters) and the iPhone. (How many telegraph operators are left? None!) When an artist learns to draw, they copy almost all their ideas from other art they’ve seen that they like. That’s how humans learn. I’m learning to compose music at the moment and everything that sounds good to me is probably a remix of musical ideas I’ve heard before in other songs. If I grew up in a different music tradition (say, ancient India) then all of my ideas about musicality would be different. It seems to me that the only difference between me and stable diffusion is that stable diffusion copies less than I do, but from more sources. Also, the idea that artists can’t learn each other’s styles is totally wrong. I heard an interview years ago with an art director at blizzard. The interviewer pointed out that blizzard’s games all have different art styles, and asked how they swap between styles. “Do you have different art teams?”. The art director laughed and said that was the difference between amateur artists and professionals. Professional artists can be given a style and a brief and they can draw in the style. When they move between games, he said, the whole art team spends about 2 weeks practicing concept art for game they’re moving to and critiquing each others’ work to align their styles. Then it’s smooth sailing. That’s how they hire artists too - they ask them to draw some concept art in the style of one of their games. Sounds far fetched? That’s what we do when we hire and onboard programmers. Art for hire isn’t any different.
  • mrtksn 4y ago
    Sure, it's disruptive and that's fine. The problem is that there's no mechanism to compensate the people who enable your new disruptive machine. As I said, humans learn but the phase humans do it still allows for people be compensated. I'm not anti-AI at all, I think its great and I think the artist who can leverage it can hugely benefit from it but it is not fair to just take something from people away.
    • social_quotient 4y ago
      So the parent post to yours said he’s taking piano lessons. Let’s suppose he becomes great. And let’s suppose he writes his own music. How is Taylor Swift supposed to get paid by him from his early lessons which have undoubtedly played a key role in not only his love for music but the song he writes today?
• XorNot 4y ago
  This presumes the "style" is unique. It probably is, but it's also influenced by what was already out there. The idea of a specific artist having a unique style they learn is dying right now: the faster and cheaper way to develop a style will be to train an AI model on public domain work, and tweak till you get something you like. Then use it as part of a process to go from sketch and composition to output. If you must, play with your own style and make a custom model - that technology has gotten very accessible very quickly. This is a gnashing of teeth over an unexpected price shock: creatives have been feeling pretty assured that automation wasn't coming for their revenue because what they did was a unique human endeavor that a soulless machine could not possibly threaten. It was meant to be factory workers and retail staff first. People aren't worried about copyright. People are worried that a skillset acquired at substantial sacrifice is about to become irrelevant and are desperately latching on to any perceived lifeline.
  • mrtksn 4y ago
    > This presumes the "style" is unique Doesn't presume such thing.
• stonith 4y ago
  > So let's say, if an artist developed a particular style and someone wants to hire them for a business project like a game they can't feasibly just learn that style and use it so they hire the artist. Later other people catch on this style and develop over it. It only works because monetising through copying the style is not very feasible. I don't think copying an art style is that hard. Professional artists in your example of the game industry can absolutely imitate each other upon request. If using the same style as another artist were so difficult games with multiple artists wouldn't have a coherent art style, but they do because the studio will develop a style guide and use their senior artists to guide the juniors. > How is the artist supposed to be compensated for spending years of developing that style? They haven't been in the past and they shouldn't be. They're compensated for the specific works they produce which are granted copyright. This is a good thing because otherwise the artistic domain would be horrendously polluted with claims, and producing original art would be like navigating a legal minefield.
  • mrtksn 4y ago
    > hey haven't been in the past and they shouldn't be So what's your suggestion, free food and housing for the artistic types or mercy killings?
    • codetrotter 4y ago
      > free food and housing for the artistic types Food and housing should be a human right, and it is only because of greed and fear that society allows someone to become homeless. Not only should we provide housing and food for the artists. We should do it for everyone. And then they can spend time doing what they want, and earn more money that way but never have to worry about housing or basic food for survival.
      • mrtksn 4y ago
        I guess you first should do your revolution, establish your new order where food and housing is a given right and later go after the work of the artist.
• luxuryballs 4y ago
  Sounds like fair use to me, unless I’m mistaken… what could be wrong with replicating a style that someone else introduced? It’s entirely possible someone else came up with the same style hundreds of years before and it just never became well known. People copy various anime styles all the time, why can’t they use a computer program to help them do it? Clearly the argument can’t just be “because they should hire someone to do it”, heck what if that person is totally booked? It’s not taking away from them in the slightest to produce additional artwork using a similar style if they weren’t available to take the job, so that seems irrelevant. As long as you’re not taking their work and saying it’s yours or selling it I don’t see why you can’t mimic the style.
  • mrtksn 4y ago
    IMHO the current laws and concepts don't work anymore, at all. Copyright laws were already very problematic and caused all kinds of troubles but what's happening now is well beyond all that. I also think that the use of AI is a fair game, the problem is that the thing itself is made possible by the hard work of thousands of people. By hard work, I mean years or even decades of development. They didn't learn to draw perfect photorealistic paintings, they developed styles and methods that capture something about humans and the machine took it from them.
    • luxuryballs 4y ago
      I never learned a ton of math but I use computer chips that were designed by people with years of experience in engineering to do math for me.
      • mrtksn 4y ago
        True, also they all got a salary and royalties for their work. They were well compensated and they continue being compensated. Have you heard of ARM Holdings? Its the British CPU design firm that designed all the CPUs in your phone and now in your macbooks. Apple and others continue paying them for their work they did in the 80s.
• pkaye 4y ago
  I don't think style can be copyrighted.
• brookst 4y ago
  > How is the artist supposed to be compensated for spending years of developing that style/method? I’m not sure. How are they providing compensation to every other artist whose work they’ve seen? To all of the people who gave them feedback and criticism? The arts have existed for far, far longer than IP law and copyright and royalties. This idea that artists have no influences and that human art is not derivative is just weird.
• intrasight 4y ago
  Won't this be self-correcting as all artists start to add visible and invisible fingerprints to their work with a license that says, in effect, "this image may only be viewed with human eyeballs. Any other consumption is forbidden. "
  • josephcsible 4y ago
    Copyright doesn't let you forbid consumption. It only lets you forbid redistribution of copies and derivative works.
• visarga 4y ago
  > How is the artist supposed to be compensated for spending years of developing that style/method? By claiming that style and all future works that look like it, barring humans and AI from ever drawing anything else that has a similar style. Copyright used to cover just the expression, now we want it to cover all possible expressions of a style.
• otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  Don't worry about it too much. From now on, nobody will release their art for public access anymore. Even portfolios will be paywalled to prevent copyright theft being laundered through "AI". Which means there will not ever be a Stable Diffusion 2.0 with new art styles. In a year or two the instantly recognizable style of Stable Diffusion will be seen as extremely lame and crass.