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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’

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?
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    She doesn't because it's not a business issue for her. She is not getting paid when you sing her songs with your friends too and this is also not a problem. I'm not thinking from the current definitions of right and compensation structures and I'm not calculating fees here. What I say is that if you build your thing on top of other people's work and put them out of business this needs to be addressed because you will cause huge problems to the people who made your machine possible in first place and you will dry up your source of "inspiration" because you will no longer have people making living of it.
  - wokwokwok 4y ago
    You are fundamentally not addressing the issue. Previously, someone was being paid to produce something. Now, they are no longer being paid and the business can get the same thing “for free”. You can argue the same issue about out sourcing programmers to south east Asia. Is it good or bad? “…but how do we compensate the programmers who lost their jobs?” It’s just economics right? …but saying that doesn’t address the social issues that this technology is creating. People. Out of jobs. Bluntly, that’s what it boils down to. Are you ok being replaced by a $0.02 / hour dude from Thailand? By a $0.001 / hour AI? You think, maybe, it’s fair for the people being replaced to feel a bit upset about it? I do.
    - josephg 4y ago
      > People. Out of jobs. > You think, maybe, it’s fair for the people being replaced to feel a bit upset about it? I think it makes all sorts of sense that people are upset about stable diffusion. And, people being upset isn't a good reason to change the law or outlaw the new technology. Today the word "luddite" is a slur. But luddites were real people who made the same argument you're making. In their case, they were a secret group of textile workers so upset by the introduction of the mechanical loom that they went around sabotaging equipment. Suppose we wound the clock back and the luddites won a legal battle and successfully outlawed the mechanical loom in the UK. Knowing what we know now, would you support a law like that to protect the jobs of textile workers in the 19th century? I sure wouldn't - it would have decimated the economy of the UK and stunted innovation. Thats the danger of using the law to protect the status quo. Sometimes the status quo needs to change to make room for what comes next, regardless of how painful that change is. The law doesn't exist to protect your business model. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite We're at the verge of the second industrial revolution. I have no idea how it shakes out, but I don't think clinging desperately to the old ways of doing things will be a winning strategy in the long run.
astrange 4y ago
> How many telegraph operators are left? None! They're in the Navy, aren't they?
vineyardmike 4y ago
> But the point of good law isn’t to protect an established business model But there are plenty of bad laws that protect business models. Hell, copyright - the law in question - is intended to protect certain models. Regulatory Capture is a term for a reason. I agree with other points of yours though. Copying in art is for sure a thing, and same with style changing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
wpietri 4y ago
> But the point of good law isn’t to protect an established business model. Really? The Constitution specifically includes a bit about: "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". That was quickly followed by the first copyright act. As I understand it, the copyright portion of this was exactly to protect the established business model for writers, which was publishing and selling copies of their work. In particular, protect it against other people publishing editions of their work.
- chii 4y ago
  > the exclusive right exactly. This usage of works for _training_ is not part of that exclusive right, as far as i can tell. Otherwise, it would be a copyright violation for a human to read and learn off an existing works.
  - romwell 4y ago
    >This usage of works for _training_ is not part of that exclusive right, as far as I can tell. Training the AI isn't the problem. Publishing output generated by it (by making it available to anyone else other than yourself), however, is. >Otherwise, it would be a copyright violation for a human to read and learn off an existing works You have the right to read and memorize the entirety of the Harry Potter series. You do not* have the right to start a podcast where you recite the entire book from memory.
    - chii 4y ago
      > You do not* have the right to start a podcast where you recite the entire book from memory. which is fine - this is public broadcasting of the works, which is part of the exclusive rights of the owner. However, this is not what the AI is doing.
      - romwell 4y ago
        >However, this is not what the AI is doing. Yes, this is what the people who use the AI are doing. As well as people who release the AI model or a product that uses it.
tveita 4y ago
"business model" feels like a very narrow lens to view this through. This isn't weavers or telegraph operators, this is coming for all human art forms. We are potentially creating an all-seeing instant plagiarism machine that saps away not just monetary compensation but even credit and recognition. Spend 2 years writing your novel? You'll barely sell a single copy, but people will happily pay 2 cents to hear GPTx's paraphrase of it. Spend 5 months in the jungle with wild animals to snap that perfect picture? The magazine covers will be Dalle 5 rendering "nature photograph of orangutan cradling its new born baby in the style of X", your royalties won't cover buying a single lens.
- chii 4y ago
  > This isn't weavers or telegraph operators, this is coming for all human art forms. so somehow the arts is above the telegraph operators or weavers? > but people will happily pay 2 cents to hear GPTx's paraphrase of it. except if you can tell that the novel GPTx "paraphrased" is a derivative work from yours, rather than transformative, you can either sue for loyalties, or take action. If you cannot tell if GPTx is sourcing from your works, even if it is, then there's no case to stand on. The AI wrote a better novel than the human. > Spend 5 months in the jungle and there's a lot of people doing "organic", "handcrafted" produce/foods. They tend to be very expensive compared to mass produced factory foods, and the market for it is relatively small. Just because something is difficult to do, doesn't automatically mean that people need to be paying for it to allow it to continue to exist. If it isn't profitable, stop doing it, rather than demand the world be changed to allow for it to continue.
  - romwell 4y ago
    >except if you can tell that the novel GPTx "paraphrased" is a derivative work from yours, rather than transformative, you can either sue for loyalties, or take action. Respectfully, no. The top comment in this thread is saurik asking Stable Diffisuion to generate "an avatar of saurik" and getting a veritable likeness of themselves back. It would be laughable to think that this is feasible without the model having labeled photos of saurik, which are all posted by (go figure) saurik. The AI also generated a "better" photo than the one saurik posted. The AI saurik has more hair. That doesn't change the fact that without the source material, this output would not exist. Nor that it would be really hard for saurik to "take action" on that. ---- In the end, the experiment to do would be very simple. Exclude certain data from the training set, retrain the model, give it the same prompt, and see whether the output changes significantly. If it does, then that data was indispensable for generating the output for that prompt. Something tells me we won't see such experiments done by OpeanAI any time soon.

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?
- mrtksn 4y ago
  She doesn't because it's not a business issue for her. She is not getting paid when you sing her songs with your friends too and this is also not a problem. I'm not thinking from the current definitions of right and compensation structures and I'm not calculating fees here. What I say is that if you build your thing on top of other people's work and put them out of business this needs to be addressed because you will cause huge problems to the people who made your machine possible in first place and you will dry up your source of "inspiration" because you will no longer have people making living of it.
- wokwokwok 4y ago
  You are fundamentally not addressing the issue. Previously, someone was being paid to produce something. Now, they are no longer being paid and the business can get the same thing “for free”. You can argue the same issue about out sourcing programmers to south east Asia. Is it good or bad? “…but how do we compensate the programmers who lost their jobs?” It’s just economics right? …but saying that doesn’t address the social issues that this technology is creating. People. Out of jobs. Bluntly, that’s what it boils down to. Are you ok being replaced by a $0.02 / hour dude from Thailand? By a $0.001 / hour AI? You think, maybe, it’s fair for the people being replaced to feel a bit upset about it? I do.
  - josephg 4y ago
    > People. Out of jobs. > You think, maybe, it’s fair for the people being replaced to feel a bit upset about it? I think it makes all sorts of sense that people are upset about stable diffusion. And, people being upset isn't a good reason to change the law or outlaw the new technology. Today the word "luddite" is a slur. But luddites were real people who made the same argument you're making. In their case, they were a secret group of textile workers so upset by the introduction of the mechanical loom that they went around sabotaging equipment. Suppose we wound the clock back and the luddites won a legal battle and successfully outlawed the mechanical loom in the UK. Knowing what we know now, would you support a law like that to protect the jobs of textile workers in the 19th century? I sure wouldn't - it would have decimated the economy of the UK and stunted innovation. Thats the danger of using the law to protect the status quo. Sometimes the status quo needs to change to make room for what comes next, regardless of how painful that change is. The law doesn't exist to protect your business model. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite We're at the verge of the second industrial revolution. I have no idea how it shakes out, but I don't think clinging desperately to the old ways of doing things will be a winning strategy in the long run.

astrange 4y ago

> How many telegraph operators are left? None! They're in the Navy, aren't they?

vineyardmike 4y ago

> But the point of good law isn’t to protect an established business model But there are plenty of bad laws that protect business models. Hell, copyright - the law in question - is intended to protect certain models. Regulatory Capture is a term for a reason. I agree with other points of yours though. Copying in art is for sure a thing, and same with style changing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

wpietri 4y ago

> But the point of good law isn’t to protect an established business model. Really? The Constitution specifically includes a bit about: "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". That was quickly followed by the first copyright act. As I understand it, the copyright portion of this was exactly to protect the established business model for writers, which was publishing and selling copies of their work. In particular, protect it against other people publishing editions of their work.

chii 4y ago
> the exclusive right exactly. This usage of works for _training_ is not part of that exclusive right, as far as i can tell. Otherwise, it would be a copyright violation for a human to read and learn off an existing works.
- romwell 4y ago
  >This usage of works for _training_ is not part of that exclusive right, as far as I can tell. Training the AI isn't the problem. Publishing output generated by it (by making it available to anyone else other than yourself), however, is. >Otherwise, it would be a copyright violation for a human to read and learn off an existing works You have the right to read and memorize the entirety of the Harry Potter series. You do not* have the right to start a podcast where you recite the entire book from memory.
  - chii 4y ago
    > You do not* have the right to start a podcast where you recite the entire book from memory. which is fine - this is public broadcasting of the works, which is part of the exclusive rights of the owner. However, this is not what the AI is doing.
    - romwell 4y ago
      >However, this is not what the AI is doing. Yes, this is what the people who use the AI are doing. As well as people who release the AI model or a product that uses it.

tveita 4y ago

"business model" feels like a very narrow lens to view this through. This isn't weavers or telegraph operators, this is coming for all human art forms. We are potentially creating an all-seeing instant plagiarism machine that saps away not just monetary compensation but even credit and recognition. Spend 2 years writing your novel? You'll barely sell a single copy, but people will happily pay 2 cents to hear GPTx's paraphrase of it. Spend 5 months in the jungle with wild animals to snap that perfect picture? The magazine covers will be Dalle 5 rendering "nature photograph of orangutan cradling its new born baby in the style of X", your royalties won't cover buying a single lens.

chii 4y ago
> This isn't weavers or telegraph operators, this is coming for all human art forms. so somehow the arts is above the telegraph operators or weavers? > but people will happily pay 2 cents to hear GPTx's paraphrase of it. except if you can tell that the novel GPTx "paraphrased" is a derivative work from yours, rather than transformative, you can either sue for loyalties, or take action. If you cannot tell if GPTx is sourcing from your works, even if it is, then there's no case to stand on. The AI wrote a better novel than the human. > Spend 5 months in the jungle and there's a lot of people doing "organic", "handcrafted" produce/foods. They tend to be very expensive compared to mass produced factory foods, and the market for it is relatively small. Just because something is difficult to do, doesn't automatically mean that people need to be paying for it to allow it to continue to exist. If it isn't profitable, stop doing it, rather than demand the world be changed to allow for it to continue.
- romwell 4y ago
  >except if you can tell that the novel GPTx "paraphrased" is a derivative work from yours, rather than transformative, you can either sue for loyalties, or take action. Respectfully, no. The top comment in this thread is saurik asking Stable Diffisuion to generate "an avatar of saurik" and getting a veritable likeness of themselves back. It would be laughable to think that this is feasible without the model having labeled photos of saurik, which are all posted by (go figure) saurik. The AI also generated a "better" photo than the one saurik posted. The AI saurik has more hair. That doesn't change the fact that without the source material, this output would not exist. Nor that it would be really hard for saurik to "take action" on that. ---- In the end, the experiment to do would be very simple. Exclude certain data from the training set, retrain the model, give it the same prompt, and see whether the output changes significantly. If it does, then that data was indispensable for generating the output for that prompt. Something tells me we won't see such experiments done by OpeanAI any time soon.