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I don't get the assumption that there should be. The machine was trained on publicly available hard that was already free. Why do people think they need to be

I don't get the assumption that there should be. The machine was trained on publicly available hard that was already free. Why do people think they need to be compensated for something they put up online for free? They don't have the right to not allow people to learn from it, that's just never been a part of copyright.

mrtksn 4y ago
They put it online for free for human consumption. Because the tech is very new, old concepts and laws don't cover it and that's not the point. The assumption that there must be compensation comes from the capitalist society that we live in. Switching to Communism or something else can be a solution to not directly pay people who do works and still have them around.
- astrange 4y ago
  Capitalism isn't when you pay for things, it's when there's capital you can sell.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    The capital of the artists is their intellectual property, that's the point.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      So if I look at everything you created with an omniscient view how many violations will I find in your artwork? These days it's both publishers and artists attempting to create RMS's world of a right to read.
    - astrange 4y ago
      "Capitalism" is selling the right itself to someone else, not earning royalties from it. IP rights are government creations; it's not like you signed a contract with each royalty payer.
    - bioemerl 4y ago
      Under capitalism artist would be unable to make a profit off of their art. Under communism artists would be barred from making art entirely, ordered by the state to work in a place where it is deemed to be productive.
      - couchand 4y ago
        You must be joking? It's obvious if you actually care to look that leftist governments value the arts much more than liberal ones.
        astrange 4y ago
        Is there a study on this? (Serious question.) It would seem that it opens you up to the problem of other people deciding whether you're an artist or not and if so whether you're a good artist. The same of course happens with capitalism, where it's your customers doing it. (Or in the case of books, which are almost never profitable, the VC-like publishers deciding to give you advances.) So of course the reason modern mixed economies are good is there's more than one set of people that you may be able to convince to fund you.
      - ilyt 4y ago
        > Under capitalism artist would be unable to make a profit off of their art. Sure they would, it would just be "I got paid to do this art/music piece that then someone will use in their product they sell"
    - ForestCritter 4y ago
      Actually, you are wrong. The capital of the artist is to physically create art. AI has to be fed physically created art and the told by humans what it is being fed. AI is not 'inspired', it is statistically driven by a human written progam, using mapping of human made work, labeled, tagged and defined by more humans to render a shopping list input by another human. Humans are using programming technology, written by humans to exploit other humans physical work.
      - astrange 4y ago
        > The capital of the artist is to physically create art. Surely that's their labor? Capital is the factor of production that isn't labor (or land if Georgist.)
- bioemerl 4y ago
  I think what we are seeing here is a proxy argument. Artists do not care about the copyright of people being able to learn from their art and reproduce it. It is not been an issue for decades, because it is a long established standard of copyright. You can't copy a work directly, you can learn from it and reproduce your own sort of stuff. What's different now is that this is a tool which artists can be replaced by. They not angry that their art has been learned from. Artists are angry that there is a tool which can replace them. And artists are looking for a way to make sure that tool is hampered as much as physically possible. If it were not learning copyright it would be something else, and whatever that's something else is it would also probably be something with proxy for that core issue. Imagine we had created an AI which was perfect, it could take your exact description of anything you asked it for and drew that thing. And then I went and asked it for a picture of Mickey mouse in the style of Disney. Because it's a perfect AI perfectly reproduces it. Who is in the wrong? I think it's absurd to think the creators of the AI would begin the wrong, because they did their job perfectly. It's a perfect app, it is a tool capable of literally anything. At the end of the day, it's the person using the tool to violate copyright who is in the wrong, assuming they distribute those images. And I don't believe the answer here is communism, I believe the answer is the same answer we've had for decades for the same situation. People need to find new jobs and learn new skills and do new things. And as programmers, it's probably going to happen to us too, about as soon as it happens to artists. Time to consider to start to learn to weld or build homes or something like that.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    I don't think we can look into this from copyright standpoint. It was already not working very well in the digital age, now it's completely useless. I don't object that people should learn new skills and find new jobs, my concern is that people who actually put huge effort to produce that "training data" are now left dry. They should be compensated and move on, I'm completely against hampering the abilities of AI in order to preserve the current business structures.
    - bioemerl 4y ago
      The problem is, the net contribution of most artists to these systems is next to zero. It's greater than zero, otherwise the AI wouldn't exist, but these AI are trained off of 5 billion plus examples. Examples that required work to collect and sort through. Examples that required millions of dollars worth of compute time to make into something useful. What is there to compensate them for? These machines are not actually going to make these companies that much money either. The tools are open source. Competition is going to reduce profit on these systems to a very slim margin. You have to not only compensate for the fact that they aren't involved in actually creating the AI, so they're only getting a fraction of what this thing is worth in the first place. Then you have to consider that there are five billion images in the training set. The compensation is going to be nothing.
- grumbel 4y ago
  The Google bot has been consuming their art for many years, even copying it verbatim into Google's site and yet they didn't complain. This seems much more about the fear of competitions, than about violation of copyright. And yes, that's scary, but unavoidable as tech progresses. I don't think anything good could come from trying to strickten copyright here. The AI is obviously not copying directly, at best it takes a bit of inspiration from other works, something artists themselves do plenty themselves. Something like UBI might help with the monetary needs eventually. Though the fear part might start getting really interesting in the near future. What do you do with your life when AI is better at it than you? When everything you can create, can be created by the AI faster and better?
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    > This seems much more about the fear of competitions, than about violation of copyright Yep, it's all about being compensated and yes copyrights are already very problematic and creativity limiting concept. People in these industries happen to be the first to face AI revolution but it will come for as all, eventually. UBI might be something but I don't know, it seems like hard times are ahead of us.
    - chii 4y ago
      > People in these industries happen to be the first to face AI revolution as has many other industries that faced automation and become obsolete. The fact that it is AI derived doesn't make it different than Luddites before.
  - adriand 4y ago
    Artists shouldn’t have to compete against themselves. If these AI companies didn’t use the work of artists, the output would suck! I’m sure many artists would be happy to compete against the artistic talents of software developers. But they’re not, they’re having to compete against their own work. I listened to an interview with an artist who referenced the “three C’s”: Consent Credit Compensation These seem reasonable to me. The request isn’t to eliminate the technology. It’s that artists should be able to consent to their work being used. Works derived from their work should include credit. And, they should be compensated.
dahart 4y ago
Available for free online is not a valid justification for copying under copyright law, though, right? You can’t distribute something just because you can see it. True for museums and magazines as it is for online content. > They don’t have the right to not allow people to learn from it, that’s just never been a part of copyright. Yeah this is true. Stable Diffusion and other neural networks are not “learning” from it they way humans do though, it’s remembering and remixing and interpolating pixels (fixed expression), which is a part of copyright. BTW compensation is not a very accurate summary of this problem. Machines that borrow someone’s style and copies and remixes without attribution is inherently problematic far beyond artists who live off selling their art, it dilutes both creativity and credit, in addition to undermining people who have to work much harder than the computer to produce images. These AI completely depend on being given human-created art to begin with, and the companies that are making them and using them are already making handsome profits, so it’s reasonable to expect some kind of return in addition to proper credit.
- Supermancho 4y ago
  >> Why do people think they need to be compensated for something they put up online for free? > Available for free online is not a valid justification for copying under copyright law, though, right? Legal and attribution and licensed are all terms that are usually involved, but the core assertion is more or less correct. eg Images on billboards are protected by copyright in a similar manner. Something displayed on a website does not invalidate the copyright of the author or indemnify the owner of the site (or downstream users) from licensing conditions.
- pksebben 4y ago
  it's not remembering pixels. for it to do that, it would have to have the pixels stored somewhere. It does not. The laion 5b dataset is in the neighborhood of 220TB. (1) That is how much storage space you need to remember the pixels. The stable diffusion 1.5 checkpoint is 7gb. (2) 1 https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset/blob/main/dataset_examples/laion5B.md https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset/blob/main/dataset_exa... 2 https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/tree/main https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/tree/m...
ForestCritter 4y ago
It is expected of any professional artist to have an online portfolio if they are serious about generating work. Scraping my portfolio that I put out because I want to generate revenue is a shitty thing to do. Also 'trained' is a complete misnomer. AI is fed images made by humans, labelled and tagged by humans, categorized by styles defined by humans, then plotted, copied, traced by a program written by humans. Along comes a human who inputs keywords and the AI uses statistics and algorythm programs also written by humans to amalgamate a resulting 'work of art' for the human with no physical art making effort. If you were to erase all tags and labelling from source images you would find zero learning happened. Art is made with physical motor skills, time and effort. AI is a human made program that uses human made imagery, classified by more humans to generate a shopping list written by another human who want art that requires no effort of aquiring the physical skill needed to make the art. With no physical product, there is no AI art and that art costs the maker. Public and free are not synonomous. If you want to physically copy my art, go for it, I will applaud your skill, but taking my art and shoving it in a program with a bunch of other art to dilute the provenance doesn't change that you are utilizing the effort and skill of artists for your own gain. If you can live with that, then I am very sad for you.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  > Also 'trained' is a complete misnomer. This here shows that you are speaking without understanding what you are speaking about. AI is absolutely trained. It's a process that is quite literally inspired by the way we understood neurons to work in the 1970s. AI start with a big batch of random numbers. There's a big fancy scientific method used to adjust those numbers in order to cause the system to learn to do some task. The process creates genuine and novel understanding of the problem space at hand. AI trained to do something simple, like add two numbers, will have a real solution to add two numbers in them once you have finished training them. With bigger problems, similar understanding certainly exists and in some cases has been proven to exist. However, once you get to the difficult problems with billions of parameters, it's very difficult for us to check that because if we could we would have just written it without needing to use an AI in the first place. There are lots of researchers who do lots of study and effort to ensure that AI are actually producing real outputs and have genuine understanding of the problems face they are working in. Do not insist that AI has no understanding if you have not taken the time to learn about those techniques. Stable diffusion has genuine understanding of different images and how to produce them within it. It is not a simple system that reproduces would already exists. It is not a collage tool. It is not incapable of producing novel outputs. Diffusion models are perfectly capable of producing any image that can possibly exist. It is only a matter of time before someone invents a new style that hasn't been seen before, and someone else is able to find a combination of descriptive words that causes stable diffusion to produce that output. Or that someone produces a novel combination of words, chucks it into stable diffusion (or some other AI model), and produces a new style of art. > Art is made with physical motor skills, time and effort. AI is a human made program that uses human made imagery, classified by more humans to generate a shopping list written by another human who want art that requires no effort of aquiring the physical skill needed to make the art. With no physical product, there is no AI art This is simply not true. Art is incredibly cultural, vaguely defined, and often involves little to no work at all. If someone prompts an AI, gets a result, and sticks it to a wall, calling it art, it is probably able to be considered art. > If you want to physically copy my art, go for it, I will applaud your skill, but taking my art and shoving it in a program In short, it appears that you are threatened by the existence of AI and the copyright argument is not actually about copyright, it's about ensuring that the competition does not exist, and that people did not have access to these tools that might make artists less valuable.

mrtksn 4y ago

They put it online for free for human consumption. Because the tech is very new, old concepts and laws don't cover it and that's not the point. The assumption that there must be compensation comes from the capitalist society that we live in. Switching to Communism or something else can be a solution to not directly pay people who do works and still have them around.

astrange 4y ago
Capitalism isn't when you pay for things, it's when there's capital you can sell.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  The capital of the artists is their intellectual property, that's the point.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    So if I look at everything you created with an omniscient view how many violations will I find in your artwork? These days it's both publishers and artists attempting to create RMS's world of a right to read.
  - astrange 4y ago
    "Capitalism" is selling the right itself to someone else, not earning royalties from it. IP rights are government creations; it's not like you signed a contract with each royalty payer.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    Under capitalism artist would be unable to make a profit off of their art. Under communism artists would be barred from making art entirely, ordered by the state to work in a place where it is deemed to be productive.
    - couchand 4y ago
      You must be joking? It's obvious if you actually care to look that leftist governments value the arts much more than liberal ones.
      - astrange 4y ago
        Is there a study on this? (Serious question.) It would seem that it opens you up to the problem of other people deciding whether you're an artist or not and if so whether you're a good artist. The same of course happens with capitalism, where it's your customers doing it. (Or in the case of books, which are almost never profitable, the VC-like publishers deciding to give you advances.) So of course the reason modern mixed economies are good is there's more than one set of people that you may be able to convince to fund you.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      > Under capitalism artist would be unable to make a profit off of their art. Sure they would, it would just be "I got paid to do this art/music piece that then someone will use in their product they sell"
  - ForestCritter 4y ago
    Actually, you are wrong. The capital of the artist is to physically create art. AI has to be fed physically created art and the told by humans what it is being fed. AI is not 'inspired', it is statistically driven by a human written progam, using mapping of human made work, labeled, tagged and defined by more humans to render a shopping list input by another human. Humans are using programming technology, written by humans to exploit other humans physical work.
    - astrange 4y ago
      > The capital of the artist is to physically create art. Surely that's their labor? Capital is the factor of production that isn't labor (or land if Georgist.)
bioemerl 4y ago
I think what we are seeing here is a proxy argument. Artists do not care about the copyright of people being able to learn from their art and reproduce it. It is not been an issue for decades, because it is a long established standard of copyright. You can't copy a work directly, you can learn from it and reproduce your own sort of stuff. What's different now is that this is a tool which artists can be replaced by. They not angry that their art has been learned from. Artists are angry that there is a tool which can replace them. And artists are looking for a way to make sure that tool is hampered as much as physically possible. If it were not learning copyright it would be something else, and whatever that's something else is it would also probably be something with proxy for that core issue. Imagine we had created an AI which was perfect, it could take your exact description of anything you asked it for and drew that thing. And then I went and asked it for a picture of Mickey mouse in the style of Disney. Because it's a perfect AI perfectly reproduces it. Who is in the wrong? I think it's absurd to think the creators of the AI would begin the wrong, because they did their job perfectly. It's a perfect app, it is a tool capable of literally anything. At the end of the day, it's the person using the tool to violate copyright who is in the wrong, assuming they distribute those images. And I don't believe the answer here is communism, I believe the answer is the same answer we've had for decades for the same situation. People need to find new jobs and learn new skills and do new things. And as programmers, it's probably going to happen to us too, about as soon as it happens to artists. Time to consider to start to learn to weld or build homes or something like that.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  I don't think we can look into this from copyright standpoint. It was already not working very well in the digital age, now it's completely useless. I don't object that people should learn new skills and find new jobs, my concern is that people who actually put huge effort to produce that "training data" are now left dry. They should be compensated and move on, I'm completely against hampering the abilities of AI in order to preserve the current business structures.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    The problem is, the net contribution of most artists to these systems is next to zero. It's greater than zero, otherwise the AI wouldn't exist, but these AI are trained off of 5 billion plus examples. Examples that required work to collect and sort through. Examples that required millions of dollars worth of compute time to make into something useful. What is there to compensate them for? These machines are not actually going to make these companies that much money either. The tools are open source. Competition is going to reduce profit on these systems to a very slim margin. You have to not only compensate for the fact that they aren't involved in actually creating the AI, so they're only getting a fraction of what this thing is worth in the first place. Then you have to consider that there are five billion images in the training set. The compensation is going to be nothing.
grumbel 4y ago
The Google bot has been consuming their art for many years, even copying it verbatim into Google's site and yet they didn't complain. This seems much more about the fear of competitions, than about violation of copyright. And yes, that's scary, but unavoidable as tech progresses. I don't think anything good could come from trying to strickten copyright here. The AI is obviously not copying directly, at best it takes a bit of inspiration from other works, something artists themselves do plenty themselves. Something like UBI might help with the monetary needs eventually. Though the fear part might start getting really interesting in the near future. What do you do with your life when AI is better at it than you? When everything you can create, can be created by the AI faster and better?
- mrtksn 4y ago
  > This seems much more about the fear of competitions, than about violation of copyright Yep, it's all about being compensated and yes copyrights are already very problematic and creativity limiting concept. People in these industries happen to be the first to face AI revolution but it will come for as all, eventually. UBI might be something but I don't know, it seems like hard times are ahead of us.
  - chii 4y ago
    > People in these industries happen to be the first to face AI revolution as has many other industries that faced automation and become obsolete. The fact that it is AI derived doesn't make it different than Luddites before.
- adriand 4y ago
  Artists shouldn’t have to compete against themselves. If these AI companies didn’t use the work of artists, the output would suck! I’m sure many artists would be happy to compete against the artistic talents of software developers. But they’re not, they’re having to compete against their own work. I listened to an interview with an artist who referenced the “three C’s”: Consent Credit Compensation These seem reasonable to me. The request isn’t to eliminate the technology. It’s that artists should be able to consent to their work being used. Works derived from their work should include credit. And, they should be compensated.

dahart 4y ago

Available for free online is not a valid justification for copying under copyright law, though, right? You can’t distribute something just because you can see it. True for museums and magazines as it is for online content. > They don’t have the right to not allow people to learn from it, that’s just never been a part of copyright. Yeah this is true. Stable Diffusion and other neural networks are not “learning” from it they way humans do though, it’s remembering and remixing and interpolating pixels (fixed expression), which is a part of copyright. BTW compensation is not a very accurate summary of this problem. Machines that borrow someone’s style and copies and remixes without attribution is inherently problematic far beyond artists who live off selling their art, it dilutes both creativity and credit, in addition to undermining people who have to work much harder than the computer to produce images. These AI completely depend on being given human-created art to begin with, and the companies that are making them and using them are already making handsome profits, so it’s reasonable to expect some kind of return in addition to proper credit.

Supermancho 4y ago
>> Why do people think they need to be compensated for something they put up online for free? > Available for free online is not a valid justification for copying under copyright law, though, right? Legal and attribution and licensed are all terms that are usually involved, but the core assertion is more or less correct. eg Images on billboards are protected by copyright in a similar manner. Something displayed on a website does not invalidate the copyright of the author or indemnify the owner of the site (or downstream users) from licensing conditions.
pksebben 4y ago
it's not remembering pixels. for it to do that, it would have to have the pixels stored somewhere. It does not. The laion 5b dataset is in the neighborhood of 220TB. (1) That is how much storage space you need to remember the pixels. The stable diffusion 1.5 checkpoint is 7gb. (2) 1 https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset/blob/main/dataset_examples/laion5B.md https://github.com/rom1504/img2dataset/blob/main/dataset_exa... 2 https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/tree/main https://huggingface.co/runwayml/stable-diffusion-v1-5/tree/m...

ForestCritter 4y ago

It is expected of any professional artist to have an online portfolio if they are serious about generating work. Scraping my portfolio that I put out because I want to generate revenue is a shitty thing to do. Also 'trained' is a complete misnomer. AI is fed images made by humans, labelled and tagged by humans, categorized by styles defined by humans, then plotted, copied, traced by a program written by humans. Along comes a human who inputs keywords and the AI uses statistics and algorythm programs also written by humans to amalgamate a resulting 'work of art' for the human with no physical art making effort. If you were to erase all tags and labelling from source images you would find zero learning happened. Art is made with physical motor skills, time and effort. AI is a human made program that uses human made imagery, classified by more humans to generate a shopping list written by another human who want art that requires no effort of aquiring the physical skill needed to make the art. With no physical product, there is no AI art and that art costs the maker. Public and free are not synonomous. If you want to physically copy my art, go for it, I will applaud your skill, but taking my art and shoving it in a program with a bunch of other art to dilute the provenance doesn't change that you are utilizing the effort and skill of artists for your own gain. If you can live with that, then I am very sad for you.

bioemerl 4y ago
> Also 'trained' is a complete misnomer. This here shows that you are speaking without understanding what you are speaking about. AI is absolutely trained. It's a process that is quite literally inspired by the way we understood neurons to work in the 1970s. AI start with a big batch of random numbers. There's a big fancy scientific method used to adjust those numbers in order to cause the system to learn to do some task. The process creates genuine and novel understanding of the problem space at hand. AI trained to do something simple, like add two numbers, will have a real solution to add two numbers in them once you have finished training them. With bigger problems, similar understanding certainly exists and in some cases has been proven to exist. However, once you get to the difficult problems with billions of parameters, it's very difficult for us to check that because if we could we would have just written it without needing to use an AI in the first place. There are lots of researchers who do lots of study and effort to ensure that AI are actually producing real outputs and have genuine understanding of the problems face they are working in. Do not insist that AI has no understanding if you have not taken the time to learn about those techniques. Stable diffusion has genuine understanding of different images and how to produce them within it. It is not a simple system that reproduces would already exists. It is not a collage tool. It is not incapable of producing novel outputs. Diffusion models are perfectly capable of producing any image that can possibly exist. It is only a matter of time before someone invents a new style that hasn't been seen before, and someone else is able to find a combination of descriptive words that causes stable diffusion to produce that output. Or that someone produces a novel combination of words, chucks it into stable diffusion (or some other AI model), and produces a new style of art. > Art is made with physical motor skills, time and effort. AI is a human made program that uses human made imagery, classified by more humans to generate a shopping list written by another human who want art that requires no effort of aquiring the physical skill needed to make the art. With no physical product, there is no AI art This is simply not true. Art is incredibly cultural, vaguely defined, and often involves little to no work at all. If someone prompts an AI, gets a result, and sticks it to a wall, calling it art, it is probably able to be considered art. > If you want to physically copy my art, go for it, I will applaud your skill, but taking my art and shoving it in a program In short, it appears that you are threatened by the existence of AI and the copyright argument is not actually about copyright, it's about ensuring that the competition does not exist, and that people did not have access to these tools that might make artists less valuable.