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Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?
- Lacerda69 4y agoAs always with this type of headline, the answer is No
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoThe article says “maybe yes” for what I understood. At least a guy is making a lawsuit, we’ll see: > The alleged wrongdoing comes down to what Butterick summarized to me as “the three ‘C’s”: The artists had not consented to have their copyrighted artwork included in the laion database; they were not compensated for their involvement, even as companies including Midjourney charged for the use of their tools; and their influence was not credited when A.I. images were produced using their work
- XorNot 4y agoTrying to pretend LAION has any culpability is how you know this is bunk. It's a list of links to publically available content. The metadata is the alt-text of the linked images. No one has the ability to demand they not be linked to, because otherwise the simple solution is "stop hosting" or "add authentication" and the ramifications of any other conclusion break the internet (EU right-to-forget would apply, but that compels action after a request, it doesn't imply linking is illegal).
- giuliomagnifico 4y agoIt’s like the story of an autonomous car that kill a guy, who is the culpable? Who write the software or the car? Same for this scraping algorithms, somebody has written them. I don’t have a solution, it’s only a consideration.
- visarga 4y ago"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." (wiki)
- taneq 4y agoBetteridge’s law of headlines.
- Dalewyn 4y agoThis is actually an exception: Yes. Why? This is no different than software in general using third-party assets without permission. We, as in both society and the legal world, know how to deal with license violators and IP thieves. The only question is whether we can stop confounding the discussion from spamming "AI" every-fucking-where every-fucking-time.
- nbzso 4y agoI believed that corporate theft from citizens was a valuable investment. Why all the commotion? Copyright is obsolete for the average person. They will optimize algorithms for free, after having fed them with user-generated, tag-labeled content for years. Now inside your Windows Desktop. Soon in Apple pods.
- londons_explore 4y agoWe the people shouldn't be wondering if this is violating the law. We the people should be deciding if this should be allowed or not. The law is ours to write, and we should make our decision what we want it to say and then work to make sure it is implemented as we want.
- labster 4y agoThis is from America, where national laws like copyright are very hard to change, due to lobbyists and both political parties thinking the other one literally works for the Devil. Your point about people deciding their own laws is great but it’s just not how our system works. Instead most law nowadays is made by judges interpreting anything controversial.
- mandmandam 4y agoOk, but, that system - "how things are" - is exploitative in the extreme to both people and the planet. It's unsustainable, eldritch, profoundly unjust and corrupt. Using "how things are" (fucked) as a justification to prevent discussion of "how things could be" (amazing) is fucked. I'm sick to the teeth of seeing it.
- mmahemoff 4y agoYou’re both right. It’s true the practical aspects many it hard to change laws, but I still appreciate OP’s starting from first principles. It’s easy to get caught up in debates over how to interpret current laws and conflate what’s legal with what’s (a) ethical (b) conducive to progress. However, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that these laws are merely social contracts and subject to change with enough impetus and savvy.
- Zetobal 4y agoThe truth is that nobody cares. Your "We the people" Braveheart speech is just cognitive dissonance with the rest of the world if you look at the reactions irl and on the web normal people, or better said people not in the tech bubble and overwhelmed artists, are rather excited.
- harshreality 4y agoNo, but large established copyright interests will go to the ends of the Earth arguing that it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pIVVpoz5zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pIVVpoz5zk It is the same as humans learning from art to imitate one or multiple other artists' styles. The differences are in scale, and flexibility in mixing and matching different styles (a very primitive, not-very-accurate model or description would be a vector of [0,1] values, one for each artist[1]), and which vector an AI art program happens to use as a default style for any prompt that doesn't specify something akin to "in the style of <x>" [1] I'm not claiming these neural nets are learning models of each artist and linearly combining them, but if you squint hard enough it approaches that.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago> No, but large established copyright interests will go to the ends of the Earth arguing that it is. Small independent copyright interests trying to eke out a living from their art will also argue this.
- andybak 4y agoI love how both sides in this debate immediately claim the other side is huge, faceless and corporate. In truth both sides are a mix of both individuals and monied interests but this rhetorical tactic seems to be irresistible.
- RandomLensman 4y agoThis is also a few big firms in a way harvesting the public domain - not sure we need new forms of rent seeking via AI.
- czzr 4y agoScale matters. And there is no reason we have to have the same rules for people and for software tools.
- jstanley 4y agoIf you're learning from existing works at scale, aren't you less infringing than someone who only learns from a handful of existing works?
- dreen 4y agoThis is much less of a problem than people make it out to be. For a lot of people, art is a way to connect to other human minds. If you know there is no human mind directly involved in the piece, you might not value the art the same way. No amount of code will change that. Having said that, I think the current iteration of AI will be a fantastic tool for artists once it matures. Even if you're making some one-off disposable piece of visual/audio design for business purposes, you will want a professional to look it over.
- simonbarker87 4y agoYou’ve summed up my issue with AI art. If no human was involved in creating the piece then as far as I’m concerned, it’s not art. It’s something but art it is not - and I’m not someone who is in to art at all, I just want to know that an actual person was trying to express an idea/opinion when making a piece. Once I know a human didn’t make something my brain just looses interest. Telling if something was human or AI made us the trick. To be clear, I’m only applying this thinking to art - if something is drawn or calculated by AI that solved a problem (circuit design, route planning etc) then I’m all for it.
- lwhi 4y agoThe point for me is, how can you know if a human was involved?
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoIndeed. How can you be sure that even if a human artist gave you a piece of art, they didn't generate it by using an AI?
- jimnotgym 4y agoThis might add value to art that machines can't do yet, like oil painting. A painter could film themselves creating the art. You could go and see them painting.
- jasmer 4y ago
- craftit 4y agoFrom what I've seen in the art world it is common practice to build on the work of others without attribution. Is this really all that different? That said, I think these tools still implicitly depend on people to pick out good images that resonate with people, as if people don't like the image it creates it won't get shared.
- a_bonobo 4y agoTwo potential counter-arguments: 1) When artists 'steal' from others, they generally build something 'new'. AI can't really create anything 'new'. Case in point: Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose steals the plot and outline from crime stories, steals the library idea from Borges, and steals the murderer's motive from Eco's medieval manuscript (forgot which one). Yet the outcome is something completely new. Same goes for hip-hop music; sampling is at its core, but the final music that comes out is nothing like what it samples, the samples are just a part of something new. 2) when artists steal from each other, it's generally poor artists ripping off other poor artists. No money can flow. When a million/billion-dollar company rips off poor artists to make more money via generative AI it's a different story. Money could flow but it doesn't.
- craftit 4y agoToo your first point, I am not sure what constitutes new or novel here. I've seen the AI do exactly the type of borrowing from different sources you describe and producing something that seems very new to me. Though I admit, often these are under human direction with some carefully chosen sentences. Is that enough to generate something really new? To your second point, most of the work I've seen generated from these models were done for free. It could be argued that these tools add to an artists toolbox rather than take something away. I can see for example where one poor artist could create a computer game of the same quality that it takes a triple-AAA game company to do today. Is that good or bad?
- thomashop 4y agoWhy would you say AI can't create something new? It should be abler to merge ideas from its training data and create something like "The Name Of The Rose". ChatGPT is able to write lyrics about a topic of my or its choice in the style of an unrelated philosopher for example. It creates something new by mixing ideas from different modalities.
- visarga 4y ago> “We’re not litigating image by image, we’re litigating the whole technique behind the system.” Oh yes, "let's sue AI-anything", no time to sue one by one. Wildcard attack, not against any specific work, but against the algorithm itself. If they wanted that, they should have patented image diffusion. And when they want to copyright their own styles, the same thing. They want a style to work like a trademark, to block any future work from using it. Another attempt to make copyright more powerful, making current holders have an advantage over newcomers. Basically they would like copyright to get trademark and patent powers, to cover any future reimplementation or style variation. But AI isn't coming just for art, and diffusion models are useful for many other things. They are not the one and only voice that matters.
- svara 4y agoDon't think of this in terms of just art. In fact art is probably a confusing example since the creative process is a bit obscure. Think of creating any immaterial object of value to you or others. A recipe book, a coding blog, a graphic novel, whatever. Are you really going to go through the pains of creating that and putting it out there, if on the next day some AI startup is going to train its models on it and offer something seemingly different, but ultimately equivalent, commercially? We're running into a huge problem for creators here, and it'll have to be solved with new laws around training models on original content some way or the other. If we want to still have a creative industry going forward, that is.
- w4ffl35 4y agoBill Gates says that ChatGPT will change the world, make Jobs more efficient. Weird that people don't feel the same about Stable Diffusion even though it will do the exact same thing
- nbzso 4y agoBill is obviously reached, a statute of God. He is starting a Climate religion as we speak, he should hire Tom Cruise for a start. He knows a lot about this profitable startup idea.
- w4ffl35 4y agobill gates is a chode. i only quote him to say: high profile people are willing to make happy predictions about text generators but not art generators. biased and stupid.
- lofaszvanitt 4y agoWhy not ask artists themselves, why every friggin article avoids artists? Give a microphone to artists and ask their opinion. Is that so hard?
- XorNot 4y agoFor much the same reason despite using Twitter a lot, Elon Musk isn't good at running it.
- artistcopy 4y ago[flagged]
- keeperofdakeys 4y agoIf an artists work is used in training an AI model without a license, should it be legal to distribute the images generated by that AI model? What about distributing the AI model itself? Would you use an online service if the Terms and Conditions stated that "You agree that content uploaded to this service may be used in training AI models without compensation, rights or acknowledgement"?
- gverrilla 4y agoThe most interesting thing to me is how these systems are text-based. Before you could pick up a mouse/pencil and draw directly. Now we're describing art. Same thing will happen to code. This will increase attention to language, which tends to increase social cohesion, not to mention productivity gains. Maybe even one day advanced mathematical theories will be abstracted away from numbers.
- ganmullet 4y agoThe main problem seem to be the inclusion of the artist name in the metadata of the training images. This makes the style of individual, currently active artists exploitable in ways that affect the artists negatively. One solution could be to allow the use of the images, but disallow the use of the artist name in the training set. From a privacy standpoint it seems reasonable to disagree to having your name and artistic characteristics connected and encoded into an AI model, even if it's legal to use the art itself as training data.
- lukko 4y agoThe Miyazaki quote really hit home: “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” I think most AI art misses the point entirely. Art is really about the person / people that make the work and their response to the time and context in which they live. It's usually a struggle to bring something new into the world, but it does feel magical and exciting - it seems to come from a very different place than interpolating past influences. AI art takes away all the magic, and without the sense of a person I think it has no artistic or aesthetic value - it just adds visual noise to the world. I think it will, unfortunately, disincentivise people to make new work, as although there is a world of difference between AI art and good art, it can be tricky to tell the difference at first glance, and to make anything good takes years of dedication and effort.
- passion__desire 4y agoThis blogpost counters your argument that all art is created through depth of emotions. https://sphericalbullshit.wordpress.com/2022/12/11/is-ai-art-art-it-doesnt-matter-because-thats-the-wrong-question/ https://sphericalbullshit.wordpress.com/2022/12/11/is-ai-art...
- lukko 4y agoSure, it can come from a boring, unoriginal place without any investment and it could be bad art. Work like that is just a waste of time for everyone. People wouldn't listen to music that was created with the same indifference, it would sound awful. I agree it's not a very important question though, it's just a shame that we will have to look at the images AI generates.
- polotics 4y agoJust wait until some ML produces a half convincing Frozen 5, 6, 7, 8. This is when the big guns from Disney come out...