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It is the word “malicious” that added venom to your first question. If I asked how artists can thwart “malicious” tools like Midjourney, you could reasonably a

It is the word “malicious” that added venom to your first question. If I asked how artists can thwart “malicious” tools like Midjourney, you could reasonably assume that I disapprove of Midjourney and think they ought to stop doing what they do.

josephcsible 4y ago
That is the way artists often talk about tools like Midjourney. I chose that word exactly to turn the tables and call attention to that implicit venom on their part.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  What are best ways for burglars to defend against malicious tools like alarms, locks, and security patrols? What are the best ways for crackers to defend against malicious tools like copy protection?
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    Burglary is bad whether a human or some kind of a robot does it. There's nothing wrong with an art school taking students to a museum to look at established artists' work. Isn't training AI on existing art the equivalent of that? If so, why does it being AI instead of human make it bad? If not, what's the difference?
    - MattRix 4y ago
      No they are not the same. An artist taking time and effort to study and learn a new art style is not the same as an company writing a program that gobbles up every image on the internet. There is a fundamental difference between when a human does it and a machine does it. I feel like this is obvious and yet people keep making this argument for some reason.
      - nonbirithm 4y ago
        > I feel like this is obvious and yet people keep making this argument for some reason. It's because scores of people coming from non-art domains are suddenly being exposed to the art domain without much real knowledge of working in that domain, find the diffusion tech convincing enough that it entrances them, and makes them believe that their original notions of art are the most important thing that matters. This debate has made me think, if there's some inability to automate a process, only the people that have spent months/years working in those domains will understand certain things about that process. The rest will be operating on only the beliefs they form from limited exposure. For example, I imagine for a lot of people, "art" is something that magically appears in their Twitter timeline within 5 seconds of opening the app, and years of opening Twitter and seeing new art almost instantly would probably condition some to believe that's all art really is, a thing that's plentiful and can be found near-instantly. So it's not controversial to them when they come across a piece of software that can give them thousands of new pictures near-instantly. But obviously, prior to around October of 2022, there was nearly always a human behind the art on those timelines. To a human artist, their own work is probably not as plentiful and takes way longer to produce than to consume. Those consumers never needed to interact with the artist or understand the process to appreciate the art privately. Up to now that was usually not a problem. Maybe that idea will undergo changes in the following years, that the tech is so advanced that a level of respect for the specific process of human artists is necessary for cordial communication of art to succeed. Otherwise it will be disparaged with the equivalent of "opinion discarded" from the nature of the thing. It makes me wonder, what are the implications of this for domains that haven't been automated to the extent of SD yet? SD has proven that many, many people wanted this level of "art" automation from the beginning. The singular event that made this fact clear was the release of SD. There could be millions of people out there with their own preconceived notions, correct or not, just waiting for the ability to cut out the middleman in their own domains. It's like a powder keg waiting for the tiniest spark of technological progress to be ignited. For the "respect of artists" angle, I'm reminded of this article[1] about a modern art installation from 12 years ago where people's art contest entries were trampled upon by visitors. People were upset by this. As Marshall McLuhan once stated, "art is anything you can get away with." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixiv#Chaos_Lounge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixiv#Chaos_Lounge
- kweingar 4y ago
  I see what you’re doing but the parallel doesn’t really work. This isn’t an equal struggle between AI builders and artists. What happened is that AI builders took artists’ images, baked them in GPUs for a few months, and are now selling the output. Again, regardless of your opinion of the IP question, you have to admit that generative AI leverages artists’ own work against their economic interests. If someone’s livelihood is affected by this, of course they will feel venom. That is not parallel to your feeling of venom toward their efforts to stop this from happening to them.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    This would be an extremely strong argument if those artists had learned to draw themselves without looking at a single pre-existing piece of art.
    - MattRix 4y ago
      There is a fundamental difference between a human taking time to learn a thing and a machine that gobbles up everything it can find in order to replicate it.
      - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
        Good luck getting these people to even acknowledge that, though. Even though they'll acknowledge it in literally every other circumstance of ML.
      - sebzim4500 4y ago
        Of course there are loads of differences between how humans learn and how AI models learn, from substrate to architecture. I don't see why any of those differences should make a difference to the morality or legality of learning from copyrighted material.
  - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    I know the most about stable diffusion. Stable diffusion (based) models are typically open source, you can download them for free, and they easily fit on a cheap USB stick. They're not actually supposed to have anyone else's pictures in them as such [1]. As far as I can tell, the training is more along the lines of "this is what a dog looks like", "this is what a cat looks like", "this is what a stick looks like" ... etc. At this point in time, unaltered output is automatically public domain, because it is not made by a human. [1] some early bugs notwithstanding.

josephcsible 4y ago

That is the way artists often talk about tools like Midjourney. I chose that word exactly to turn the tables and call attention to that implicit venom on their part.

egypturnash 4y ago
What are best ways for burglars to defend against malicious tools like alarms, locks, and security patrols? What are the best ways for crackers to defend against malicious tools like copy protection?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Burglary is bad whether a human or some kind of a robot does it. There's nothing wrong with an art school taking students to a museum to look at established artists' work. Isn't training AI on existing art the equivalent of that? If so, why does it being AI instead of human make it bad? If not, what's the difference?
  - MattRix 4y ago
    No they are not the same. An artist taking time and effort to study and learn a new art style is not the same as an company writing a program that gobbles up every image on the internet. There is a fundamental difference between when a human does it and a machine does it. I feel like this is obvious and yet people keep making this argument for some reason.
    - nonbirithm 4y ago
      > I feel like this is obvious and yet people keep making this argument for some reason. It's because scores of people coming from non-art domains are suddenly being exposed to the art domain without much real knowledge of working in that domain, find the diffusion tech convincing enough that it entrances them, and makes them believe that their original notions of art are the most important thing that matters. This debate has made me think, if there's some inability to automate a process, only the people that have spent months/years working in those domains will understand certain things about that process. The rest will be operating on only the beliefs they form from limited exposure. For example, I imagine for a lot of people, "art" is something that magically appears in their Twitter timeline within 5 seconds of opening the app, and years of opening Twitter and seeing new art almost instantly would probably condition some to believe that's all art really is, a thing that's plentiful and can be found near-instantly. So it's not controversial to them when they come across a piece of software that can give them thousands of new pictures near-instantly. But obviously, prior to around October of 2022, there was nearly always a human behind the art on those timelines. To a human artist, their own work is probably not as plentiful and takes way longer to produce than to consume. Those consumers never needed to interact with the artist or understand the process to appreciate the art privately. Up to now that was usually not a problem. Maybe that idea will undergo changes in the following years, that the tech is so advanced that a level of respect for the specific process of human artists is necessary for cordial communication of art to succeed. Otherwise it will be disparaged with the equivalent of "opinion discarded" from the nature of the thing. It makes me wonder, what are the implications of this for domains that haven't been automated to the extent of SD yet? SD has proven that many, many people wanted this level of "art" automation from the beginning. The singular event that made this fact clear was the release of SD. There could be millions of people out there with their own preconceived notions, correct or not, just waiting for the ability to cut out the middleman in their own domains. It's like a powder keg waiting for the tiniest spark of technological progress to be ignited. For the "respect of artists" angle, I'm reminded of this article[1] about a modern art installation from 12 years ago where people's art contest entries were trampled upon by visitors. People were upset by this. As Marshall McLuhan once stated, "art is anything you can get away with." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixiv#Chaos_Lounge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixiv#Chaos_Lounge
kweingar 4y ago
I see what you’re doing but the parallel doesn’t really work. This isn’t an equal struggle between AI builders and artists. What happened is that AI builders took artists’ images, baked them in GPUs for a few months, and are now selling the output. Again, regardless of your opinion of the IP question, you have to admit that generative AI leverages artists’ own work against their economic interests. If someone’s livelihood is affected by this, of course they will feel venom. That is not parallel to your feeling of venom toward their efforts to stop this from happening to them.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  This would be an extremely strong argument if those artists had learned to draw themselves without looking at a single pre-existing piece of art.
  - MattRix 4y ago
    There is a fundamental difference between a human taking time to learn a thing and a machine that gobbles up everything it can find in order to replicate it.
    - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
      Good luck getting these people to even acknowledge that, though. Even though they'll acknowledge it in literally every other circumstance of ML.
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      Of course there are loads of differences between how humans learn and how AI models learn, from substrate to architecture. I don't see why any of those differences should make a difference to the morality or legality of learning from copyrighted material.
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  I know the most about stable diffusion. Stable diffusion (based) models are typically open source, you can download them for free, and they easily fit on a cheap USB stick. They're not actually supposed to have anyone else's pictures in them as such [1]. As far as I can tell, the training is more along the lines of "this is what a dog looks like", "this is what a cat looks like", "this is what a stick looks like" ... etc. At this point in time, unaltered output is automatically public domain, because it is not made by a human. [1] some early bugs notwithstanding.