3 ms·

Right, so off the bat, if you're going into a situation with your generative art model, and you're first thought is, "we're totally going to break through this

Right, so off the bat, if you're going into a situation with your generative art model, and you're first thought is, "we're totally going to break through this attempt at someone trying to protect their artwork"....aren't you automatically in the wrong?

satvikpendem 4y ago
Wrong? It's just a fact that generative AI can simply train against these "protected" images. I don't think the parent said anything about ethics, if this is even an ethical issue in the first place.
userbinator 4y ago
Not if you don't believe in Imaginary Property.
- wwweston 4y ago
  All property is imaginary. It also turns out to be useful in often helping human beings coexist relatively peacefully and sometimes negotiating mutual interests productively, so like a number of things that don't exist until enough people agree to conduct themselves as if they do, it's probably a good idea in general. Intellectual property has some distinct characteristics, but it's fundamentally the same. And assuming entitlement to any available data for ingestion into a training set without a moment's regard to the labor and agency of the people who produced it has things in common with the ethic of a thief who, coming upon your stuff, decides that if they can take it, it's theirs, society's construction of property be damned.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Except that intellectual property can be copied while leaving the original behind, but this is a centuries-old debate and I doubt we'll break new ground going 'round the mulberry bush about it again here. (... I'm literally wearing a "YOU WOULDN'T REIMPLEMENT AN API" t-shirt as I type this.)
    - wwweston 4y ago
      You'll note on reviewing my comment that I didn't claim there are no differences. That's intentional, having tread the relevant ground plenty of times myself. The similarities matter more than the differences here. And the problem really isn't breaking new ground in general. People saw the similarities at least as far back as the printing press. The problem is getting people to care about the claims others have on the fruits of their labor, and why incentives might matter for everyone.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        If technology causes the value of the fruits of that labor to crash, then... The value of the fruit of that labor crashes. No more and no less. The invention of the printing press didn't stop writing, the invention of the camera didn't stop painting, and the invention of Stable Diffusion won't stop creation of novel art. But it definitely upends a known methodology for extracting value from non-fungibility of labor product. In any case, the labor-to-value question is moot because Stable Diffusion will enable companies to generate unlimited visuals off the single-time-compensated manual labor of a handful of artists (for no other reason than some artists will take that deal). So whether any one artist is in the training set will become irrelevant as people choose nearly-free good-enough product over far-more-expensive handcrafted product most of the time. Glaze is useless when an advertising firm is fairly-compensating consenting artists to toss their work into the meat grinder and that grinder then still churns out work that swamps the individuality of traditional-methods artists.
        wwweston 4y ago
        > If technology causes the value of the fruits of that labor to crash Well then, if the fruits are worthless, then presumably there's no loss from excluding it from a training set, and creating norms or even laws which allow people the privilege of negotiating the basis on which their work can be so used, right? Of course, nobody believes that. Much like no one really believed that unauthorized copies of 18th century print works were valueless just because the production could be industrialized. The enterprises producing unauthorized copies did so because they knew full well they could capture the value... without any of the pesky pro-social obligation to respect the labor and interests of those who created it. The interest in the works as training data betrays the position. This work is valuable, and works derived from it are valuable. > Glaze is useless when an advertising firm is fairly-compensating consenting artists I imagine there will be artists who opt in after negotiating the basis on which their work can be used -- although who knows what kind of surprises there could be there, some might even demand equity or collectively bargain. But deciding there's no need for a framework of negotiation and consent just because some people will get to yes sounds like a really bad precedent. And if the argument is that this isn't sufficient to protect interests, well, sure. Necessary but insufficient points exist all the time, usually the thing to do is pair them with other axioms / initiatives.
posnet 4y ago
Unfortunately as we have learned from open source software, it doesn't matter if it's write or wrong. The only way to enforce licensing is to litigate. The decades of GPL violations have taught us the only way to get commercial interests to not abuse copyleft licenses is to force them via the courts, and in doing so dis-incentivize other businesses from violating the licenses. But it isn't 100% effective by any means, and usually relies on a large commercially successful organization to already have aligned interests in enforcing their GPL/copyleft licenses. Anything else is just ethics paper fodder.
imron 4y ago
Maybe so, but that’s not going to stop people. The tech industry is full of examples.
teaearlgraycold 4y ago
You wouldn't even need to try to break it. The goal of the model is to learn patterns and pass tests against the training data. Given that these images are expected to ned up in training sets, then eventually whatever technique is being used here will fail to thwart the training process.
textninja 4y ago
Unless it’s specifically trained not to, I’m fairly certain AI will bypass this without even trying. Such is the way of the unsupervised hill climb on huge unstructured datasets. To put it another way, in order for an artist’s style to truly be invisible to AI, it would have to be invisible to humans.
josephcsible 4y ago
If bypassing "protection" like this makes you automatically in the wrong, does that also make it immoral to try to refill ink cartridges?

satvikpendem 4y ago

Wrong? It's just a fact that generative AI can simply train against these "protected" images. I don't think the parent said anything about ethics, if this is even an ethical issue in the first place.

userbinator 4y ago

Not if you don't believe in Imaginary Property.

wwweston 4y ago
All property is imaginary. It also turns out to be useful in often helping human beings coexist relatively peacefully and sometimes negotiating mutual interests productively, so like a number of things that don't exist until enough people agree to conduct themselves as if they do, it's probably a good idea in general. Intellectual property has some distinct characteristics, but it's fundamentally the same. And assuming entitlement to any available data for ingestion into a training set without a moment's regard to the labor and agency of the people who produced it has things in common with the ethic of a thief who, coming upon your stuff, decides that if they can take it, it's theirs, society's construction of property be damned.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Except that intellectual property can be copied while leaving the original behind, but this is a centuries-old debate and I doubt we'll break new ground going 'round the mulberry bush about it again here. (... I'm literally wearing a "YOU WOULDN'T REIMPLEMENT AN API" t-shirt as I type this.)
  - wwweston 4y ago
    You'll note on reviewing my comment that I didn't claim there are no differences. That's intentional, having tread the relevant ground plenty of times myself. The similarities matter more than the differences here. And the problem really isn't breaking new ground in general. People saw the similarities at least as far back as the printing press. The problem is getting people to care about the claims others have on the fruits of their labor, and why incentives might matter for everyone.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      If technology causes the value of the fruits of that labor to crash, then... The value of the fruit of that labor crashes. No more and no less. The invention of the printing press didn't stop writing, the invention of the camera didn't stop painting, and the invention of Stable Diffusion won't stop creation of novel art. But it definitely upends a known methodology for extracting value from non-fungibility of labor product. In any case, the labor-to-value question is moot because Stable Diffusion will enable companies to generate unlimited visuals off the single-time-compensated manual labor of a handful of artists (for no other reason than some artists will take that deal). So whether any one artist is in the training set will become irrelevant as people choose nearly-free good-enough product over far-more-expensive handcrafted product most of the time. Glaze is useless when an advertising firm is fairly-compensating consenting artists to toss their work into the meat grinder and that grinder then still churns out work that swamps the individuality of traditional-methods artists.
      - wwweston 4y ago
        > If technology causes the value of the fruits of that labor to crash Well then, if the fruits are worthless, then presumably there's no loss from excluding it from a training set, and creating norms or even laws which allow people the privilege of negotiating the basis on which their work can be so used, right? Of course, nobody believes that. Much like no one really believed that unauthorized copies of 18th century print works were valueless just because the production could be industrialized. The enterprises producing unauthorized copies did so because they knew full well they could capture the value... without any of the pesky pro-social obligation to respect the labor and interests of those who created it. The interest in the works as training data betrays the position. This work is valuable, and works derived from it are valuable. > Glaze is useless when an advertising firm is fairly-compensating consenting artists I imagine there will be artists who opt in after negotiating the basis on which their work can be used -- although who knows what kind of surprises there could be there, some might even demand equity or collectively bargain. But deciding there's no need for a framework of negotiation and consent just because some people will get to yes sounds like a really bad precedent. And if the argument is that this isn't sufficient to protect interests, well, sure. Necessary but insufficient points exist all the time, usually the thing to do is pair them with other axioms / initiatives.

posnet 4y ago

Unfortunately as we have learned from open source software, it doesn't matter if it's write or wrong. The only way to enforce licensing is to litigate. The decades of GPL violations have taught us the only way to get commercial interests to not abuse copyleft licenses is to force them via the courts, and in doing so dis-incentivize other businesses from violating the licenses. But it isn't 100% effective by any means, and usually relies on a large commercially successful organization to already have aligned interests in enforcing their GPL/copyleft licenses. Anything else is just ethics paper fodder.

imron 4y ago

Maybe so, but that’s not going to stop people. The tech industry is full of examples.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago

You wouldn't even need to try to break it. The goal of the model is to learn patterns and pass tests against the training data. Given that these images are expected to ned up in training sets, then eventually whatever technique is being used here will fail to thwart the training process.

textninja 4y ago

Unless it’s specifically trained not to, I’m fairly certain AI will bypass this without even trying. Such is the way of the unsupervised hill climb on huge unstructured datasets. To put it another way, in order for an artist’s style to truly be invisible to AI, it would have to be invisible to humans.

josephcsible 4y ago

If bypassing "protection" like this makes you automatically in the wrong, does that also make it immoral to try to refill ink cartridges?