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Learning is not theft and never has been. I don't care whether it's a human or machine doing it. AI will benefit everyone enormously, even if it won't be equall

Learning is not theft and never has been. I don't care whether it's a human or machine doing it. AI will benefit everyone enormously, even if it won't be equally distributed. The real issue here is that some skills are increasingly becoming obsolete and people have a hard time coping with that. Instead of demanding compensation, which would really be impractical to implement anyways, why not focus on developing new skills?

kranke155 3y ago
No that is not what people are upset about. They are upset that their life's work is being used without even asking permission, for someone else to get insanely rich. That's what they're upset about. If there were no use for 2D artists, then Stability Ai wouldn't be making an AI to replace them. Key word here is: replace. 2D artists are not becoming obsolete - they're being replaced by a machine that was trained on their works without permission. If you want to make an AI that does amazing paintings, and doesn't use human training data, more power to you. I can't compete with that. But if you use MY WORK to make a machine that's going to replace me, you do it under the cover of darkness and without permission - yeah i'll get pretty mad. What happened to visual artists was more like Logitech announcing Logitech CoPilot and revealing they've extracted code from keylogging for the past 20 years.
- constantly 3y ago
  > No that is not what people are upset about. They are upset that their life's work is being used without even asking permission, for someone else to get insanely rich. That's what they're upset about. This is kind of petulant then, respectfully. They got paid to produce that work, and they sold their services for that paycheck and the knowledge that they were putting their work into the world. The fruits of their labor were already being used to make Disney, etc. massively wealthy. But this is even another step of indirection from that totally fine and reasonable situation: people (or machines) are learning from the work and producing their own. They might as well be angry at interns who learned their style to get junior jobs at Disney and who are now up and coming, replacing them.
  - kranke155 3y ago
    Where did you get this idea that Disney or someone paid for all these works to be produced? A lot of the works were just ripped off Arstation and similar websites. It's likely a very large number was never "paid for". A lot of that work was never paid for to begin with. It was just spec work by artists who a. might be too young b. might be in between jobs c. just doing passion work. Again a lot of people at HN don't really seem to know the story very well, or how artists are compensated.
    - constantly 3y ago
      I just assumed Disney paid their employees, though maybe they’re volunteers or something. I read Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc. a while back and my takeaway (in addition to seeing a glimpse into how the management worked) was that all workers at Pixar were compensated for their work. Not totally orthogonal because Disney did end up acquiring Pixar. But I have a hard time believing a movie like Frozen was created without paying for it to be created.
      - kranke155 3y ago
        You're absolutely correct that Disney pays its employees. However most of the images that are being used for training data don't come from Disney. Most of the imagery used for Stable Diffusion and Midjourney was from portfolio websites and other sources, afaik. The Artstation website, which is a popular portfolio website, was one of the main targets, alongside many others. Other websites used include DeviantArt and Flickr. You can check using this website https://haveibeentrained.com https://haveibeentrained.com A lot of people placed their passion work, personal work, and unpaid work on Artstation, DeviantArt and Flickr. Some of those people are brilliant. Stability AI used their work as training data, without announcing it or asking for permission. The result is that a lot of more profilic and famous artists can see a lot of work that directly seems to be a reference to their own, copying their style. A lot of the work on these websites is quite simply not commercial work. The only commercial application in fact, so far, is these image engines.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
- rpdillon 3y ago
  AI is just leveraging value in the data that wasn't used before. In the same way we can automate jobs by watching how the human workers do the job, we can automate writing text or producing a picture. As we drive to work, we do so so we can get to work, but cameras on other vehicles watch us drive, and take all the judgement and learning we put into driving to try and create automated drivers. Should all drivers be compensated when their driving style is used to train an autonomous vehicle? It's the same scenario you mention: the work of humans is used to automate away that same work (this is pretty much how we automated everything, AI is just more explicit about it). It seems to me that these lawsuits are really about trying to stop the automation of certain creative jobs. And perhaps this is where we disagree, since stopping automation of jobs doesn't seem like a nobel end to me. Indeed, if we'd had this attitude about automating other jobs (like farming and manufacture of goods), creative jobs wouldn't exist, since everyone would be spending all their time producing food and tools. I'm not sure what your comment about "Logitech CoPilot" is. GitHub CoPilot exists, was trained on code from the past 20 years, and by and large developers enjoy the additional automation, and are looking for ways to leverage this automation to be more productive. I would think artists and writers would adopt a similar approach. Experience tells me that fighting automation is a waste of time. Best to stay ahead of it.
  - kranke155 3y ago
    >Should all drivers be compensated when their driving style is used to train an autonomous vehicle? Yes.
    - rpdillon 3y ago
      It sounds like you want to expand intellectual property rights to include the details of any action people take that could be observed by a machine so it can learn how to do the same thing. That's an untenable strategy: the ROI of the existing IP regime is already doubtful, and expanding it won't improve it, it'll simply expand all those problems to new areas.
    - MacsHeadroom 3y ago
      That's plainly ridiculous.
- EnergyAmy 3y ago
  Your job will only be replaced if you're unwilling to adapt. It's like saying that C made assembly programmers obsolete. There's a lot fewer people programming in assembly, but the correct view is that there's a lot more programmers now than there were in the days that you had to know assembly. "Under the cover of darkness and without permission" implies quite a bit, but you're coming at it from the wrong angle, which this court ruling affirms. Try thinking of it as a new tool that will act as a force multiplier for your work.
  - kranke155 3y ago
    This is a completely misled interpretation of events, since automating my work to the scale of generative AI, there won't be any work left for humans. This "but progress" argument is tiring. The Industrial Revolution was a complete failure if you measure quality of life in its first decades. It got turned around by people who you know, fought back, created unions, and demanded fair pay.
    - EnergyAmy 3y ago
      > there won't be any work left for humans Good. That's the goal, and we can stop inventing stupid make-work for people when that happens. Jobs aren't the goal, making robots do all of the work is the goal. You're falling into the myopic trap of assuming that the current way of things won't change along with generative AI becoming commonplace.
      - kranke155 3y ago
        I would agree. My fear is that in between the world we have now and the world where robots do everything, we have a giant valley of madness where robots take all the jobs, all the profits, and a lot of people are left with nothing.
      - bcrosby95 3y ago
        That's whose goal? It certainly isn't the goal of billionaires and people that run the country. By in large, their goal is to be rich and powerful: to have power over other people. You don't get that by eliminating the need to work. It would take an incredible amount of altruism to share your goal, and you don't become a billionaire by being altruistic.
cmiles74 3y ago
It's convenient to refer to the training of the machine as learning but let's not lose sight of the fact that "machine learning" is not at all the same thing as people "learning". Pretending they mean the same thing in this context, in my opinion, is dishonest. I also take issue with the assumption that AI will "benefit everyone enormously, even if it won't be equally distributed"; I don't see any factual basis for this assumption. On the contrary, it seems much more likely that AI will be used to concentrate wealth even further. Given the high cost, I find it hard to believe it will ever by "equally distributed". For as long as I can remember big corporations have been merciless in their preservation of "intellectual property". I didn't love it then and I don't love it now. OTOH, the idea that Microsoft can train their LLM on code I've written and then sell access to that LLM for money (sharing no dollars with me) strikes me as outright theft.

kranke155 3y ago

No that is not what people are upset about. They are upset that their life's work is being used without even asking permission, for someone else to get insanely rich. That's what they're upset about. If there were no use for 2D artists, then Stability Ai wouldn't be making an AI to replace them. Key word here is: replace. 2D artists are not becoming obsolete - they're being replaced by a machine that was trained on their works without permission. If you want to make an AI that does amazing paintings, and doesn't use human training data, more power to you. I can't compete with that. But if you use MY WORK to make a machine that's going to replace me, you do it under the cover of darkness and without permission - yeah i'll get pretty mad. What happened to visual artists was more like Logitech announcing Logitech CoPilot and revealing they've extracted code from keylogging for the past 20 years.

constantly 3y ago
> No that is not what people are upset about. They are upset that their life's work is being used without even asking permission, for someone else to get insanely rich. That's what they're upset about. This is kind of petulant then, respectfully. They got paid to produce that work, and they sold their services for that paycheck and the knowledge that they were putting their work into the world. The fruits of their labor were already being used to make Disney, etc. massively wealthy. But this is even another step of indirection from that totally fine and reasonable situation: people (or machines) are learning from the work and producing their own. They might as well be angry at interns who learned their style to get junior jobs at Disney and who are now up and coming, replacing them.
- kranke155 3y ago
  Where did you get this idea that Disney or someone paid for all these works to be produced? A lot of the works were just ripped off Arstation and similar websites. It's likely a very large number was never "paid for". A lot of that work was never paid for to begin with. It was just spec work by artists who a. might be too young b. might be in between jobs c. just doing passion work. Again a lot of people at HN don't really seem to know the story very well, or how artists are compensated.
  - constantly 3y ago
    I just assumed Disney paid their employees, though maybe they’re volunteers or something. I read Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc. a while back and my takeaway (in addition to seeing a glimpse into how the management worked) was that all workers at Pixar were compensated for their work. Not totally orthogonal because Disney did end up acquiring Pixar. But I have a hard time believing a movie like Frozen was created without paying for it to be created.
    - kranke155 3y ago
      You're absolutely correct that Disney pays its employees. However most of the images that are being used for training data don't come from Disney. Most of the imagery used for Stable Diffusion and Midjourney was from portfolio websites and other sources, afaik. The Artstation website, which is a popular portfolio website, was one of the main targets, alongside many others. Other websites used include DeviantArt and Flickr. You can check using this website https://haveibeentrained.com https://haveibeentrained.com A lot of people placed their passion work, personal work, and unpaid work on Artstation, DeviantArt and Flickr. Some of those people are brilliant. Stability AI used their work as training data, without announcing it or asking for permission. The result is that a lot of more profilic and famous artists can see a lot of work that directly seems to be a reference to their own, copying their style. A lot of the work on these websites is quite simply not commercial work. The only commercial application in fact, so far, is these image engines.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
rpdillon 3y ago
AI is just leveraging value in the data that wasn't used before. In the same way we can automate jobs by watching how the human workers do the job, we can automate writing text or producing a picture. As we drive to work, we do so so we can get to work, but cameras on other vehicles watch us drive, and take all the judgement and learning we put into driving to try and create automated drivers. Should all drivers be compensated when their driving style is used to train an autonomous vehicle? It's the same scenario you mention: the work of humans is used to automate away that same work (this is pretty much how we automated everything, AI is just more explicit about it). It seems to me that these lawsuits are really about trying to stop the automation of certain creative jobs. And perhaps this is where we disagree, since stopping automation of jobs doesn't seem like a nobel end to me. Indeed, if we'd had this attitude about automating other jobs (like farming and manufacture of goods), creative jobs wouldn't exist, since everyone would be spending all their time producing food and tools. I'm not sure what your comment about "Logitech CoPilot" is. GitHub CoPilot exists, was trained on code from the past 20 years, and by and large developers enjoy the additional automation, and are looking for ways to leverage this automation to be more productive. I would think artists and writers would adopt a similar approach. Experience tells me that fighting automation is a waste of time. Best to stay ahead of it.
- kranke155 3y ago
  >Should all drivers be compensated when their driving style is used to train an autonomous vehicle? Yes.
  - rpdillon 3y ago
    It sounds like you want to expand intellectual property rights to include the details of any action people take that could be observed by a machine so it can learn how to do the same thing. That's an untenable strategy: the ROI of the existing IP regime is already doubtful, and expanding it won't improve it, it'll simply expand all those problems to new areas.
  - MacsHeadroom 3y ago
    That's plainly ridiculous.
EnergyAmy 3y ago
Your job will only be replaced if you're unwilling to adapt. It's like saying that C made assembly programmers obsolete. There's a lot fewer people programming in assembly, but the correct view is that there's a lot more programmers now than there were in the days that you had to know assembly. "Under the cover of darkness and without permission" implies quite a bit, but you're coming at it from the wrong angle, which this court ruling affirms. Try thinking of it as a new tool that will act as a force multiplier for your work.
- kranke155 3y ago
  This is a completely misled interpretation of events, since automating my work to the scale of generative AI, there won't be any work left for humans. This "but progress" argument is tiring. The Industrial Revolution was a complete failure if you measure quality of life in its first decades. It got turned around by people who you know, fought back, created unions, and demanded fair pay.
  - EnergyAmy 3y ago
    > there won't be any work left for humans Good. That's the goal, and we can stop inventing stupid make-work for people when that happens. Jobs aren't the goal, making robots do all of the work is the goal. You're falling into the myopic trap of assuming that the current way of things won't change along with generative AI becoming commonplace.
    - kranke155 3y ago
      I would agree. My fear is that in between the world we have now and the world where robots do everything, we have a giant valley of madness where robots take all the jobs, all the profits, and a lot of people are left with nothing.
    - bcrosby95 3y ago
      That's whose goal? It certainly isn't the goal of billionaires and people that run the country. By in large, their goal is to be rich and powerful: to have power over other people. You don't get that by eliminating the need to work. It would take an incredible amount of altruism to share your goal, and you don't become a billionaire by being altruistic.

cmiles74 3y ago

It's convenient to refer to the training of the machine as learning but let's not lose sight of the fact that "machine learning" is not at all the same thing as people "learning". Pretending they mean the same thing in this context, in my opinion, is dishonest. I also take issue with the assumption that AI will "benefit everyone enormously, even if it won't be equally distributed"; I don't see any factual basis for this assumption. On the contrary, it seems much more likely that AI will be used to concentrate wealth even further. Given the high cost, I find it hard to believe it will ever by "equally distributed". For as long as I can remember big corporations have been merciless in their preservation of "intellectual property". I didn't love it then and I don't love it now. OTOH, the idea that Microsoft can train their LLM on code I've written and then sell access to that LLM for money (sharing no dollars with me) strikes me as outright theft.