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> 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 insane
by 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 agoWhere 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 agoI 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 agoYou'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 agoLet's say I have a band. We make a record, and we sell some records. We get paid for that. Now someone wants to use one of the songs in an ad. We "got paid" to produce the work, but the people making the ad still have to pay us for that use of the song, because it's a different use than the one we got paid for.
- cmiles74 3y agoPeople who do the work should be compensated when their work is used to generate income for someone else. This is the way it's worked for as long as I can remember: I get paid to do some work, the company then gets my output. What we have here is someone hoovering up copyrighted and protected content, from all over the internet, and using it to generate income. They then are turning around and claiming that they do not need to pay for these protected works because... Well, it's always something hand-wavy like "machine learn like people" but it boils down to "I want to keep the money."
- Filligree 3y agoIs Stability actually making any profit? They trained the AI, and released it for free, and- I'm still confused as to their business model.
- MacsHeadroom 3y agoThey build private enterprise AI solutions for big bucks and use their free models as advertisement of their ability. StableDiffusion is marketing.