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On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
- tonetegeatinst 3y agoOne thing that confuses me in this whole thing we are talking about is the following.... If you paid a bunch of people to just churn out material in the form of text....art....comics....and video and then used it to train you model then is that ethical? Because plenty of jobs own the intellectual property or copyright if your doing this work on company time....so simply by hiring people to create data for your model bypasses this ethics problem. You could even run a side business publishing articles these employees write.
- ParetoOptimal 3y agoYeah, there really needs to be a solution to situations like this honestly.
- esafak 3y agoIt's called paying copyright owners -- artists. The economic model can be worked out, but it's not the status quo, where software companies take all the profit and artists are left with nothing.
- brigadier132 3y agoAmazing how everyone is an intellectual property zealot now.
- NewJazz 3y agoYeah I would also point out... If copyright terms were shorter, perhaps people would be less tempted to hoover up modern artists' and writers' works.
- DFHippie 3y agoMaybe because it's more relevant? If you see one artist being ripped off, it's sad, but it's an outlier. When you see the entire sector being ripped off, you start paying attention. It helps if you care about the people being ripped off, which most people are capable of, having an instinct for empathy.
- CaptainFever 3y agoYeah. "Copyright for me but not for thee". Yes I'm aware that applies to commercial AI too -- use open models.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- homefree 3y agoArguably there is - training is not a copyright violation imo. I think it's more akin to you viewing the art and then later making your own thing, you get an intuition/inspiration from what you've seen. The other complaints are mostly about how it has become hard to not share to social media, but that's mostly a complaint about how people are. He can still just post on a website, it's not really the fault of social media companies that people prefer that.
- ParetoOptimal 3y agoIts not like looking and getting inspiration, its looking and being able to almost perfectly duplicate the style. Their complaint is not being able to post art for its own sake because it will be hoovered up into datasets to train more AI: They are forced to submit to helping train AI or not post their art.
- boolemancer 3y ago> Its not like looking and getting inspiration, its looking and being able to almost perfectly duplicate the style. You cannot copyright a style. A person is perfectly within their right to copy your art style when they produce their own work. So, I think "duplicate the style of" and "taking inspiration from" are the same thing in this context.
- Workaccount2 3y agoMost skilled artists are perfectly capable of generating near identical copies of other artists work. This is something that has been going on for millennia.
- ParetoOptimal 3y agoThat's different though because there are social and legal reasons not to do it. Also, the pool of people that can imitate a skilled artist is much smaller than those who can prompt "in the style of Picasso...".
- mock-possum 3y agoI have no patience for midjourney’s hacky-ass discord interface so - is anyone with access able to weigh in on how effectively one can generate images aping the style of ‘cat and girl?’
- MWil 3y agothis is what I get explicitly asking for "Cat and Girl" in the style of Dorothy Gambrell. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1098302916395270235/1196882198045917355/mwil_Cinematic_scene_-_Cat_and_Girl_-_detailed_color_pen__ink_c_e7189cc6-9296-4cbd-9c1c-009a9931132d.png?ex=65b93e69&is=65a6c969&hm=b7814546d1d3b5982ad294d88fe536254a9213d4f26c52b560d95339ac21fb59& https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1098302916395270235/1...
- MWil 3y agoIt gets even worse being MORE explicit about referencing THE '"Cat and Girl" online comic strip by Dorothy Gambrell'
- refulgentis 3y agoMore or less. Cat and Girl is interpreted as 2 not-proper nouns. But even when you just spam Dorothy Gambrell it doesn't get it. It doesn't seem to know the style individually, at all.
- mock-possum 3y agoThat’s what I was afraid of. This comic reads like someone complaining about an imaginary problem, not a real one. (The images generated here are lovely though)
- dartos 3y agoWhat’s hacky about it? They’re using the discord chat bot interaction tools to make interactions for their chat bot. They also have a UI on their website, not sure if it’s still closed or not.
- muststopmyths 3y agoIf the artist's license was for non-commercial use, isn't using it for training an AI for commercial use a clear violation ? I would love to know why not.
- artninja1988 3y agoFair use, if it does indeed apply, doesn't care about license
- croes 3y agoI doubt it's still fair use if you become one of most valuable companies, hence the word "fair" in fair use.
- yreg 3y agoThe value of a company has nothing to do with whether copyright applies.
- croes 3y agoUnless the value of the company is based on one product with alleged copyright infringement. OpenAI has one asset: GPT. >Commercial use does not automatically make the use copyright infringement, but it is an important deciding factor. https://saltiellawgroup.com/2021/10/%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8Bcan-you-profit-from-copyright-fair-use-what-creators-should-know/ https://saltiellawgroup.com/2021/10/%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8Bcan-yo...
- yreg 3y agoThat says nothing about the value of the company. If it's an infringement when OpenAI does it, it would be an infringement when a company with 1/1000th the value did it.
- andybak 3y agoIt's a specific legal term - so the everyday meaning of the words isn't relevant as far as I understand it.
- rimeice 3y agoThe sooner anyone making profit from models trained on creators proprietary content start paying for the content they’re using the better for creators, society and even the AI companies. It’s pretty tiring hearing people argue about whether copyright law applies to AI companies or not. It applies. Just get on and sort out a proper licensing model.
- rimeice 3y agos/profit/any revenue what so ever
- Wissenschafter 3y agoIt's pretty tiring hearing people think anything like what you're saying is going to happen. The horse is out of the barn already, deal with it.
- BizarreByte 3y ago> The horse is out of the barn already, deal with it. Like leaded gas, the government can make regulations to deal with anything should they choose to. Why do you think it's okay for massive companies to freely profit off the work of others?
- Wissenschafter 3y agoLeaded gas isn't open source software. Try again.
- BizarreByte 3y agoMost of the big AI models aren't open source and even if they were? You can absolutely regulate them.
- Wissenschafter 3y ago[flagged]
- minimaxir 3y agoThe argument here seems more mad at the decline of the ability of an individual to promote their work on social media channels (which is indeed a problem that's getting worse for reasons unrelated to generative AI) rather than losing money to people making AI art with Midjourney.
- rideontime 3y agoThe point is that they no longer have a choice not to enrich profit-seeking companies with their unpaid labor, because by posting to those sites, you're generating the content they place their ads beside. And then pointing out that at least with social media, they had a choice in the matter, while AI scrapers just take it, wherever they might have posted it.
- csallen 3y agoWhy is the author so concerned about enriching profit-seeking companies?
- rideontime 3y agoFixed, should have specified "unpaid labor." Hopefully that makes it clear.
- csallen 3y agoGoing out of your way to voluntarily choose to post your work on the internet, and on social media specifically, in order to market yourself and connect with new readers, is unpaid labor? No it's not. It's being sour that you live in an interconnected world where others might find a way to benefit as a side effect of your own efforts.
- rideontime 3y agoThat's your opinion; the creator of the comic disagrees.
- wlesieutre 3y agoOn the same topic from another webcomic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/01/03/terminarter https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/01/03/terminarter (text commentary below the comic, in case your OS has decided to conceal the scroll bar from you and you didn't notice the page is longer)
- rideontime 3y agoThis would explain why I find midjourney art so hideous.
- Minor49er 3y agoI think a better explanation is that the vast majority of users don't try any prompt parameters or different styles and just rely on its default settings
- rideontime 3y agoSorry, this was a joke about the decline of "Gabe's" artistic output. I'd find midjourney's output repulsive no matter what it looked like.
- Minor49er 3y agoGot it. Though Midjourney can certainly be pushed beyond its fingerprint, so you might not be aware that a given image you've seen was generated by it or not
- rideontime 3y agoLet me be clear: it is the knowledge that an image was created with midjourney that repulses me, not the visual appeal of the image itself.
- Minor49er 3y ago
- ssgodderidge 3y agoI wonder what effects AI ripping off today's artists will have on the next generation. They will grow up with AI "art" generators. Will they be concerned enough about AI-ripping them off that the don't put out novel, "human-made" works of art? Will they put down the AI tools long enough to learn "manual" forms of art?
- 0xf00ff00f 3y agoYeah, it's over. Why would a kid want to spend thousands of hours practicing with pencil and paper, when they can get a much more impressive result by typing a couple of words on a web site?
- andybak 3y agoThe same reason there's been a huge resurgence in rediscovering "artisanal" methods in many fields. The same reason that photorealism as an artistic movement still exists despite photography existing. The same reason people still learn to play the piano.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SirMaster 3y agoBecause they find the process of creativity and creation to be a fun way to spend their time? Why do people do anything that has an arguably better and more efficient option available?
- the_af 3y agoHave you ever taken a pencil or a brush to a blank sheet of paper? Thousands of people do and produce wonderful works of art. Even before the AI craze, not everyone embraced even "plain old" digital art. The physicality of feeling a graphite pencil scratching a blank page is gratifying and cannot be reproduced by typing a prompt somewhere online.
- surfingdino 3y agoAI business model is that of a school bully who a) steals a cup of lemonade from your lemonade stand, b) drinks it, c) pees into the cup, d) sells it to others, e) convinces the cheerleaders to go around telling everyone that you are not going to be able to make or sell your own lemonade anymore.
- caconym_ 3y agoIt's a perfect example of the "if you're making a shitload of money, whatever you're doing to make it must be okay" rationalization that pervades SV and America in general.
- bloopernova 3y agoProsperity Gospel. "Everything happens due to god's plan, therefore anyone who does well is blessed by god." Bleh.
- hutzlibu 3y agoAll your points would imply that the original art was degraded somehow. How?
- artninja1988 3y agoBecause now any child can create art by typing a prompt, creating more competition for them, I guess. Very selfish thinking imo
- s1artibartfast 3y agoA school yard bully that goes to an art museum, learns how to paint, and then sells those paintings.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- madeofpalk 3y ago> But I can't even get cartoons to most people for free now, without doing unpaid work for the profit-making companies who own the most use channels of communication This is the sticking point for me. OpenAI isn't a profit-making company, but it's certainly a valuable company. A valuable company that is built from the work of content others created without transferring any value back to them. Regardless of legalities, that's wrong to me. Put it this way - you remove all the copyrighted, permission-less content from OpenAIs training, what value does OpenAI's products have? If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content.
- larrik 3y agoI thought this was more of a reference to Facebook, etc. I could be wrong, though, it's pretty vague.
- Ardon 3y agoI think it it's a reference to the media landscape, Facebook and OpenAI inclusive.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fouc 3y agoYes, OP knows that the quote is referring to platforms/media channels like youtube/facebook/google, etc. But it's also referring to profit-making companies on the internet, like OpenAI.
- robertlagrant 3y agoIt would be good to see how much it changes if you only include work that is public domain.
- notpachet 3y agoAny prompt response longer than 30 characters inevitably devolves into verbatim passages from The Iliad.
- aldousd666 3y agoI still don't get it. Why are they upset? Nothing has been taken from them. There is no alternative in midjourney that sates anyone's desire to read their comic. Just as many people are going to visit the page for the comic, if not more. Why are they complaining?
- csallen 3y ago[flagged]
- gumballindie 3y agoSadly, ai has been overtaken by thieves and sociopaths led by sama and others like him. GPL 4 here we come. Training a model with such code will require the model to be open source.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- skepticATX 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- morelisp 3y agoAs someone who still has a couple physical Cat and Girl zines, and who spent those same years writing free software for real people and not to pad a resume or force a standards committee's hand... this hits really hard.
- ilc 3y agoWhile I don't have the Cat and Girl zines. I've spent years convincing companies to open up what source code they can, or working for open source companies. I get it, though I had the day GitHub CoPilot came out and I wanted them to take a long walk off a short pier. (And I still do.)
- morelisp 3y ago> convincing companies to open up what source code they can, or working for open source companies. Yeah, no, you don't get it. Sorry.
- mirekrusin 3y agoThere is simple way to fix this. Ban private large models trained on public data, require them to be public weights. If a company wants to train large private model, they can do it with their own data.
- low_tech_punk 3y agoSome of the public data may still have license attached, so there are still challenges in provenance, attribution, and copyright. To draw a parallel in software, we have MIT licenses that allow for-profit, private use of source code in the public. The copyleft license might be more aligned to what you are envisioning?
- mirekrusin 3y agoYou can draw parallel with many things, ie. student who is learning on copyrighted work in a library.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoFor some reason the people complaining don’t agree with that either.
- mirekrusin 3y agoYou can't make everybody happy at the same time.
- niceice 3y agoIt's not simple since you can't ban it everywhere. China, India, et al. You can't ban it for open source either.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI agree that it isnt that simple, but you could still ban it. Real world policy is rarely black and white, all or nothing. An inability to prevent every instance of something is not a reason to forgo any action Just because country X has slavery, doesnt mean the US can't ban it. There may be some consequences, and disadvantages to doing so, but that is a trade off, not a show stopper. Same thing with open source. There is lots of illegal and bootlegged content that is shared on the internet, and cant be eradicated. That doesnt mean it can all be freely bought at Walmart.
- CapitalistCartr 3y agoSome comic artists took it differently. Personally, I think we're building our future on the remains of Mordor. http://www.dorktower.com/2024/01/05/putting-the-ai-into-aieeeeeee-dork-tower-05-01-23/ http://www.dorktower.com/2024/01/05/putting-the-ai-into-aiee...
- Literalyevery 3y agoYour result is art not some AI generating something which looks familiar to what you did. As far fetched as it might sound for obviuos artists: I'm also an artist when i write code and design systems and architect things. I hate software patents and if i write a really good system, i'm happy to share how i did it. I would only be pissed at someone if they just copy paste my work not if they got inspired by it.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoMy 2 cents - people often compare this AI to automation that came before say the printing press, or automatic fabric production . But it’s actually far worse. If all the calligraphers drop dead, the printing press still works. If everyone who hand makes fabrics drops dead, the automatic fabric machines continue to develop. But midjourney doesn’t work without artists, it depends on them like a parasite depends on its host. Once the host dies, the parasite is doomed. So it’s value-destroying, more vandalism than capitalism. Or maybe like Viking pillaging. It’s like the people who used to burn millions of penguins alive to convert their fat into oil. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21501-boiled-to-death-penguins-are-back-from-the-brink/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21501-boiled-to-death...
- Minor49er 3y agoWhat about training on art that's in the public domain or that's privately made specifically for training?
- its_ethan 3y ago> If all the calligraphers drop dead, the printing press still works. If all artists drop dead, MidJourney still has a trained model that will continue to work.... it relied on artists to become operational (just like the printing press and automatic looms relied on their respective artisans success) but it is not dependent on them to continue to function.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoPrinting press does not rely on work of calligraphers at all, not to become operational, not to continue functioning. new fonts and typefaces are created by an entirely different profession. Printing industry is still advancing and the number of calligraphers is basically zero. Without artists, midjourney will never learn a new style. It is not capable of advancing.
- kghe3X 3y agoI think the analogy holds. Printing presses can't produce hand-drawn calligraphy just like Midjourney can't produce art outside some boundary on it's training set. Both are limited in capability compared to humans, both have inhuman capabilities. Both required humans to initially produce value. Neither requires humans to continue to produce value.
- chankstein38 3y ago[flagged]
- shadowfacts 3y agoYou may believe it's the future and be happy to be included, but that's certainly not for everyone. > I don't get the complaint here. > Sure their ability to choose whether or not their art was commercialized was taken away That is exactly the complaint: that their agency was taken away. It's entirely reasonable to lament that loss.
- KaiserPro 3y ago> I'd love to have been added to something like MidJourney. The thing they are railing against is that they can't do that anymore 1) because someone is generating art in their style 2) because all the channels that drive traffic are controlled by apple, Google, Meta and now microsoft. 3) what little money the did make has now evaporated.
- dmazzoni 3y agoLet's say instead of AI, it was cheap artists in a third-world country reproducing art in their style. How would you feel then? That's completely legal. Artists don't own a "style". And nobody has the "right" to continue to earn money just because they did in the past.
- throwboatyface 3y agoYou can't just write an unlicensed harry potter book, or make an unlicensed sequel to Fast and Furious. Why would you think it's broadly permissible to rip off someone's comics (which have an identifiable style but also characters, etc).
- jazzyjackson 3y agowe actually get to collectively decide what the future is through legislation, it's kind of the whole idea of democracy, that we don't have to just let the richest couple of companies determine what's best for us
- chrisknyfe 3y agoThose of you who are desperately trying to soften the blow - "they're talking about facebook, not OpenAI", "it's fair use, the license terms are irrelevant", "nothing has been taken from them" - you need to allow yourself to think the thought that maybe your AI startup's business model is only valuable because of theft. You need to let yourself entertain the idea that maybe you are only getting paid a cushy tech salary because you're aiding and abetting theft. You need to at least try to learn how to draw hands, the hard way, before hopping on Midjourney and saying "art is easy, why do these artists think they deserve to get paid for this?".
- endo_bunker 3y agonothing has been taken from them
- rimeice 3y agoValue has been taken. Motivation to create has been taken if the second you upload something it gets sucked in to a model that any old person can create infinite iterations.
- Cheer2171 3y agoNothing except their ability to make a living.
- chrisknyfe 3y agoThe understanding you're missing is that artists benefit when they are credited for their work. Let's say you drew concept art for a videogame, and your name appears in the credits. You can now go to recruiters and hiring managers and say "I worked on a game that shipped" and get hired. Let's say, during hard times when you don't have a job, fans of the game you worked on notice you on twitter and say "hey I loved your work, here's $5 for your patreon." Now you can pay your medical bills this month. Their livelihood was taken from them. Midjourney is theft.
- jMyles 3y agoYou are using the word "theft" in a way which does not describe conduct that is actually theft. Not all of us participate in the form of thought control that has been euphemistically pushed as "intellectual property."
- ganzuul 3y agoIt has to be very hard to overcome the bad vibes of being in a situation like this. The technology seems indecipherable to a non-techie. The law seems indecipherable to a layman. The ethics seem indecipherable to everyone. With so much confusion, to feel that one has been treated justly it might not be enough to participate in a class-action lawsuit resolving what happened. It would help with public trust if there were available for example protocols or sites for connecting people who want to sue companies. - Just something that shows that society does support values of equality and justice.
- edent 3y agoI think the ethics are pretty clear. 1. Don't do things to people that they don't want to be done to them. 2. Do as you would be done by. It really is that simple.
- nojvek 3y agoPeople and them are quite varied though. One one hand I want better AI that can generate whatever image that comes to my mind. On the other hand I don’t want it to blatantly copy someone else’s style that they spent years making. US is pretty fucked since it has very little safety net compared to other modern countries if AI really started replacing humans. This is people’s livelihoods we are talking about. Will AI cause people to commit suicide? Yeah if it starts replacing them and they lose meaning in life.
- edent 3y ago> People and them are quite varied though. So ask permission. Do you want to have our model ingest your work? Y/N
- CaptainFever 3y ago[No answer]. Then what? Permission isn't the end-all-be-all. I don't ask for your permission to exist or walk down the street, for example. You could try to make the case that people need to ask for permission first, on a balanced-harms argument, but it's not self-evident to be true. "It's also not inherently unethical to do things that someone doesn't want, because not all wants are valid or reasonable. A child may not want to have the candy put away, but it is still done anyway." - ronsor
- runnr_az 3y agoI don't think there was an actual list of artists released, was there?
- minimaxir 3y agoIt was in a court filing: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.407208/gov.uscourts.cand.407208.129.10.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...
- runnr_az 3y agoYeah... but I don't think it's an actual list of artists that were used? Here's a relevant comment from the last discussion of this on HN: "Looking at the source tweet[1], this isn't a list of artists specifically used to train Midjourney, but instead is a list of artists used to pre-render additives that can be added to an existing prompt much faster than an arbitrary addition." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38908079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38908079
- jazzyjackson 3y agoAgreed its a bit tertiary, but how would that list of artists have any meaning if their work was not included in training? also the discovery of the list was a strong rebuttal to the (iirc) CEO of Midjourney complaining that finding the source of online images in order to ask permission / offer compensation was just too arduous a task and also that they didn't bother. Well here's a list of thousands of artist styles they bothered to identify.
- rideontime 3y agoYou raise a good point. Why doesn't Midjourney release the list of plagiarized artists?
- Imnimo 3y agoIsn't that the LAION dataset? It's publicly available.
- seshagiric 3y agoAn independent artist who was already struggling now got bamboozled by Midjourney. Instead of listing the Artist somewhere in the midst of a million attributions, every instance Midjourney draws a cartoon in the Artist's style should at least have a (clickable link) attribution to the artist's website.
- dmazzoni 3y agoBut today there are thousands of (human) artists who create original works "in the style of" other famous artists, and my understanding is that this is completely legal. Artists own a copyright to their actual works. Not to a "style". Besides, all artists learned from other artists and borrowed lots of ideas from predecessors. Why should we hold AI to a higher standard than we hold human artists to?
- axus 3y agoBecause it makes some people feel bad, and we care about their feelings?
- CaptainFever 3y agoTrue, but don't forget to take into account the harm done to the general public if you restrict the ability to "copy styles". Personally, I think that's a much larger concern.
- itishappy 3y ago> Why should we hold AI to a higher standard than we hold human artists to? Why hold it to human standards at all? It cannot be argued with, jailed, or shot. The only vaguely human thing it can do is draw kinda good.
- speedgoose 3y agoIf you ask MidJourney to mix the style of a few artists, what should the attribution be? I find the ChatGPT Dall.e solution better: if you name a style from an artist, ChatGPT will attempt to describe the style rather than using the artist name.
- Imnimo 3y agoI'm a little skeptical that this artist's work was "used to train Midjourney" just because their name appears on that list. My understanding is that the list in question is just a scraped list of artist names from Wikipedia, and was used as a list of possible styles to try in prompts, to see if CLIP happened to know them. I don't think that being on the list necessarily means that an artist's work was used to train Midjourney, nor does not being on the list mean it wasn't.
- unnamed76ri 3y agoAn easy way to tell is to instruct Midjourney to create something “in the style of ______ “ I don’t currently have a MJ subscription or I’d try it.
- qingcharles 3y agoWell, I tried it, and MJ gets thrown off by the name of the style being two generic words "cat and girl." It basically thinks you want a cat and a girl. I tried lots of variations and prompt options and I was giving too many hints. Lesson being: give yourself a name as an artist that cannot be used easily in an AI prompt. I think some musicians did this with artist names and track names that meant they couldn't easily be represented as MP3s, but could easily be printed on the tracklisting on the CD inlay.
- ShamelessC 3y agoIs the artist anonymous or something? Use their real name…
- qingcharles 3y agoWell if you call your band just a string of characters that search engines don't like, such as punctuation, math symbols etc. I think Aphex Twin did some of this. Maybe Royksopp? And I think there is band called Various Artists.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
- rafaelero 3y agoThis is an understandable but at the same time petty feeling to be attached to. Progress is more important than your right to limit the uses of your work.
- itishappy 3y ago> Progress is more important than your right to... Hard no. We progress civilization so that we (as humans) may benefit. Progress at any cost is pathological, see universal paperclips as the extreme example.
- rafaelero 3y agoI don't think we even have a choice here. It's unstopable.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoHuman laws are not natural products of the universe. It was a mistake to accept the validity of Aquinas and Hobbes arguments because we end up with conclusions like this. The concept of intellectual property is a legal fiction, a fabrication invented from whole cloth and somehow we've ended up here where it's assumed part of the natural universe. When we reverse the direction of laws from being products of human creation to reflecting the laws of the universe we're forgetting the power of their authors and in turn giving up one our agency in drafting laws from myriad possibilities, any number of which, if had been picked by chance, would have been equally erased in authorship and told to us was a natural, universal, unstoppable law.
- rafaelero 3y agoYou have a three line sentence. Come on. Write clearer. The reason I said it is unstopable is not because of a philosophical/deterministic argument. It was a figure to speech to verbalize the fact that the incentives are so strong for allowing AI to use copyright data that going against it would be a societal backwards decision. Similar to what avoiding agriculture was for previous societies that don't exist anymore.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- exabrial 3y agoSilicon Valley does not understand the concept of consent.
- ilc 3y agoOh man can that be taken out of context... and still probably be right.
- CaptainFever 3y agoConsent is not needed to copy and reuse public information.
- exabrial 3y ago^ wow
- CaptainFever 3y agoThe free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-culture_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-culture_movement
- cratermoon 3y ago[flagged]
- jazzyjackson 3y ago"no copyright intended" xD
- theLiminator 3y agoI'm not sure how to feel about this, ultimately any work you put on the internet can be used in a way to enrichen other people. If you write free software, if you write a poem, if you draw art, etc. People will be free to heavily copy or be inspired by your work (and the distinction between copy and inspire is very muddy/gray). The real question is about the scale and how "original" ai works are. Does generative ai enabling this at scale make it different than humans doing it? Is there something special about human authorship? I personally don't care if my open source code gets trained on by AI, but I'm not sure about the social contract around artistic expression.
- itronitron 3y agoLet's say I develop an AI that is trained on all of the software IDEs in existence and then make the AI available for people to generate their own IDE from a set of prompts, like "jetbrains python" or "visual studio". As the developer of the AI model am I at all accountable if people use specific prompts to generate copycats of proprietary IDEs?
- honkycat 3y ago> and without being exploited This is naive at best. Even as a kid, I saw horror stories about how badly artists were exploited. I watched my parents struggle. I never experienced anything near poverty, but I definitely experienced the fear and anxiety of standing on the precipice of it. I remember taking up the responsibility of helping my profoundly depressed and grieving mother sort through the mail of our family business and seeing how far behind we were. This was a few years before we sold everything to avoid bankruptcy, which was also around the time I left for college. I'm not complaining about this. I think it was good for me. It bred a cynicism and understanding in me: this world isn't fair. It isn't going to get better. You are going to have to fight for the life you want, and you will probably still lose. I understand the desire to pass gently over the earth. But this has never been a kind world, and has not become any MORE kind since 1999. This is, I think, an example of toxic optimism. Many people over-estimate the likelihood of a positive outcome. Not to make excuses for Midjourney. They should have asked permission from artists to use their work.
- czzr 3y agoI wasn’t familiar with cat and girl, so I looked at a few random comics, and stumbled across this one: https://catandgirl.com/heroes-and-villains/ https://catandgirl.com/heroes-and-villains/ The universe, I’m sometimes convinced, has a dark sense of humour.
- Jackson__ 3y agoSo can midjourney replicate the art style or not? I was seeing a lot of back and forth on whether that list was actually used to train, and I haven't seen a single artist manage to claim that their style can accurately be replicated.
- suddenexample 3y agoIt's sad to me that so many in this community side with OpenAI/etc against the artists. It's understandable, because these companies have created a very cool and useful technology. But I think the arguments - from "it's not technically copying, it's just viewing copyrighted material and then producing its own version like a human is allowed to do" to "intellectual property/copyright is inherently flawed" - come from a lack of understanding. Let's make an analogy that more people here will understand. If you built an app for your startup, and OpenAI trained on its source code such that any prompter could produce an app that's virtually identical with no effort - would that be OK with you? Would you claim that copyright is in fact irrelevant and that this doesn't constitute copying?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nmz 3y agoWith that whole harvard plagiarism debacle, I must say this is the new normal, copyright and accreditation is a thing of the past. The only way forward is plagiarism and outsourcing your work, the only ones who will make the money will be the ones who offer the quickest way of offering the work, no matter its quality. A world for AI to AI. As morals erodes, 20 years from now, there will be no instagram/tik tok/facebook, it will be machine generated from current events that may or may not happen, nobody will know a hallucination from reality. You might be able to go to a journalism hub. but those also use AI generation to focus on the most clickbaity title.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- arnaudsm 3y agoAnd AI is only accelerating an already existing trend. Freebooting and content farms have existed for a decade now. I wish too that consumers will grow tired of low-quality stolen/generated content, but that is not the case yet. Take some horrific YouTube Kids content farms that are still churning billions of views for example.
- gandalfgeek 3y agoA: model is influenced by artist's work, output of model influences human work. B: human influenced/inspired by artist's work In both scenarios (A) and (B), the activity may or may not be commercial. Why are we so much more worried about (A), when (B) is considered totally fine, even desirable? Please note neither A nor B involve verbatim copying.
- mvolfik 3y agoI think a good reason to be more worried about A is outlined in this sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39017576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39017576 - humans have limited capacity, AI models are able to produce content at unmatched speed and quantity
- xyproto 3y agoPeople that consume copyrighted content are also copying some of it into their brain.
- niceice 3y agoWhether this is bad or good or should be banned or not is functionally irrelevant. There is nothing that can be done short of terminating the global internet. Sure you could ban it in the US and Europe, but you can't in China, et al. You can't ban it everywhere. You can't ban open source. Art has been democratized. It's not going back in the bottle. A kid with a laptop anywhere on the planet will be able to compete with the largest Hollywood studio in the near future.
- madeofpalk 3y agoYou can't ban torrents, but Netflix still pays rights holders for movies.
- spicybbq 3y ago> Sure you could ban it in the US and Europe, but you can't in China, et al. The same can be said for enforcing intellectual property rights, and we do enforce IP in western countries despite other countries not respecting those rights. We could end up where models can only be legally trained with public domain IP, enforced by regulation, royalties, private causes of action, etc. You may like things the way they are, but it's false that "nothing" can be done to change it.
- chrisknyfe 3y agoAnd yet, Comcast and AT&T will gladly terminate any customer on their network pirating copyrighted works from large corporate owners. It seems to me like we very much can do something about AI infringement.
- CaptainFever 3y agoDoes that actually happen often, if you use a VPN or live in one of the countries that don't care about piracy?
- JeremyNT 3y ago> There is nothing that can be done short of terminating the global internet. Sure you could ban it in the US and Europe, but you can't in China, et al. You can't ban it everywhere. You can't ban open source. Ah yes, the Nirvana Falacy. [0] Microsoft, Google, etc are corporations that operate within a legal framework. You can quite readily claw back some of their profits from such ill-gotten gains and redistribute them to the creators who they currently intend to put out of work. "Oh, but some pirate will do it! Oh, but China will do it! So why not let those poor megacorporations do it, too!" So what. The megaorporations who nominally answer to and respect the rule of law are the lion's share of this problem. They can be made to stop. Solve them and you're 90% there, don't get bogged down in the other 10%. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
- bloopernova 3y agoIs "training a neural net" an entirely novel legal construct? At what point does fair use become unfair, and should that question be considered separately from the context of doing it trillions of times? And the further context of the resulting computer code being used to make a profit?
- tuna74 3y agoThat was really good and insightful!
- voidhorse 3y agoBefore the advent of cameras, and likely still in some cases, several painters would have companies that predominantly reproduced the works of a known artist and sold them so that you could have a nice replica of a famous painting in your home. One might think that tools like mid journey are much within the same category, but I think there is a key difference. The system of reproduction up to this point has largely been centered on successful and renowned artists—the only way you'd make money is by reproducing something that already had a lot of value to people, and it was also incredibly clear that it was a reproduction. In this case, things have changed. Now, the vast works of largely obscure artists are partially reproduced, and in a fashion that further occludes their source. These artists rightly feel robbed as they endure the treatment of a van gogh without the riches of fame or the palliative of death before fame.
- bann 3y agoNowadays life is like this (exploit or be exploited). You need to secure your future with what you have (context: micro, macro). In many situations, you need to break country-related rules or be temporarily anti-ethic to thrive(reduce costs and/or risks), but in the long term comply with what is sold to investors (if any). Authoritarians win today because they have a strong ego-driven 'why' to stay in power, but they are detrimental to the rest of societies or even on the organizational level and the 'why's' of every other individual. Make the decisions that suit your current needs, including deciding if it is time to go away for good. If you risk too many times but can't reach any relevant material success in a context that is unfavorable. Where you need to be an entrepreneur to make serious money. Sometimes deciding to give up can be the only way to see. I'm not endorsing suicide to anyone, but it can be part of everyone's life just once, and then it is finished. 'No suffering' can be now or surely later, and you will most likely "rejoin" in the next chapter of an infinite book of human lives depending on your beliefs in this life because nobody knows the truth behind that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- danShumway 3y agoThe comment section is going to be filled with people saying that this is fair use, and I'm sympathetic to that argument (even though I do feel like we should be mature enough thinkers to have the capability to tell the difference between the morality of building on top of a commons and plundering it). I'm very openly not a copyright maximalist; I think there's real danger in equating training to copyright infringement, and I think it's an argument that might come back to bite artists in the future -- I do worry that the current lawsuits are misguided. However, in every single conversation about fair use, two followup questions need to be asked: 1. If you're making the argument that AI's "learning" from existing pieces is just like a human learning from existing pieces, then you're indirectly comparing that AI to a human being. So let's be consistent about that analogy: commissioning or working with a human artist to produce a piece of art does not grant you copyright over that art. To people who are saying that AIs training are just like humans learning from art, do you support the idea that AI-generated works can not be copyrighted? Because that's the consistent view of AI as analogues for human training: commissioning humans doesn't grant you copyright. 2. If we're viewing AI training as fair use, then is it fair use to circumvent the licenses on these models in order to train other models on them? The majority of these commercial tools have explicit clauses in their terms of service to prevent their use when training other AIs. Is it fair use to circumvent that TOS? If the TOS is in a different category that somehow magically gets rid of the fair use question, then if an artist puts up a TOS in front of viewing a piece of artwork that says it may not be used to train AIs, does training on that art stop being fair use? It doesn't make sense that one shrinkwrap license would be OK and one wouldn't be. If Midjourney has a legal case that circumventing its TOS and gaining access isn't fair use, then artists should be able to put up a click-through in front of images that includes an agreement not to train and that should be legally enforceable. If artists can't do that, if artists can't legally enforce terms of use in front of artwork about how that artwork can be used, then commercial companies building these models shouldn't be able to either. ---- It's not that the fair use argument doesn't hold any water, it's that people tend to be very selective about how they want that argument applied. And I think that's revealing. Taking a step back from those questions: It's somewhat frustrating to have debates on this because the debates are very abstract and are disconnected from the completely bad-faith way in which these arguments are often proposed. You're forced to debate in a very dry way, and what you really want to do is step back and say, "none of these companies actually believe in open culture, all of them are copyright maximalists when it's convenient, none of them care about accessibility of art tools, they just want to plunder the culture and insert themselves as middlepeople between art and the people who make art." We all know this is a grift. We know what these companies actually believe, but we have to pretend we're having some kind of emotionless conversation about "Open" models and to look at their uses as if the primary intended audience is people using image generators to make printouts for their local D&D campaigns. But come on, that's not the reality that's ever going to happen. That kind of indie, low-cost usage and Open access can't exist in the long-term if these models are intended to be the commercial powerhouses that companies want. Monetization of their output and access necessarily requires restriction of their output and access. The truth that we all kind of know deep down is that these models are about inserting a monetary layer between human beings and art, a layer that is owned by private corporations and is deliberately used (regardless of its quality or suitability) to devalue labor and to poison the resources that these models were built on in order to reduce competition and to give gatekeepers more leverage over their workforces and their markets. It's a tragedy of the commons being played out in real time: the creation of a service that just like every other privatized platform will become crappier and worse over time as more control over model use is taken away and as prices increase and as restrictions over usage are increasingly layered on top normal individuals who will increasingly need to ask permission in order to create. At the same time, businesses hope that model usage will shrink and dilute the fields that are necessary to sustain those models, fields that are now treated as competitors, and who's destruction is desirable because the elimination of that resource makes it harder to replicate or compete with established AI models. As is very often the case, the goal is to get up a ladder and then pull the ladder up. That doesn't mean that this isn't fair use (although as someone who advocates very strongly for expansion of fair use and heavy reduction of copyright, I will say that fair use and morality are two entirely different subjects). But we can advocate for fair use without pretending that the companies and grifters making these arguments actually believe them. Actual ubiquitous open access to AI art tools would be toxic to a company like Midjourney; Midjourney's entire business model relies on them constructing an artificial moat in front of the production of art that forces creators to give them money. And the existence of that moat relies on Midjourney being able to restrict what people can do with their model, it can not exist without strong legal protections around copyright and licensing agreements. If Midjourney actually believed in free culture and free use, they wouldn't be launching a private model behind Discord with a bunch of ridiculous license terms telling people what does and doesn't count as fair use when using Midjourney. They wouldn't be pretending that model outputs are covered by copyright. As far as I'm concerned, every single "license" in front of model weights or model output is an admission that the companies behind those models don't actually believe in the fair use argument. They're just saying it because it's convenient. I would love to have a purely intellectual debate about AI as a genuinely open tool that can fit into artists' belts alongside other tools. I would love to ignore the hype cycle and the spammers and the grifters who all couldn't care less about making creation accessible or expanding the scope of what artists create. But unfortunately, I can't; there's a real world that exists alongside that hypothetical debate, and we are allowed to look at that real world for context. And I can be sympathetic to the fair use argument while still recognizing the utter hypocrisy behind how companies actually use that argument, and while still recognizing that the direction that large companies are pushing AI and the way they want to use AI is toxic to real artists. ---- That doesn't mean I'm panicking about it any more than I'm panicking about GPT trying to program. I understand the limitations of these tools as well, and a little bit of perspective goes a long way. But I still understand why artists are upset. I don't always agree with the specific arguments but it's not just them being sore losers or something, they have a legitimate grievance with the AI market even if they don't always perfectly know how to put it into words. And in a lot of ways, this doesn't really have anything to do with the quality of the output or about what's "better" or "fair" anyway; that's not really what the debate is about. Midjourney would be perfectly happy to live in a world where all art gets kind of crappy and repetitive as long as everybody uses Midjourney to produce it. They don't care, they just want you to pay them every time you generate a picture. So the social dynamics around the market are very different from the technical dynamics or even the philosophical arguments that people make.
- ReflectedImage 3y agoRegular artists take a large number of other artists work and combine them together to produce new art works. Midjourney is performing the same blending function as regular artists. It's hard to see why one is any different from the other other than a human is involved.
- kibbi 3y agoI'd find it hard to argue against this, or the Penny Arcade's statements, since I'm having trouble understanding their concrete arguments in between the rhetoric. I'd be hesitant to even discuss this in their comment sections or social media channels. One might ask: Under what circumstances would AI art be acceptable then? For example, does it really matter if these models are created by large corporations? I don't see what the legal or ethical difference would be if it was an individual who created such a model. Is it relevant whether their artworks were used in the training data? Well, what if a new model that is trained only on public domain photos, videos and artworks turns out to be just as capable? What if a future model is able to imitate an art style after seeing merely one or two examples of it? It might just be a matter of time until such a model is developed. Would it be alright then? If not, why? (Personally, I think it's the responsibility of the AI model user to use the AI art legally and ethically, as if the user made the image themselves.)
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI think these are the interesting question. Especially if the user provided the context Style for samples. It's currently fair use to give an artist paintings and say I want something like this but different in these ways. You can tell a script writer to watch Star Wars and write something similar. Questions of copyright will depend on if the output is sufficiently transformative, not if copyrighted work was used as inspiration
- causal 3y agoThat question - "Under what circumstances would AI art be acceptable then?" - is definitely not asked enough. And I think taking time to make it acceptable is a worthwhile goal, part of the path, not an obstacle.
- romwell 3y ago> "Under what circumstances would AI art be acceptable then?" Easy! Under the circumstances where the artists whose art was used to train the model explicitly consented to that (without coercion), licensed their art for such use, and were fairly compensated for that. Plenty of artists would gladly paint for AI to learn from — just like stock photographers, or clip art designers, or music sample makers. Somehow, "paying for art" isn't an idea that has entered the minds of those who use the art. Perhaps because it wasn't asked enough.
- owenversteeg 3y agoThis is certainly the first commentary on the subject that made me _feel_ anything, so hats off to the author. The generative AI that is changing the world today was built off the work of three groups - software developers, Reddit comment writers, and digital artists. The Reddit comment writers released their rights long ago and do not care. We are left with software developers and digital artists. In general, the software developers were richly paid, the digital artists were not. The software developers released their work open to modification; the artists did not. Perhaps most importantly, software developers created the generative AIs, so in a way it is a creation of our own; cannibalizing your own profession is a much different feeling than having yours devoured by another alien group. If Washington must burn, let it be the British and not the Martians. How might we have reacted if what has been done was not by our own hand?
- slowhadoken 3y agoMidjourney is not art, it’s theft by proxy. LLMs aren’t A.I., they’re stochastic copy and paste chatbots.
- Kiro 3y agoCopying is not theft. Are we hackers or RIAA lobbyists?
- slowhadoken 3y agoThat’s a naive and insidious line of reasoning. Free art and code should stay that way. Any company making a profit off of it through LLMs is unethical. It’s the opposite of open source.
- Kiro 3y agoImagine if someone told me during the Pirate Bay showtrial that in the future I would see fellow hackers turn into copyright and intellectual property zealots.
- slowhadoken 3y agoI’ve been around since before Pirate Bay and you’re conflating two separate issues. Don’t be melodramatic. You’re advocating for corporate poachers.
- orangesite 3y agoScans through all the comments… nope not a single person picked up on what the original post was saying… y'all just arguing about whether you can be a fucking cunt and get away with it or not.
- Dah00n 3y agoIf it is "allowed by copyright law" what about anything non-American they used? Chinese? Russian? Does the AI know and uphold all nation's laws or do they just think the US will protect them?
- vagab0nd 3y agoEvolve or die. The world is cruel. This is true for everyone. Due to human nature, we will make AI increasingly capable at an exponential pace. Eventually, our efforts to control them will become futile, and humans will no longer be the dominant species. Luckily, we are uniquely positioned in evolution to prevent this. We must merge with AI.
- vagab0nd 3y agoTaking this further, why would future newborns even care if they are AI or meat? It's really just us trying to cling on to our pathetic consciousnesses. It's quite sad and pointless, really, but it means the world to us.
- gmerc 3y agoFirst they came for the artists The voice actors The translators And when they finally came for the tech bros, the entire world cheered. soon.
- midtake 3y agoI find it difficult to sympathize with stick figure artists. At least penny arcade has a distinct style. But with the stick figure artists I just feel a sense of disgust and don't really care if their "art" gets consumed by diffusion models. I know I'm being unfair but I think it's important to say the quiet part out loud so we can all be aware of which way the wind blows, because I can't be alone in this feeling. If the class action lawsuit presents the justices with a bunch of soyboys clamoring about AI stealing their "hard work" I have a hard time imagining them ruling against AI.
- imgabe 3y agoConsiders profit "unethical", gives work away for free, mad that people take free work and use it for their own purposes. You can't have it both ways. You can either give stuff away and realize that once you give it away you have no control over what anyone does with it, or you can charge for it and get paid up front (and ultimately still have no control over what happens to it after it leaves your hands). Are you making art because you want to share your vision or what? If so, then share it and be glad that your vision got out there. If not, charge for your work and make sure you get paid first. Don't whine and cry that you didn't get paid after you decided that getting paid was evil or whatever.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoGiving something for free doesn’t mean giving it for others to make a profit. We have copyright and other legal rules for a reason. Likewise, many open source licenses don’t allow for people to profit off what you donated to the world. It’s not a forgone conclusion that everything must be exploited for money by someone.
- imgabe 3y agoIn theory, sure. In practice, if you don't have the money to file the lawsuits to enforce it, no you don't. And if you think making money is unethical or exploitative, then it's unlikely you are going to be able to have the money to enforce whatever rules you think anyone who uses the stuff you put out there for free should follow.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI see, so theft is right so long as you get away with it? Fortunately you actually can lodge lawsuits in such cases even if you can’t afford it so long as you find either a lawyer who works on contingency in expectation of a settlement or one who believes in something. In this case, almost any lawyer in the field of copyright would be eager to simply make their name with a case that sets precedent in such an important domain. Fwiw, I make a considerable amount of money, yet also write and contribute to free software. I think it’s unethical and exploitive to take my labor given for free to the community and claim it as your own for your personal enrichment. I think I’m not alone in this specific community on hacker news. So, in theory you’re right. In practice, the libertarian ideal of mad max exploitation of anything you can find not bolted down appeals to a few small number of people, and the rest of us are happy to defend artists and creators from that small population.
- 6510 3y agoimho everything came crumbling down when folk [even developers] stopped making websites. Took whatever one could from generous others then gave nothing back. We search google then find a spam page repeating our question, then we blame google! LOL In the old days, if you had an interesting question, you would write down your progress in a draft blog post, you would polish it (or not at all) and present the answer to those looking to do the same or you would leave it to your comment section for others to rage about the problem, sometimes answer it for you, sometimes they would write a post of their own. If things are good enough someone will link to it... but now? Nothing is ever good enough? If everything is anonymized dumped on on stack overflow no one maintains it. There is no free flow of dialog about the topic. It tries to be all work, no fun. Who wrote this stuff? What else did they do? Why are all these wrong answers on the page? Anyway, to state the obvious, Google doesn't make websites.
- golol 3y agoThere's a certain prevalent belief that I consider a fallacy, which is that if A profits from B, then that must be to the detriment of B and B is being exploited. Irregarding of whether midjourney is exploiting the authors, the author draws a comparison to instagram. He claims him posting his art there is unlaid labour as instagram profits from it, and hence he is being expliited when he does so. That comparison weakens his case for me, as I do not agree with the above implication.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoIn my house my wife and I have a saying: "Trade benefits both parties by definition." We say it often as a kind of ward against evil. The zero sum thinking that leads one to feel they're getting gypped in a given deal is almost never actually the case in a free market society. You always have the option to, if a deal provides no value to you, simply leave it on the table and move on with your life. However, I always mentally add an important word to the beginning: Voluntary trade benefits both parties by definition. Who decides what is considered voluntary? If this market square is the only one in town I can sell in without being beaten up, is selling there voluntary? What if it's just the case that no one wants to go to my random grocery stall in the woods? I've come to conclude that's ultimately an ethical question, not an economic one. Hence the eternal bickering. So from a certain point of view, I could see why my handy ward against evil could just be seen as another way the capitalistic regime imposes its will. One of the fun things about the internet is all the edge cases it creates along this very boundary.
- golol 3y agoTruth is, there are many platforms where you can distribute your works very effectively while ads are being shown, so there is at least competition, severalarket squares. There are also many ways to distribute your works lrss effectively where ads aren't being shown, so you have that option too. It just sucks because guess in comparison because hosting and distributing just costs some money.
- nathias 3y ago'profit as unethical' is a toxic idea that has ruined many good people
- dorkwood 3y agoI was arguing with an artist the other day about this. I said that Midjourney copies the work of artists the same way that all human artists "copy" each other (checkmate, in my opinion). They pointed out that Midjourney wasn't a person and that I shouldn't treat it like one. They went on to say that it was a bit like enlisting a cheetah in a sprinting event, and that the game was still fair because the rule book didn't specifically outlaw the participation of cheetahs, and because the cheetah had to obey all the same rules that humans were bound by, such as gravity and requiring food for energy. I pointed out that this was obviously not the same, since the entire game falls apart if you let a cheetah play by the same rules as a human. They didn't seem to understand that, though.
- boxed 3y ago> I pointed out that this was obviously not the same, since the entire game falls apart if you let a cheetah play by the same rules as a human. I think that was exactly their point. And a better one than your.
- johhns4 3y agoI think you made the point for him, "the entire game falls apart if you let [AI] play by the same rules as a human."
- turok 3y ago> Blocked on this page0 (0%) Please feel free to include adverts as a means to monetize your work, my first impulse was to disable uBlock on your page.