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Computers and machines have been capable of mass production for decades, and humans have used them as tools. In the past 170 years, these tools of mass producti

Computers and machines have been capable of mass production for decades, and humans have used them as tools. In the past 170 years, these tools of mass production have already diminished many thousands of professions that were staffed by people who had to painstakingly craft things one at a time. Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models, when many other technologies were allowed to bloom despite killing other existing business models? Nobody can really answer these questions.

bluefirebrand 3y ago
> Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? It shouldn't be. As soon as someone makes an AI that can produce it's own artwork without requiring ingesting every piece of stolen artwork it can, then I'm on board. But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as that.
- csallen 3y ago
  Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you know any artists that lived in a box their whole life and never saw other art? Do you know any writers who'd never read a book? Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings? Also, FYI, you can't steal digital artwork. You can only commit copyright infringement, which is not the same crime as theft, because theft requires depriving the owner of something in their possession.
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    > Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you know any artists that lived in a box their whole life and never saw other art? Do you know any writers who'd never read a book? > Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings? This still is pretending that humans and AI models are equivalent actors and should have the same rights Emphatically no they shouldn't. The capabilities are vastly different. Fair use should not apply to AI.
    - Ukv 3y ago
      > Emphatically no they shouldn't. The capabilities are vastly different. Fair use should not apply to AI. Fair use applies even to use of traditional algorithms, like the thumbnailing/caching performed by search engines. If I make a spam detector network, why should it not be covered by fair use?
      - rideontime 3y ago
        No idea on the legality, but common sense suggests that the difference would be that a spam detector doesn't replace the products that it was trained on, while AI-generated "art" is intended to replace human artists.
        Ukv 3y ago
        > common sense suggests that the difference would be that a spam detector doesn't replace the products that it was trained on The extent to which it supplants the original work is one of the fair use considerations. I think it'd make more sense to have a stance of "current LLMs and image generators should be judged by fair use factors and I believe they'd fail", though I'd still disagree, instead of having machine learning models subject to a different set of rules than humans and traditional algorithms.
        rideontime 3y ago
        That is indeed the most common stance. There isn't nearly as much outcry over, say, image classification by LLMs, as there is over AI "art" generation.
        shagie 3y ago
        The question is "is it a derivative work of the original?" - not if it is a generative work. If that was the distinction to be made, using ChatGPT as a classifier would be acceptable while using it to write new spam (see the "I am sorry" amazon listings of the other day) would be unacceptable. If two different uses of a tool allow for both infringing and non-infringing uses (are photocopiers allowed to make copies(!) of copyrighted works?) it has generally been the case that the tool is allowed and the person with agency to either use the copyrighted work in an infringing or a non-infringing way is the one to come under scrutiny. I believe that if it is found that OpenAI is found to have committed copyright infringement in training the model, then an argument that training a model on spam be considered to be copyright infringement could be reasonably constructed. If, on the other hand, OpenAI is found to have sufficiently transformative in its creation of the model and some uses are infringing, then it is the person who did the infringing (as with a photocopier or a printer printing off a copy of a comic from the web) that should be have legal consequences.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    > Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? This sounds so detached from human experience that I am tempted to ask if you are a human or just a disembodied spirit that haunts the internet. When the first neanderthal drew a deer on the walls of a cave, where did they get inspiration? When a little child draws a tree for the first time, where do they draw inspiration? Do you think they were reviewing works of Picasso? When the firm man made an axe, chopped a tree, made a bed, sown some clothes, discovered fire, where did they draw inspiration? Do you not have eyes, ears, do you not perceive and get inspiration from the natural world around you?
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      Yeah, but that’s not really your sole source of inspiration. My son has been ‘inspired’ by the art of all other kids in his kindergarden. Certainly by the time he gets to the age where he does it professionally he’s been inspired by an uncountable number of people.
      - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        What % is his independent inspiration? 30%? 90%? There are certainly people for whom it was 90%. For most we don’t know. We do know one thing for sure - that for AI it’s 0%
        mlyle 3y ago
        We don't know what percentage is independent inspiration for a person using the AI to create art. Once upon a time it was a contentious idea that humans had significant authorship in photographs, which merely mechanically captured the world. What % is the camera's independent inspiration? Here, we have humans guiding what's often a quite involved process of synthesis of past human (and machine) creation.
        bluefirebrand 3y ago
        > We don't know what percentage is independent inspiration for a person using the AI to create art The person using the AI doesn't matter in the equation. They aren't an artist, they're a monkey with a typewriter. We're talking about the AI here, because it can generate the same images no matter which monkey with a typewriter is typing the prompts.
  - guappa 3y ago
    > Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you think art was there before humans? Or humans made art? If you believe the 1st proposition… please tell me about your very unique religion! If not… you've answered your own question.
  - eggdaft 3y ago
    > Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Logically, the answer to this is (almost certainly) yes, so you’ll need to discount this argument. If the answer were no, then either an infinite number of humans have lived (such that there was always a previous artist to learn from), or it was true in the past but false in the present, which seems unlikely given humans brains have generally become more and not less sophisticated over time. I presume what you’re missing here is that the brain can be inspired from other sources than human art. For example: nature; life experience; conversation. Not making any other comment about what machines can or can’t do, just wanted to point out this argument is invalid as it comes up a lot and is probably grounded in ignorance around the artistic process. It’s such a strange idea to suggest that the artist process is ingesting lots of art to make more art. That’s such a weird world view. It’s like insisting every artist is making art the way Quentin Tarantino makes films. I’ve spent a lot of time with artists, I’ve worked with them, I’ve been in relationships with artists, and I can tell you the great ones see the world differently. There’s something about their brains that would cause them to create art even if born on a desert island without other human contact. Some of them don’t even take an interest in other art. In fact, those artists that _do_ make art heavily based on other artists’ work as suggested are often derided as “derivative” and “unoriginal”.
- Ukv 3y ago
  > But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as that. Do you feel the same way about tools like Google Translate?
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    Tbh I'm not familiar enough with how Google Translate is built, but if it's ingesting tons of people's work without their permission so it can be used to replace them then yes I do.
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      For what it's worth: that's pretty much how Translate works. Translate operates at a large-chunk resolution, and one of the insights in solving the problem was the idea that you can often get a pretty-good-enough translation by swapping a whole sentence for another whole sentence. So they ingest vast amounts of pre-translated content (the UN publications are a great source, because they have to be published in the language of every member nation), align it for sentence- and paragraph-match, and feed the translation engine at that level. It's created an uncanny amount of accuracy in the result, and it's basically fed wholesale by the diligent work of translators who were not asked their consent to feed that beast. Almost nobody bats an eye about this because the value (letting people using different languages communicate with each other) grossly outstrips the opportunity cost of lost human translator work, and even the translators are, in general, in favor of it; they aren't going to be displaced because (a) it doesn't really work in realtime (yet), (b) it can't handle any of the deeper signal (body language, tone, nuance) of face-to-face negotiation, and (c) languages are living things that constantly evolve, and human translators handle novel constructs way better than the machines do (so in high-touch political environments, they matter; the machines have replaced translators in roles like "rewriting instruction manuals" that were always pretty under-served in the first place).
      - skydhash 3y ago
        Google translate is very basic and not even close to something good if you already know both languages. Useful if you're translating to your language (you do the correction when reading), but can lead to confusion the other way.
- theLiminator 3y ago
  What about code? Or what about if we eventually robot labourers that is trained on observing human labourers?
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Code has licenses too. And we've had very high profile lawsuits based on "copying code". >what about if we eventually robot labourers that is trained on observing human labourers? Interesting point, but by that point in time I don't think generative art will even be in the top 10 ethical dilemmas to solve for "sentient" robots. As it is now, robots aren't the ones at the helm grabbing data for themselves. Humans give orders (scripts) and provide data and what/where to obtain that data.
nullptr_deref 3y ago
Redacted.
- csallen 3y ago
  Mass production hasn't killed art and never will. What's killing art is this idea by a vocal minority of "artists" that they need to mass produce their work, enter the market, and attempt to make millions of dollars by selling and distributing it to millions. That's not art. That's capitalism. That's competing to produce something that customers will want to buy more than what your competitors offer. If you want to compete on the capitalistic marketplace, then compete on the capitalistic marketplace. But if you want to be an artist, be an artist. Art is still alive and well and always will be. Every day I see people singing because they love singing, making pottery because they love making pottery, writing because they love writing. Whether other people love or enjoy their art, the artist may or may not care. Whether they can profit from their art, the artist may or may not care. But many billions of artists will keep creating, crafting, and designing day after day, and they will never be stopped by AI or anything else.
  - nullptr_deref 3y ago
    Redacted.
    - csallen 3y ago
      Jobs have never been less soul crushing, or more creative, in the history of humanity. And that becomes increasingly true every decade. Do you know what a job does? What a company does? It contributes to society! It produces something that someone else values. That they value so much they're willing to pay for it. Being part of this isn't a bad thing. It's what makes society work. A job/company entertains. It keeps things clean. It transports people to where they need to go. It produces. It gives people things they want. It creates tools, and paints, and nails, and shirts. I look out my window, and I see people delivering furniture, chefs cooking food and selling it out of trucks, keepers maintaining grounds, people walking dogs. Being useful to the fellow members of your society for 40 hours a week is not "soul crushing."
robryan 3y ago
What if the AI was solely trained on this person's work, then from that churned out a similar replacement that was monetized?
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? Because in this case the art is still necessary for the machine to work. You don't need horse buggies to make a car, nor existing books to make a printing press. You DO need artist's art to make these generative AI tools work. If these worked purely off of open source art or from true scratch, I wouldn't personally have an issue. >Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models, We don't need to kill it. Just pay your dang labor. But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it. Maybe in the 2010's tech would have the goodwill to pull this off in PR, but the 2020's have drained that goodwill and then some. Tech's made so many promises to make lives easier and now they joined the very corporations they claimed to fight against. >Nobody can really answer these questions. Well it's in courts, so someone is going to answer it soon-ish
- csallen 3y ago
  > We don't need to kill it. Just pay your dang labor. > But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it. That's just it, nobody looking to get paid by OpenAI actually did any labor for OpenAI. They did labor for other reasons, and were happy with it. OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet benefits by learning from the images of their fellow artists. OpenAI just uses technology to do it much more efficiently. This has never been considered labor in the past. We've never asked artists to "properly compensate" each other for learning/inspiration in the past. I don't know why it should be considered labor or proper compensation now. But we shall see what the courts decide!
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >They did labor for other reasons, and were happy with it. True, sadly most of those copyright are probably owned by other megacorp. So they either collude to surppess the entire industry or eat each other alive in legal clashes. The latter is happening as we speak (the writers for NYT are probably long retired, but NYT still owns the words) so I guess we'll see how that goes. >OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet benefits by learning from the images of their fellow artists. If we treat AI like humans, art historically has an equally thin line between inspiration and plagiarism. There are simply more objective metrics to measure now because we can indeed go inside an AI's proverbial brain. So the metaphor is pretty apt, except with more scrutiny able to be applied.
3asdf123 3y ago
Well art predates other professions by like thousands of year so it rightfully earned it's privileges.
visarga 3y ago
Just the people in this discussion thread, devs and antrepreneurs, have probably automated a huge amount of work. But here we are bickering about AI and copyrights like its a new thing.

bluefirebrand 3y ago

> Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? It shouldn't be. As soon as someone makes an AI that can produce it's own artwork without requiring ingesting every piece of stolen artwork it can, then I'm on board. But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as that.

csallen 3y ago
Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you know any artists that lived in a box their whole life and never saw other art? Do you know any writers who'd never read a book? Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings? Also, FYI, you can't steal digital artwork. You can only commit copyright infringement, which is not the same crime as theft, because theft requires depriving the owner of something in their possession.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  > Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you know any artists that lived in a box their whole life and never saw other art? Do you know any writers who'd never read a book? > Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings? This still is pretending that humans and AI models are equivalent actors and should have the same rights Emphatically no they shouldn't. The capabilities are vastly different. Fair use should not apply to AI.
  - Ukv 3y ago
    > Emphatically no they shouldn't. The capabilities are vastly different. Fair use should not apply to AI. Fair use applies even to use of traditional algorithms, like the thumbnailing/caching performed by search engines. If I make a spam detector network, why should it not be covered by fair use?
    - rideontime 3y ago
      No idea on the legality, but common sense suggests that the difference would be that a spam detector doesn't replace the products that it was trained on, while AI-generated "art" is intended to replace human artists.
      - Ukv 3y ago
        > common sense suggests that the difference would be that a spam detector doesn't replace the products that it was trained on The extent to which it supplants the original work is one of the fair use considerations. I think it'd make more sense to have a stance of "current LLMs and image generators should be judged by fair use factors and I believe they'd fail", though I'd still disagree, instead of having machine learning models subject to a different set of rules than humans and traditional algorithms.
        rideontime 3y ago
        That is indeed the most common stance. There isn't nearly as much outcry over, say, image classification by LLMs, as there is over AI "art" generation.
      - shagie 3y ago
        The question is "is it a derivative work of the original?" - not if it is a generative work. If that was the distinction to be made, using ChatGPT as a classifier would be acceptable while using it to write new spam (see the "I am sorry" amazon listings of the other day) would be unacceptable. If two different uses of a tool allow for both infringing and non-infringing uses (are photocopiers allowed to make copies(!) of copyrighted works?) it has generally been the case that the tool is allowed and the person with agency to either use the copyrighted work in an infringing or a non-infringing way is the one to come under scrutiny. I believe that if it is found that OpenAI is found to have committed copyright infringement in training the model, then an argument that training a model on spam be considered to be copyright infringement could be reasonably constructed. If, on the other hand, OpenAI is found to have sufficiently transformative in its creation of the model and some uses are infringing, then it is the person who did the infringing (as with a photocopier or a printer printing off a copy of a comic from the web) that should be have legal consequences.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? This sounds so detached from human experience that I am tempted to ask if you are a human or just a disembodied spirit that haunts the internet. When the first neanderthal drew a deer on the walls of a cave, where did they get inspiration? When a little child draws a tree for the first time, where do they draw inspiration? Do you think they were reviewing works of Picasso? When the firm man made an axe, chopped a tree, made a bed, sown some clothes, discovered fire, where did they draw inspiration? Do you not have eyes, ears, do you not perceive and get inspiration from the natural world around you?
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Yeah, but that’s not really your sole source of inspiration. My son has been ‘inspired’ by the art of all other kids in his kindergarden. Certainly by the time he gets to the age where he does it professionally he’s been inspired by an uncountable number of people.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      What % is his independent inspiration? 30%? 90%? There are certainly people for whom it was 90%. For most we don’t know. We do know one thing for sure - that for AI it’s 0%
      - mlyle 3y ago
        We don't know what percentage is independent inspiration for a person using the AI to create art. Once upon a time it was a contentious idea that humans had significant authorship in photographs, which merely mechanically captured the world. What % is the camera's independent inspiration? Here, we have humans guiding what's often a quite involved process of synthesis of past human (and machine) creation.
        bluefirebrand 3y ago
        > We don't know what percentage is independent inspiration for a person using the AI to create art The person using the AI doesn't matter in the equation. They aren't an artist, they're a monkey with a typewriter. We're talking about the AI here, because it can generate the same images no matter which monkey with a typewriter is typing the prompts.
- guappa 3y ago
  > Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you think art was there before humans? Or humans made art? If you believe the 1st proposition… please tell me about your very unique religion! If not… you've answered your own question.
- eggdaft 3y ago
  > Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Logically, the answer to this is (almost certainly) yes, so you’ll need to discount this argument. If the answer were no, then either an infinite number of humans have lived (such that there was always a previous artist to learn from), or it was true in the past but false in the present, which seems unlikely given humans brains have generally become more and not less sophisticated over time. I presume what you’re missing here is that the brain can be inspired from other sources than human art. For example: nature; life experience; conversation. Not making any other comment about what machines can or can’t do, just wanted to point out this argument is invalid as it comes up a lot and is probably grounded in ignorance around the artistic process. It’s such a strange idea to suggest that the artist process is ingesting lots of art to make more art. That’s such a weird world view. It’s like insisting every artist is making art the way Quentin Tarantino makes films. I’ve spent a lot of time with artists, I’ve worked with them, I’ve been in relationships with artists, and I can tell you the great ones see the world differently. There’s something about their brains that would cause them to create art even if born on a desert island without other human contact. Some of them don’t even take an interest in other art. In fact, those artists that _do_ make art heavily based on other artists’ work as suggested are often derided as “derivative” and “unoriginal”.
Ukv 3y ago
> But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as that. Do you feel the same way about tools like Google Translate?
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  Tbh I'm not familiar enough with how Google Translate is built, but if it's ingesting tons of people's work without their permission so it can be used to replace them then yes I do.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    For what it's worth: that's pretty much how Translate works. Translate operates at a large-chunk resolution, and one of the insights in solving the problem was the idea that you can often get a pretty-good-enough translation by swapping a whole sentence for another whole sentence. So they ingest vast amounts of pre-translated content (the UN publications are a great source, because they have to be published in the language of every member nation), align it for sentence- and paragraph-match, and feed the translation engine at that level. It's created an uncanny amount of accuracy in the result, and it's basically fed wholesale by the diligent work of translators who were not asked their consent to feed that beast. Almost nobody bats an eye about this because the value (letting people using different languages communicate with each other) grossly outstrips the opportunity cost of lost human translator work, and even the translators are, in general, in favor of it; they aren't going to be displaced because (a) it doesn't really work in realtime (yet), (b) it can't handle any of the deeper signal (body language, tone, nuance) of face-to-face negotiation, and (c) languages are living things that constantly evolve, and human translators handle novel constructs way better than the machines do (so in high-touch political environments, they matter; the machines have replaced translators in roles like "rewriting instruction manuals" that were always pretty under-served in the first place).
    - skydhash 3y ago
      Google translate is very basic and not even close to something good if you already know both languages. Useful if you're translating to your language (you do the correction when reading), but can lead to confusion the other way.
theLiminator 3y ago
What about code? Or what about if we eventually robot labourers that is trained on observing human labourers?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Code has licenses too. And we've had very high profile lawsuits based on "copying code". >what about if we eventually robot labourers that is trained on observing human labourers? Interesting point, but by that point in time I don't think generative art will even be in the top 10 ethical dilemmas to solve for "sentient" robots. As it is now, robots aren't the ones at the helm grabbing data for themselves. Humans give orders (scripts) and provide data and what/where to obtain that data.

nullptr_deref 3y ago

Redacted.

csallen 3y ago
Mass production hasn't killed art and never will. What's killing art is this idea by a vocal minority of "artists" that they need to mass produce their work, enter the market, and attempt to make millions of dollars by selling and distributing it to millions. That's not art. That's capitalism. That's competing to produce something that customers will want to buy more than what your competitors offer. If you want to compete on the capitalistic marketplace, then compete on the capitalistic marketplace. But if you want to be an artist, be an artist. Art is still alive and well and always will be. Every day I see people singing because they love singing, making pottery because they love making pottery, writing because they love writing. Whether other people love or enjoy their art, the artist may or may not care. Whether they can profit from their art, the artist may or may not care. But many billions of artists will keep creating, crafting, and designing day after day, and they will never be stopped by AI or anything else.
- nullptr_deref 3y ago
  Redacted.
  - csallen 3y ago
    Jobs have never been less soul crushing, or more creative, in the history of humanity. And that becomes increasingly true every decade. Do you know what a job does? What a company does? It contributes to society! It produces something that someone else values. That they value so much they're willing to pay for it. Being part of this isn't a bad thing. It's what makes society work. A job/company entertains. It keeps things clean. It transports people to where they need to go. It produces. It gives people things they want. It creates tools, and paints, and nails, and shirts. I look out my window, and I see people delivering furniture, chefs cooking food and selling it out of trucks, keepers maintaining grounds, people walking dogs. Being useful to the fellow members of your society for 40 hours a week is not "soul crushing."

robryan 3y ago

What if the AI was solely trained on this person's work, then from that churned out a similar replacement that was monetized?

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? Because in this case the art is still necessary for the machine to work. You don't need horse buggies to make a car, nor existing books to make a printing press. You DO need artist's art to make these generative AI tools work. If these worked purely off of open source art or from true scratch, I wouldn't personally have an issue. >Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models, We don't need to kill it. Just pay your dang labor. But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it. Maybe in the 2010's tech would have the goodwill to pull this off in PR, but the 2020's have drained that goodwill and then some. Tech's made so many promises to make lives easier and now they joined the very corporations they claimed to fight against. >Nobody can really answer these questions. Well it's in courts, so someone is going to answer it soon-ish

csallen 3y ago
> We don't need to kill it. Just pay your dang labor. > But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it. That's just it, nobody looking to get paid by OpenAI actually did any labor for OpenAI. They did labor for other reasons, and were happy with it. OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet benefits by learning from the images of their fellow artists. OpenAI just uses technology to do it much more efficiently. This has never been considered labor in the past. We've never asked artists to "properly compensate" each other for learning/inspiration in the past. I don't know why it should be considered labor or proper compensation now. But we shall see what the courts decide!
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >They did labor for other reasons, and were happy with it. True, sadly most of those copyright are probably owned by other megacorp. So they either collude to surppess the entire industry or eat each other alive in legal clashes. The latter is happening as we speak (the writers for NYT are probably long retired, but NYT still owns the words) so I guess we'll see how that goes. >OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet benefits by learning from the images of their fellow artists. If we treat AI like humans, art historically has an equally thin line between inspiration and plagiarism. There are simply more objective metrics to measure now because we can indeed go inside an AI's proverbial brain. So the metaphor is pretty apt, except with more scrutiny able to be applied.

3asdf123 3y ago

Well art predates other professions by like thousands of year so it rightfully earned it's privileges.

visarga 3y ago

Just the people in this discussion thread, devs and antrepreneurs, have probably automated a huge amount of work. But here we are bickering about AI and copyrights like its a new thing.