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This is a tired argument; whether or not the diffusion models are "learning", they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists, and should be resisted for

This is a tired argument; whether or not the diffusion models are "learning", they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists, and should be resisted for that reason alone.

persnickety 3y ago
As a representative of a lot of things but hardly any capital who uses diffusion models to get something I would otherwise not pay a human artist for anyway, I testify that, the models are not exclusively what you describe them to be. I do not support indiscriminate banning of anything and everything that can potentially be used to fuck someone over.
- NoraCodes 3y ago
  I did not say they were exclusively that; I said they were that. Once we as a society have implemented a good way for the artists whose work powers these machines to survive, you can feel good about using them. Until then, frankly, you're doing something immoral by paying to use them.
  - akx 3y ago
    What if I run Stable Diffusion locally without paying anyone anything? Is it less immoral?
    - NoraCodes 3y ago
      Marginally, yeah, since you're not supporting the development of more capable labor-saving devices in this category. I'm still not a fan, though.
      - riversflow 3y ago
        How is empowering others to create not a moral good?
        NoraCodes 3y ago
        It is! This method of doing so has overwhelming negative externalities, though. I'd expect anyone who actually gave a shit about AI empowering people to create to spend just as much effort pushing legislation so the displaced artists don't starve on the street as a result.
  - Filligree 3y ago
    Who pays to use generators? The open ones are way more capable and interesting, generally.
    - wokwokwok 3y ago
      Is that really your concern? Whether you pay for it? Let’s put it this way: paying for or not paying for stolen goods. Does it make any difference? Why is that remotely relevant? You want to argue “are the good stolen?” Sure. That’s a discussion we can have. Did you pay for them or not? Who cares?
      - thfuran 3y ago
        That's a terrible analogy. Until the scrapers start deleting all other copies of what what they're scraping, "stealing" the art in a traditional sense, there's no harm done in the process of training the network. Any harm done comes after that.
    - jsheard 3y ago
      Isn't high-quality open image generation almost entirely dependent on Stability releasing their foundational models for free, at great expense to them? That's not something you'll be able to rely on long-term, there won't always be a firehose of venture capital money to subsidise that kind of charity.
      - Filligree 3y ago
        The cost of training them is going down, though. Given the existence of models like Pixart, I don’t think we’ll stay dependent on corporate charity for long.
  - Levitz 3y ago
    By this logic we ought to start lynching artists, why they didn't care about all of those who lost their jobs making pigments, canvasses, pencils, brushes etc etc
    - hirsin 3y ago
      Artists pay those people and make their jobs needed. Same as the person above claiming Duchamp didn't negotiate with the ceramics makers - yes, they absolutely did and do pay their suppliers. Artists aren't smash and grabbing their local Blick. AI pays no artist.
      - CaptainFever 3y ago
        Not digital artists, though.
      - Levitz 3y ago
        >Artists pay those people and make their jobs needed. Enter factories, now you gather all the knowledge from those who made the product, automate it and leave them without jobs.
    - NoraCodes 3y ago
      Why on earth would you choose the word 'lynch' here? At worst I'm suggesting mild disapproval and regulation, not historically racist mob violence.
SonicSoul 3y ago
great comment! imagine being a photographer that takes decades to perfect their craft. sure another student can study and mimic your style. but it's still different than some computer model "ingesting" vast amount of photos and vomiting something similar for $5.99 in aws cpu cost so that some prompt jockey can call themselves an AI artist and make money off of other peoples talent. i get that this is cynical and does not encompass all ai art, but why not let computers develop their own style wihout ingesting human art? that's when it would actually be AI art
- wincy 3y ago
  Like 99.9% of the art the common people care about is Darth Vader and Taylor Swift and other pop culture stuff like that. These people literally don’t care what your definition of what is and isn’t art is, or how it’s made, they just want a lock screen wallpaper of themselves fighting against Thanos on top of a volcano. The argument of “what is art” has been an academic conversation largely ignored by the people actually consuming the art for hundreds of years. Photography was just pop culture trash, comics were pop culture trash, stick figure web comics were pop culture trash. Today’s pop culture trash is the “prompt jockey”. I make probably 5-10 pictures every day over the course of maybe 20 minutes as jokes on Teams because we have Bing Chat Enterprise. My coworkers seem to enjoy it. Nobody cares that it’s generated. I’m also not trying to be an “artist” whatever that means. It just is, and it’s fun. I wasn’t gonna hire an artist to draw me pictures to shitpost to my coworkers. It’s instead unlocked a new fun way to communicate.
  - SonicSoul 3y ago
    not entirely sure what your point is, but i think you are saying that art is just a commodity we use for cheap entertainment so it's ok for computers to do the same? in the context of what i was saying the definition of what is art can be summed up as anything made by humans. i have no problem when its used in memes and being open sourced etc.. the issue i have is when a human invests real time into it and then its taken and regurgitated without their permission. do you see that distinction?
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
witherk 3y ago
"Cameras are a tool of captial to fuck over human portrait artists" It's funny that these people use the langauge of communism, but apparently see artwork as purley an economic activity.
- NoraCodes 3y ago
  That's an intentional misinterpretation, I think. I mention art as an economic activity because it's primarily professional artists that are harmed by the widespread adoption of this technology.
- indigo0086 3y ago
  They tried to use the labor theory early on by claiming, "real art takes hard work and time as opposed to the miniscule cpu hours computers use to make 'AI art". The worst thing AI brings to the table is amplifying these types of sentiments to control industry in their favor where they would otherwise be unheard and relegated to Instagram likes
- redwall_hp 3y ago
  > It's funny that these people use the langauge of communism, but apparently see artwork as purley an economic activity. You hit the nail on the head. Copyright is, by its very nature, a "tool of capital." It's a means of creating new artificial property fiefdoms for a select few capital holders to lord over, while taking rights from anyone else who wants to engage in the practice of making art. Everyone has their right to expression infringed upon, all so the 1% of artists can perpetually make money on things, which are ultimately sold to corporations that only pay them pennies on the dollar anyway. You, as an indie hip hop or house musician supported by a day job, can't sample and chop some vocals or use a slice of a chord played in a song (as were common in the 80s and 90s) for a completely new work, but apparently the world is such a better place because Taylor Swift is a multimillionaire and Disney can milk the maximum value from space and superhero films. I'd rather live in a world where anyone is free to make whatever art they want, even if everyone has to have a day job.
  - skydhash 3y ago
educaysean 3y ago
As a human artist I don't feel the same as you, and I somehow doubt that you care all that much about what we think anyways. You already made up your mind about the tech, so don't feel the need to protect us from "a tool of capital [sic]" to fortify your argument.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- NoraCodes 3y ago
  My opinion is based on my interactions with my friends who are artists. I admit freely to caring less about what people I don't know say, in the absence of additional evidence.
- tester457 3y ago
  Among working human artists your opinion is in the minority. Most professionals are not a fan of this.
  - bongodongobob 3y ago
    Yeah because their wage is inflated. Photographers were mad about digital cameras too. Womp womp.
    - tester457 3y ago
      Inflated is not an apt descriptor of artist wages, those are known to be low.
      - bongodongobob 3y ago
        If you're independent selling paintings, sure. Designing packaging or something commercial? 4 hours of work a week for nearly 6 figures. I know a couple graphic designers and they don't do shit for what they're paid.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists So are the copyright and intellectual property laws that artists rely on. From my perspective, you are the capital and I am the one being fucked. So are you ready to abolish all that?
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  Right. This new outrage is just the copyright owners realising that their power is not safe. Where is the outrage when self checkouts happened?
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Copyright owners indeed. That's what these artists are. They're copyright owners. Monopolists. They are the capital. Capitalism is all about owning property. Copyright is intellectual property. Literally imaginary property. Ownership of information, of bits, of numbers. These artists are the literal epitome of capitalism. They enjoy state granted monopolies that last multiple human lifetimes. We'll be long dead before their works enter the public domain. They want it to be this way. They want eternal rent seeking for themselves and their descendants. At least one artist has told me exactly that in discussions here on HN. They think it's fair. They are the quintessential representation of capital. And they come here to ask us to "resist" the other forms of capital on principle. I'm sorry but... No. I'm gonna resist them instead. It's my sincere hope that this AI technology hammers in the last nails on the coffin of copyright and intellectual property as a whole. I want all the models to leak so that it becomes literally impossible to get rid of this technology no matter how much they hate it. I want it to progress so that we can run it on our own machines, so that it'll be so ubiquitous it can't be censored or banned no matter how much they lobby for it.
    - NoraCodes 3y ago
      > It's my sincere hope that this AI technology hammers in the last nails on the coffin of copyright and intellectual property as a whole. If it does, I will give you one thousand United States dollars, and you can quote me on thst whenever you like. More likely, big companies will retain control as they always have (via expensive lawyers), and individual artists will get screwed.
dartharva 3y ago
Exactly. Artists should drop the pretentious philosophical bumbling and accept what this is, a fight for their livelihood. Which is, in every sense, completely warranted and good. Putting blame on the technology and trying to limit public access to software will not go anywhere. Your fight for regulation needs to be with publishers and producers, not with the teen trying to make a cool new wallpaper or the office-man trying to make an aesthetic powerpoint presentation.

This is a tired argument; whether or not the diffusion models are "learning", they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists, and should be resisted for that reason alone.

persnickety 3y ago

As a representative of a lot of things but hardly any capital who uses diffusion models to get something I would otherwise not pay a human artist for anyway, I testify that, the models are not exclusively what you describe them to be. I do not support indiscriminate banning of anything and everything that can potentially be used to fuck someone over.

NoraCodes 3y ago
I did not say they were exclusively that; I said they were that. Once we as a society have implemented a good way for the artists whose work powers these machines to survive, you can feel good about using them. Until then, frankly, you're doing something immoral by paying to use them.
- akx 3y ago
  What if I run Stable Diffusion locally without paying anyone anything? Is it less immoral?
  - NoraCodes 3y ago
    Marginally, yeah, since you're not supporting the development of more capable labor-saving devices in this category. I'm still not a fan, though.
    - riversflow 3y ago
      How is empowering others to create not a moral good?
      - NoraCodes 3y ago
        It is! This method of doing so has overwhelming negative externalities, though. I'd expect anyone who actually gave a shit about AI empowering people to create to spend just as much effort pushing legislation so the displaced artists don't starve on the street as a result.
- Filligree 3y ago
  Who pays to use generators? The open ones are way more capable and interesting, generally.
  - wokwokwok 3y ago
    Is that really your concern? Whether you pay for it? Let’s put it this way: paying for or not paying for stolen goods. Does it make any difference? Why is that remotely relevant? You want to argue “are the good stolen?” Sure. That’s a discussion we can have. Did you pay for them or not? Who cares?
    - thfuran 3y ago
      That's a terrible analogy. Until the scrapers start deleting all other copies of what what they're scraping, "stealing" the art in a traditional sense, there's no harm done in the process of training the network. Any harm done comes after that.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    Isn't high-quality open image generation almost entirely dependent on Stability releasing their foundational models for free, at great expense to them? That's not something you'll be able to rely on long-term, there won't always be a firehose of venture capital money to subsidise that kind of charity.
    - Filligree 3y ago
      The cost of training them is going down, though. Given the existence of models like Pixart, I don’t think we’ll stay dependent on corporate charity for long.
- Levitz 3y ago
  By this logic we ought to start lynching artists, why they didn't care about all of those who lost their jobs making pigments, canvasses, pencils, brushes etc etc
  - hirsin 3y ago
    Artists pay those people and make their jobs needed. Same as the person above claiming Duchamp didn't negotiate with the ceramics makers - yes, they absolutely did and do pay their suppliers. Artists aren't smash and grabbing their local Blick. AI pays no artist.
    - CaptainFever 3y ago
      Not digital artists, though.
    - Levitz 3y ago
      >Artists pay those people and make their jobs needed. Enter factories, now you gather all the knowledge from those who made the product, automate it and leave them without jobs.
  - NoraCodes 3y ago
    Why on earth would you choose the word 'lynch' here? At worst I'm suggesting mild disapproval and regulation, not historically racist mob violence.

SonicSoul 3y ago

great comment! imagine being a photographer that takes decades to perfect their craft. sure another student can study and mimic your style. but it's still different than some computer model "ingesting" vast amount of photos and vomiting something similar for $5.99 in aws cpu cost so that some prompt jockey can call themselves an AI artist and make money off of other peoples talent. i get that this is cynical and does not encompass all ai art, but why not let computers develop their own style wihout ingesting human art? that's when it would actually be AI art

wincy 3y ago
Like 99.9% of the art the common people care about is Darth Vader and Taylor Swift and other pop culture stuff like that. These people literally don’t care what your definition of what is and isn’t art is, or how it’s made, they just want a lock screen wallpaper of themselves fighting against Thanos on top of a volcano. The argument of “what is art” has been an academic conversation largely ignored by the people actually consuming the art for hundreds of years. Photography was just pop culture trash, comics were pop culture trash, stick figure web comics were pop culture trash. Today’s pop culture trash is the “prompt jockey”. I make probably 5-10 pictures every day over the course of maybe 20 minutes as jokes on Teams because we have Bing Chat Enterprise. My coworkers seem to enjoy it. Nobody cares that it’s generated. I’m also not trying to be an “artist” whatever that means. It just is, and it’s fun. I wasn’t gonna hire an artist to draw me pictures to shitpost to my coworkers. It’s instead unlocked a new fun way to communicate.
- SonicSoul 3y ago
  not entirely sure what your point is, but i think you are saying that art is just a commodity we use for cheap entertainment so it's ok for computers to do the same? in the context of what i was saying the definition of what is art can be summed up as anything made by humans. i have no problem when its used in memes and being open sourced etc.. the issue i have is when a human invests real time into it and then its taken and regurgitated without their permission. do you see that distinction?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago

witherk 3y ago

"Cameras are a tool of captial to fuck over human portrait artists" It's funny that these people use the langauge of communism, but apparently see artwork as purley an economic activity.

NoraCodes 3y ago
That's an intentional misinterpretation, I think. I mention art as an economic activity because it's primarily professional artists that are harmed by the widespread adoption of this technology.
indigo0086 3y ago
They tried to use the labor theory early on by claiming, "real art takes hard work and time as opposed to the miniscule cpu hours computers use to make 'AI art". The worst thing AI brings to the table is amplifying these types of sentiments to control industry in their favor where they would otherwise be unheard and relegated to Instagram likes
redwall_hp 3y ago
> It's funny that these people use the langauge of communism, but apparently see artwork as purley an economic activity. You hit the nail on the head. Copyright is, by its very nature, a "tool of capital." It's a means of creating new artificial property fiefdoms for a select few capital holders to lord over, while taking rights from anyone else who wants to engage in the practice of making art. Everyone has their right to expression infringed upon, all so the 1% of artists can perpetually make money on things, which are ultimately sold to corporations that only pay them pennies on the dollar anyway. You, as an indie hip hop or house musician supported by a day job, can't sample and chop some vocals or use a slice of a chord played in a song (as were common in the 80s and 90s) for a completely new work, but apparently the world is such a better place because Taylor Swift is a multimillionaire and Disney can milk the maximum value from space and superhero films. I'd rather live in a world where anyone is free to make whatever art they want, even if everyone has to have a day job.
- skydhash 3y ago

educaysean 3y ago

As a human artist I don't feel the same as you, and I somehow doubt that you care all that much about what we think anyways. You already made up your mind about the tech, so don't feel the need to protect us from "a tool of capital [sic]" to fortify your argument.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NoraCodes 3y ago
My opinion is based on my interactions with my friends who are artists. I admit freely to caring less about what people I don't know say, in the absence of additional evidence.
tester457 3y ago
Among working human artists your opinion is in the minority. Most professionals are not a fan of this.
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  Yeah because their wage is inflated. Photographers were mad about digital cameras too. Womp womp.
  - tester457 3y ago
    Inflated is not an apt descriptor of artist wages, those are known to be low.
    - bongodongobob 3y ago
      If you're independent selling paintings, sure. Designing packaging or something commercial? 4 hours of work a week for nearly 6 figures. I know a couple graphic designers and they don't do shit for what they're paid.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

> they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists So are the copyright and intellectual property laws that artists rely on. From my perspective, you are the capital and I am the one being fucked. So are you ready to abolish all that?

CaptainFever 3y ago
Right. This new outrage is just the copyright owners realising that their power is not safe. Where is the outrage when self checkouts happened?
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Copyright owners indeed. That's what these artists are. They're copyright owners. Monopolists. They are the capital. Capitalism is all about owning property. Copyright is intellectual property. Literally imaginary property. Ownership of information, of bits, of numbers. These artists are the literal epitome of capitalism. They enjoy state granted monopolies that last multiple human lifetimes. We'll be long dead before their works enter the public domain. They want it to be this way. They want eternal rent seeking for themselves and their descendants. At least one artist has told me exactly that in discussions here on HN. They think it's fair. They are the quintessential representation of capital. And they come here to ask us to "resist" the other forms of capital on principle. I'm sorry but... No. I'm gonna resist them instead. It's my sincere hope that this AI technology hammers in the last nails on the coffin of copyright and intellectual property as a whole. I want all the models to leak so that it becomes literally impossible to get rid of this technology no matter how much they hate it. I want it to progress so that we can run it on our own machines, so that it'll be so ubiquitous it can't be censored or banned no matter how much they lobby for it.
  - NoraCodes 3y ago
    > It's my sincere hope that this AI technology hammers in the last nails on the coffin of copyright and intellectual property as a whole. If it does, I will give you one thousand United States dollars, and you can quote me on thst whenever you like. More likely, big companies will retain control as they always have (via expensive lawyers), and individual artists will get screwed.

dartharva 3y ago

Exactly. Artists should drop the pretentious philosophical bumbling and accept what this is, a fight for their livelihood. Which is, in every sense, completely warranted and good. Putting blame on the technology and trying to limit public access to software will not go anywhere. Your fight for regulation needs to be with publishers and producers, not with the teen trying to make a cool new wallpaper or the office-man trying to make an aesthetic powerpoint presentation.