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We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, whose existence and names we will never know or acknowledge. The way these models are creative is the same way

We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, whose existence and names we will never know or acknowledge. The way these models are creative is the same way humans are. The artist that painted Mona Lisa didn't credit any of the influences and inspirations that they had. Just as cameras made many artists redundant, so too will every other new tool, and not just artist but pretty much every job. But there are still people that weave baskets, and people are prepared to pay the premium to get a product that was 'hand-made'. While receiving the credit that you are deserved is nice and fair. The world doesn't work that way.

padolsey 3y ago
"The world doesn't work that way". Quite pessimistic a position to hold here, no? We–in technology especially–are in positions of significant leverage. We should be talking about how we can limit the negatives and bolster the positives from these generative models. The world can work in a different way if we put enough energy into it. We don't have to stand by as subjects of inertia. That is why OpenAI and others are treading carefully, trying to trigger some kind of momentum of reflection instead of letting our base demons run amok.
- Avicebron 3y ago
  That's a massively charitable reading on their actions, whenever I see a "thought leader" behind these companies talk about how careful they are being, I just see marketing. Someone desperately trying to impress upon everyone how revolutionary their model and by extension they are, it's kind of sad..
  - padolsey 3y ago
    I definitely see it as self-serving too, yes, but I also see it as a convenient temporary alignment of incentives. The world and its regulators definitely need time to adjust and educate themselves, so I'm glad for now that they're exercising restraint.
deergomoo 3y ago
None of the examples you’ve given are even remotely the same thing. > The artist that painted Mona Lisa didn't credit any of the influences and inspirations that they had. This is not “influence and inspiration”, this is companies feeding other people’s work into a commercial product which they sell access to. The product would be useless without other people’s work, therefore they should be compensated. > Just as cameras made many artists redundant, so too will every other new tool, and not just artist but pretty much every job. The camera enabled something that was not possible before, and I wasn’t built by taking the work of sketch artists and painters. It was an entirely new form of art and media. The only thing this stuff revolutionises is new ways to not pay people. I find the implications deeply depressing.
- ttoinou 3y ago
  Da Vinci also made money from the painting, and the Louvres continues to do so right now. They didn't credit his influence and inspiration. This is not sad. The camera did enable painters to pretend they were, for hours, at a scene they painted, but instead they painted photographs from others. Artists are not angels, they do the same "bad" things than OpenAI
  - jonplackett 3y ago
    Da Vinci was just a man though. He was able to produce one or perhaps two paintings at a time. He was not able to create a monopoly on the creation of paintings across the entire world and undercut the price and ability of all other painters. It’s not a sensible comparisons.
    - throwuwu 3y ago
      In what way does anyone have a monopoly on generated images and video? Last I checked there were several major players and more startups than you can shake a stick at.
      - jakub_g 3y ago
jaystraw 3y ago
my name is timothy basket -- you're saying people have stolen my weave?! end sarcasm. but seriously -- claiming you made something you didn't isn't ok. but it happens, regardless of laws or regulations or norms. i don't have any solutions; the internet helps because you can publish something and point to it. i'm a musician and sometimes i only realize well after the fact how influenced i was by something after the fact for a song i've written. and of course, my precious baskets.
mihaic 3y ago
I don't really want to weave baskets, that's what I'd want a machine to do. "The world doesn't work that way" - I've seen this so often, but the most incredible thing about humans was the optimism to be able to change how the world worked -- that's the main impetus of most revolutions. Personifying computer programs also is an error, it's like saying that bombs kill people when there has to be a person dropping them (at least until we get Skynet).
- LoveMortuus 3y ago
  >I don't really want to weave baskets, that's what I'd want a machine to do. In my free time I like to code games, I don't have money to pay for an artist, nor the time/will to learn how to draw, that's what I'd want a machine to do. I do agree with you that personifying computer programs is an error. That's also why I avoid calling these AI, because they're FAR from that. But I do believe that there will come a day, where personifying a computer program will be a real question.
pera 3y ago
Artists do credit their teachers (Verrocchio in the case of da Vinci), schools, sources of inspiration and influences, so I'm confused by this comment. What kind of acknowledgement did you have in mind?
- s3p 3y ago
  What kind of acknowledgement should AI be giving?
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    if the producers of these models weren't incentivized to hide their training data it would be almost trivial to at least retrieve the images most similar to the content produced some images will be maximally distant from training examples but midjourney repainting frames from "harry potter" could very easily automatically send a check to jk rowling per generation these AI start ups are just trying to have a free lunch in a very mature industry
- spookybones 3y ago
  Yeah, some of these comments are clearly made by people who don't actually know the history of art.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    I'm not even sure the commenter knew who "the artist that painted Mona Lisa" was when they made that comment.
jonplackett 3y ago
da Vinci is a silly comparison. He is just one man. Even he didn’t have such great ability that he can put all other artists out of business. This is more like the invention of weaving machines. Yes we still have weavers but no where near as many.
camillomiller 3y ago
It is absolutely not the same, and saying so disregards centuries of knowledge stratification. These machine produce superficial artifacts that lack any layering of meaning of semantic capital (see Luciano Floridi). They are the byproduct of the engineering extremism and lack of humanities knowledge of the people getting rich through their creation.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  If what you say is true then people will still value non-superficial artifacts. However the mass produced semi-superficial artifact creators that were being created before AI will adapt or suffer.
- chefandy 3y ago
  Models learn exactly like artists, and also, for some reason, the person that uses those models are artists making art. Wait… Artists learn by passively ingesting many millions pieces of media someone feeds them for the non-specific purpose of “generating art” so some person who wants to take credit for making the end piece can tell them exactly what to make, right?
- nostrebored 3y ago
  If the lack of humanities education is what allows us to create the most abundance of art in human history, was that education really worth it?
TaupeRanger 3y ago
> The way these models are creative is the same way humans are We have no idea how human creativity works, but we know with certainty that it doesn't involve a Python program sucking in pixel data and outputting statistical likelihoods.
- jerojero 3y ago
  You know, Ive seen people do amazing things with math equations. Beautiful visualisations. As these tools improve and it becomes more possible for us to actually take our ideas into images and videos that fit a sort of "yes this is what I want" bill we are going to see amazing things come out. I mean, a few days ago I saw this clearly AI generated video of some wizards doing snowboard and having a blast in the mountains. It's one of the funniest things I've seen in a while, simply so ridiculous. Obviously someone had the idea "I want to make a video of wizards doing snowboard in a mountain" that's where creativity lies. So to say "creativity doesn't involve a python program outputting statistical likelihoods" imo is just you saying you're not creative enough to know what to do with the tools you've been given. Some people when they see a strawberry they see a fruit. Others see endless dishes where the fruit is just an ingredient.
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    rude obviously you can use python to create works of art whether a python script can itself be creative is the question posed by OP, but you went with "you're just not creative enough to get it"
- ben_w 3y ago
  Those Python programs are (loosely) inspired by how organic brains work. (I still have on my to-do list "learn more about why Hebbian learning is different from gradient descent and how much those differences matter").
- eric_cc 3y ago
  We do have, at the very least, an idea about how human creativity works and it is an input output pattern.
spunker540 3y ago
I agree and actually think the camera was definitely more disruptive to artists than this AI stuff, and somehow the camera didn’t kill artists.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
reactordev 3y ago
“whose existence and names we will never know or acknowledge.” That’s the problem. We know their names. We know their stories, their contributions. Babbage. Lovelace. Ritchie. Spielberg. Picasso. Rembrandt. This is what giving attribution is all about. So we don’t just stand there asking how we got here.
soperj 3y ago
This is nonsense, people give credit to their influences all the time.
- nostrebored 3y ago
  To the influences that they know. Our brain isn’t an attribution machine. When a musician recreates a chord progression that they’ve heard before without noticing it, is that theft? If a comedian accidentally retells a joke, is that theft? Our influences are subtle and often inscrutable.
goatlover 3y ago
> The world doesn't work that way. The human world works that way humans make it work. Pretty much what Jody Foster's character in the movie Contact told that asshole trying to steal all the credit from her, and take her place in the mission to go visit alien dad in Pensacola.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
IAmGraydon 3y ago
>The way these models are creative is the same way humans are. The artist that painted Mona Lisa didn't credit any of the influences and inspirations that they had. I'm continually amazed at how many people argue against this point on HN, which is largely biased toward logical discourse. What you just said is exactly right, and is the Achilles heel of the legal arguments against generative AI. If what they are doing illegal, then so is the human act of creativity. If human creativity is legal, then so is generative AI trained on existing art. What has yet to come is the mass realization (or perhaps, admission) that the way AI works is no different from the way we work.
sebastiennight 3y ago
This reads like a wildly confident statement about art. While at the same time not mentioning the actual name of "the artist that painted Mona Lisa" (Leonardo Da Vinci), nor knowing that the name of his master is very well known, and even the influence of artists that he seemed to despise (eg Michaelangelo) are very well documented as well. Maaybe this narrow view of (art) history needs to be fine-tuned on more data :-)

padolsey 3y ago

"The world doesn't work that way". Quite pessimistic a position to hold here, no? We–in technology especially–are in positions of significant leverage. We should be talking about how we can limit the negatives and bolster the positives from these generative models. The world can work in a different way if we put enough energy into it. We don't have to stand by as subjects of inertia. That is why OpenAI and others are treading carefully, trying to trigger some kind of momentum of reflection instead of letting our base demons run amok.

Avicebron 3y ago
That's a massively charitable reading on their actions, whenever I see a "thought leader" behind these companies talk about how careful they are being, I just see marketing. Someone desperately trying to impress upon everyone how revolutionary their model and by extension they are, it's kind of sad..
- padolsey 3y ago
  I definitely see it as self-serving too, yes, but I also see it as a convenient temporary alignment of incentives. The world and its regulators definitely need time to adjust and educate themselves, so I'm glad for now that they're exercising restraint.

deergomoo 3y ago

None of the examples you’ve given are even remotely the same thing. > The artist that painted Mona Lisa didn't credit any of the influences and inspirations that they had. This is not “influence and inspiration”, this is companies feeding other people’s work into a commercial product which they sell access to. The product would be useless without other people’s work, therefore they should be compensated. > Just as cameras made many artists redundant, so too will every other new tool, and not just artist but pretty much every job. The camera enabled something that was not possible before, and I wasn’t built by taking the work of sketch artists and painters. It was an entirely new form of art and media. The only thing this stuff revolutionises is new ways to not pay people. I find the implications deeply depressing.

ttoinou 3y ago
Da Vinci also made money from the painting, and the Louvres continues to do so right now. They didn't credit his influence and inspiration. This is not sad. The camera did enable painters to pretend they were, for hours, at a scene they painted, but instead they painted photographs from others. Artists are not angels, they do the same "bad" things than OpenAI
- jonplackett 3y ago
  Da Vinci was just a man though. He was able to produce one or perhaps two paintings at a time. He was not able to create a monopoly on the creation of paintings across the entire world and undercut the price and ability of all other painters. It’s not a sensible comparisons.
  - throwuwu 3y ago
    In what way does anyone have a monopoly on generated images and video? Last I checked there were several major players and more startups than you can shake a stick at.
    - jakub_g 3y ago

jaystraw 3y ago

my name is timothy basket -- you're saying people have stolen my weave?! end sarcasm. but seriously -- claiming you made something you didn't isn't ok. but it happens, regardless of laws or regulations or norms. i don't have any solutions; the internet helps because you can publish something and point to it. i'm a musician and sometimes i only realize well after the fact how influenced i was by something after the fact for a song i've written. and of course, my precious baskets.

mihaic 3y ago

I don't really want to weave baskets, that's what I'd want a machine to do. "The world doesn't work that way" - I've seen this so often, but the most incredible thing about humans was the optimism to be able to change how the world worked -- that's the main impetus of most revolutions. Personifying computer programs also is an error, it's like saying that bombs kill people when there has to be a person dropping them (at least until we get Skynet).

LoveMortuus 3y ago
>I don't really want to weave baskets, that's what I'd want a machine to do. In my free time I like to code games, I don't have money to pay for an artist, nor the time/will to learn how to draw, that's what I'd want a machine to do. I do agree with you that personifying computer programs is an error. That's also why I avoid calling these AI, because they're FAR from that. But I do believe that there will come a day, where personifying a computer program will be a real question.

pera 3y ago

Artists do credit their teachers (Verrocchio in the case of da Vinci), schools, sources of inspiration and influences, so I'm confused by this comment. What kind of acknowledgement did you have in mind?

s3p 3y ago
What kind of acknowledgement should AI be giving?
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  if the producers of these models weren't incentivized to hide their training data it would be almost trivial to at least retrieve the images most similar to the content produced some images will be maximally distant from training examples but midjourney repainting frames from "harry potter" could very easily automatically send a check to jk rowling per generation these AI start ups are just trying to have a free lunch in a very mature industry
spookybones 3y ago
Yeah, some of these comments are clearly made by people who don't actually know the history of art.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  I'm not even sure the commenter knew who "the artist that painted Mona Lisa" was when they made that comment.

jonplackett 3y ago

da Vinci is a silly comparison. He is just one man. Even he didn’t have such great ability that he can put all other artists out of business. This is more like the invention of weaving machines. Yes we still have weavers but no where near as many.

camillomiller 3y ago

It is absolutely not the same, and saying so disregards centuries of knowledge stratification. These machine produce superficial artifacts that lack any layering of meaning of semantic capital (see Luciano Floridi). They are the byproduct of the engineering extremism and lack of humanities knowledge of the people getting rich through their creation.

mlrtime 3y ago
If what you say is true then people will still value non-superficial artifacts. However the mass produced semi-superficial artifact creators that were being created before AI will adapt or suffer.
chefandy 3y ago
Models learn exactly like artists, and also, for some reason, the person that uses those models are artists making art. Wait… Artists learn by passively ingesting many millions pieces of media someone feeds them for the non-specific purpose of “generating art” so some person who wants to take credit for making the end piece can tell them exactly what to make, right?
nostrebored 3y ago
If the lack of humanities education is what allows us to create the most abundance of art in human history, was that education really worth it?

TaupeRanger 3y ago

> The way these models are creative is the same way humans are We have no idea how human creativity works, but we know with certainty that it doesn't involve a Python program sucking in pixel data and outputting statistical likelihoods.

jerojero 3y ago
You know, Ive seen people do amazing things with math equations. Beautiful visualisations. As these tools improve and it becomes more possible for us to actually take our ideas into images and videos that fit a sort of "yes this is what I want" bill we are going to see amazing things come out. I mean, a few days ago I saw this clearly AI generated video of some wizards doing snowboard and having a blast in the mountains. It's one of the funniest things I've seen in a while, simply so ridiculous. Obviously someone had the idea "I want to make a video of wizards doing snowboard in a mountain" that's where creativity lies. So to say "creativity doesn't involve a python program outputting statistical likelihoods" imo is just you saying you're not creative enough to know what to do with the tools you've been given. Some people when they see a strawberry they see a fruit. Others see endless dishes where the fruit is just an ingredient.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  rude obviously you can use python to create works of art whether a python script can itself be creative is the question posed by OP, but you went with "you're just not creative enough to get it"
ben_w 3y ago
Those Python programs are (loosely) inspired by how organic brains work. (I still have on my to-do list "learn more about why Hebbian learning is different from gradient descent and how much those differences matter").
eric_cc 3y ago
We do have, at the very least, an idea about how human creativity works and it is an input output pattern.

spunker540 3y ago

I agree and actually think the camera was definitely more disruptive to artists than this AI stuff, and somehow the camera didn’t kill artists.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

reactordev 3y ago

“whose existence and names we will never know or acknowledge.” That’s the problem. We know their names. We know their stories, their contributions. Babbage. Lovelace. Ritchie. Spielberg. Picasso. Rembrandt. This is what giving attribution is all about. So we don’t just stand there asking how we got here.

soperj 3y ago

This is nonsense, people give credit to their influences all the time.

nostrebored 3y ago
To the influences that they know. Our brain isn’t an attribution machine. When a musician recreates a chord progression that they’ve heard before without noticing it, is that theft? If a comedian accidentally retells a joke, is that theft? Our influences are subtle and often inscrutable.

goatlover 3y ago

> The world doesn't work that way. The human world works that way humans make it work. Pretty much what Jody Foster's character in the movie Contact told that asshole trying to steal all the credit from her, and take her place in the mission to go visit alien dad in Pensacola.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

IAmGraydon 3y ago

>The way these models are creative is the same way humans are. The artist that painted Mona Lisa didn't credit any of the influences and inspirations that they had. I'm continually amazed at how many people argue against this point on HN, which is largely biased toward logical discourse. What you just said is exactly right, and is the Achilles heel of the legal arguments against generative AI. If what they are doing illegal, then so is the human act of creativity. If human creativity is legal, then so is generative AI trained on existing art. What has yet to come is the mass realization (or perhaps, admission) that the way AI works is no different from the way we work.

sebastiennight 3y ago

This reads like a wildly confident statement about art. While at the same time not mentioning the actual name of "the artist that painted Mona Lisa" (Leonardo Da Vinci), nor knowing that the name of his master is very well known, and even the influence of artists that he seemed to despise (eg Michaelangelo) are very well documented as well. Maaybe this narrow view of (art) history needs to be fine-tuned on more data :-)