4 ms·

Well, not a great start. It says "art theft", but right in the panels before you have "allow unrestricted access". Well, if you allowed it, it surely can't be

Well, not a great start. It says "art theft", but right in the panels before you have "allow unrestricted access". Well, if you allowed it, it surely can't be theft. IMO, a big problem on pressing on the theft and copyright angles is that they're trivially, trivially circumvented. Because there exists the public domain, permissive licensing, and permissions. And once enough permission for enough content has been obtained, that's it. Digital content rarely goes away, we have high quality data already, and if it works fine now, tomorrow it'll surely work better. I believe fighting against AI by means of copyright is a dead-end and short-sighted tactic, because it will unavoidably lead to creating models that are 100% legal anyway. First of all from companies like Meta, Microsoft and Google that are big enough to collect the data. Trying to sabotage it is unlikely to work great either. We're talking about computers here, which excel in the mass processing of data. Any transformation is likely detectable, possible to work around, and won't impact already existing content.

artninja1988 3y ago
Copying data isn't stealing in the first place. There is no argument.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  It's kinda weird how HN (and reddit) is extremely pro-piracy... until AI does it. I've seen a D&D subreddit that bans AI art but encourages the use of art taken from google images.
  - jprete 3y ago
    It's not weird. One of them is piracy to play games, watch movies, and post throwaway memes. The other is for training generative models that directly compete with the creators of the pirated works and drop the value of human creative skills to zero. The actual act of piracy is small compared to attempting to devalue and commodify our most human characteristics and abilities.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      People are panicking too much over that. AI is very good at low effort content. But that's not really competitive in the professional market. There it's just a nice tool that still needs an user with artistic skills.
      - jprete 3y ago
        AI competitiveness depends very strongly on whether AI will get better at creating coherent and usable video/audio/images, or not. The better it gets, and the more amenable to user control it gets in the fine details, the more it will displace actual artists. And I don't know the answer to that because it's not clear what the limits are on current techniques or whether anyone's working on something that would transcend the current techniques. I agree that current techs are not really suitable for high-value content without human followup; SORA might be lauded but it still does not understand what a human body is and will happily give it a random number of limbs in various stages of simultaneous movement. (But, for the legal issues, I believe intent to compete is enough and not just actual competitiveness. E.g. fanfic is not actually legal unless clearly a parody or meta-commentary or the like, but it's ignored because it doesn't directly do anything negative to the media market.)
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  Explain why we should not therefore allow and even encourage students to copy their homework, research projects, and exam answers from one another, or from their instructor's grading key. While we're at it, let's force companies to share all of their internal research and content with each other, so that in the very best of scenarios everything turns into a giant bureaucratic monoculture as organizations optimize for least friction of copying data, and the lowest common denominator solutions compatible with that goal. Do the same for authors and composers and nuclear weapon designers. The value of individual contribution immediately becomes worth exactly what was paid for it. A world that functions according to a rule that all individual knowledge work is worth zero compensation cannot exist except as a parasite on the back of one that rejects this premise. This does not excuse the opposite abuse, of charging rent purely to distribute gatekept data without contributing anything of special value to it.
  - _Algernon_ 3y ago
    Students do homework for learning purposes, not because they are producing anything valuable. Copying something (eg. a movie) is a different issue from copying something and lying about it being your own work. I'd celebrate if we ever reach the point were we are in a post-scarcity world for physical goods. But we are already there for intellectual "property" and it's being ruined by lawyers and bureaucrats.
    - advael 3y ago
      I do think the paradigm of intellectual property is fundamentally broken, but you can't claim we're post-scarcity for knowledge when vast swaths of the economy are knowledge work and economic viability is still a requirement to live I don't even think you can have "post-scarcity" dynamics in a piecemeal manner like this, because any erosion of scarcity is an erosion of value in an environment that is ruled by economic paradigms that equate the two
  - throwaway14356 3y ago
    OT: My mind wants to play with tax funded rewards for volentary sharing. If its worth something we may bid and they may refuse, counter bid or release into the wild. We aren't always imaginative enough to fund research in advance. (put mildly)
- advael 3y ago
  Is this some kind of mantra? Seems kind of anti-intellectual and borderline culty. "There is no argument" I still think generative AI is an exciting technology but the tech hype wave brainrot makes working in this space such a slog
advisedwang 3y ago
> It says "art theft", but right in the panels before you have "allow unrestricted access". Well, if you allowed it, it surely can't be theft. Those are two different things it's talking about. AI headshot-type stuff with the permission of the person whose headshot is being made vs generally the scraping of source data to build the models.

artninja1988 3y ago

Copying data isn't stealing in the first place. There is no argument.

Legend2440 3y ago
It's kinda weird how HN (and reddit) is extremely pro-piracy... until AI does it. I've seen a D&D subreddit that bans AI art but encourages the use of art taken from google images.
- jprete 3y ago
  It's not weird. One of them is piracy to play games, watch movies, and post throwaway memes. The other is for training generative models that directly compete with the creators of the pirated works and drop the value of human creative skills to zero. The actual act of piracy is small compared to attempting to devalue and commodify our most human characteristics and abilities.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    People are panicking too much over that. AI is very good at low effort content. But that's not really competitive in the professional market. There it's just a nice tool that still needs an user with artistic skills.
    - jprete 3y ago
      AI competitiveness depends very strongly on whether AI will get better at creating coherent and usable video/audio/images, or not. The better it gets, and the more amenable to user control it gets in the fine details, the more it will displace actual artists. And I don't know the answer to that because it's not clear what the limits are on current techniques or whether anyone's working on something that would transcend the current techniques. I agree that current techs are not really suitable for high-value content without human followup; SORA might be lauded but it still does not understand what a human body is and will happily give it a random number of limbs in various stages of simultaneous movement. (But, for the legal issues, I believe intent to compete is enough and not just actual competitiveness. E.g. fanfic is not actually legal unless clearly a parody or meta-commentary or the like, but it's ignored because it doesn't directly do anything negative to the media market.)
ChainOfFools 3y ago
Explain why we should not therefore allow and even encourage students to copy their homework, research projects, and exam answers from one another, or from their instructor's grading key. While we're at it, let's force companies to share all of their internal research and content with each other, so that in the very best of scenarios everything turns into a giant bureaucratic monoculture as organizations optimize for least friction of copying data, and the lowest common denominator solutions compatible with that goal. Do the same for authors and composers and nuclear weapon designers. The value of individual contribution immediately becomes worth exactly what was paid for it. A world that functions according to a rule that all individual knowledge work is worth zero compensation cannot exist except as a parasite on the back of one that rejects this premise. This does not excuse the opposite abuse, of charging rent purely to distribute gatekept data without contributing anything of special value to it.
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  Students do homework for learning purposes, not because they are producing anything valuable. Copying something (eg. a movie) is a different issue from copying something and lying about it being your own work. I'd celebrate if we ever reach the point were we are in a post-scarcity world for physical goods. But we are already there for intellectual "property" and it's being ruined by lawyers and bureaucrats.
  - advael 3y ago
    I do think the paradigm of intellectual property is fundamentally broken, but you can't claim we're post-scarcity for knowledge when vast swaths of the economy are knowledge work and economic viability is still a requirement to live I don't even think you can have "post-scarcity" dynamics in a piecemeal manner like this, because any erosion of scarcity is an erosion of value in an environment that is ruled by economic paradigms that equate the two
- throwaway14356 3y ago
  OT: My mind wants to play with tax funded rewards for volentary sharing. If its worth something we may bid and they may refuse, counter bid or release into the wild. We aren't always imaginative enough to fund research in advance. (put mildly)
advael 3y ago
Is this some kind of mantra? Seems kind of anti-intellectual and borderline culty. "There is no argument" I still think generative AI is an exciting technology but the tech hype wave brainrot makes working in this space such a slog

advisedwang 3y ago

> It says "art theft", but right in the panels before you have "allow unrestricted access". Well, if you allowed it, it surely can't be theft. Those are two different things it's talking about. AI headshot-type stuff with the permission of the person whose headshot is being made vs generally the scraping of source data to build the models.