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Maybe because that’s misleading and not very useful? There are different kinds of stealing, and the platitude “all art is stolen” conflates them. The kind you’r

by dahart 2y ago

Maybe because that’s misleading and not very useful? There are different kinds of stealing, and the platitude “all art is stolen” conflates them. The kind you’re referring to is stealing ideas, and is not illegal. The kind parent is referring to is what copyright is designed for, and it happens to be illegal. It’s helpful to distinguish between these two kinds of stealing, because one can be good for society and art and business, and the other not so much. The historical context of the idea that “all art is stolen” is intentional hyperbole, it’s meant to be provocative and a little but humorous, and not meant to be taken absolutely literally like you are implicitly suggesting. It does not mean literally that thieves walked out with the paintings, nor does it mean that art progressed because people were hand-copying the Mona Lisa. It was referring to varying degrees of using other people’s art as inspiration, borrowing subject matter or composition, mimicking techniques, etc. None of this is what AI does. AI is trained on fixations (to borrow the copyright term) and can only produce remixes of fixations. It can’t do the kind of stealing that T.S. Eliot was talking about. It doesn’t steal ideas, it only steals pixels.

FeepingCreature 2y ago
I disagree that it's what copyright is designed for, and I disagree that it's illegal, and I also disagree that it's stealing - or in the sense of the phrase, I disagree that it's a different kind of stealing. I think the sense in which AI steals is exactly and only the sense in which artists steal. The historical context is taking others' art into your own cognition and building upon it, adding your own spin. That is exactly what AI does. The idea that AI can only produce remixes - putting aside the battles that were fought in the art world over the validity of remixes - is simply false. It was never true! It's an urban legend that's retold and retold because it'd be very convenient for certain arguments if it were true. But it just isn't. I seriously recommend that you spend a week's worth of free time just playing around with SDXL, in a UI that's capable of inpainting. IMO, the quickest way to realize this idea is false is to actually engage with the system.
- dahart 2y ago
  What is the “it” you are announcing disagreement with? You deny that breaking copyright is illegal? Or what are you trying to say exactly? It’s not an opinion that photocopying art is illegal and borrowing ideas is not, that is codified into law. Declaring disagreement with that idea seems silly to me, so I assume you mean something else, but it’s not clear what you mean. This isn’t a convincing argument, it seems like hyperbole to me. The authors of copyright laws, and the Berne Convention, did happen to write down what they intended, and they do make an actual distinction between stealing fixations and stealing ideas, and they clarified that stealing ideas is not covered by copyright laws. There are other IP laws that cover some forms of idea stealing. > The idea that AI can only produce remixes […] is simply false Why do you believe that? We know exactly how it’s built, we know what the algorithms do, and there’s nothing in there capable of original thought. It only interpolates, it does not extrapolate. AI is trained on examples, it builds a Markov model that reproduces what it learned, statistically, and locally reproduces what it was shown. We can prove it without engaging with the system, because we (humans) built the system. It’s deterministic and mechanical and repeatable. What exactly do you claim it’s doing beyond this? Be specific.
  - FeepingCreature 2y ago
    I don't think training is photocopying, and I don't think it's breaking copyright. > Why do you believe that? We know exactly how it’s built correct > we know what the algorithms do Dubiously correct, we know their function but not the purpose of the particular individual patterns learnt, see interpretability research > and there’s nothing in there capable of original thought. Incorrect, we have no idea what it takes to be capable of "original thought", the concept isn't even defined, we don't even know if humans do it. It's entirely possible that networks are capable of original thought, in fact there's a lot of evidence for it, like how if you put them in situations that aren't covered in the training they can often handle it fine. > it builds a Markov model Okay, do you know how the networks work? No, complete nonsense, Markov models have nothing to do with this. For one, LLMs are exactly not "locally" due to the long-range attention mechanism. Even things like RWKV, that "just" uses persistent state, can express correlations much, much longer than any Markov chain ever built. If you built a Markov chain for the sorts of correlation distances you'd get in LLMs you would need exponentially more states than there are atoms in the universe, which demonstrates that what's going on cannot be modelled as a Markov process without torturing the concept into incoherence. > It's deterministic Sure, it's deterministic plus a random noise factor. Anything in the world is deterministic plus a random noise factor, us included. If you perfectly recorded the thermal noise in a human brain you could deterministically repeat its output forever. Imo this view is just "well the network can't be doing the same thing we're doing, it's too simple. I'm not that simple am I?" Yeah sorry, the human brain isn't that complicated.

by dahart 2y ago

FeepingCreature 2y ago

I disagree that it's what copyright is designed for, and I disagree that it's illegal, and I also disagree that it's stealing - or in the sense of the phrase, I disagree that it's a different kind of stealing. I think the sense in which AI steals is exactly and only the sense in which artists steal. The historical context is taking others' art into your own cognition and building upon it, adding your own spin. That is exactly what AI does. The idea that AI can only produce remixes - putting aside the battles that were fought in the art world over the validity of remixes - is simply false. It was never true! It's an urban legend that's retold and retold because it'd be very convenient for certain arguments if it were true. But it just isn't. I seriously recommend that you spend a week's worth of free time just playing around with SDXL, in a UI that's capable of inpainting. IMO, the quickest way to realize this idea is false is to actually engage with the system.

dahart 2y ago
What is the “it” you are announcing disagreement with? You deny that breaking copyright is illegal? Or what are you trying to say exactly? It’s not an opinion that photocopying art is illegal and borrowing ideas is not, that is codified into law. Declaring disagreement with that idea seems silly to me, so I assume you mean something else, but it’s not clear what you mean. This isn’t a convincing argument, it seems like hyperbole to me. The authors of copyright laws, and the Berne Convention, did happen to write down what they intended, and they do make an actual distinction between stealing fixations and stealing ideas, and they clarified that stealing ideas is not covered by copyright laws. There are other IP laws that cover some forms of idea stealing. > The idea that AI can only produce remixes […] is simply false Why do you believe that? We know exactly how it’s built, we know what the algorithms do, and there’s nothing in there capable of original thought. It only interpolates, it does not extrapolate. AI is trained on examples, it builds a Markov model that reproduces what it learned, statistically, and locally reproduces what it was shown. We can prove it without engaging with the system, because we (humans) built the system. It’s deterministic and mechanical and repeatable. What exactly do you claim it’s doing beyond this? Be specific.
- FeepingCreature 2y ago
  I don't think training is photocopying, and I don't think it's breaking copyright. > Why do you believe that? We know exactly how it’s built correct > we know what the algorithms do Dubiously correct, we know their function but not the purpose of the particular individual patterns learnt, see interpretability research > and there’s nothing in there capable of original thought. Incorrect, we have no idea what it takes to be capable of "original thought", the concept isn't even defined, we don't even know if humans do it. It's entirely possible that networks are capable of original thought, in fact there's a lot of evidence for it, like how if you put them in situations that aren't covered in the training they can often handle it fine. > it builds a Markov model Okay, do you know how the networks work? No, complete nonsense, Markov models have nothing to do with this. For one, LLMs are exactly not "locally" due to the long-range attention mechanism. Even things like RWKV, that "just" uses persistent state, can express correlations much, much longer than any Markov chain ever built. If you built a Markov chain for the sorts of correlation distances you'd get in LLMs you would need exponentially more states than there are atoms in the universe, which demonstrates that what's going on cannot be modelled as a Markov process without torturing the concept into incoherence. > It's deterministic Sure, it's deterministic plus a random noise factor. Anything in the world is deterministic plus a random noise factor, us included. If you perfectly recorded the thermal noise in a human brain you could deterministically repeat its output forever. Imo this view is just "well the network can't be doing the same thing we're doing, it's too simple. I'm not that simple am I?" Yeah sorry, the human brain isn't that complicated.