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But if I create a magic box that generates work in the style of a specific artist, based on me feeding that artist's work into the magic box, then sell access t
by colonelspace 2y ago
But if I create a magic box that generates work in the style of a specific artist, based on me feeding that artist's work into the magic box, then sell access to the output of the magic box, notably output that results from a request using the artist's name, that seems to deprive the artist of something, based on my use of the artist's work.
Copyright isn't really the issue, it's a company exploiting the work of others. It's literally the only value of the magic box.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoThat's how human brains work too. There are people who can mimic styles very well. They need to be "fed" the style first though.
- digging 2y agoScale and availability matter
- Pet_Ant 2y agoSo if you put one buggy whip maker out of work a year, it's okay. But if you put hundreds of over the course of a couple of years, now it's wrong? Cars must be illegal. When have we ever put the scope of the impact as part of the judgement of the legality of disruptive businesses? When did the impact of WalMart on small businesses matter legally, or Amazon on independent bookstores, or iTunes music store on independent music stores, or Netflix on video rental stores? Or NAFTA on American factory workers? Sorry, I don't buy the argument that the scale of the impact transformative impacts the question of legality; it never has before. If you are talking about the social problem of skilled people willing to work who cannot find meaningful employment: well, let's address that directly, but not by banning generative AI.
- dj_mc_merlin 2y ago> it never has before. Look up the Digital Markets Act.
- colonelspace 2y agoThe buggy whip analogy doesn't work because car makers didn't and don't sell buggy whips in the specific style of specific buggy whip makers.
- bb88 2y agoEver hear the term, "Horseless Carriage?" The entire point was to sell something familiar to people, just without the horse. To be honest, this is a rabbit hole worth going down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseless_carriage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseless_carriage And from that page is this, and and this cracked a smile on my face. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsey_Horseless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsey_Horseless Look at the 1908 Model T. https://corporate.ford.com/articles/history/the-model-t.html https://corporate.ford.com/articles/history/the-model-t.html And then compare that with the Curricle, say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curricle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curricle
- colonelspace 2y agoI'm familiar with early automobiles. Still not an apt analogy. Innovation is quite different to overt copying.
- bb88 2y agoSo that's your argument? His analogy is wrong? Ergo, you don't have to argue the broader argument of people resenting technology because it puts them out of jobs? A lot of good arguments exist with bad analogies.
- colonelspace 2y agoNo, I'm just saying the analogy isn't apt. But on the broader argument, saying people just don't like it because it puts them out of jobs also seems to miss the point. Disruptive technologies of the kind that "put people put out of jobs" usually just replace labour, ie. mechanised looms, calculators and computers, rather than replacing the result of one's labour. Often this is a distinction without any meaningful difference, but when we're talking about art and creative work products I think it's significant.
- digging 2y agoYou've missed the mark, and admittedly I was vague, but you seem to be talking about a completely separate phenomenon from the one I replied to. I am not talking about "technology putting people out of work." I am talking about "technology enabling the mass copying of a specific person's copyrighted works." I am comparing these two things: 1. a professional imitator, who works for years to develop a mimicked style and then has to work for hours to produce a piece, (and in any case is not legal to claim as original,) 2. a piece of software that could produce millions of copies a day, frankly creating a nontrivial chance that eventually a copy of a specific work would be created and claimed as "original." You can argue my points here, as I'm not a copyright lawyer, but what you've argued above is irrelevant.
- colonelspace 2y agoIs it how human brains work? Even if it is, why does that make it ok on an industrial scale?
- dj_mc_merlin 2y agoYes but a human brain needs years of training to to get the basic skills, and further needs to refine on a specific style which can take anywhere from days to months/years depending on prior experience. There are also social connotations that apply to humans that come with copying another artist's style. AI can do it 10x-100x quicker and the copier can remain completely anonymous much easier. This changes the dynamics.
- amonith 2y agoIndividuals are allowed to do that by law. Companies cannot do that to create commercial products. They need to obtain relevant permissions / licenses from the creators first.
- taylorius 2y agoThis is true - but such artists can't create a new one every few seconds. A change in scale is a change in kind. Such "democratization" is, in my view, rather demeaning to an artist, who doubtless worked hard to develop a new style, only to have their work digested by the machines and a million imitators pop up almost immediately.
- peteGodonn 2y agoSelling art to pay rent isn’t making art. Most of these artists are appropriating existing style elements and composing them; that itself isn’t new. Someone think of the first world artist reliant on sweat shop labor to serve their real needs so the artist can master science fiction comic book art Story mode economic feudalism is the last barnacle of history to wash out. It’s from religious times but stripped of the metaphor and analogy. Automation and physical statistics can keep enough stuff on shelves we don’t riot, communities can solve their last mile problems as their daily work, and noodle on their own artistic thing without having to sell it.
- taylorius 2y agoBut artists create for a reason. You can take away the financial component, but the artist will still hope to get something out of it for themselves. Consider a band releasing a new album they've spent 9 months writing and recording. In our post-financial brave new world, they give it away for free. But they'll read the reviews, and get excited if their music is well received. In short, they are hoping to be "paid" in public acclaim. Now imagine that the minute they release it, some AI system digests all their new tracks, and a thousand randoms start making songs that are similar to the style and aesthetic they have spent time creating. In short order, the number of synthetic AI tracks will dwarf the originals, and the recognition will go to whoever markets their synthetic tracks the best, rather than the original creator. The only hope I see for artistic creativity is in training custom, boutique AI systems that accurately encompass the Artist's style. But that's not really creativity to be honest, it's more akin to licensing.
- LoganDark 2y agoThe last time I saw a human artist doing this, they were about as hated as AI is. They intentionally mimicked the style of a specific other artist which directly impacted the other artist's sales and even their mental health.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoThey were hated, but were they legally prevented from doing it?
- LoganDark 2y agoI mean they could have been if they had been sued over it.
- triceratops 2y agoI don't understand the logic of "humans are allowed therefore machines must be too".
- dj_mc_merlin 2y agoIt comes from wanting the law to behave like physics and be universalizable. It is not at all like that in practice.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoWhy are machines allowed to do anything? Should machines have been allowed to weave fabric just because a human was allowed to?
- triceratops 2y agoPrecisely.
- falcolas 2y ago> That's how human brains work too. TL;DR: Brains and diffuse AI work very differently, and it's short sighted that the meme is so often repeated. It's really not. Human brains don't categorize inputs by a set of keywords and then use other keywords to compose an output collage of inputs with the same keyword. Humans are lossy, and so our brains are actually quite good at filling in the blanks contextually. We also don't think of keywords, we think of objects. A banana is an object to us with lots of context other than how it looks, whereas it's just a tag to an AI. Which is all to say, if an AI doesn't have a reference for a particular artists' method of doing a specific paint stroke, it can never create that paint stroke. A person can - they can re-create a paint stroke from everything else they've studied about an artist and style and what kinds of paints they had available to them at the time. There's a reason that producing decent pieces of art out of an AI can take tens of hours and hundreds of prompts. It's still the human brain driving the final output. They've just handicapped themselves to just using keyword prompts to avoid learning a specific skill set.
- XorNot 2y agoNo one knows exactly how AIs work. It's an active area of research, you can go and look the papers up. This statement here: > Which is all to say, if an AI doesn't have a reference for a particular artists' method of doing a specific paint stroke, it can never create that paint stroke. This is unsupported at best. You don't know. Pre-eminent experts in the field don't know. But this is simply a restatement of the weird "it just interpolates" fallacy people constantly spout about AI, which isn't even true of simple mathematical interpolation A simple example: finding a way to interpolate between points (1,1) and (2,4) would be something like y = 2x. Fairly obviously, that equation will easily tell you how to work outside that range, the distinction is you don't have any more data to verify if this is real. Replace the point geometry with the abstract "paint stroke" algorithm, and an AI model can do exactly the same thing.
- falcolas 2y agoAn AI can only work with the inputs it has, modulo a random seed. That is, it can't interpolate using anything more than two axes (to use your example). A human can interpolate in 4 different axes (if not more). And let's be frank, the whole "the AI can do the exact same thing" is a disingenuous assertion with nothing backing it other than "we don't know that it can't." I could also be a god, since you don't know that I'm not a god.
- petesergeant 2y agoYeah, I think that’s it. I think there’s a difference in the machine deriving “labial flower paintings” from first principles and having been trained with a bunch of pictures tagged as Georgia O’Keefe and spitting them out when someone asks for a picture in her style