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I’m not really exposed to children’s drawings, but these look particularly talented. I always feel a little weird about generating AI art because it really is

I’m not really exposed to children’s drawings, but these look particularly talented. I always feel a little weird about generating AI art because it really is standing on the shoulders of giants. I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft. Any little simple drawing you generate is really off the back of kids and teenagers that draw out of a passion. So I try not to do it, feels icky. Ideally we want a world where we license the artist’s style, and hopefully they can get paid out like streaming music artists in the long term. Along with that, we need laws that let you sue people that copy the style with no license.

ses1984 2y ago
Napster got people used to piracy not theft. Tape recording was already huge before Napster and it’s also considered piracy.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  Class Piracy extends Theft. It’s just an abstraction. I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole though.
  - geon 2y ago
    Nonsense. Theft by definition requires the original owner to lose something. Me not buying something is not theft.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Depriving them the opportunity to make a sale is still depriving them of something.
      - saulpw 2y ago
        What if they're not selling it anymore?
        Retric 2y ago
        What if you take a fallen branch from someone’s yard when they aren’t going to use it for something? Dealing with edge cases where maybe theft isn’t theft is why we have a court system. Words themselves are more generic in nature. It’s through phrases, sentences, etc where that ever finer nuances can be described.
        saulpw 2y ago
        This is not academic: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/video-game-preservation-dmca-copyright-office/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/video-game-preservation... These are old games, they can't be purchased anywhere, they aren't taking anyone's precious profits, and they still can't be (legally) played. This is one case at least where "piracy" is definitively not theft.
        Retric 2y ago
        > can’t be purchased anywhere At a single moment sure, but many games have gone from a state where you can’t purchase them to you can. I’d be cautious of any argument which suggests watching a movie the day before it hits movie theaters has zero economic impact. So you’d need to find a game that couldn’t ever be purchased until the end of copyright coverage, which is more a theoretical argument than something you can demonstrate in the moment.
        saulpw 2y ago
        "watching a movie the day before it hits movie theaters" is not the same thing at all. This is more like trying to show racist Looney Tunes cartoons from the 1940s in an educational setting. No one's making any money off "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs" (1943) nor "Pitfall!" (1983) on the Atari 2600. They're not being sold, for reasonable economic reasons, and rigid copyright restrictions should not apply to them. Corporations already have enough influence over copyright, so I'm loathe to defend a defunct corporation's theoretical ability to resell an ancient game, over an actual person's real interest in preserving and disseminating video game history.
      - geon 2y ago
        That’s a strange idea. I am depriving businesses of sales worth millions every day. Just this morning, I did not buy a single sports car.
  - ses1984 2y ago
    If we’re going by the age of sail definition then yeah. Is recording a song freely broadcast over the air considered piracy or theft? Courts said no. Is recording video (even premium cable) on your dvr considered piracy or theft? Courts said no. Is giving a mixtape to your friend considered piracy or theft? Actually I’m not sure…
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - vidarh 2y ago
    We have laws defining copyright infringement exactly because property rights inherently do not cover piracy.
yapyap 2y ago
> I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft that’s a bit dramatic, I’d argue the way AI has been used, I.E. scraping up people’s work without consent and then using it to train models that will recreate said work to the best of their abilities so you won’t even need the artist anymore (in the ideal vision of the people running AI companies) is a much more heinous thing. You’re downloading and using the artist’s work without their consent to train a tool to replace them. Whereas Napster is downloading their work and you might buy their work in the future cause you love it so much.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  For the training part. Generating art off someone’s art is nuanced. Let’s say you generate art off Darwin’s kid’s art. - First off most people won’t ever know, so you don’t even have to hide the theft. - If you copied a well known style, then you would have to hide that you did so by layering another style on top - You don’t have to worry about the first two points if you are not stealing and just commission an artist. - Or you are oblivious and uncaring about all of this, and all is sound in your mind because you bought the fake gem currency fair and square to generate your image. So, we are talking about taking. Some people have issue with the word stealing.
sebzim4500 2y ago
>I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft. I think the defining feature of theft is that you deprive the victim of their property. Redefining theft to include copying just feels silly, it's fundamentally a different sin (if it's a sin at all).
- nuc1e0n 2y ago
  Well it hasn't been long since Disney got everyone used to suing each other for making similar drawings either. Which is odd because Mickey wasn't the first mouse drawn with round ears at the time of his first cartoon. A whole Simpsons episode satirised the affair.
- xp84 2y ago
  You can easily still get the GP’s meaning if you substitute the phrase “sneakily cheating the artist out of any compensation” for “theft” though, right?
  - yreg 2y ago
    The "kids and teenagers that draw out of a passion" in GP's comment are not being cheated out of any compensation.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
WalterBright 2y ago
Copyright is a very recent invention, since 1790. Ownership of property goes back long before recorded history.
WalterBright 2y ago
> Ideally we want a world where we license the artist’s style, and hopefully they can get paid out like streaming music artists in the long term. Along with that, we need laws that let you sue people that copy the style with no license. Years ago, I just kind of assumed that should be true. I'm not so sure anymore. I don't see any evidence that creativity comes from copyright and patent protection. Germany flowered in the 19th century without them. For the last 20 years, I've been releasing my work under the Boost license which is the most permissible license out there (public domain is my preference, but it is not recognized in some countries).
autoexec 2y ago
> Ideally we want a world where we license the artist’s style Ideally no one's art would be hindered by having to track down and pay someone for creating something in another "artist's style". Ideally people would just create what they like and be free to intentionally practice and play around with the styles of others as they see fit while they develop their own. No artist, ever, should own a "style" just as no author should own a "genre". Artists should be the free to express and explore whatever they want using whatever tools they want. > I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft. Napster didn't get people used to theft, it got them used to access. It introduced people to music and entire musical genres that they'd never have otherwise encountered. It even got people to buy music and attend concerts they otherwise wouldn't have. Access to culture enriches everyone and inspires the creation of new artistic works. The music industry wasn't worried about theft. They were worried that they'd lose their jobs as useless middlemen and gatekeepers.
- computerthings 2y ago
  > Ideally no one's art would be hindered by having to track down and pay someone for creating something in another "artist's style". After "you" tracked them down, slurped up their art and spent a lot of electricity to garble it, it's oddly convenient to suddenly get lazy when it comes to giving credit. And being able to understand, even SEE (or hear etc.) something well enough you can re-create it, that's one thing. That at least implies some common experience between artist and copycat, even in the case of just straight copying the style. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, right? But copying and then garbling it with algorithms, forever and ever and ever, is something else entirely. Different enough that artists should opt-in. It's like what killer robots are what to soldiers, too, and I'm not joking. At least until now, to create a lot of propaganda in text and image you would have to at least convince or force a proportional amount of humans to do it, which is harder the more atrocities and people they know and love are involved. No such qualms with machines, and no scaling issues. And hey, the constant drowning out of intelligent and still applicable things that already have been made, in favor of some product, some content, some "take", produced by something someone who happens to live right now (which makes it important I see their thing, and not something made in the past that would do more for me) is already a problem without any machines involved. So I want to be able to opt-in as consumer, too. I don't want to restrict the choice of others, but it just allowing to mingle and drown out everything else by being infinitely cheap to produce predictably will destroy my choice. If it's so great for creativity, and the results so great, neither should be an issue. I mean, the way you make it sound artists should be pushing for it -- where are they? And if barely any artists want to give away their art for it, and only computer people want them to, well, then the people who want their machines to make art will have to learn making art themselves, first. That is not too much to ask. No lover of language looks at the output of LLM and thinks "I want to write like that". People who can't write (or "don't have the time" for the thought process while still oddly feeling entitled to the appearance of it) see that, want it for themselves, because it's better than what they can make. Same or even worse with music.

ses1984 2y ago

Napster got people used to piracy not theft. Tape recording was already huge before Napster and it’s also considered piracy.

bloomingkales 2y ago
Class Piracy extends Theft. It’s just an abstraction. I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole though.
- geon 2y ago
  Nonsense. Theft by definition requires the original owner to lose something. Me not buying something is not theft.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Depriving them the opportunity to make a sale is still depriving them of something.
    - saulpw 2y ago
      What if they're not selling it anymore?
      - Retric 2y ago
        What if you take a fallen branch from someone’s yard when they aren’t going to use it for something? Dealing with edge cases where maybe theft isn’t theft is why we have a court system. Words themselves are more generic in nature. It’s through phrases, sentences, etc where that ever finer nuances can be described.
        saulpw 2y ago
        This is not academic: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/video-game-preservation-dmca-copyright-office/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/video-game-preservation... These are old games, they can't be purchased anywhere, they aren't taking anyone's precious profits, and they still can't be (legally) played. This is one case at least where "piracy" is definitively not theft.
        Retric 2y ago
        > can’t be purchased anywhere At a single moment sure, but many games have gone from a state where you can’t purchase them to you can. I’d be cautious of any argument which suggests watching a movie the day before it hits movie theaters has zero economic impact. So you’d need to find a game that couldn’t ever be purchased until the end of copyright coverage, which is more a theoretical argument than something you can demonstrate in the moment.
        saulpw 2y ago
        "watching a movie the day before it hits movie theaters" is not the same thing at all. This is more like trying to show racist Looney Tunes cartoons from the 1940s in an educational setting. No one's making any money off "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs" (1943) nor "Pitfall!" (1983) on the Atari 2600. They're not being sold, for reasonable economic reasons, and rigid copyright restrictions should not apply to them. Corporations already have enough influence over copyright, so I'm loathe to defend a defunct corporation's theoretical ability to resell an ancient game, over an actual person's real interest in preserving and disseminating video game history.
    - geon 2y ago
      That’s a strange idea. I am depriving businesses of sales worth millions every day. Just this morning, I did not buy a single sports car.
- ses1984 2y ago
  If we’re going by the age of sail definition then yeah. Is recording a song freely broadcast over the air considered piracy or theft? Courts said no. Is recording video (even premium cable) on your dvr considered piracy or theft? Courts said no. Is giving a mixtape to your friend considered piracy or theft? Actually I’m not sure…
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- vidarh 2y ago
  We have laws defining copyright infringement exactly because property rights inherently do not cover piracy.

yapyap 2y ago

> I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft that’s a bit dramatic, I’d argue the way AI has been used, I.E. scraping up people’s work without consent and then using it to train models that will recreate said work to the best of their abilities so you won’t even need the artist anymore (in the ideal vision of the people running AI companies) is a much more heinous thing. You’re downloading and using the artist’s work without their consent to train a tool to replace them. Whereas Napster is downloading their work and you might buy their work in the future cause you love it so much.

bloomingkales 2y ago
For the training part. Generating art off someone’s art is nuanced. Let’s say you generate art off Darwin’s kid’s art. - First off most people won’t ever know, so you don’t even have to hide the theft. - If you copied a well known style, then you would have to hide that you did so by layering another style on top - You don’t have to worry about the first two points if you are not stealing and just commission an artist. - Or you are oblivious and uncaring about all of this, and all is sound in your mind because you bought the fake gem currency fair and square to generate your image. So, we are talking about taking. Some people have issue with the word stealing.

sebzim4500 2y ago

>I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft. I think the defining feature of theft is that you deprive the victim of their property. Redefining theft to include copying just feels silly, it's fundamentally a different sin (if it's a sin at all).

nuc1e0n 2y ago
Well it hasn't been long since Disney got everyone used to suing each other for making similar drawings either. Which is odd because Mickey wasn't the first mouse drawn with round ears at the time of his first cartoon. A whole Simpsons episode satirised the affair.
xp84 2y ago
You can easily still get the GP’s meaning if you substitute the phrase “sneakily cheating the artist out of any compensation” for “theft” though, right?
- yreg 2y ago
  The "kids and teenagers that draw out of a passion" in GP's comment are not being cheated out of any compensation.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

WalterBright 2y ago

> Ideally we want a world where we license the artist’s style, and hopefully they can get paid out like streaming music artists in the long term. Along with that, we need laws that let you sue people that copy the style with no license. Years ago, I just kind of assumed that should be true. I'm not so sure anymore. I don't see any evidence that creativity comes from copyright and patent protection. Germany flowered in the 19th century without them. For the last 20 years, I've been releasing my work under the Boost license which is the most permissible license out there (public domain is my preference, but it is not recognized in some countries).

autoexec 2y ago

> Ideally we want a world where we license the artist’s style Ideally no one's art would be hindered by having to track down and pay someone for creating something in another "artist's style". Ideally people would just create what they like and be free to intentionally practice and play around with the styles of others as they see fit while they develop their own. No artist, ever, should own a "style" just as no author should own a "genre". Artists should be the free to express and explore whatever they want using whatever tools they want. > I’d say it’s the closest thing to when Napster got everyone used to theft. Napster didn't get people used to theft, it got them used to access. It introduced people to music and entire musical genres that they'd never have otherwise encountered. It even got people to buy music and attend concerts they otherwise wouldn't have. Access to culture enriches everyone and inspires the creation of new artistic works. The music industry wasn't worried about theft. They were worried that they'd lose their jobs as useless middlemen and gatekeepers.

computerthings 2y ago
> Ideally no one's art would be hindered by having to track down and pay someone for creating something in another "artist's style". After "you" tracked them down, slurped up their art and spent a lot of electricity to garble it, it's oddly convenient to suddenly get lazy when it comes to giving credit. And being able to understand, even SEE (or hear etc.) something well enough you can re-create it, that's one thing. That at least implies some common experience between artist and copycat, even in the case of just straight copying the style. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, right? But copying and then garbling it with algorithms, forever and ever and ever, is something else entirely. Different enough that artists should opt-in. It's like what killer robots are what to soldiers, too, and I'm not joking. At least until now, to create a lot of propaganda in text and image you would have to at least convince or force a proportional amount of humans to do it, which is harder the more atrocities and people they know and love are involved. No such qualms with machines, and no scaling issues. And hey, the constant drowning out of intelligent and still applicable things that already have been made, in favor of some product, some content, some "take", produced by something someone who happens to live right now (which makes it important I see their thing, and not something made in the past that would do more for me) is already a problem without any machines involved. So I want to be able to opt-in as consumer, too. I don't want to restrict the choice of others, but it just allowing to mingle and drown out everything else by being infinitely cheap to produce predictably will destroy my choice. If it's so great for creativity, and the results so great, neither should be an issue. I mean, the way you make it sound artists should be pushing for it -- where are they? And if barely any artists want to give away their art for it, and only computer people want them to, well, then the people who want their machines to make art will have to learn making art themselves, first. That is not too much to ask. No lover of language looks at the output of LLM and thinks "I want to write like that". People who can't write (or "don't have the time" for the thought process while still oddly feeling entitled to the appearance of it) see that, want it for themselves, because it's better than what they can make. Same or even worse with music.