3 ms·

I can steal a company's codebase without depriving them of their code. I can steal an invention without wiping the inventor's memory. These are other kinds of

I can steal a company's codebase without depriving them of their code. I can steal an invention without wiping the inventor's memory. These are other kinds of stealing, which deprives the creator not of the art itself, but the other benefits of having created it.

visarga 2y ago
The logic "gen AI is theft" is pretty careless. Let's say I use gen-AI to identify a skin sore, and seek appropriate treatment. Who's copyright was being violated? How about if I ask it to make a story where my kid is a protagonist? In fact the more I put into a prompt, the less it looks like anything in the training set, the longer the discussion, the greater the divergence.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  I'm saying that training gen-AI on Benn Jordan's art against his will, without permission, and without remuneration, is theft. You can train on a suitably licensed database of medical images if you want.
  - visarga 2y ago
    It depends, is it a LoRa focused on Benn? Is it intended to replicate his style? Or is Benn one of the billion authors in the training set? In that case his impact will be minimal, and the generated images/texts will be very different from any training example, mostly reflecting the prompt.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      If the impact is really so minimal that the appropriate compensation is zero, then surely your AI would also be just fine without training on those works?
      - visarga 2y ago
        I understand what you are saying, but there are different kinds of learning. If your model learns how many fingers are on a hand, it does not violate copyright in that regard. Every copyrighted work relies on facts, abstractions and styles they don't own. Models don't have the necessary capacity to remember exact expression from each source, only generalities are being learned and later recombined. Blocking AI from training on grounds of copyright is a maximalist take on what copyright protects. Let's say we change copyright to cover abstractions, then any human creator would be in deep trouble. Incidental similarities would make the creative act too risky.
        mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        Setting aside questions like why the AI company is entitled to use these materials for free to develop commercial products, why would you even want to use art to learn factual information like how many fingers are on a hand? And how can you claim that this is what they pull from that art, right after we've just been through a wave of unmistakable AI Studio Ghibli copies?
        visarga 2y ago
        I am more fearful that Ghilibi will demand to own their style, forbidding anyone from using it without permission. If everyone stakes a claim on some style or abstraction, then we are in a situation where nothing new can be created without automatically becoming infringing.
        mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        Wait, what happened to "it's just learning hands have five fingers"? A few comments ago you seemed to be saying that copying one artist's style on purpose might be bad, but that with billions of training images, no one source will be recognizeable in the output, and under that condition the impact to the artist is minimal. (and yet...[1]). Now you're taking the position that even using their work without permission to train AI for the purpose of directly and unmistakably replicating that artist's signature style is OK? Which is it? And are you not fearful of a world in which nobody ever develops a new Ghibli-tier art style, because they'd starve in the process while competing against low-cost AI interpolations of prior art and AI companies make a fortune selling their efforts? I'm fearful of a world in which anyone can print "Huggies" on counterfeit diapers and pass them off on Amazon as the real deal, so I hope you at least have room in your philosophy for trademarks, if not trademark art styles. But either way, the good news is that you yourself can put in the work to hand-paint 100,000 frames of imitation Ghibli-style artwork and then train an AI on your portfolio and give it to whoever you want, or even master a style of your own; the bad news is that this will take sixty years of your life and career, during which time you'll have to feed yourself and your staff, and when you're done you might not feel so generous about giving it away for other people to use to sell greeting cards on Etsy. But there's more good news, which is that Miyazaki is at least generous enough to allow at least one other studio to use his art style with his blessing, as long as the result lives up to the following standard: "every film you make, you’ll have to realize that has to be a film that is worthy to show to children".[2] And personally, I do think he's earned the right to ask that much. [1] https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-archeologist-adventurer https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-arche... [2] https://www.themarysue.com/studio-ponoc-interview/ https://www.themarysue.com/studio-ponoc-interview/
    - dwighttk 2y ago
      So leave him out of the training set… the impact will be minimal
      - NobleLie 2y ago
        Excellent comment (seriously)
      - pogue 2y ago
        That's the entire issue and the point of his attempts to poison his music from AI training: you can't opt-out of having your work used to train GenAI. I'd encourage you to watch his video.
        mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        GP clearly understands this. The comment makes perfect sense in the context of the thread. It is directed not at the artist, but at those who believe that AI companies training on art without permission aren't stealing anything.
- rideontime 2y ago
  How about you write a story where your kid is the protagonist, instead? I'm sure they'll look back on it with far more appreciation than something an LLM shit out.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > The logic "gen AI is theft" is pretty careless. No, it isn't. It is a widely understood if not explicitly stated and frankly, so easy to understand concept that I'm forced to conclude people as yourself who refuse point blank to understand it are merely doing so out of sheer determination. When you post things online, be it art, be it music, be it photographs, be it the idle thoughts of your mind: you do this to share it with other people. That's the point. Why you want to share it can certainly change and explanations range from desiring an online following/clout to making money to simply the fact that you are driven to create and share whatever it is you do. This is the entire basis of the proto-Internet, to a degree where it predates the whole notion of extracting wealth from others via the Internet, and to a large degree, also predates the notion of a following. If you desire to counteract this premise, then I would suggest you must somehow explain the existence of BBSes, newsgroups, anonymous web forums, blogs, etc. that are some of the oldest, dustiest pillars of the Internet, that our modern Internet would not exist without, and moreover, tons of these existed when analytics, statistics, etc. were barely conceived of. Some websites had a guest book, and some had visitor counters, and that was literally it. If you published on a blog like I did in the 90's, you had no fucking clue if anyone at all was actually reading it. Or to put it shortly: The Internet and it's constituent communities existed long before there was a financial motive to publish, and absent that, what possible explanation could there be to publish apart from have your thing seen by people? Ergo, to then take those intellectual products, shared in good faith for the enjoyment of others, run them through an industrial shredder, identify the most common patterns in their underlying structure, and sell it back to the public to whom it's existence simply must be credited, is perverse. It is self-expression without the self; it is merely expression, for the sake of expression. Noise. And we all kind of know this, prior to LLMs, the most common experience of this phenomenon was spam. Because if you simply posted links to whatever thing you were hocking it would be deleted immediately, spammers had to get clever. They would write what were ostensibly "blog posts" but they were not sincere expressions of anything apart from avaricious greed and a desire to camouflage it. Websites rose that were nothing but endless pages of this shit, designed to be optimally crawled by Google and other engines, linking back to sites seeking favor in search engines. Web forums at that time had to regularly moderate away content not for being hateful, but for being openly fucking stupid, irrelevant to topic, and simply seeking to drive traffic to other sites. Anywhere there was an unprotected text input who's contents may, eventually, arrive at a page was, to a spammer, a perfectly valid place to park their shit that nobody wanted, and park it they did. And this is exactly what LLMs make. Soulless nothing who's primary reason to exist is to occupy space. Image generators are the same; their outputs exist because an image, no matter how generic or mediocre, would look better in this spot than a blank color. Music, without motivation or drive behind it, as a convenient alternative to silence. Video because an image would be boring. Functional, purposeless, driveless, motivation-free content to occupy the otherwise empty void around whatever thing you're actually trying to get eyes on: Text to cloak your links, mediocre art to cloak your sales pitch, etc. And the reason the business parasite class is so thrilled about it's existence is that it finally allows people who have not nurtured creativity within themselves for whatever reason you'd care to assign access to creative outputs. They have sneered derisively at people who feel the drive to create and learn the ability to do so because fundamentally they do not believe creative products have value, that the attention, the adoration, and more than anything the money that said creatives are given so freely by their fans would be far better in their pocket instead. You can hear this in the way they talk: "I'm making a movie with AI!" said as though it's a revolutionary statement, as though great directors announce "I've started production on my next picture using Red Digital Cameras" like anyone from the public would give an ounce of a shit how a thing was made. They don't even consider "will someone want to see this movie?" because other people seeing it isn't the point, their elevation is the point. The promotion of their brand is the point. They have nothing at all to say, and it will doom anything they make to abject failure. AI permits capital to access skill without requiring at all that skill be permitted to access capital.

visarga 2y ago

The logic "gen AI is theft" is pretty careless. Let's say I use gen-AI to identify a skin sore, and seek appropriate treatment. Who's copyright was being violated? How about if I ask it to make a story where my kid is a protagonist? In fact the more I put into a prompt, the less it looks like anything in the training set, the longer the discussion, the greater the divergence.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
I'm saying that training gen-AI on Benn Jordan's art against his will, without permission, and without remuneration, is theft. You can train on a suitably licensed database of medical images if you want.
- visarga 2y ago
  It depends, is it a LoRa focused on Benn? Is it intended to replicate his style? Or is Benn one of the billion authors in the training set? In that case his impact will be minimal, and the generated images/texts will be very different from any training example, mostly reflecting the prompt.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    If the impact is really so minimal that the appropriate compensation is zero, then surely your AI would also be just fine without training on those works?
    - visarga 2y ago
      I understand what you are saying, but there are different kinds of learning. If your model learns how many fingers are on a hand, it does not violate copyright in that regard. Every copyrighted work relies on facts, abstractions and styles they don't own. Models don't have the necessary capacity to remember exact expression from each source, only generalities are being learned and later recombined. Blocking AI from training on grounds of copyright is a maximalist take on what copyright protects. Let's say we change copyright to cover abstractions, then any human creator would be in deep trouble. Incidental similarities would make the creative act too risky.
      - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        Setting aside questions like why the AI company is entitled to use these materials for free to develop commercial products, why would you even want to use art to learn factual information like how many fingers are on a hand? And how can you claim that this is what they pull from that art, right after we've just been through a wave of unmistakable AI Studio Ghibli copies?
        visarga 2y ago
        I am more fearful that Ghilibi will demand to own their style, forbidding anyone from using it without permission. If everyone stakes a claim on some style or abstraction, then we are in a situation where nothing new can be created without automatically becoming infringing.
        mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        Wait, what happened to "it's just learning hands have five fingers"? A few comments ago you seemed to be saying that copying one artist's style on purpose might be bad, but that with billions of training images, no one source will be recognizeable in the output, and under that condition the impact to the artist is minimal. (and yet...[1]). Now you're taking the position that even using their work without permission to train AI for the purpose of directly and unmistakably replicating that artist's signature style is OK? Which is it? And are you not fearful of a world in which nobody ever develops a new Ghibli-tier art style, because they'd starve in the process while competing against low-cost AI interpolations of prior art and AI companies make a fortune selling their efforts? I'm fearful of a world in which anyone can print "Huggies" on counterfeit diapers and pass them off on Amazon as the real deal, so I hope you at least have room in your philosophy for trademarks, if not trademark art styles. But either way, the good news is that you yourself can put in the work to hand-paint 100,000 frames of imitation Ghibli-style artwork and then train an AI on your portfolio and give it to whoever you want, or even master a style of your own; the bad news is that this will take sixty years of your life and career, during which time you'll have to feed yourself and your staff, and when you're done you might not feel so generous about giving it away for other people to use to sell greeting cards on Etsy. But there's more good news, which is that Miyazaki is at least generous enough to allow at least one other studio to use his art style with his blessing, as long as the result lives up to the following standard: "every film you make, you’ll have to realize that has to be a film that is worthy to show to children".[2] And personally, I do think he's earned the right to ask that much. [1] https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-archeologist-adventurer https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-arche... [2] https://www.themarysue.com/studio-ponoc-interview/ https://www.themarysue.com/studio-ponoc-interview/
  - dwighttk 2y ago
    So leave him out of the training set… the impact will be minimal
    - NobleLie 2y ago
      Excellent comment (seriously)
    - pogue 2y ago
      That's the entire issue and the point of his attempts to poison his music from AI training: you can't opt-out of having your work used to train GenAI. I'd encourage you to watch his video.
      - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        GP clearly understands this. The comment makes perfect sense in the context of the thread. It is directed not at the artist, but at those who believe that AI companies training on art without permission aren't stealing anything.
rideontime 2y ago
How about you write a story where your kid is the protagonist, instead? I'm sure they'll look back on it with far more appreciation than something an LLM shit out.
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> The logic "gen AI is theft" is pretty careless. No, it isn't. It is a widely understood if not explicitly stated and frankly, so easy to understand concept that I'm forced to conclude people as yourself who refuse point blank to understand it are merely doing so out of sheer determination. When you post things online, be it art, be it music, be it photographs, be it the idle thoughts of your mind: you do this to share it with other people. That's the point. Why you want to share it can certainly change and explanations range from desiring an online following/clout to making money to simply the fact that you are driven to create and share whatever it is you do. This is the entire basis of the proto-Internet, to a degree where it predates the whole notion of extracting wealth from others via the Internet, and to a large degree, also predates the notion of a following. If you desire to counteract this premise, then I would suggest you must somehow explain the existence of BBSes, newsgroups, anonymous web forums, blogs, etc. that are some of the oldest, dustiest pillars of the Internet, that our modern Internet would not exist without, and moreover, tons of these existed when analytics, statistics, etc. were barely conceived of. Some websites had a guest book, and some had visitor counters, and that was literally it. If you published on a blog like I did in the 90's, you had no fucking clue if anyone at all was actually reading it. Or to put it shortly: The Internet and it's constituent communities existed long before there was a financial motive to publish, and absent that, what possible explanation could there be to publish apart from have your thing seen by people? Ergo, to then take those intellectual products, shared in good faith for the enjoyment of others, run them through an industrial shredder, identify the most common patterns in their underlying structure, and sell it back to the public to whom it's existence simply must be credited, is perverse. It is self-expression without the self; it is merely expression, for the sake of expression. Noise. And we all kind of know this, prior to LLMs, the most common experience of this phenomenon was spam. Because if you simply posted links to whatever thing you were hocking it would be deleted immediately, spammers had to get clever. They would write what were ostensibly "blog posts" but they were not sincere expressions of anything apart from avaricious greed and a desire to camouflage it. Websites rose that were nothing but endless pages of this shit, designed to be optimally crawled by Google and other engines, linking back to sites seeking favor in search engines. Web forums at that time had to regularly moderate away content not for being hateful, but for being openly fucking stupid, irrelevant to topic, and simply seeking to drive traffic to other sites. Anywhere there was an unprotected text input who's contents may, eventually, arrive at a page was, to a spammer, a perfectly valid place to park their shit that nobody wanted, and park it they did. And this is exactly what LLMs make. Soulless nothing who's primary reason to exist is to occupy space. Image generators are the same; their outputs exist because an image, no matter how generic or mediocre, would look better in this spot than a blank color. Music, without motivation or drive behind it, as a convenient alternative to silence. Video because an image would be boring. Functional, purposeless, driveless, motivation-free content to occupy the otherwise empty void around whatever thing you're actually trying to get eyes on: Text to cloak your links, mediocre art to cloak your sales pitch, etc. And the reason the business parasite class is so thrilled about it's existence is that it finally allows people who have not nurtured creativity within themselves for whatever reason you'd care to assign access to creative outputs. They have sneered derisively at people who feel the drive to create and learn the ability to do so because fundamentally they do not believe creative products have value, that the attention, the adoration, and more than anything the money that said creatives are given so freely by their fans would be far better in their pocket instead. You can hear this in the way they talk: "I'm making a movie with AI!" said as though it's a revolutionary statement, as though great directors announce "I've started production on my next picture using Red Digital Cameras" like anyone from the public would give an ounce of a shit how a thing was made. They don't even consider "will someone want to see this movie?" because other people seeing it isn't the point, their elevation is the point. The promotion of their brand is the point. They have nothing at all to say, and it will doom anything they make to abject failure. AI permits capital to access skill without requiring at all that skill be permitted to access capital.