6 ms·

It’s great that you have sympathy for illustrators, but I don’t see a big difference if the training data is a novel, a picture, a song, a piece of code, or eve

by sshine 1y ago

It’s great that you have sympathy for illustrators, but I don’t see a big difference if the training data is a novel, a picture, a song, a piece of code, or even a piece of legal text. As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower. In the end, the work we do that is heavily robotic will be done by less expensive robots.

earthnail 1y ago
Here’s the argument: The output of her translations had no copyright. Language developed independently of translators. The output of artists has copyright. Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output. The fear now is that if we no longer have a market where people generate novel arts, that space will stagnate.
- briansm 1y ago
  Makes me wonder if the generous copyright protections afforded to artists had not become so abhorrent (thanks, Disney) then this kind of thing might not have happened.
- wongarsu 1y ago
  I don't think the Berne Convention on Copyright was meant as a complete list of things where humans have valuable input. Translators do shape the space in which they generate output. Their space isn't any single language bit rather the connecting space between languages. Most translation work is simple just as the day-to-day of many creative professions is rather uncreative. But translating a book, comic or movie requires creative decisions on how to best convey the original meaning in the idioms and cultural context of a different language. The difference between a good and a bag translation can be stark
- imiric 1y ago
  > The output of artists has copyright. Copyright is a very messy and divisive topic. How exactly can an artist claim ownership of a thought or an image? It is often difficult to ascertain whether a piece of art infringes on the copyright of another. There are grey areas like "fair use", which complicate this further. In many cases copyright is also abused by holders to censor art that they don't like for a myriad of unrelated reasons. And there's the argument that copyright stunts innovation. There are entire art movements and music genres that wouldn't exist if copyright was strictly enforced on art. > Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output. Art created by humans is not entirely original. Artists are inspired by each other, they follow trends and movements, and often tiptoe the line between copyright infringement and inspiration. Groundbreaking artists are rare, and if we consider that machines can create a practically infinite number of permutations based on their source data, it's not unthinkable that they could also create art that humans consider unique and novel, if nothing else because we're not able to trace the output to all of its source inputs. Then again, those human groundbreaking artists are also inspired by others in ways we often can't perceive. Art is never created in a vacuum. "Good artists copy; great artists steal", etc. So I guess my point is: it doesn't make sense to apply copyright to art, but there's nothing stopping us from doing the same for machine-generated art, if we wanted to make our laws even more insane. And machine-generated art can also set trends and shape the space they're generated in. The thing is that technology advances far more rapidly than laws do. AI is raising many questions that we'll have to answer eventually, but it will take a long time to get there. And on that path it's worth rethinking traditional laws like copyright, and considering whether we can implement a new framework that's fair towards creators without the drawbacks of the current system.
  - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    >Art created by humans is not entirely original. The catch here is that a human can use single sample as input, but AI needs a torrent of training data. Also when AI generates permutations of samples, does their statistic match training data?
    - taneq 1y ago
      Not without a torrent of pre-training data. The qualitative differences are rapidly becoming intangible ‘soul’ type things.
    - wongarsu 1y ago
      A skilled artist can imitate a single art style or draw a specific object from a single reference. But becoming a skilled artist takes years of training. As a society we like to pretend some humans are randomly gifted with the ability to draw, but in reality it's 5% talent and 95% spending countless hours practising the craft. And if you count the years worth of visual data the average human has experienced by the time they can recreate a van Gogh then humans take magnitudes more training data than state of the art ML models
      - startupsfail 1y ago
        In case of an ML model either a very good description or that single reference could be added to the context.
    - brookst 1y ago
      No human could use a single sample if it was literally the first piece of art they had ever seen. Humans have that torrent of training data baked in from years of lived experience. That’s why people who go to art school or otherwise study art are generally (not always of course) better artists.
      - collingreen 1y ago
        I don't think the claim that the value of art school simply being more exposure to art holds water.
- nickserv 1y ago
  A translation is absolutely under copyright. It is a creative process after all. This means a book can be in public domain for the original text, because it's very old, but not the translation because it's newer. For example Julius Caesar's "Gallic War" in the original latin is clearly not subject to copyright, but a recent English translation will be.
  - dcsan 1y ago
    So if a machine was to do the translation, should that also be considered a creative work? If not, that would put pressure on production companies to use machines so they don’t have to pay future royalties
    - MoonGhost 1y ago
      > So if a machine was to do the translation, should that also be considered a creative work? No, but it will be derived work covered by the same copyright as original. The quality of human translation is better, for now.
    - nickserv 1y ago
      Well that's the real question, isn't it? Our current best technology, LLMs, are good enough for translating an email or meeting transcript and getting the general message across. Anything more creative, technical, or nuanced, and they fall apart. Meaning for anything of value like books, plays, movies, poetry, humans will necessarily be part of the process: coaxing, prompting, correcting... If we consider the machine a tool, it's easy, the work would fall under copyright. If we consider the machine the creator, then things get tricky. Are only the parts reworked/corrected under copyright? Do we consider under copyright only if a certain portion of the work was machine generated? Is the prompt under copyright, but not its output? Without even getting into the issue of training data under copyright... There is some movement regarding copyright of AI art, legislation being drawn up and debated in some countries. It's likely translations would be impacted by those decisions.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  Piracy is promotion, look at all the fanfiction. Also in case of graphic and voice artists unique style looks more valuable than output itself, but style isn't protected by copyright.
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  You are wrong. Translations have copyright. That is why a new translation of for example an ancient book has copyright and you are now allowed to reproduce it without permission.
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  Wrong from the first sentence…
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  That makes no sense, neither legally nor philosophically. > Language developed independently of translators. And it also developed independently of writers and poets. > Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output. Not writers and poets, apparently. And so maybe not even artists, who typically mostly painted book references. Color perception and symbolism developed independently of professional artists, too. Moreover, all of the things you mention predate copyright. > The fear now is that if we no longer have a market where people generate novel arts, that space will stagnate. But that will never happen; it's near-impossible to stop humans from generating novel arts. They just do it as a matter of course - and the more accessible the tools are, the more people participate. Yes, memes are a form of art, too. What's a real threat is lack of shared consumption of art. This has been happening for the past couple decades now, first with books, then with visual arts. AI will make this problem worse by both further increasing volume of "novel arts" and by enabling personalization. The real value we're using is the role of art as social objects - the ability to relate to each other by means of experiencing the same works of art, and thus being able to discuss and reference it. If no two people ever experienced the same works of art, there's not much about art they can talk about; if there's no shared set of art seen by most people in a society, there's a social baseline lost. That problem does worry me.
  - gregw2 1y ago
    If you think memes are art too and we lack shared consumption of art due to personalization, you clearly don't have kids into YouTube or Minecraft or Frozen, or ...
    - anon-3988 1y ago
      I don't get what you are trying to say here? Yes, memes are arts however foreign it might be to older folks. To your second point, you know about Frozen because everyone else also watches that. We are about to lose that if there are 1 million variations of "Frozen"-esque movie that people can watch. I don't think have an AI partner that is trained from zero from childhood to adulthood with goals such as "make me laugh" is too far fetched. The problem is you will never be able to connect with this child because the AI is feeding it insanely obscure, highly specific videos that matches the neurons of the kid perfectly.
- brookst 1y ago
  Translations absolutely have copyright.
- fennecbutt 1y ago
  Stagnate just like hand thatched rooves? Or like weavers, ever since Jaquard? I don't see too many people defending artists also calling for people to start buying handmade clothing and fabrics again. That said and because people on here are feisty, I have many artist friends and I deeply appreciate their work at the same time as appreciating how cool diffusion models are. The difference being of course that we live in a modern society and we should be able to find a solution that works for all. That said, humans can't even get in something basic like UBI for people and humans consistently vote against each other in favour of discriminating on skin colour, sex, sexuality, culture. Meanwhile the billionaires that are soon to become trillionaires are actively defended by many members of our species, sometimes even by the poor. The industrial age broke our evolved monkey brains.
kouteiheika 1y ago
> As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower. She was lucky to be able to retire when she did, as the job of a translator is definitely going to become extinct. You can already get higher quality translations from machine learning models than you get from the majority of commercial human translations (sans occasional mistakes for which you still need editors to fix), and it's only going to get better. And unlike human translators LLMs don't mangle the translations because they're too lazy to actually translate so they just rewrite the text as that's easier, or (unfortunately this is starting to become more and more common lately) deliberately mistranslate because of their personal political beliefs.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  Maybe for dry text. Translation of art is art too and there's no such thing as higher quality art.
  - taneq 1y ago
    I’m intrigued by this statement. It seems obvious to me that some artworks are ‘higher quality’ than others. You wouldn’t, I’d presume, consider the Sistine Chapel or the Mona Lisa to be the same quality as a dickbutt scribbled on a napkin?
    - Ylpertnodi 1y ago
      >You wouldn’t, I’d presume, consider the Sistine Chapel or the Mona Lisa to be the same quality as a dickbutt scribbled on a napkin? To paraphrase Frank Zappa...Art just needs a frame. If you poo on a table...not art. If you declare 'my poo on the table will last from the idea, until the poo dissappears', then that is art. Similarly, banksy is just graffiti unless you understand (or not) the framing of the work.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
emsign 1y ago
You can't compare translation to creating new works of art. Sorry mom, but that's apples and oranges. A dangerously false comparison.
- sshine 1y ago
  As noted in another sub-thread, translations are indeed works of art. As evidence, my mom has received royalties for her translations for decades, both from sales and from library lending. And she could sue for copyright infringement if someone stole her translation. The only difference is that she needs permission to distribute the translation, unless it’s translated from the public domain.
- anton-c 1y ago
  If you speak more than one language(esp something like Chinese or Japanese) you understand how subjective some choices are. It certainly takes creative decision making.
  - numpad0 1y ago
    I speak Japanese natively and hell, I'm just going to say, there is no such thing as translation, there is just foreign language ghostwriting. I'm not even sure if bilingualism is real or if it's just an alternate expression for relatively benign forced split personality. Could very well be.
idiotsecant 1y ago
My prediction: It will be like furniture. A long time ago, every piece of furniture was handmade. It might have been good furniture, or crude, poorly constructed furniture, but it was all quite expensive, in terms of hours per piece. Now, furniture is almost completely mass produced, and can be purchased in a variety of styles and qualities relatively cheaply. Any customization or uniqueness puts it right back into the hand-made category. And that arrangement works for almost everyone. Media will be like that. There will be a vast quantity of personalized media of decent quality. It will be produced almost entirely automatically based on what the algorithm knows about you and your preferences. There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation.
- collingreen 1y ago
  This prediction implies that people will value consuming tailored media, knowing 100% that it was generated because they wanted it (as opposed to because someone wanted to express something), with no deeper story or connection or exploration to it. If people instead care about the creation story and influences (the idea of "behind the scenes" and "creator interviews" for on demand ai generated media is pretty funny) then this won't have much value. Time will tell - it's an exciting, discouraging time to be alive, which has probably always been the case.
  - idiotsecant 1y ago
    I think the proportion of people who care about 'the making of' type content is vanishingly small. Almost everyone is looking for a dopamine hit and that's it.
- sshine 1y ago
  > There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation. This addresses one axis of development. Meanwhile, there's lots of people around willing to express themselves for advertisement money. Like with translation: We're going to see tool-assisted work where the tools get more and more sophisticated. Your example with furniture is good. Another is cars: From horses to robotaxis. Humans are in the loop somewhere still.

by sshine 1y ago

earthnail 1y ago

Here’s the argument: The output of her translations had no copyright. Language developed independently of translators. The output of artists has copyright. Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output. The fear now is that if we no longer have a market where people generate novel arts, that space will stagnate.

briansm 1y ago
Makes me wonder if the generous copyright protections afforded to artists had not become so abhorrent (thanks, Disney) then this kind of thing might not have happened.
wongarsu 1y ago
I don't think the Berne Convention on Copyright was meant as a complete list of things where humans have valuable input. Translators do shape the space in which they generate output. Their space isn't any single language bit rather the connecting space between languages. Most translation work is simple just as the day-to-day of many creative professions is rather uncreative. But translating a book, comic or movie requires creative decisions on how to best convey the original meaning in the idioms and cultural context of a different language. The difference between a good and a bag translation can be stark
imiric 1y ago
> The output of artists has copyright. Copyright is a very messy and divisive topic. How exactly can an artist claim ownership of a thought or an image? It is often difficult to ascertain whether a piece of art infringes on the copyright of another. There are grey areas like "fair use", which complicate this further. In many cases copyright is also abused by holders to censor art that they don't like for a myriad of unrelated reasons. And there's the argument that copyright stunts innovation. There are entire art movements and music genres that wouldn't exist if copyright was strictly enforced on art. > Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output. Art created by humans is not entirely original. Artists are inspired by each other, they follow trends and movements, and often tiptoe the line between copyright infringement and inspiration. Groundbreaking artists are rare, and if we consider that machines can create a practically infinite number of permutations based on their source data, it's not unthinkable that they could also create art that humans consider unique and novel, if nothing else because we're not able to trace the output to all of its source inputs. Then again, those human groundbreaking artists are also inspired by others in ways we often can't perceive. Art is never created in a vacuum. "Good artists copy; great artists steal", etc. So I guess my point is: it doesn't make sense to apply copyright to art, but there's nothing stopping us from doing the same for machine-generated art, if we wanted to make our laws even more insane. And machine-generated art can also set trends and shape the space they're generated in. The thing is that technology advances far more rapidly than laws do. AI is raising many questions that we'll have to answer eventually, but it will take a long time to get there. And on that path it's worth rethinking traditional laws like copyright, and considering whether we can implement a new framework that's fair towards creators without the drawbacks of the current system.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  >Art created by humans is not entirely original. The catch here is that a human can use single sample as input, but AI needs a torrent of training data. Also when AI generates permutations of samples, does their statistic match training data?
  - taneq 1y ago
    Not without a torrent of pre-training data. The qualitative differences are rapidly becoming intangible ‘soul’ type things.
  - wongarsu 1y ago
    A skilled artist can imitate a single art style or draw a specific object from a single reference. But becoming a skilled artist takes years of training. As a society we like to pretend some humans are randomly gifted with the ability to draw, but in reality it's 5% talent and 95% spending countless hours practising the craft. And if you count the years worth of visual data the average human has experienced by the time they can recreate a van Gogh then humans take magnitudes more training data than state of the art ML models
    - startupsfail 1y ago
      In case of an ML model either a very good description or that single reference could be added to the context.
  - brookst 1y ago
    No human could use a single sample if it was literally the first piece of art they had ever seen. Humans have that torrent of training data baked in from years of lived experience. That’s why people who go to art school or otherwise study art are generally (not always of course) better artists.
    - collingreen 1y ago
      I don't think the claim that the value of art school simply being more exposure to art holds water.
nickserv 1y ago
A translation is absolutely under copyright. It is a creative process after all. This means a book can be in public domain for the original text, because it's very old, but not the translation because it's newer. For example Julius Caesar's "Gallic War" in the original latin is clearly not subject to copyright, but a recent English translation will be.
- dcsan 1y ago
  So if a machine was to do the translation, should that also be considered a creative work? If not, that would put pressure on production companies to use machines so they don’t have to pay future royalties
  - MoonGhost 1y ago
    > So if a machine was to do the translation, should that also be considered a creative work? No, but it will be derived work covered by the same copyright as original. The quality of human translation is better, for now.
  - nickserv 1y ago
    Well that's the real question, isn't it? Our current best technology, LLMs, are good enough for translating an email or meeting transcript and getting the general message across. Anything more creative, technical, or nuanced, and they fall apart. Meaning for anything of value like books, plays, movies, poetry, humans will necessarily be part of the process: coaxing, prompting, correcting... If we consider the machine a tool, it's easy, the work would fall under copyright. If we consider the machine the creator, then things get tricky. Are only the parts reworked/corrected under copyright? Do we consider under copyright only if a certain portion of the work was machine generated? Is the prompt under copyright, but not its output? Without even getting into the issue of training data under copyright... There is some movement regarding copyright of AI art, legislation being drawn up and debated in some countries. It's likely translations would be impacted by those decisions.
GoblinSlayer 1y ago
Piracy is promotion, look at all the fanfiction. Also in case of graphic and voice artists unique style looks more valuable than output itself, but style isn't protected by copyright.
victorbjorklund 1y ago
You are wrong. Translations have copyright. That is why a new translation of for example an ancient book has copyright and you are now allowed to reproduce it without permission.
wahnfrieden 1y ago
Wrong from the first sentence…
TeMPOraL 1y ago
That makes no sense, neither legally nor philosophically. > Language developed independently of translators. And it also developed independently of writers and poets. > Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output. Not writers and poets, apparently. And so maybe not even artists, who typically mostly painted book references. Color perception and symbolism developed independently of professional artists, too. Moreover, all of the things you mention predate copyright. > The fear now is that if we no longer have a market where people generate novel arts, that space will stagnate. But that will never happen; it's near-impossible to stop humans from generating novel arts. They just do it as a matter of course - and the more accessible the tools are, the more people participate. Yes, memes are a form of art, too. What's a real threat is lack of shared consumption of art. This has been happening for the past couple decades now, first with books, then with visual arts. AI will make this problem worse by both further increasing volume of "novel arts" and by enabling personalization. The real value we're using is the role of art as social objects - the ability to relate to each other by means of experiencing the same works of art, and thus being able to discuss and reference it. If no two people ever experienced the same works of art, there's not much about art they can talk about; if there's no shared set of art seen by most people in a society, there's a social baseline lost. That problem does worry me.
- gregw2 1y ago
  If you think memes are art too and we lack shared consumption of art due to personalization, you clearly don't have kids into YouTube or Minecraft or Frozen, or ...
  - anon-3988 1y ago
    I don't get what you are trying to say here? Yes, memes are arts however foreign it might be to older folks. To your second point, you know about Frozen because everyone else also watches that. We are about to lose that if there are 1 million variations of "Frozen"-esque movie that people can watch. I don't think have an AI partner that is trained from zero from childhood to adulthood with goals such as "make me laugh" is too far fetched. The problem is you will never be able to connect with this child because the AI is feeding it insanely obscure, highly specific videos that matches the neurons of the kid perfectly.
brookst 1y ago
Translations absolutely have copyright.
fennecbutt 1y ago
Stagnate just like hand thatched rooves? Or like weavers, ever since Jaquard? I don't see too many people defending artists also calling for people to start buying handmade clothing and fabrics again. That said and because people on here are feisty, I have many artist friends and I deeply appreciate their work at the same time as appreciating how cool diffusion models are. The difference being of course that we live in a modern society and we should be able to find a solution that works for all. That said, humans can't even get in something basic like UBI for people and humans consistently vote against each other in favour of discriminating on skin colour, sex, sexuality, culture. Meanwhile the billionaires that are soon to become trillionaires are actively defended by many members of our species, sometimes even by the poor. The industrial age broke our evolved monkey brains.

kouteiheika 1y ago

> As my mom retired from being a translator, she went from typewriter to machine-assisted translation with centralised corpus-databases. All the while the available work became less and less, and the wages became lower and lower. She was lucky to be able to retire when she did, as the job of a translator is definitely going to become extinct. You can already get higher quality translations from machine learning models than you get from the majority of commercial human translations (sans occasional mistakes for which you still need editors to fix), and it's only going to get better. And unlike human translators LLMs don't mangle the translations because they're too lazy to actually translate so they just rewrite the text as that's easier, or (unfortunately this is starting to become more and more common lately) deliberately mistranslate because of their personal political beliefs.

GoblinSlayer 1y ago
Maybe for dry text. Translation of art is art too and there's no such thing as higher quality art.
- taneq 1y ago
  I’m intrigued by this statement. It seems obvious to me that some artworks are ‘higher quality’ than others. You wouldn’t, I’d presume, consider the Sistine Chapel or the Mona Lisa to be the same quality as a dickbutt scribbled on a napkin?
  - Ylpertnodi 1y ago
    >You wouldn’t, I’d presume, consider the Sistine Chapel or the Mona Lisa to be the same quality as a dickbutt scribbled on a napkin? To paraphrase Frank Zappa...Art just needs a frame. If you poo on a table...not art. If you declare 'my poo on the table will last from the idea, until the poo dissappears', then that is art. Similarly, banksy is just graffiti unless you understand (or not) the framing of the work.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

emsign 1y ago

You can't compare translation to creating new works of art. Sorry mom, but that's apples and oranges. A dangerously false comparison.

sshine 1y ago
As noted in another sub-thread, translations are indeed works of art. As evidence, my mom has received royalties for her translations for decades, both from sales and from library lending. And she could sue for copyright infringement if someone stole her translation. The only difference is that she needs permission to distribute the translation, unless it’s translated from the public domain.
anton-c 1y ago
If you speak more than one language(esp something like Chinese or Japanese) you understand how subjective some choices are. It certainly takes creative decision making.
- numpad0 1y ago
  I speak Japanese natively and hell, I'm just going to say, there is no such thing as translation, there is just foreign language ghostwriting. I'm not even sure if bilingualism is real or if it's just an alternate expression for relatively benign forced split personality. Could very well be.

idiotsecant 1y ago

My prediction: It will be like furniture. A long time ago, every piece of furniture was handmade. It might have been good furniture, or crude, poorly constructed furniture, but it was all quite expensive, in terms of hours per piece. Now, furniture is almost completely mass produced, and can be purchased in a variety of styles and qualities relatively cheaply. Any customization or uniqueness puts it right back into the hand-made category. And that arrangement works for almost everyone. Media will be like that. There will be a vast quantity of personalized media of decent quality. It will be produced almost entirely automatically based on what the algorithm knows about you and your preferences. There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation.

collingreen 1y ago
This prediction implies that people will value consuming tailored media, knowing 100% that it was generated because they wanted it (as opposed to because someone wanted to express something), with no deeper story or connection or exploration to it. If people instead care about the creation story and influences (the idea of "behind the scenes" and "creator interviews" for on demand ai generated media is pretty funny) then this won't have much value. Time will tell - it's an exciting, discouraging time to be alive, which has probably always been the case.
- idiotsecant 1y ago
  I think the proportion of people who care about 'the making of' type content is vanishingly small. Almost everyone is looking for a dopamine hit and that's it.
sshine 1y ago
> There will be a niche industry of 'hand made' media with real acting and writing from human brains, but it will be expensive, a mark of conspicuous consumption and class differentiation. This addresses one axis of development. Meanwhile, there's lots of people around willing to express themselves for advertisement money. Like with translation: We're going to see tool-assisted work where the tools get more and more sophisticated. Your example with furniture is good. Another is cars: From horses to robotaxis. Humans are in the loop somewhere still.