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What is unique about graphic design that warrants such extraordinary care? Should we just ban technology that approaches "replacement" territory? What about the

What is unique about graphic design that warrants such extraordinary care? Should we just ban technology that approaches "replacement" territory? What about the people, real or imagined, that earn a living making Graphviz diagrams?

tptacek 1y ago
The article discusses this.
- hatefulmoron 1y ago
  Does it? It admits at the top that art is special for no given reason, then it claims that programmers don't care about copyright and they deserve what's coming to them, or something.. "Artificial intelligence is profoundly — and probably unfairly — threatening to visual artists" This feels asserted without any real evidence
  - tptacek 1y ago
    LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession, and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression. An coding agent writes a SQL join or a tree traversal. The two things are not the same. Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have. Finally, though I'm not stuck on this: I simply don't agree with the case being made for LLMs violating IPR. I have had the pleasure, many times over the last 16 years, of expressing my discomfort with nerd piracy culture and the coercive might-makes-right arguments underpinning it. I know how the argument goes over here (like a lead balloon). You can agree with me or disagree. But I've earned my bona fides here. The search bar will avail.
    - hatefulmoron 1y ago
      > LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession And so what? Tell it to the Graphviz diagram creators, entry level Javascript programmers, horse carriage drivers, etc. What's special? > .. and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression What does this actually mean, though? ChatGPT isn't claiming to have "creative expression" in this sense. Everybody knows that it's generating an image using mathematics executed on a GPU. It's creating images. Like an LLM creates text. It creates artwork in the same sense that it creates novels. > Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have. Programmers are very particular about licenses in opposition to your theory. Copyleft licensing leans heavily on enforcing copyright. Besides, I hear artists complain about the duration of copyright frequently. Pointing to some subset of programmers that are against IPR is just nutpicking in any case.
      - tptacek 1y ago
        Oh, for sure. Programmers are very particular about licenses. For code.
        hatefulmoron 1y ago
        I get it, you have an axe to grind against some subset of programmers who are "nerds" in a "piracy culture". Artists don't deserve special protections. It sucks for your family members, I really mean that, but they will have to adapt with everybody else.
        mwcampbell 1y ago
        I disagree with you on this. Artists, writers, and programmers deserve equal protection, and this means that tptacek is right to criticize nerd piracy culture. In other words, we programmers should respect artists and writers too.
        hatefulmoron 1y ago
    - thanksgiving 1y ago
      > Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have. I think the case we are making is there is no such thing as intellectual property to begin with and the whole thing is a scam created by duck taping a bunch of different concepts together when they should not be grouped together at all. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
      - rfrey 1y ago
        That's exactly the point, it's hard to see how someone could hold that view and pillory AI companies for slurping up proprietary code. You probably don't have those views. But I think Thomas' point is that the profession as a whole has been crying "information wants to be free" for so many years, when what they meant was "information I don't want to pay for wants to be free" - and the hostile response to AI training on private data underlines that.
        b3morales 1y ago
        Because it's rules for us and not for them. If I take Microsoft's code and "transform" it I get sued. If Microsoft takes everyone else's code and "transforms" it (and sells it back to us) well, that's just business, pal. Thomas's argument is completely missing this point. EDIT to add, I said this more completely a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381996
    - ivape 1y ago
      counterfeiting creative expression This is the only piece of human work left in the long run, and that’s providing training data on taste. Once we hook up a/b testing on ai creative outputs, the LLM will know how to be creative and not just duplicative. The ai will never have innate taste, but we can feed it taste. We can also starve it of taste, but that’s impossible because humans can’t stop providing data. In other words, never tell the LLM what looks good and it will never know. A human in the most isolated part of the world can discern what creation is beautiful and what is not.
      - fennecbutt 1y ago
        Everything is derivative, even all human work. I don't think "creativity" is that hard to replicate, for humans it's about lived experience. For a model it would need the data that impacts its decisions. Atm models are trained for a neutral/overall result.
        hmcq6 1y ago
        Your premise is an axiom that I don’t think most would accept. Is the matrix a ripoff of the Truman show? Is Oldboy derivative of Oedipus? Saying everything is derivative is reductive.
    - fennecbutt 1y ago
      >bread-and-butter replacement-tier How is creative expression required for such things? Also, I believe that we're just monkey meat bags and not magical beings and so the whole human creativity thing can easily be reproduced with enough data + a sprinkle of randomness. This is why you see trends in supposedly thought provoking art across many artists. Artists draw from imagination which is drawn from lived experience and most humans have roughly the same lives on average, cultural/country barriers probably produce more of a difference. Many of the flourishes any artist may use in their work is also likely used by many other artists. If I commission "draw a mad scientist, use creative license" from several human artists I'm telling you now that they'll all mostly look the same.
    - oompty 1y ago
      What about ones trained on fully licensed art, like Adobe Firefly (based on their own stock library) or F-Lite by Freepik & Fal (also claimed to be copyright safe)?
    - Jensson 1y ago
      > LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession, and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression. An coding agent writes a SQL join or a tree traversal. The two things are not the same. In what way are these two not the same? It isn't like icons or ui panels are more original than the code that runs the app. Or are you saying only artists are creating things of value and it is fine to steal all the work of programmers?
    - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
      Modern flat graphic style has basically zero quality, I drew one myself even though I'm absolutely incompetent in proper drawing.
  - palmfacehn 1y ago
    >This feels asserted without any real evidence Things like this are expressions of preference. The discussion will typically devolve into restatements of the original preference and appeals to special circumstances.
omnimus 1y ago
It’s more question of how it does what it does. By making statistical model out of work of humans that it now aims to replace. I think graphic designers would be a lot less angry if AIs were trained on licensed work… thats how the system worked up until now after all.
- hatefulmoron 1y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but given that LLMs are trained on every available written word regardless of license, there's no meaningful distinction. Companies training LLMs for programming and writing show the same disregard for copyright as they do for graphic design. Therefore, graphic designers aren't owed special consideration that the author is unwilling to extend to anybody else.
  - omnimus 1y ago
    Of course i think the same about text, code, sound or any other LLMs output. The author is wrong if they are unwilling to give same measure to everything. The fact this is new normal now for everything does not make it right.
- fennecfoxy 1y ago
  I don't think most artists would be any less angry & scared if AI was trained on licensed work. The rhetoric would just shift from mostly "they're breashing copyright!" to more of the "machine art is soulless and lacks true human creativity!" line. I have a lot of artist friends but I still appreciate that diffusion models are (and will be with further refinement) incredibly useful tools. What we're seeing is just the commoditisation of an industry in the same way that we have many, many times before through the industrial era, etc.
  - omnimus 1y ago
    It actually doesn't matter how would they feel. In currently accepted copyright framework if the works were licensed they couldn't do much about it. But right now they can be upset because suddenly new normal is massive copyright violation. It's very clear that without the massive amount of unlicensed work the LLMs simply wouldn't work well. The AI industry is just trying to run with it hoping nobody will notice.

tptacek 1y ago

The article discusses this.

hatefulmoron 1y ago
Does it? It admits at the top that art is special for no given reason, then it claims that programmers don't care about copyright and they deserve what's coming to them, or something.. "Artificial intelligence is profoundly — and probably unfairly — threatening to visual artists" This feels asserted without any real evidence
- tptacek 1y ago
  LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession, and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression. An coding agent writes a SQL join or a tree traversal. The two things are not the same. Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have. Finally, though I'm not stuck on this: I simply don't agree with the case being made for LLMs violating IPR. I have had the pleasure, many times over the last 16 years, of expressing my discomfort with nerd piracy culture and the coercive might-makes-right arguments underpinning it. I know how the argument goes over here (like a lead balloon). You can agree with me or disagree. But I've earned my bona fides here. The search bar will avail.
  - hatefulmoron 1y ago
    > LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession And so what? Tell it to the Graphviz diagram creators, entry level Javascript programmers, horse carriage drivers, etc. What's special? > .. and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression What does this actually mean, though? ChatGPT isn't claiming to have "creative expression" in this sense. Everybody knows that it's generating an image using mathematics executed on a GPU. It's creating images. Like an LLM creates text. It creates artwork in the same sense that it creates novels. > Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have. Programmers are very particular about licenses in opposition to your theory. Copyleft licensing leans heavily on enforcing copyright. Besides, I hear artists complain about the duration of copyright frequently. Pointing to some subset of programmers that are against IPR is just nutpicking in any case.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      Oh, for sure. Programmers are very particular about licenses. For code.
      - hatefulmoron 1y ago
        I get it, you have an axe to grind against some subset of programmers who are "nerds" in a "piracy culture". Artists don't deserve special protections. It sucks for your family members, I really mean that, but they will have to adapt with everybody else.
        mwcampbell 1y ago
        I disagree with you on this. Artists, writers, and programmers deserve equal protection, and this means that tptacek is right to criticize nerd piracy culture. In other words, we programmers should respect artists and writers too.
        hatefulmoron 1y ago
  - thanksgiving 1y ago
    > Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have. I think the case we are making is there is no such thing as intellectual property to begin with and the whole thing is a scam created by duck taping a bunch of different concepts together when they should not be grouped together at all. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
    - rfrey 1y ago
      That's exactly the point, it's hard to see how someone could hold that view and pillory AI companies for slurping up proprietary code. You probably don't have those views. But I think Thomas' point is that the profession as a whole has been crying "information wants to be free" for so many years, when what they meant was "information I don't want to pay for wants to be free" - and the hostile response to AI training on private data underlines that.
      - b3morales 1y ago
        Because it's rules for us and not for them. If I take Microsoft's code and "transform" it I get sued. If Microsoft takes everyone else's code and "transforms" it (and sells it back to us) well, that's just business, pal. Thomas's argument is completely missing this point. EDIT to add, I said this more completely a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381996
  - ivape 1y ago
    counterfeiting creative expression This is the only piece of human work left in the long run, and that’s providing training data on taste. Once we hook up a/b testing on ai creative outputs, the LLM will know how to be creative and not just duplicative. The ai will never have innate taste, but we can feed it taste. We can also starve it of taste, but that’s impossible because humans can’t stop providing data. In other words, never tell the LLM what looks good and it will never know. A human in the most isolated part of the world can discern what creation is beautiful and what is not.
    - fennecbutt 1y ago
      Everything is derivative, even all human work. I don't think "creativity" is that hard to replicate, for humans it's about lived experience. For a model it would need the data that impacts its decisions. Atm models are trained for a neutral/overall result.
      - hmcq6 1y ago
        Your premise is an axiom that I don’t think most would accept. Is the matrix a ripoff of the Truman show? Is Oldboy derivative of Oedipus? Saying everything is derivative is reductive.
  - fennecbutt 1y ago
    >bread-and-butter replacement-tier How is creative expression required for such things? Also, I believe that we're just monkey meat bags and not magical beings and so the whole human creativity thing can easily be reproduced with enough data + a sprinkle of randomness. This is why you see trends in supposedly thought provoking art across many artists. Artists draw from imagination which is drawn from lived experience and most humans have roughly the same lives on average, cultural/country barriers probably produce more of a difference. Many of the flourishes any artist may use in their work is also likely used by many other artists. If I commission "draw a mad scientist, use creative license" from several human artists I'm telling you now that they'll all mostly look the same.
  - oompty 1y ago
    What about ones trained on fully licensed art, like Adobe Firefly (based on their own stock library) or F-Lite by Freepik & Fal (also claimed to be copyright safe)?
  - Jensson 1y ago
    > LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession, and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression. An coding agent writes a SQL join or a tree traversal. The two things are not the same. In what way are these two not the same? It isn't like icons or ui panels are more original than the code that runs the app. Or are you saying only artists are creating things of value and it is fine to steal all the work of programmers?
  - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    Modern flat graphic style has basically zero quality, I drew one myself even though I'm absolutely incompetent in proper drawing.
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  >This feels asserted without any real evidence Things like this are expressions of preference. The discussion will typically devolve into restatements of the original preference and appeals to special circumstances.

omnimus 1y ago

It’s more question of how it does what it does. By making statistical model out of work of humans that it now aims to replace. I think graphic designers would be a lot less angry if AIs were trained on licensed work… thats how the system worked up until now after all.

hatefulmoron 1y ago
I get where you're coming from, but given that LLMs are trained on every available written word regardless of license, there's no meaningful distinction. Companies training LLMs for programming and writing show the same disregard for copyright as they do for graphic design. Therefore, graphic designers aren't owed special consideration that the author is unwilling to extend to anybody else.
- omnimus 1y ago
  Of course i think the same about text, code, sound or any other LLMs output. The author is wrong if they are unwilling to give same measure to everything. The fact this is new normal now for everything does not make it right.
fennecfoxy 1y ago
I don't think most artists would be any less angry & scared if AI was trained on licensed work. The rhetoric would just shift from mostly "they're breashing copyright!" to more of the "machine art is soulless and lacks true human creativity!" line. I have a lot of artist friends but I still appreciate that diffusion models are (and will be with further refinement) incredibly useful tools. What we're seeing is just the commoditisation of an industry in the same way that we have many, many times before through the industrial era, etc.
- omnimus 1y ago
  It actually doesn't matter how would they feel. In currently accepted copyright framework if the works were licensed they couldn't do much about it. But right now they can be upset because suddenly new normal is massive copyright violation. It's very clear that without the massive amount of unlicensed work the LLMs simply wouldn't work well. The AI industry is just trying to run with it hoping nobody will notice.