4 ms·

If "people who made this possible" were getting their fair share, "a millionth of a cent for every billion USD made with it" would be about it for the artists.

If "people who made this possible" were getting their fair share, "a millionth of a cent for every billion USD made with it" would be about it for the artists. What makes the dataset valuable isn't that the image 0012992 in it is precious and irreplaceable. It's that the index goes to seven digits. Pre-training is very much a matter of scale - and scraping is merely the easiest way to get data at scale. People who complain about "artists not getting paid" must have in their imagination some kind of counterfactual where artists are being paid thousands for their contributions. That's not how it works. A counterfactual world where artists were paid for AI training is one where an average artist is 5 cents richer, an average image generation AI performs 5% worse, and the bulk of extra data spending is captured by platforms selling stock photos and companies destructively digitizing physical media.

lionkor 6mo ago
The ideal world would be one where, to train on art, you have to buy a license to that art. Sure, for most artists they would maybe put a low price tag, but that isn't the point. The point isn't about money. It's that copies were made, without license and without permission, and without any legal right to do so, of art, and then used to train a system which generates similar art. The first step, the copy, is illegal without a license, and even for most public images online, licenses and copyright notices (which must be preserved) are attached.
- kolinko 6mo ago
  Ideal for whom? For society in general, I don’t think so.
  - peepee1982 6mo ago
    I think it would obviously better for society.
  - bigfishrunning 6mo ago
    I think you may be placing too much value on the output of these machines which use tons of energy, generate pollution (both noise and chemical), and generate output that's worse then what a human can do. We would be better off if these LLMs didn't exist.
    - azan_ 6mo ago
      Average person in US reducing his/her meat intake by 1/4 would do much, much more for environment compared with completely scrapping entire AI infrastructure worldwide. For some reason people concerned with environmental impact of AI get really angry whenever I point this out.
      - bluebarbet 6mo ago
        The average person here would do more still by just taking one less flight. It's air travel that really blows individual emissions out of the water.
- ACCount37 6mo ago
  "Without any legal right to do so" is for the courts to decide. And so far, the courts are very much not deciding the way you want them to. "Fair use" counters "without license and without permission" hard. The argument that training AI on scraped data is "fair use" and the resulting model outputs are "transformative works" has held up in courts. Anthropic got dinged for downloading pirated books, but not for throwing the ones they didn't pirate down the training pipeline. Some countries, like Japan, have amended their copyright laws to make AI training categorically legal. Others are in "fair use clauses" grey areas with courts deciding case by case based on precedent and interpretation. So trying to latch onto copyright law is, as it always was, the wrong move. Copyright never favored the small guy. Stupid to expect that it suddenly will.
  - davemp 6mo ago
    > The argument that training AI on scraped data is "fair use" and the resulting model outputs are "transformative works" has held up in courts. Nope. Nope. Nope. That has explicitly not been ruled on yet. Transformative means that you don't need a fair use defense. Anthropic has only gotten away with their outputs being called transformative so far because they put a dubiously effective filter in front to block the most egregious infringing outputs. No one has actually challenged this afaik.
- brookst 6mo ago
  Would your ideal world apply to humans as well? Like if I see some art in a museum and it inspires me to create some of my own, I would need to pay a licensing fee to the original artist? And what about the artists that inspired them? There is no art in the world that sprang fully formed from one single person, without any influences. Should we reshape our economy to ensure knowledge and artistic provenance is maintained perpetually? This whole discussion is so weird to me. It’s like AI has freaked everyone out so much that the instinct is to run to the safety of Disney-esque complete control and perpetual monetization of every work. Which is exactly the opposite of how art worked for the first several hundred thousand years. Really, we want to double down on the perverse incentives and tight control that IP owners have given us in the past 50 years?
  - Jtarii 6mo ago
    >Like if I see some art in a museum and it inspires me to create some of my own, I would need to pay a licensing fee to the original artist? Nope, humans are admitted for free :). >And what about the artists that inspired them? There is no art in the world that sprang fully formed from one single person, without any influences. As long as you are a human you get to be inspired all you want :) You seem very invested in licking the boot of the trillion dollar corporations. Your fellow humans are concerned. >Really, we want to double down on the perverse incentives and tight control that IP owners have given us in the past 50 years? Isn't it interesting that the EXACT second that copyright law impedes billion dollar corporations it is thrown out the window, really makes you think huh?
    - brookst 6mo ago
      [dead]
peepee1982 6mo ago
If the dataset weren't valuable, big tech wouldn't depend on it to train their models. I don't care about getting a millionth of a cent as an artist (which btw is a number *you* just pulled out of your imagination). I care about them paying a fair share instead of pocketing it, so the money stays in circulation instead of creating a new class of technofeudal lords.
SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
> Pre-training is very much a matter of scale - and scraping is merely the easiest way to get data at scale. Therein lies the problem. AI firms just bulldozed ahead and "just did it" with no consideration for the ethics or legality. (Nor for that matter, how they're going to get this data in the future now that they're pushing artists into unemployment and filling the internet with slop.) There is no "imagined counterfactual", people just want AI firms to follow basic ethics and apply consent. Something tech in general is woefully inadequate at. The counterfactual isn't offered by artists, but AI companies. "If we had to ask consent then we couldn't have made this". Okay, so? The world isn't worse off without OpenAI's image generator. Who cares, there's no economic value to these slop images, they're merely replacing stock assets & quickly thrown together MS paint placeholders. Given how much of a shitshow this technology has always been (I refuse to mince words: This tech had it's "big break" as "deepfakes", and Elon Musk has escalated that even further. It's always been sexual harassment.) The actual net value to society is almost certainly negative.
jeroenhd 6mo ago
> A counterfactual world where artists were paid for AI training is one where an average artist is 5 cents richer, an average image generation AI performs 5% worse, and the bulk of extra data spending is captured by platforms selling stock photos and companies destructively digitizing physical media. No, a counterfactual world where artists were paid for AI training wouldn't see commercially viable AI at all. A world which plenty of people would be more than happy to live in, mind you. AI relies on mass piracy worth Googols of dollars if you count like you would the million dollar iPod, but because AI surprised the copyright industry, it's now too late to enforce copyright like that.
- ACCount37 6mo ago
  Even in a counterfactual world where any data that's not in public domain can't be used in AI training at all, ever, AIs would exist. Training on public domain data is a bitch, but it's doable. It's just that it results in worse AIs for more effort. So no one does it other than to flex. It would still be "commercially viable", mind. I'm not sure how much would it stall the AI development in practice, but all the inputs of making AIs only get cheaper over time. So I struggle to imagine not having something like DALL-E 1 by 2030. If we extend the counterfactual and allow for licensed media, we compress the timelines and raise the bar. The "best" image generation AIs of 2026 are now made by the likes of Adobe and locked behind some kind of $500 a month per seat Creative Cloud Pro Future subscription. Because Adobe is rich enough to afford big bulk licensing deals, while the likes of academia and smaller startups have to subsist on old public domain data, permissively licensed scraps and small carefully selected batches of licensed data that might block them from sharing the resulting weights with the licensing deals. In the "counterfactual: licensed media" world, the local AI generation powerhouse of Stable Diffusion ecosystem probably doesn't exist at all. Big companies selling AI do. Their offerings cost a lot more and perform considerably worse than the actual AIs we have today. So you can't just go to a random website and get an image edited for a shitpost for free. But the high end commercial suites exist, they're used by the media and the marketing companies, and they are still way cheaper than hiring artists. The big copyright companies get their pound of flesh, but don't confuse that for the artists getting a win.
- BoxOfRain 6mo ago
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
whywhywhywhy 6mo ago
If it was about this why do OpenAI and Anthropic lose their minds when people are training off their output.
whywhywhywhy 6mo ago
If it was about this why do OpenAI and Anthropic lose their minds when people are training off their output or trying to scrape their systems. I actually don't have an issue with training off the mass of everyones work if the models are open and free to build upon, it's locking them away and then throwing your toys out the pram when people try and do the same thing that bothers me.
- ACCount37 6mo ago
  Good question. I actually have a technical answer, believe it or not. Pre-training is: training a model from scratch on cheap data that sets the foundation of a model's capabilities. It produces a base model. Post-training is: training a base model further, using expensive specialized data, direct human input and elaborate high compute use methods to refine the model's behavior, and imbue it with the capabilities that pre-training alone has failed to teach it. It produces the model that's actually deployed. When people perform distillation attacks, they take an existing base model and try to post-train it using the outputs of another proprietary model. They're not aiming to imitate the cheap bulk pre-training data - they're aiming to imitate the expensive in-house post-training steps. Ones that the frontier labs have spent a lot of AI-specialized data, compute, labor and hours of R&D work on. This is probably not "fair use", because it directly tries to take and replicate a frontier lab's competitive edge, but that wasn't tested in courts. And a lot of the companies caught doing that for their own commercial models are in China. So the path to legal recourse is shaky at best. But what's on the table is restricting access to full chain of thought, and banning the suspected distillation attackers from the inference API. Which is a bit like trying to stop a sieve from leaking - but it may slow the competitors down at least.
  - whywhywhywhy 6mo ago
    >Ones that the frontier labs have spent a lot of AI-specialized data, compute, labor and hours of R&D work on. Granted thats time and money but it's an absolute minuscule amount of human hours compared to the scraped data. We know this for a fact because of parallelization, work of hundreds of millions vs the work of 20-100 even of OpenAIs team worked for the entire lifetimes of the current team and the lifetimes of the offspring of that team and the lifetimes of their offspring even with several lifetimes they still wouldnt have even made a dent in recreating that initial scraped training data.

lionkor 6mo ago

The ideal world would be one where, to train on art, you have to buy a license to that art. Sure, for most artists they would maybe put a low price tag, but that isn't the point. The point isn't about money. It's that copies were made, without license and without permission, and without any legal right to do so, of art, and then used to train a system which generates similar art. The first step, the copy, is illegal without a license, and even for most public images online, licenses and copyright notices (which must be preserved) are attached.

kolinko 6mo ago
Ideal for whom? For society in general, I don’t think so.
- peepee1982 6mo ago
  I think it would obviously better for society.
- bigfishrunning 6mo ago
  I think you may be placing too much value on the output of these machines which use tons of energy, generate pollution (both noise and chemical), and generate output that's worse then what a human can do. We would be better off if these LLMs didn't exist.
  - azan_ 6mo ago
    Average person in US reducing his/her meat intake by 1/4 would do much, much more for environment compared with completely scrapping entire AI infrastructure worldwide. For some reason people concerned with environmental impact of AI get really angry whenever I point this out.
    - bluebarbet 6mo ago
      The average person here would do more still by just taking one less flight. It's air travel that really blows individual emissions out of the water.
ACCount37 6mo ago
"Without any legal right to do so" is for the courts to decide. And so far, the courts are very much not deciding the way you want them to. "Fair use" counters "without license and without permission" hard. The argument that training AI on scraped data is "fair use" and the resulting model outputs are "transformative works" has held up in courts. Anthropic got dinged for downloading pirated books, but not for throwing the ones they didn't pirate down the training pipeline. Some countries, like Japan, have amended their copyright laws to make AI training categorically legal. Others are in "fair use clauses" grey areas with courts deciding case by case based on precedent and interpretation. So trying to latch onto copyright law is, as it always was, the wrong move. Copyright never favored the small guy. Stupid to expect that it suddenly will.
- davemp 6mo ago
  > The argument that training AI on scraped data is "fair use" and the resulting model outputs are "transformative works" has held up in courts. Nope. Nope. Nope. That has explicitly not been ruled on yet. Transformative means that you don't need a fair use defense. Anthropic has only gotten away with their outputs being called transformative so far because they put a dubiously effective filter in front to block the most egregious infringing outputs. No one has actually challenged this afaik.
brookst 6mo ago
Would your ideal world apply to humans as well? Like if I see some art in a museum and it inspires me to create some of my own, I would need to pay a licensing fee to the original artist? And what about the artists that inspired them? There is no art in the world that sprang fully formed from one single person, without any influences. Should we reshape our economy to ensure knowledge and artistic provenance is maintained perpetually? This whole discussion is so weird to me. It’s like AI has freaked everyone out so much that the instinct is to run to the safety of Disney-esque complete control and perpetual monetization of every work. Which is exactly the opposite of how art worked for the first several hundred thousand years. Really, we want to double down on the perverse incentives and tight control that IP owners have given us in the past 50 years?
- Jtarii 6mo ago
  >Like if I see some art in a museum and it inspires me to create some of my own, I would need to pay a licensing fee to the original artist? Nope, humans are admitted for free :). >And what about the artists that inspired them? There is no art in the world that sprang fully formed from one single person, without any influences. As long as you are a human you get to be inspired all you want :) You seem very invested in licking the boot of the trillion dollar corporations. Your fellow humans are concerned. >Really, we want to double down on the perverse incentives and tight control that IP owners have given us in the past 50 years? Isn't it interesting that the EXACT second that copyright law impedes billion dollar corporations it is thrown out the window, really makes you think huh?
  - brookst 6mo ago
    [dead]

peepee1982 6mo ago

If the dataset weren't valuable, big tech wouldn't depend on it to train their models. I don't care about getting a millionth of a cent as an artist (which btw is a number *you* just pulled out of your imagination). I care about them paying a fair share instead of pocketing it, so the money stays in circulation instead of creating a new class of technofeudal lords.

SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago

> Pre-training is very much a matter of scale - and scraping is merely the easiest way to get data at scale. Therein lies the problem. AI firms just bulldozed ahead and "just did it" with no consideration for the ethics or legality. (Nor for that matter, how they're going to get this data in the future now that they're pushing artists into unemployment and filling the internet with slop.) There is no "imagined counterfactual", people just want AI firms to follow basic ethics and apply consent. Something tech in general is woefully inadequate at. The counterfactual isn't offered by artists, but AI companies. "If we had to ask consent then we couldn't have made this". Okay, so? The world isn't worse off without OpenAI's image generator. Who cares, there's no economic value to these slop images, they're merely replacing stock assets & quickly thrown together MS paint placeholders. Given how much of a shitshow this technology has always been (I refuse to mince words: This tech had it's "big break" as "deepfakes", and Elon Musk has escalated that even further. It's always been sexual harassment.) The actual net value to society is almost certainly negative.

jeroenhd 6mo ago

> A counterfactual world where artists were paid for AI training is one where an average artist is 5 cents richer, an average image generation AI performs 5% worse, and the bulk of extra data spending is captured by platforms selling stock photos and companies destructively digitizing physical media. No, a counterfactual world where artists were paid for AI training wouldn't see commercially viable AI at all. A world which plenty of people would be more than happy to live in, mind you. AI relies on mass piracy worth Googols of dollars if you count like you would the million dollar iPod, but because AI surprised the copyright industry, it's now too late to enforce copyright like that.

ACCount37 6mo ago
Even in a counterfactual world where any data that's not in public domain can't be used in AI training at all, ever, AIs would exist. Training on public domain data is a bitch, but it's doable. It's just that it results in worse AIs for more effort. So no one does it other than to flex. It would still be "commercially viable", mind. I'm not sure how much would it stall the AI development in practice, but all the inputs of making AIs only get cheaper over time. So I struggle to imagine not having something like DALL-E 1 by 2030. If we extend the counterfactual and allow for licensed media, we compress the timelines and raise the bar. The "best" image generation AIs of 2026 are now made by the likes of Adobe and locked behind some kind of $500 a month per seat Creative Cloud Pro Future subscription. Because Adobe is rich enough to afford big bulk licensing deals, while the likes of academia and smaller startups have to subsist on old public domain data, permissively licensed scraps and small carefully selected batches of licensed data that might block them from sharing the resulting weights with the licensing deals. In the "counterfactual: licensed media" world, the local AI generation powerhouse of Stable Diffusion ecosystem probably doesn't exist at all. Big companies selling AI do. Their offerings cost a lot more and perform considerably worse than the actual AIs we have today. So you can't just go to a random website and get an image edited for a shitpost for free. But the high end commercial suites exist, they're used by the media and the marketing companies, and they are still way cheaper than hiring artists. The big copyright companies get their pound of flesh, but don't confuse that for the artists getting a win.
BoxOfRain 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

whywhywhywhy 6mo ago

If it was about this why do OpenAI and Anthropic lose their minds when people are training off their output.

whywhywhywhy 6mo ago

If it was about this why do OpenAI and Anthropic lose their minds when people are training off their output or trying to scrape their systems. I actually don't have an issue with training off the mass of everyones work if the models are open and free to build upon, it's locking them away and then throwing your toys out the pram when people try and do the same thing that bothers me.

ACCount37 6mo ago
Good question. I actually have a technical answer, believe it or not. Pre-training is: training a model from scratch on cheap data that sets the foundation of a model's capabilities. It produces a base model. Post-training is: training a base model further, using expensive specialized data, direct human input and elaborate high compute use methods to refine the model's behavior, and imbue it with the capabilities that pre-training alone has failed to teach it. It produces the model that's actually deployed. When people perform distillation attacks, they take an existing base model and try to post-train it using the outputs of another proprietary model. They're not aiming to imitate the cheap bulk pre-training data - they're aiming to imitate the expensive in-house post-training steps. Ones that the frontier labs have spent a lot of AI-specialized data, compute, labor and hours of R&D work on. This is probably not "fair use", because it directly tries to take and replicate a frontier lab's competitive edge, but that wasn't tested in courts. And a lot of the companies caught doing that for their own commercial models are in China. So the path to legal recourse is shaky at best. But what's on the table is restricting access to full chain of thought, and banning the suspected distillation attackers from the inference API. Which is a bit like trying to stop a sieve from leaking - but it may slow the competitors down at least.
- whywhywhywhy 6mo ago
  >Ones that the frontier labs have spent a lot of AI-specialized data, compute, labor and hours of R&D work on. Granted thats time and money but it's an absolute minuscule amount of human hours compared to the scraped data. We know this for a fact because of parallelization, work of hundreds of millions vs the work of 20-100 even of OpenAIs team worked for the entire lifetimes of the current team and the lifetimes of the offspring of that team and the lifetimes of their offspring even with several lifetimes they still wouldnt have even made a dent in recreating that initial scraped training data.