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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

Surprised by the lack of comments on the ethics of DALL-E being trained on artists content whereas copilot threads are chock full of devs up in arms over models trained on open source code. Isn’t it the same thing?

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I recently talked with a concept artist about DALL-E and first thing they mentioned was "you know that's all stolen art, right?" Immediately made me think of GitHub Copilot.

However the artists being featured in DALL-E's newsletters can't stop gushing about 'the new instrument they are learning how to play' and other such metaphors that are meant to launder what's going on.

My theory is that the professions most at-risk for automation are acting on their anxieties. Must not be a lot of freelance artists on HN, and a whole lot of programmers.

I think the artists have an even clearer case. I don't think GitHub Copilot is ready to steal anyone's job yet. But DALL-E is poised to replace all formerly commissioned filler art for magazines, marketing sites, and blogs. Now the only point to hiring a human is to say you hired a human. Our filler art is farm-to-table.

Where did they get the art from anyway? Do they have a list of sources anywhere?

Quite true. Best case, we're seeing DJ Spooky style culture jamming/remixing. But more likely it is as you write.

On the other hand, the market for stock photography was already decimated by the internet. Where previously skilled photographers would create libraries of images to exemplify various terms and sell these as stock, in the last decade or so, an art director with the aid of a search engine could rapidly produce similar results.

I first read the artist's reply as "you know all art is stolen, right" which made more sense to me. If you look at the history of art, you'd also know that it's true.

Having used copilot for over a year now, it isn't there to replace programmers. It isn't called GitHub Pilot, and it doesn't do well with generating original ideas. Sure, if your job is to create sign up forms in HTML then sure, it'll do your job in a second, but if you're creating more complex systems, copilot is just there to help save you time when writing code (which is just implementing ideas).

Think of it like a set of powertools saving you time over manual tools.

Agreed. But I also understand the anxieties. I'd say a very significant % of programmers are not creating complex systems; they're coding up mostly CRUD UIs that have a great deal in common. It's getting to that inflection point where less programmers might be needed [??] ... Let's wait and see.

> My theory is that the professions most at-risk for automation are acting on their anxieties

That's not my problem with Copilot. I think tools and methods that can free human from some amount of work are good in a correctly organized society. They have been existing for a long time, too. They let us free time for other stuff that can't be automated. This extra free time could theoretically let us have more leisure or rest time too. I also trust myself to be able to learn another job if mine can ever be automated.

But I don't want my work to be reused under terms I don't approve of. There are some things I don't want to help with my work and this is reflected in the licenses I choose. I totally sympathize with artists who don't want their work to be reused in ways they don't like. I don't find this hard to understand. I also don't find it hard to understand that if an artist do some work that you should pay for to use is not happy with their work being reused without being paid. They should get paid a tiny bit for each generated art if theirs is in the training set, and only if they approve this use. That's would be only fair, the set would not be possible without those artists.

(Good for me, my personal code is not on GitHub for other, older, reasons)

This entire concept of AI learning using copyrighted works is going to be really tested in courts at some point, perhaps very soon, if not already.

However if the result is adequately different, I don't see how it is different from someone viewing other's work and then being "inspired" and creating something new. If you think about it the vast majority of things are built on top of existing ideas.

Of course. Because the majority of the tech bros on this site are self centered and think of arts as a lowly field deserving of no respect. While something slightly resembling some boilerplate lego code they wrote is a criminal act to learn from.

If you really want to learn, visit github.com. There are over 200 million freely available, open source code repositories for you to study and learn from.

Surely being suprised by the lack of comments on the ethics of DALL-E on HN is the same as the lack of comments on the ethics of co-pilot on some artists forum. I highly doubt you're going to find r/artists or whatever up in arms about co-pilot, even if they are about DALL-E.

Why is this any worse than an art student learning to paint by looking at other painter's work?

You are surprised that human beings react more strongly to things that more directly threaten them?

It is bad. But:

As long as DALL-E isn't caught painting out a 1-to-1, reverse searchable copy of an image, its not really as bad as copilot, IMO.

The issue isnt just that copilot is trained on my GPL code, its that it might decide to copy paste lines from it, including my comments, etc.

"DALL-E being trained on artists content"

Well, I can't go ask Caravaggio or Gentileschi to paint my query since they've been dead hundreds of years. But being able to to feed a query containing much more modern concepts in and get a baroque style painting in that specific style is wonderful.

Plus what has already been said about a lot of art being an imitation/derivation of previous works.

It's because the furor over AI replicating human artists already played out over earlier AI iterations. Remember when thisfursonadoesnotexist.com was flamed for stealing furry art? Turns out that many artists shared an extremely generic style that the AI could easily replicate.

It feels like it would be good for this to not be a legal grey area. Whether it's considered a large copyright infringement conspiracy or a form of fair use, it would be good if the law reached a position on that sooner rather than later.

Is it trained on unlicensed work gathered at random at the web?

(I really don't know, and I didn't find anything about it on their site.)

In a way, it's no different than an artist walking through an art gallery then going home, inspired, to paint a dark portrait a la Rembrandt

In such analogy, Copilot is no different than looking at someone code a bubble sort and then later doing one yourself. Some people on this forum had issue with that.

What is ok if they do something different, and not ok if they just repaint the same thing, depending on the source. And this software surely repaints a lot of the same things, so the only question is the source.

There are a few of those discussions going on in artist's circles these days. I imagine they'll get sued for doing this, but it'll probably take a very famous artist or a hell of a class action suit to make it happen.

Another question related to ethics

> Preventing harmful images: We’ve made our content filters more accurate so that they are more effective at blocking images that violate our content policy — which does not allow users to generate violent, adult, or political content

What is defined as political content? Can I prompt DALL-E to draw ”Fat Putin”?

No. Just tried.

good artists borrow, great artists steal

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