Why is DALL-E a scam? | Hacker News Reader

Why is DALL-E a scam?

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57 pointsakaij33 comments

To be fair, consider the human brain as purely a neural network that trains on any and all artwork it encounters over its lifetime. It then produces a piece of artwork. Is it wrong for that brain to charge for copies of the artwork?

I find it quite amusing that there seems to be overlap between people who think IP/copyright law needs an overhaul, and people who think that Github Code Pilot and DallE are exploitive.

Those two opinions are orthogonal. One might believe that Mickey Mouse should not dictate copyright law and think these tools are exploitative.

I use them, I do not think they are evil. I can also appreciate the asymmetry of using code with restrictive licenses or private to train an ML vs the consumer visibility over, for instance, windows source code. In the case of DallE I find it fascinating and useful, and can likewise appreciate the asymmetry of having the compute power and placing restrictions on which prompts are allowed,

It is not difficult to see how those asymmetries can be seen as exploitative. I don’t have a side but the thought is easy to entertain.

Edit: grammar

This is such a new frontier but there is something there.

If I draw a picture and release it into the world; I'm familiar with that process. I know, it'll be viewed and consumed by human eyeballs and I understand to some degree their capabilities and motives, or maybe I pretend I do. The point is, the release of the content into the wild was done with some understanding of its consequences.

Now, along comes DALL-E, it's an unfamiliar, new class of a consumer. It'll swallow anything you produce and turn it into profit for another human, right before your eyes. It'll also do so in such a way without _recognizing_ the contributors to its success. DALL-E is a black box where the effort of creators goes in and someone else pocket is made fatter.

The key point for me is that DALL-E would be worthless without it consuming other peoples work. Folks here have mentioned how they've consumed content over their lives that others have produced... yeah, but, with enough time you could have got there yourself. DALL-E simply cannot. It is absolutely necessary for it to consume the content of others.

Everyone who learns to create art has a background in what’s been done before them. I don’t see painters in galleries list everything that’s gone into their education. Song credits don’t have the thousands of albums the creators have listened to. Computers are displacing humans here for sure, but they way they learn and apply it is the same.

Nonsense. I’ve been immersed in the world for decades and absorbed all sorts of human creativity during that time. When I create something it’s still mine.

It would be nigh impossible to connect any particular DALL-E output with any particular input, thus making a legal novelty but not a scam.

Also, in the paid version, all rights accrue to the user, not to OpenAI, so that assertion is false.

It's clearly an artist seething at grim realization that they are about to get irrevocably replaced.

Now this is where I have my little rant about 'art' Art represents two different things. That pretty picture in IKEA is 'art' the Mona Lisa is also 'art'. In one context it's a necessarily human endeavour, on the other, it's something to make you buy one box of corn flakes over another.

I wish we had 2 different words for these things. Artist has a different ring than graphic designer.

One deserves to be protected, and I don't think will go away anyway, the other may well be automated away, but will invoke the former to protect itself.

We do have two terms: fine art and commercial art.

That makes sense - I do often look at it and think "Eh, it's fine."

Painters were not (entirely) replaced by photographers. Pretty sure that even with Dall-E around, there will still be a market for pure human creation, or even hybrid one.

But they're certainly giving up some ground. Corporate art is already more meaningless than DALLE. Can't imagine $BANK spending anything on artists if they can just type a few random words and get passable art

Ok but this is already the case with stock photos for example which have become a commodity.

lolno, artists aren't getting replaced any time soon. try getting something with a transparent background from it or more than 2 layers of composition. it falls apart when you try to do anything with a complex prompt and you have to describe the prompt, let alone the fact pretty much everyone who buys art likes to finetune it which would be awful to do here

The proper Dalle2 interface lets you finetune by masking out sections for regeneration.

Cosmopolitan leaked how the process looks like: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a40314356/dall-e-2-ar...

https://hmg-h-cdn.hearstapps.com/videos/creation-loop-165578...

At the end of the day dalle is a fancy Content-Aware Fill on steroids(style translation), pasting mishmash of copyrighted data scrapped off the web.

as many responses to this point out, it is doing the exact same thing as people. i learned about computers by reviewing the work of others. i sell those skills for money.

yeah but i cant imagine you put Getty Images' watermark in your code

That’s not what “scam” means, I think the word is “exploitative”, but even that is debatable.

Not a SCAM but a scummy way to create ML Model based on stolen artwork.

Only in a socially constructed system of intellectual property based on modern artificial scarcity for the benefit of propertyholders.

It's not just DALLE. This logic can be applied to Imagine, Parti, Midjourney, Gato, GPT-3 and any other ML technology.

How is it mechanically different from a human studying various artwork—besides the quantity of works studied?

The human. People all comparing it to humans here, but for humans to study art, be influenced by it and create derivative works, they have to invest their most precious resource: time. That makes all the difference.

All the difference to who? Because it takes our slug meat longer, it has more value? Sounds like jealousy on our part.

Also humans respect copyright, meaning other people's published work and don't just copy it, otherwise there are legal consequences which seem to not be the case with DALLE and others.

The scale is different. Quantity is a quality of its own, etc.

are all words based on stolen letters

> based on stolen artwork.

if it were only trained on public artwork (where copyright has expired) would that still be a problem?

Not under the current understanding of copyright.

The idea that the copyright to a piece of artwork is an asset which can be owned, and therefore stolen, is a relatively recent invention of dubious social utility. For this completely new field of human endeavor, we could choose many different precedents to apply when inventing rules of conduct.

The history of private property is rife with abuse and exploitation. We should not rush to extend such ideas into new arenas.

I don't have an opinion on whether it's a scam. But if it's able to create original art work after going through the others I'd be impressed.

Don't fight it. Let the future wash over you.

Any idea when could we expect DALLE to reach Google Parti levels of detail?

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