Ask HN: Is it ethical/correct for DALL-E to charge money? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it ethical/correct for DALL-E to charge money?

Since it's using lots of copyrighted data and someone else work to be "trained", is it ok to charge money for it?

I feel like the copyright issue is a proxy argument.

What if a very large group of artists, around the level of Disney, created art for the purpose of training and selling their own AI artist? Would DISNEY-E be ethical if 100.0% legal?

I suspect the real debate is the unfair advantage this puts in the hands of a few. Not copyright in the legal sense, but copyright in the labor sense.

Which is a perfectly valid argument, but that brings us to debating relative ethics over the absolute ethics of copyright violation.

Is it ethical for Microsoft to charge for GitHub Copilot, since they didn't pay the programmers who provided the code it was trained on? Is it ethical for Elsevier to charge for scientific papers, since they didn't pay the scientists who wrote or peer reviewed them?

They all apply as well.

Is it ethical/correct for an art student to study the techniques and copyrighted works of other artists in learning to create their own art? Was the 2nd impressionist painter ethical/correct?

That's completely different.

In what way?

Humans can't learn zillions of techniques, that's why we need to build an AI?

Every human has built on the efforts and ideas of others. Nothing is truly novel

Has the "ai" actually learned anything? Is it running itself or only when prompted?

Did you ever try dall-e?

What is your response to each answer? Why is either answer important here? What if my questions are Socratic in nature?

Yes, there's manpower and energy that goes into every image creation. Without a profit incentive the technology would mostly stagnate. So ya it makes sense to charge to keep things rolling.

Well Idk about that. Many illicit activities also use manpower and energy, so I'm not sure if it's the best argument.

The original purpose of copyright was to incentivize artists to create more art. The question is, in a post-DALL-E world, is art still incentivized by said laws? Arguably not if any art can just be generated in a fraction of the time it would take to create it by hand.

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