I've thought about this comparison to human artists taking inspiration from each other a bit. The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour.
Consider facial recognition technology. At an individual level, empowering people to quickly see all of the photos they have taken of their spouse through running facial recognition against their photos is useful and harmless. Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook is a massively harmful expansion of the surveillance state.
I don't think training models against 5bn unlicensed images is in the same scale of harm as running facial recognition against an entire country's worth of people. But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale.
We should allow _everybody_ to run the exact same technology. Governments are not special. Power to the people.
I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker.
> I've thought about this comparison to human artists taking inspiration from each other a bit. The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour.
A human can mimic something with a single reference. It might not be good, but that can hardly matter for a discussion of ethics. The morality cannot depend on whether or not humans can do something poorly or not.
> Consider facial recognition technology. At an individual level, empowering people to quickly see all of the photos they have taken of their spouse through running facial recognition against their photos is useful and harmless. Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook is a massively harmful expansion of the surveillance state.
Entirely different issue that happens to utilize a similar tech.
> But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale.
It does not.
I agree. This would more accurately be called "AI Luddism", opposing a new technology because of fears related to its immense productivity over humans. It has nothing to do with veganism
EDIT: that said, vegan is used in the sense of the article as "a really obvious and strong stance that people do not follow even though all the information about how it is bad is readily available"
At times this whole thing feels hypocritical. Generations of laborers grew up with the reality that their work was essentially a commodity. Now that it's our turn, we raise the age old arguments again.
Automation of labor has been an ongoing force for decades and a reality laborers have had to live with for years.
https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/napoleon-d...
> In one conversation on St Helena, Napoleon was asked by his doctor what he would have done if he had managed to invade southern England in 1805. Napoleon’s reply was an absolute cracker: “I would have hastened over my flotilla with two hundred thousand men, landed as near Chatham as possible and proceeded direct to London, where I calculated to arrive in four days from the time of my landing. I would have proclaimed a republic and the abolition of the nobility and the House of Peers, the distribution of the property of such of the latter as opposed me amongst my partisans, liberty, equality and the sovereignty of the people.”
They smashed machines because that hurt the people oppressing them, not because they hated the machines.
Admittedly, the UK was warring againt the French Monach as well before, so it's not a clear cut thing, but things like Luddites and the 'Peterloo' show that Britain was not speeding towards greater democracy. They very slowly gave ground over centuries of struggle.
> The Tory Prime Minister in 1830, Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, was resolutely opposed to parliamentary reform. However, there was growing support for limited change within his party, primarily because partially extending the franchise would allow the wealth and influence of Britain's growing middle class to be exploited.
That's 20 years later, a small extra step of democracy.
I was just trying to point out that smashing some stuff was a fairly reasonable thing to do when you don't have a vote and you're hungry, by providing some political context on the era.
This is another example of an ethical choice that I made!
Is the harm here that is caused by being offensive to veganism outweighed by the value of sparking useful conversations about personal approaches to AI ethics?
I think that it is.
It's similar to the ethics of attaching a click-bait headline to a valuable piece of journalism. Is it OK to do that? That depends, both on the specific case and on the opinions of individuals who observe that decision.
And to be honest, if it hadn't worked I would have thought "well, it was worth a shot". The analogy genuinely works well for me.
There are many, many, many people out there who believe it's fine to eat meat but not fine to e.g. feign attribution on intellectual work. Asserting that objections to this kind of tech are much weaker than various vegan arguments without explanation is odd.
> A human can mimic something with a single reference. It might not be good, but that can hardly matter for a discussion of ethics. The morality cannot depend on whether or not humans can do something poorly or not.
Asserting this without argument suggests you have a particular unstated idea of how ethical determinations are supposed to be made that you are projecting out onto the discussion. This would be important to lay out.
It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required to think the two are in the same league.
It's really not hard. You just have to care more for the harm to the well-being of human artists than for the harm for the well-being of farmed animals. It may surprise some people but speciesism is the default position for the vast majority of the population.
What you're saying is that you think intellectual property is more valuable, to you, than the life of other conscious non human beings.
I think for most people, this is a stretch.
But I don’t find either one hard to imagine.
The mental gymnastics are required to rationalize the act of eating meat and murder being the same thing.
The vegan argument is that factory farms are literal lifetime torture pins. This isn't much up to debate. You can shrug and choose to eat meat anyway, but co-opting their name for your argument on ip seems incredibly shallow. Even if you believe that ip violations are worse than animal cruelty. I'm not a vegetarian at all fwiw. Not too dissimilar from trying to frame this as the holocaust of artists or any other strongly held event / movement by many others.
> Asserting this without argument suggests you have a particular unstated idea of how ethical determinations are supposed to be made that you are projecting out onto the discussion. This would be important to lay out.
If your ethical framework suggests ip violations are immoral, unless you think the execution was bad that's just silly.
To me this seems to similar to old fashioned luddites. The machines back then that improved the productivity of labourers mostly displaced the societal role of skilled craftsmen. Of course using the machine is different to doing it by hand, but we did have some benefits from improving our productivity using machines, as well as some downsides. The interesting thing is that in this case we are moving from using machines to improve productivity of material objects, into sociocultural objects (art), and it's not clear what that will "do" exactly.
> But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale.
Right but of course, the words "can be" are there. I don't think anyone is claiming that scaling a given thing up is always harmless, but generally with these kinds of technological developments you really need a super strong, clear, and concrete (for this specific case) argument to stop them. I haven't seen any such arguments, except the traditional luddite one I posted above.
"meat-based" vs "plant-based" is a spectrum we are all on; no reason to make it all-or-nothing
Can you say more about the scale argument? It reads as if you're saying that an entity that has an advantage shouldn't use that advantage.
If you reduce the comparison to human scale, do you still have a problem with the competition? I.e., if one artist has a working memory of 5 inspirational artworks (unlicensed) and another artist has a working memory of 3, is that wrong if they both compete to produce new artwork based on what they know of existing art?
If the answer to that question is no, then I don't see how the scale question is applicable.
One of the computer's "super powers" is its ability to run at scale.
Very few people are happy with that.
Therefore, if there was some way to eliminate this sort of advantage, especially for very large organisations like the government, that would be excellent.
It's just another step on the path towards AI being better than humans at certain activities. We've already gone through this with things like math, chess, imitating voices, translating languages, and lately visual art seems to be coming close to a point where the AI will have an edge over humans. We will have to learn to cope, one way or another, because eventually, AI will be better at everything, as we are limited by our biological bodies.
Humanity will create its own synthetic god, and the consequences will be interesting.
This idea of CAPTCHAs and “human only, no bots” networks is only for a decade or two, until bots just become more desirable members of every community, to humans and other bots.
What people don’t get is that their individual decisions in their own self interest doom the group. Dad works 10 hours a day to provide for family. Then mom does too. Now they both neglected their kids and each other.
Similarly, you choose a bot for its wittier comebacks and impeccably romantic style of talking. Your husband chooses a bot for its better sexual techniques and never complaining. Ultimately, neither of you needs the other and you’re one step away drom NO ONE IN SOCIETY needing you.
You would become the Borg. Except why have the drone bodies at all?
To the last question: No, but I wouldn't pursue art either way.
For example, it's easy to construct hypothetical scenarios where a difference in scale seem to clearly constitute a difference in kind and where suppression of a new technology seems clearly reasonable. An easy hypothetical (but not implausible) example is some new kind of extremely deadly weapon that would be much easier to build than existing weapons if the "recipe" was made public.
But it's also easy to make the same argument for things like, say, the printing press. And indeed there has always been intense opposition from many to the printing press and subsequent technologies that make distributing written language much easier, with opponents often presenting arguments in this same form. Yet it feels wrong to me to apply the argument this way.
Is that just because I have existing opinions that generally oppose restrictions in the ability to distribute ideas, but I don't generally oppose restrictions on very deadly weapons? Or is there some other way to distinguish between valid and invalid instances of this form of argument, perhaps by attempting to estimate the overall risk versus reward?
Humans also are good at taking inspiration from ideas, where today’s AI is borrowing pixels. The AI is copying in a way that humans don’t, it’s not mimicking and taking inspiration - that is anthropomorphising the software that is trained and programmed to make automated mashups of images.
So in part it depends on what we do with AI images. There may be nothing wrong with training on copyrighted material if the resulting inferences are never distributed publicly nor used for commercial purposes. Of course that seems extremely unlikely, which is why it needs to be discussed carefully and debated in good faith, right?
Maybe in part it also depends on whether the AI software is guaranteed to produce something very different from any individual training image. If the outputs are guaranteed to be always a mashup, and never indistinguishable from any single input, that seems like it would be an easier pill to swallow. (There appears to be legal precedent along these lines for music sampling.)
I disagree with this, we don't just hear about ideas we actually see the art. Both are shown pictures.
Direct copying yes, but stealing ideas? No. Actually it is a well-known practice in the art industry to use several existing works as references, and creating new artwork that is bit of mixture of all of them.
That is exactly what DALL-E/StableDiffusion are trying to do.
AI isn't borrowing pixels, either. If you read the idea of diffusion models, quite the opposite, what it directly learns is how to destroy an image from what it is into gaussian noise. The trick here is we can reverse this process 'creating' arts from noises.
There is no copying pixels, not even in the most simplistic version of how this model works.
All this goes out the window with AI, we have to judge the entire model as a whole, and even though we see DALL-E etc spit out watermarks we can't call it a liar or a thief. "This part overfits but the whole model is transformative, we think" say the authors.
2) We still don't know exactly how much the models memorise. I'm sure you'll agree that something like Google image search retrieval doesn't qualify as original art, and copyright is still an issue. If you photoshop two images together, you probably also still have to give credit to the original images. We have to draw the line somewhere on the scale from "100% derivative to 100% original". It's not yet clear where AI image generation falls on this.
Ok so let's just feed the ai some dashcam footage and this argument is null.
> I'm sure you'll agree that something like Google image search retrieval doesn't qualify as original art,
Yes
> and copyright is still an issue
No
But for now when the training set is 100% others work and you can see the AI literally trying to inject a jumbled artist name/trademark into "original" art I can't see it as anything more than extreme photobashing
> Yes
>> and copyright is still an issue
> No
You don't think I'll get trouble with copyright infringement if I start using images I find on Google commercially? "But officer, I came up with the keyword for this image all by myself!!" Or do you just mean you don't think copyright should exist in the first place?
I think you’re wrong on this. Humans learn (anything) from teachers. Yes, you can learn much on your own, but the idea of a solo artist learning from books is exceedingly rare.
So in this case, you learn art by doing, critiquing your work and the works of others. You put forth effort.
While I am amazed at the generated images and think they truly are amazing, I can’t help but think they all feel a little cheap. Like someone took a shortcut that was never meant to be found.
I do think there are real ethical issues behind the training data for both image and code generation. Nothing that can’t be solved, but random images scraped from the web are not meant for training. First - it’s not necessarily a fair-use issue. And second, garbage in, garbage out. I don’t want my auto generated images to come with a Getty watermark.
Where I do think there is hope is for the use of these as tools for artists. Where there can still be a human behind the choices and curation, but using the algorithms as a means rather than an end.
If you take an art class where a teacher instructs you and tells you to replicate 12 paintings by Van Gogh, I would argue you've learned more from Van Gogh than the teacher, even if he's showing you some physical techniques.
The student/teacher interaction is where you learn. Even if you want to only paint in Van Gogh’s style, the back and forth with the teacher is where you actually learn how to apply that style to new works. To explore the meaning behind the stars, etc.
(You could get there solo, but you’d still need to go through the criticism/questioning phase somehow, which is probably best done with an IRL teacher).
And only some can boldly go, to were no person has gone before.
Which makes this the ultimate training goal for AI. Not AGI, but a synthesis AI, capable to produce "breakthrough" candidates for the field it is trained upon, by allowing noise and filtering for the criteria of great break throughs- explanation power, beauty, higher consistency, that puzzle piece fitting all gaps moment. If there is ever a creature out there, doing that, silicon or otherwise, humanity will own its continued existence to its existence.
We're still not sure whether humans are deterministic or not. So you can't really equate the human process of art creation to a computers. Humans may still be pulling from some external inspiration that will never be within the reach of computers (I like to think that's the case).
Or maybe you want to still argue that that's ultimately deterministic.
Okay, well, just have a person show up to the art computer, look deep within their soul, then type in a completely random, soulful, non-deterministic seed value into the art computer. Bam! Now the computer can create real art.
Thinking that this system, with such a small set or data and no natural language processing, is going to replace artists anytime soon, is, I think, incredibly eager to the point of foolishness.
My fear is copilot will be allowed to copy code, but I won't be.
This is not a reasonable model.
Art is not about form. It's about content. Meaning that can be generated and understand only by humans.
Would you say that artist did not produce something that could be called art, just because they used an AI model as part of their process?
Art is more deep. Has meaning. It doesn't matter how is it done. I mean... You wouldn't find something like that in art gallery on wall.
What if the image that person had drawn really impressed you on its artistic merits before you learned how they had made it?
These models take 5bn+ images and use them to influence the weights on a giant array of floating point numbers. Each input image has a truly tiny effect on the finished product.
The final model is on the order of 4.5GB - the compression ratio is unreal. Nothing of the original images remains.
So "stencil copy" doesn't work for me.
i suppose we'd all feel uneasy when AI eventually becomes better than humans at creative tasks which pay our bills or differentiate us within a profession.