Artist today use the exact same method of learning from other peoples artwork to generate new artwork and styles. These models are learning just like any artist learns and then producing new content.
If you tried learning, let's say, the chiaroscuro technique from Caravaggio you'd be analyzing the way the painter simulated volumetric space by using white and dark tones in place of natural lighting and shadows. You wouldn't even think of splitting the whole painting into puzzle size pieces while checking how many how those look similar when put close one another.
Given somewhat decent painting skills, you'd be able to steadily apply this technique for the rest of your life just by looking at a very small sample of Caravaggio's corpus.
On the other hand if you tried removing even just a single work from the original Stable Diffusion data set you used to generate your painting, it would be absolutely impossible to recreate a similar enough picture even by starting from the same prompt and seed values.
Given how smart some of the people working on this are, I'm starting to believe they're intentionally playing dumb to make sure nobody is going ask them to prove this during a copyright infringement case.
Both my parents (though retired now) were commercial artists. I was trying to be an artist at one point in my life before moving in Engineering and Science. All my parents friends are artists so I grew up around artists.
Ask any artist here who is using illustrator, Photoshop, Krita etc. How often do they google image search for textures, or reference images that gets incorporated into their artwork? The final artwork is their own but it may incorporate many elements from others artwork.
>If you tried learning, let's say, the chiaroscuro technique from Caravaggio.. You wouldn't even think of splitting the whole painting into puzzle size pieces while checking how many how those look similar when put close one another.
Ever seen hyperealistic pointillism?
Who are you to be the arbitrator of how an artists creates their work? Have you ever gone to a modern art gallery and seen all the different methods people use to create artwork?
Art is boundless and unique to each who creates it.
If a Artist uses a tool to create art, everyone agrees that is art. It could be a paint brush, clay, software on a computer etc etc. If an artist uses AI as a tool to create art then suddenly it's not art.
- It appears people can train AIs from scratch or at least fine-tune them at home.
- Even if your art isn’t in “the training set”, that does not prevent the AI from learning its style. (Someone can decode it to CLIP embeddings. It could have a really good text model trained on vivid art museum descriptions of your art.)
- The ability of an image model to generate your art means it could also be trained in reverse to recognize it, producing a caption model, which would give vision to the blind. And surely you’d feel bad about that.
You can also require cloud providers to enforce a ban on training (and deploying) such models, it's doable. Good luck training it in your basement, it will probably take you a decade.
If this is banned, it will become a lot like piracy - yes, it's available, no, most people (at least in the West) don't do it, practically no businesses do it.
Either use a CC0 set like Wikimedia/Flickr and throw in some dead artists like Brueghel, or train on data from a country we don’t respect the IP of. Lots of Taobao product photos out there. It’s enough.
As of about a week ago this tech runs on consumer GPUs. The weights have been downloaded 100s of thousands of times, and fine-tuning / modifying is possible.
Training from scratch is about $500k still, but it will only get cheaper and easier.
But I would not be surprised if this was trainable on a commercial GPU at home within that time. But I think another important trend that we are seeing is that you don't need to train these models from scratch.
Open-source "foundation models" means that you can usually get away with the much easier task of fine-tuning, as to not throw away / re-learn everything that these large models have already fit.
Edit: I initially said 2-5 years, but on more reflection this does seem optimistic (for training from scratch).
I don't know enough about diffusion models but if LLMs (of current size) have to use only public domain, they will be undertrained and we will see significant degradation in performance. Not to mention that Codex will be effectively dead.
Why would you, though? If art is for the sake of art, then all art is valuable regardless of origin. If art is for the sake of providing human employment, AI being better in no way stops performative make-work from existing. If art is for the sake of copyright trolls to troll harder, then fuck art, feed it to the AI!
Your "logic" for making AI art illegal is basically "don't like it". Your personal and subjective opinion is that it's not art by definition.. This is like refusing to eat artificially grown meat because you have some strange idea about what food "should" be. Even if the meat was made MORE delicious you would still claim it wasn't food and turn it away. There's no logical consistency to your position, it's purely reactionary.
What is not logically consistent is to claim that a black box utilizing statistical relationships between pixels in a giant dataset is an "artist" and that its products create "value".
The compiler is not a programmer, AI can never be an artist.
Step 1: Tweak settings and type text
Step 2: Look at the result
Step 3: If you like the result, go to step 4, otherwise go back to step 1.
Step 4: Save and share the result
Feels like art to me. Ultimately it's still a human using a tool to create art. For me AI art is just the name of the art style.
All this boils down to a simple fact that egos like to think of themselves (and of artistic interaction) much more than there actually is.
I remember a story when a literature teacher insisted on a definite symbolism of some minor detail in a novel. People contacted the author about it and he said no, there is nothing behind it. It was just a filler without any second thought. Makes you think how much symbolism is far-fetched in classics, where you cannot simply email an author.