Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

Here's why I believe it is inevitable...

It's already out there. On people's local computers and soon their mobile devices. People are tinkering with it at warp speed. This point addresses that it technically cannot be stopped.

I don't expect it to be possible to detect that the art is AI-generated. This becomes further impossible when using a personal input image as well as many follow-up edits or composite works. It blends into normal image creation. The only way to prove that it's not AI-generated is to record in-progress "human art" as is sometimes done in art contests, but this isn't reasonable to legally require of every single piece of art to be created.

You can't enforce what you can't detect.

View on HN

As a society we have gone through great pains to protect the software developer's incompe and job, source code was given copyright and patent protection - no other industry gets both protections at once.

Now you seek to deny others such protection while taking advantage of it yourself.

Let's not kid ourselves. Those protections exist for the benefit of corporations, not software developers. If those corporations could have robots write the software and copyright that software and patent it, they absolutely would.

Ironically, the high salaries the software industries is able to pay is precisely because of the copyright protection afforded that prevents the value of the software from being diluted by way of rampant copying.

This is also the same reason due to which open source projects often struggle with funding, and why many databases (among other OSS software) are moving towards stricter licenses such as the AGPL.

I don't think so. The highest paying companies don't distribute software, they provide access to a remote service. Even if copyright didn't exist, you couldn't copy the Google executable.

You're making my point though. The fact that Google is successful, in part, is because of the fact that you can't copy their trade secrets and methods; which is one reason no solid competitor has come up to challenge Google.

(There are infrastructure challenges as well, but this thread is about intellectual property.)

My understanding is that trade secrets are distinct from patents. For patents, you tell everyone how to do it but they're not allowed to for 20 years. For trade secrets, you don't tell anyone how to do it, but if someone else figures it out for themselves, it's fair game. Most of Google's search IP is protected as trade secrets rather than patent/copyright, I believe.

Your point is that you can't copy Google's secrets because of copyright, and therefore copyright is valuable to its employees. I'm saying that the reason you can't copy that information is different from copyright.

> Even if copyright didn't exist, you couldn't copy the Google executable.

If copyright did not exist, you could take it as a google employee and start your own google without going to jail.

Pretty sure you could sue them using other means, such as through contract law, if they signed an appropriate contract. You really don't need copyright if you aren't broadly distributing information.

if Guy A copied your code, and i got it off him, you can sue him for violation of contract but you cant stop me, a third party.

Your ability to sue him will be limured, he cant go to jail, he can deckare bancrupsy, and you have to be spesific about what is protected, 'idea' is a vague term that cant be protectedm

Many (most?) software developers believe that software shouldn't be patentable at all. Many also believe that copyright terms should be way shorter.

They only believe this because this won't (immediately) affect their material prospects.

Or maybe they genuinely believe that the content they make today shouldn't be copyrighted for the next 100 years? Lifetime of the author +70 years is a very long time.

Given a binary choice between unemployability and extending patent protection to (even) snippets of code, I am quite confident that 90+% of salaried developers today will chose the latter.

thats not the argument we are discussing - the question is should these protections exist at all. We are talking about denying the artists all protection, only fair to confront developers with the same dialemma.

Whether they are 3 years or 300 is a finer point, and is only worth discussing after nessesity and legitimacy of sich protections is established

It doesn't matter what any of us think. The genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back because unlike pirating existing media, this new style pirates the whole style.

Visual arts as a career will be dead soon. Visual arts as a hobby will live on.

>Visual arts as a career will be dead soon

Put a fine of 10% of annual turnover if a company cannot prove that images used in its product/ads are human generated. Make payment to visual artists part of the process of proving it. Boom, visual arts as a career saved.

It's one thing to say we shouldn't do it, it's quite another to say we cannot.

With the amount of power the copyright lobby has, who knows it might be true. However advertising is not the only industry where visual arts will be affected. Gaming, Comics, Animation, VR, Movies etc will be affected as well. And regulation isn't going to keep up across all the countries.

Even if we assume the above rule is made, there is no way to prove it because even if a human does it, he might still use the help of photoshop etc which are planning to integrate such tools currently. Most favorable outcome I see out of this is for famous/competent artists to license out their style of art to these generation companies which then train their models on them (which sounds win-win but won't be as profitable as it is today)

>Even if we assume the above rule is made, there is no way to prove it because even if a human does it, he might still use the help of photoshop etc which are planning to integrate such tools currently.

It's unclear to what extend tool producers will support AI in this context at all. Also, this is a problem for safeguarding the integrity of the product of artists, not for safeguarding their income.

That's a profoundly stupid idea. There are low code solutions that generate fully compilable pieces of programs and applications, so let's make sure we ban those.

Plenty of music is procedurally generated so we gotta make sure we ban those as well.

What's profoundly stupid is to assume every piece of technology is good so we should do nothing about its proliferation. Yes, we should ban low-code tools based on deep learning over "fairly used" (not) datasets and we should ban the same for music, writing, whatever. AI bros can go cry in the corner, I don't care.

Think of it from a non-monetary way and ignoring job security for a moment. Why would anyone (artists/programmers) spend their time doing something a machine can do ? It would be a terrible way to spend ones life. Perhaps the datasets can be licensed (if that's the sticky point) and embrace the AI ?

It's the difference between a bus and hiking: With a bus, you can arrive at lots of places fast but you will never experience the place as the hiker does.

>Why would anyone (artists/programmers) spend their time doing something a machine can do

Why do humans play chess after 1997? Why do they play checkers after the 70s?

AI capability is destroying human enjoyment of activities because it also destroys the economic rationale for engaging in them and/or allows other humans to cheat.

The obvious conclusion of this position is that we should just all kill ourselves if strong AI ever starts to exists. No, thank you, I'd rather do everything possible to prevent it from being created.

> The obvious conclusion of this position is that we should just all kill ourselves if strong AI ever starts to exists.

Indeed that is the logical conclusion. I expect some people advocating this line of logic to follow through

What a load of nonsense. The last 40 years has made the barrier of entry to software development lower than it's ever been.

We got applications like unity for game generation, low code solutions that let you generate a crud dashboard for a database in a few clicks, etc.

As a developer with an actual degree in comp sci, I can guarantee I'd be a helluva lot better paid if everyone had to do their software development in low level C.

That wasn't to protect software developers that was to protect companies & corporations. Twisting the law/politics is what capitalism has always had companies try to do.

Software developers aren't protected at all, we are simply just in demand for the time being. There will probably be a time in the far flung future where our jobs are phased out, too.

The companies that pay artists' salaries won't be willing to secretly break the law to save money.

Microsoft won't legally be able to continue its abuse of GitHub. Copilot will be dead. OpenAI and Stability will not legally be able to profit from large-scale intellectual property theft. All these violations will end.

These are the most significant digits. The residual amateur piracy doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if random guy gets some leet neural net warez and uses it to make his desktop wallpaper.

First, you didn't address my point that you cannot detect AI output.

I already have Stability running on my PC. I generate an image with it. How do you know the output comes from Stability? Answer that, please.

Second, a worldwide draconian ban on AI image training and generation just isn't going to happen. Very few legal things are coordinated worldwide, and copyright law is incredibly low on the list.

Even training without consent can be addressed. Google trained some of their AI from Google Photos. Which they made free for unlimited use so that us fools would produce billions of images, accept the terms we don't even read and voila: AI legally trained.

Just because you can buy a knife to kill someone discreetly, doesn't mean that we should just give up on the idea of making murder illegal.

Of course "killing someone" and "copying someone's artwork" are at different levels, however, I'm sure artists would beg to differ.

I don't think there is any work on that yet, but if the model is known it should be possible to derive the probability that a particular image is the output from it.

It's inevitable that someone comes up with methods to detect generated images, since a lot of political (Edit: and financial) capital hinges on that. If AI image generation is inevitable, then methods to analyze images wrt. known generators are even more inevitable.

> GAN

And your point is invalid in long term.

Ive produced over 5000 images on my local SD install. Currently, there are many dead giveaway if you produced the art with it. Specifically around hands, feet, holding things, pupil directions. Of course these things will get better with time, but currently there are many things that exposure generative art.

I've noticed there's a lot of newly created luddite accounts.

Reddit luddite brigade?

I'm sure I've still got a bunch of MP3 files from Napster on a hard drive somewhere, but yeah, that genie was put back in the bottle. This one can too.

And as we all know, music piracy over the Internet ended the day Napster stopped working. /s

It was put back in the bottle by Apple legitimating the piracy business model by cutting desks with the major labels to digitize their music.

The analogue here is AI art week be legitimized, and the artists who profit will be the ones who let their work be used as input for a cut of the profits. And nobody will be able to compete with them, and the owners of the machine will be able to set the profit rate as they choose.

... That does sound like a new stable equilibrium, actually.

How was it put back in the bottle? The Pirate Bay still exists. Bittorrent tools still exist. Name any song and I'm sure we can find it.

Napster was on millions of machines and now it isn't. It's like you skipped that part.

True, but the post-Napster media negotiations very much priced it in.

Nobody is paying $10 per CD anymore.

Looks like Taylor Swift's new release on CD is $14 at Target right now and $12 for digital download.

They're not paying $10, they're paying more.

According to this site [1], $14 in 2022 Dollars is $7.19 in 1995 Dollars.

So, about $3 less.

[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

(Who knows if that site is reliable though, the point is inflation.)

Napster has single points of failure and future p2p had poisoned seeds for tracking.

Stable Diffusion is math and cannot be stopped now the toothpaste is out. You can attempt to regulate, assign draconian requirements by force of law, but ultimately these are as unenforceable as regulating that pi=3.

Ironically, what could help is NFT type tech. Signed with a private artist key, your copy is "original". Even if knockoff generative copies are produced, the digitally signed produced-bys are still authentic.

>Ironically, what could help is NFT type tech. Signed with a private artist key, your copy is "original". Even if knockoff generative copies are produced, the digitally signed produced-bys are still authentic.

That solves a completely different problem, though. I don't think anyone is saying that the problem is one of false attribution, where people are claiming generated images are the work of a particular person. What's being discussed is artists having less work because people generate art computationally rather than commission artists to do it.

Aye, and on your concern about the different problem, the toothpaste is out of the tube never to truly be returned.

We can evolve the market (in my view, into luxury goods with NFT type tech) or we can wait for artists to truly starve. I'm a proponent for solving the problem that can be solved to help folks move forward.

We can try to evolve it, sure. I don't think that's an option that will interest enough people to matter.

While it's possible that these AI tools will leave some (certainly not all) artists without work, what I think is really going to happen is that artists will harness them to do new things that were simply impossible before, or to make their work easier. Technology rarely destroys jobs; it more frequently changes their nature. Just like how at some points animators needed to know how to use 3D tools when in previous decades they didn't, in the near future graphical artists will need to know how to use AI. It's possible that where there were previously two artists working there will then be only one, but such is life. Demand for art is finite.

I worry that the ability to effortlessly conjure a "good enough" image may drown out efforts to thoughtfully create a great one.

Your comparison to computer animation is apt. Rewatching animated classics recently, I can see what we've lost now that every film is plastic.

I agree, traditional animation was better than modern CGI, but I don't think it's as simple as CGI being an inherently worse medium, but that films are produced more cheaply. Some weeks ago a friend and I were watching and comparing some scenes of Snow White and Cinderella in English and Spanish and were stunned by the singers in both languages. How often do you hear actual opera singers in modern Disney films?

So, yes, what you say may definitely happen, but it's a trend some graphical industries have been on for decades. It's why there are so many fewer professional animators anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if some techniques of traditional animation have been lost by now.

Yeah, sure, but that's because streaming was merely more convenient than Napster. No more downloading bad songs with bad metadata. No more lugging around and hand curating an mp3 library. And for a lot of people: no more having to choose what to listen to.

In two years people will be generating novel music of any style with any vocals and vocalists they want. That'll be even more of a fit to consumers' wants. They'll never run out of music that will appeal to them.

I'm currently working in this space and it's wild the things that are possible.

Napster, the centralized service, was stopped.

Napster, P2P sharing of music, was not.

Piracy is held at bay only by the ease & affordability of legally obtaining media and difficulty accessing the technical means to pirate.

... and well-packaged piracy solutions and modern broadband bandwidth likely sink the maximum price (the only remaining term) below the cost of production.

It took me 20 minutes to go from nothing to an entire season saved locally and streaming to a Roku. That's finding the software, installing, configuring, finding torrents, downloading, and then playing. And that's not having pirated in a decade or so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com