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Comment by Guvante | Hacker News Reader

> someone doesn’t like them

AI art is literally working against what Kickstarter was made for.

AI art is about putting together the work that artists have done in a way that isn't technically theft (well it might be the law is very slow about reacting to this thing and you can't go after someone for copyright violation as a class action lawsuit)

If someone wanted to pay artists to create a brand new collection of art to train AI on that would be fine. However the reality is current AI art is all farmed from publicly "available" images. (Copyright law currently allows you to display images for public consumption without worrying about those images being re-appropriated, AI art bypasses that)

> Let bad ideas be rejected by society

Except society doesn't understand what is going on and explaining it requires expert testimony. Of course you can discard those complaints by just making shit up and sound nearly as convincing.

> Because inevitably they don’t represent everyone

Kickstarter didn't say they were doing this for everyone. They explicitly said they were doing it to support artists. Artists haven't universally called out AI art as theft but a ton have.

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> AI art is about putting together the work that artists have done in a way that isn't technically theft (well it might be the law is very slow about reacting to this thing and you can't go after someone for copyright violation as a class action lawsuit)

How do you think humans learn art? Humans aren't magic, they learn to make art by looking at and being inspired by other art, and I'd bet quite a lot of that art is copyrighted. AIs are just doing the same thing but way faster, and I don't see any issue with that. (Same with GitHub Copilot for that matter.)

Humans generally recognize when they are plagiarizing. AIs don’t.

When I dated a musician, she would randomly point out all the pieces in various kinds of music that are "borrowed" or blatantly copied from other music. It is understood among musicians that almost all music are derivatives of prior art.

While yes a lot of music is based on prior art there are levels of that and there is a lot of case law on what doesn’t break copyright. There is a lot of music that steals from classical but that is public domain. There are rules about how much of a riff from a copyrighted song you can borrow before it becomes copyright infringement and you owe the original writer royalties. Music also has a lot of standard conventions that lead to similar conclusions at least if you are using western music theory since that is based on western classical music.

So an amount of this deals with scale and the copyright status of the prior art.

Yes, and they also put a lot of effort into intentionally disguising the fact that they're plagiarizing. AIs don't.

The real problem is that our definition of "plagiarism" did not anticipate, and was never intended to describe, anything even remotely like ML.

I think humans don’t learn art like statistical learning AI. What did Dali steal copyright from? I think humans are not like this in the same way that Ramanujan was not like ChatGPT.

> AIs are just doing the same thing but way faster, and I don't see any issue with that.

Isn't this like saying "cars are just doing the same as horse drawn carriages but faster, they shouldn't be regulated differently"? That "faster" changes the game completely. Similarly, many of the laws applying to physical actions can't be immediately transposed to electronic actions.

The current rules were made under the assumption that we're dealing with humans and "natural" laws. Like the fact that humans eventually die while an AI can live forever or transfer the entirety of useful knowledge to the next generation. A human doesn't have time to steal in a lifetime as much as an AI can do in mere minutes. A human can be punished for breaking the law, especially for repeat offenses, whereas an AI can't be even if it breaks the law more times than all human artists put together. These are all complete game changers, speed is only one of the many compounding factors. Scale changes things, a punch in the face isn't just "a gentle tap, but faster". An AI can suck in all of human knowledge and work with all of it at the speed of light.

> How do you think humans learn art?

Humans as a race have created art from literally nothing. Humans as individuals have constantly advanced it with original material. AI seems to be by definition derivative. Humans are encouraged to create something as original as possible and attacked if they borrow too much, AI in "encouraged" to copy as much as possible and as this discussion stands to prove, also to "borrow".

This at the very least invalidates the too simplistic view that AI is the same as humans but faster.

> Humans as a race have created art from literally nothing.

No, they didn't? Humans don't have any magic creative juices that allow them to come up with ideas out of thin air, that's silly. Ideas are created from our brain using our past experiences and knowledge, why do you think some of our earliest art is of animals?

Also, I'm not sure comparing artists to horse-drawn carriages is the best analogy to support your argument, considering horse-drawn carriages are almost nonexistent nowadays. I'd argue a better analogy would be something like chess or any other game. When computers beat humans at chess, nobody changed the rules of chess to make computers perform worse. People just acknowledged that computers were better.

Scale enables all sorts of things in technology that require new rules.

In theory, you could have 1000 people watching cameras with a list of people to watch for in 1980, but in practice it was too expensive and not a consideration. Now you can cheaply record tens of thousands of hours of video indefinitely and run analyses on everyone in them. This has huge implications on freedom and society and calls for new rules.

Just because technology is doing the "same thing" that was done before at scale does not make it the same thing.

AI is the same.

I'm not sure if you understand my point and you're also undermining your own points almost as soon as you make them. I don't want to stop computers in their tracks. To this day in the interest of fairness we apply different rules even between humans in a lot of things. Suddenly bundling computers and humans under the same rules is a severely flawed idea.

> Ideas are created from our brain using our past experiences and knowledge

Humans experienced random things in life and some created art from it. Sometimes after hallucinogenic drugs they created art even from things that never existed. Then other humans created something new on top of the existing art. AI "experienced" already created art and was tasked to recombine pieces to create more art. Simply put, nobody gave an AI sounds of nature and had it come up with a symphony after some thousands of human years' equivalent of processing.

> Also, I'm not sure comparing artists to horse-drawn carriages is the best analogy to support your argument, considering horse-drawn carriages are almost nonexistent nowadays.

Not sure why this harms the analogy, it's meant to point out that "speed" makes a difference and changes the rules. Artists may also be nonexistent tomorrow. If AI is doing everything legitimately and creating art the same way as humans but faster and better, why would human artists continue to exist? And then what would you feed as training material to your AI? The dictionary definition of "love"? Sounds of nature? Art created by the previous AIs?

> When computers beat humans at chess, nobody changed the rules of chess to make computers perform worse.

Right, we just don't allow computers to play the game in official positions. Different rules, as it were.

in the whole discussion, I feel you are missing a point. AI creates something that looks like art to humans based on a probability distribution.

for me art is not the end product but the process. I want to understand the artists intentions and often a work that looks blant, because deep because of the artist's explanations.

Take Agnes Martin's paintings as an example.

The way you say “something that looks like art” feels like you don’t consider the output of these AI models as art, and that generally speaking you have specific views on either what art is or what counts as art…

So what of the Dadaist, the postmodern and the rest, where art is only art because we say it is art, and the creation of art need only involve the “artist” scribbling their signature on the object to bestow it with “artistic merit”. I cannot see a good way to reconcile a philosophy (law is different here, plenty of art can be illegal, eg: graffiti) involving AI and art like this… Duchamp’s readymades, are the products of a factory’s meant for consumer use, are Art… AI art is the product of an sophisticated set of multiple software tools combined and then used by a person to produce their own artistic vision, the output is Art.

If Duchamp signing a urinal makes the urinal art then me using a prompt to craft a specific artistic outcome arguably required more creative effort to understand my “tools” and use them to produce a result that should also be considered art if I want to call it that.

I accept that we may come around and regulate and legislate these tools, just like how it’s illegal to make a graffiti masterpiece on someone’s wall without permission, it may eventually be illegal to use models trained with “unlicensed” data and the matter settled… but can we quit with this denigration of the output as somehow not actually art?

It might be art but it's art created by humans using matrix multiplications and a lot of data. For me the image generators are tools. They don't have intention, consciousness, and don't "know" why they produce something. So if you are asking if AI alone can produce art, I would say no, because AI lacks these properties. You have to present a prompt and press a button, that person is the creator of the Art. The AI when prompted can just produce sth. that looks like art to us humans. The user who prompted it has to add the "process and intention" to it.

Regarding Duchamp's Urinal, the intention and the critique it voices is critical for being considered art (and a lot of people still argue about it). https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170410-the-urinal-that...

There have been a lot of upside down urinals in the world before Duchamp did that, yet nobody considered it art. Here again the intention matters. Matrix multiplications on big data don't have any intention.

If you use MS Paint to copy three photos you found online you are violating their copyright. Your personal insight into how it is done might provide you your own copyright and exactly how you use the other things might make your usage fair use.

However the AI process does not create a copyright (there is no human involved) and cannot use the transformative exceptions for fair use due to, again, no human being involved.

The thing to remember is AI literally copies the originals. While it mashes them together in a way that makes the lines hard to see that is in fact what it is doing.

Do you agree with copyright laws?

Are they the best way to reward creation?

Do they serve humanity well?

> Do you agree with copyright laws?

In their entirety? No of course not.

Certainly the duration is ridiculous beyond measure.

But the idea of having no protections for your own work seems barbaric. At least for work that requires "work" for lack of a better word.

I think the laze faire nature of online memes for instance makes sense in that space.

> Are they the best way to reward creation?

I think that providing a mechanism for people to share their work without losing control of it makes sense.

> Do they serve humanity well?

While I wouldn't attribute societies recent online boon to them. I do think that having protections of this kind are one of the reasons we have seen such a huge investment in the space.

Like the current internet or not the hundreds of billions or trillions pumped into it would be harder to stomach if the internet were the wild west some would like it to be.

Honestly, I suspect creating

> a mechanism for people to share their work without losing control of it

Is impossible.

Napster thought so too

> The thing to remember is AI literally copies the originals. While it mashes them together in a way that makes the lines hard to see that is in fact what it is doing.

I see this argument a lot, but it cannot be true. The image database behind Stable Diffusion is 5 billion images resized to 512x512 each and compressed down to a roughly 100,000 gigabytes. But, you can run it on a model file that is as small as 2 gigabytes. The originals are not in there. They have not been compressed to 4 bits per image.

I've studied and used AI art generators for a long time now and I can tell you from both a technical and experiential POV, the images they create are not mashups.

None of the evidence you present here supports your conclusion:

20kb per image is like a jpeg worth of data, so certainly not throwing away anything.

A tiny model file without logic as to how you got to it isn't interesting. You could just throw away 99.5% (or whatever the ratio is) of the data and call it good. Mishmash data before you do and you might not even have to do that.

This style of AI is all about getting right past the human ability to perceive the mishmash and stop there. Given the underlying algorithm is literally about mishmashing I don't know why you are trying to fight that point.

0.5 bytes per image. Not 20,000 bytes per image.

Mishmashing implies that small clumps of pixels are in the model file somewhere. That's literally not true and has no relationship to how the algorithm actually works.

There's a ton of misinformation about how this works being tossed around. It's causing a lot of anger over ideas that simply false. That's what I'm fighting.

100,000 / 5 = 20,000 off the numbers given here.

Don't quote the 2 GB one that one is disingenuous.

That is like copying the dictionary heap sorting by word frequency leaving only the most popular words and saying "see I couldn't have copied the dictionary it is too small to have done that".

And no the fact that it has "all" the data isn't material here.

> The thing to remember is AI literally copies the originals. While it mashes them together in a way that makes the lines hard to see that is in fact what it is doing.

As another commenter already pointed out, this is literally not possible. The model size for Stable Diffusion isn't nearly big enough to contain all its training data. Understanding the concepts (at least on some abstract level) of the artwork it's trained on is the only possible way a 6 GB[0] model can be based on such a massive data-set.

In conclusion, the important thing to remember is that AI does not just copy and paste the originals. It's simply not possible.

[0]: https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-diffusion-2-1/tree...

A computer algorithm is not a human and should not have the same rights as a human.

I'm getting really tired of repeating this really simple concept that AI evangelists can't seem to understand.

I'm not saying that AI should have rights. I'm saying it's silly to call it "theft" when an AI does it, but "learning" and "inspiration" when a human does the same thing.

>https://twitter.com/sinix777/status/1604514161391677440

'Digital devices are not afforded the same "observational rights" as humans. You can't just buy an extra ticket for a video camera and take it to watch Avatar with you. And you're definitely not allowed to sell those "observations" no matter how compressed the format.'

All art, to some degree, is farmed from public imagery. That isn't a great argument for AI art being theft. All major styles of visual art came from somewhere, and people copy them anyway. If you study art in college, art history is literally part of the curriculum and you spend time trying out different mediums and styles pioneered by other people.

Truly original art is rarer than 8' tall humans, but that doesn't stop the industry from existing at scale.

AI art is more akin to uploading a copy of someone's work and claiming it is my own that inspired work.

It would be one thing if the AI were actually trained like a human was and created unique artwork based on ideas given to it. The reality is it copy/pastes parts of images it found online.

What make you think human inspiration doesn't work the same way as image diffusers? To a degree we know we are compressing input features into our own latent space and conjuring them when producing our own works. The math may not be exactly the same, but the principles are eerily similar.

It isn't surprising given this rhetoric was created by AI art producers to avoid having to pay for their training sets.

I'm basing this on the architecture of the models, not any rhetoric. How does a person draw inspiration in your words then?

I don't think you understand how ML models work at all.

I don't work with them professionally, but I've done several small projects using them, and even written smaller models from scratch. I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I definitely know more than nothing.

> It would be one thing if the AI were actually trained like a human was and created unique artwork based on ideas given to it.

I am not sure you understand all this, because this is exactly what Stable Diffusion does. Give or take the “like a human does”, because we don’t understand how humans work.

> The reality is it copy/pastes parts of images it found online.

It does not. This is physically impossible; the pictures used during training are orders of magnitude larger than the model. It does not contain any description of those pictures used in training and you cannot get those pictures back.

Luddism has a pretty long history, by now it should be clear that fighting against technological advancement is such an impossible challenge that it's utterly pointless and a massive waste of time.

While I understand why some artists are upset, the ones who succeed in the future will be the ones who use the technology in their work, instead of those who just complain and whine.

I disagree. Fighting against technology has a point. Some people are already recognizing it and using less technology, and trying to live simpler lives. Every dollar that is not spent on technology slows its progress, and if enough people quit spending money on it, it cannot develop.

Movements can grow unexpectedly and seemingly out of nowhere. It may be possible that enough people will enjoy the idea of living a life unencumbered by pointless junk and if so, their actions can have the power to shut down companies like OpenAI and the like.

If I could convince even one other person on this planet of the dangers of technology, I would consider the effort I put into talking about it worth it. In fact, I myself have been convinced by other people and in turn I have already spent far less money on technology because of it. Maybe it's a drop in the ocean, but drops of rain can become floods, and one day I truly hope that flood will come to completely shut down efforts like UnstableDiffusion and similar projects.

Honestly I think that's an absurd pipedream, OpenAI can't keep their servers stable due to the massive demand and Unstable Diffusion has over 100 000 users in their Discord.

To hope that they shut down due to a lack of users is just a thought process that is only guaranteed to cause unhappiness.

Unhappiness? That must be a strange definition of happy you are using. All those people can go on to amuse themselves some other way. It's as silly as saying that people would be unhappy if no more Marvel movies were made. It's just a little diversion and people would go on to do something else.

I think it's very unlikely that true happiness is caused by the highly specific diversions we have created in society. I can put myself out there -- I have hobbies too. And if they stopped, I would miss them a little. But I certainly wouldn't go far as to say that would make me unhappy.

I think you're whooshing here.

Thinking you can control others will lead to unhappiness, I think is their point.

I don't aim to control anyone. Only not support AI and find other people of a similar mindset to do so, and spread this message. People can of course ignore it.

Uh huh....

Build an AI using copyright free work and we can talk.

Stealing other's work under the guise of "advancement" isn't futurism...

As a content creator, I believe unstable diffusion and AI models is theft, at least in a moral sense. Computer programmers have taken all the art that humans have worked hard to produce, and are producing it themselves at a rate much faster than any artist can produce it and reaping the financial benefits. Because AI is so general, it operates on a scale not previously known in the realm of automation, and so it's too much of an unfair advantage -- far more so than someone coming up with an invention that makes a few other previous inventions obsolete.

AI is like an alien race coming to our planet. The alien race is so advanced that it can do everything better than any human, and they use their technology to sell us perfect products of every nature in return for degrading acts. Such a thing disrupts the fabric of society, which is held together by people needing each other.

Computer programmers and tech companies are not just robbing artists, but robbing all of humanity of the necessities that we need in order to have a fair chance at this world.

Nonsense. The "art" you're creating is derivative of art other people made which you saw and learned from/incorporated into your own work.

More to the point, much of modern art is derivative nonsense that lacks soul - which is why it's modern artists who are scared of AI. Their work is easy to mimic.

AI isn't going to replace a Van Gogh anytime soon.

> Nonsense. The "art" you're creating is derivative of art other people made which you saw and learned from/incorporated into your own work.

Do you then believe humanity has exhausted its well of original thoughts? That would includes you and this statement, by the way (unless you hold yourself in unnaturally high regard, or are a rogue AI)

Edit: phrasing

If it's not reproducing protectable expressions then it's not theft on any level, but merely another tool for producing art, albeit at an industrial scale. This happens in every profession eventually. It's simply your turn.

For my part, I'm quite content with this state of affairs. Now, rather than paying exorbitant amounts of money for lackluster results from artists, people can use so-called AI to generate decent results on the cheap. On a long enough timeline this should result in the price of art assets for games dropping into the basement where they belong, taking the price of games with them in the process. The public benefits, while intermediaries lose. I fail to see the problem.

TL;DR Humanity should not be compelled to dwell in darkness so candlemakers can continue to profit.

I certainly don't see how not using AI is dwelling in darkness. We can have a very nice and functional society without it.

You also say that you hope AI will drop the price of art to the basement where it belongs. What if AI drops the cost of generating a computer program to the basement where it belongs, and programmers will be paid minimum wage? Would you be so content then?

Frankly, the attitude on this board is dismaying, but that is expected because the people who are benefiting from AI with higher salaries are currently the programmers. It has nothing to do with logic or fairness, only selfishness.

> What if AI drops the cost of generating a computer program to the basement where it belongs, and programmers will be paid minimum wage? Would you be so content then?

I'd be more than happy to get rid of the "programmers" that are generating the same quality code as Copilot. Engineers are employed to translate human needs into tangible system designs, that they have to write code to do so is mostly an artefact of our current system-building methodology. In fact, I would be immensely happy if I could get rid of that part.

> Engineers are employed to translate human needs into tangible system designs,

I mean, isn't this with achievable prompt refinement?

One could argue that it wouldn't satisfy some $arbitrary_dimension (scalability, accessibility, whatever), but you can imagine it wouldn't be hard to get there with prompt refinement eventually, especially on an AI trained to satisfy SWE requirement (and not talking about GH's Copilot,which is an early application of a fairly young technology)

Then again, it also seems we perform worse when using AI tools, so maybe I'm wrong https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622

Right now, how DALL-E works is that you enter a prompt, it gives you a few images, you fine tune your prompt, and after a few rounds you may pick an image and maybe polish it before you can use it.

What would the co-pilot equivalent be? You give it a prompt, it generates a few repos, but then you still have to understand the whole project to judge that it respects the system needs and restrictions. After a few rounds, maybe you will have to change up the code a little, but 90% code will be written by the machine. I, for one, welcome this future -- because once again, this "prompt refinement" iteration is where our human creativity is used most effectively; I think it's a significant improvement over writing boilerplate code every time.

You clearly aren't familiar with the state of advancement in being able to develop an app in the last 40 years.

I have a rigorous academic background in computer science and you don't see me throwing a tantrum that your average layman today can fire up unity or RPG maker to create games without having a firm grasp of rigid body Newtonian physics, game loops, asset management, graphic drivers, and handrolled x86 assembly.

I started programming on a 486 and graphing calculators and have used some pretty modern frameworks and languages as well. It's great that you have an academic background. I assure you I have a very rigorous one also, including publications, and I have a very deep knowledge of many technical disciplines.

My argument is not that we should avoid everything that makes tasks easier, but that AI does it on a fundamentally different scale, and that should be treated with caution.

It's like salt. I put salt on my food, but not too much. Some restaurants put way too much salt on their food but you can still eat there. AI is like eating handfuls of it, which will kill you.

> I certainly don't see how not using AI is dwelling in darkness. We can have a very nice and functional society without it.

We can also have a very nice and functional society without penicillin, hot water, or fire... but nobody argues in favor of getting rid of those things just because doing so would make lives more profitable for the few. In fact, most people would be horrified by the selfishness of such a suggestion.

> You also say that you hope AI will drop the price of art to the basement where it belongs. What if AI drops the cost of generating a computer program to the basement where it belongs, and programmers will be paid minimum wage? Would you be so content then?

I would, yes, since I'm not employed as a software engineer and I'm tired of cleaning up after those who are who can't write programs worth a damn.

> Frankly, the attitude on this board is dismaying, but that is expected because the people who are benefiting from AI with higher salaries are currently the programmers. It has nothing to do with logic or fairness, only selfishness.

...or we recognize your class interest for what it is and we are not impressed. Everyone is made obsolete at some point. shrug Learn to code, I guess?

1. Of course I don't argue for getting rid of penicillin. Each invention has its own merits and each should be debated separately without making an analogy to another.

2. I am not personally worried about being made obsolete. I can code just fine and have extensive coding experience, and I can do a lot of other things as well. Nonetheless, I am still opposed to it. My opinion is just that we should slow down, examine how disruptive AI can be.

3. I only ask that we be more cautious towards technology. Currently our modus operandi is invent and release anything, as long as it makes money, which I think is crazy.

Why do you think the price of art assets for games belong in the basement? Do you value it so little? What about games themselves?

Not sure of this is what's they're referring to, but there are people who misrepresent their skills, and they tend to produce unsatisfactory results when commissioned. Scammers, I guess? This particular scam seem to be inbreeding within the indie gamedev community (no proof on this, just a hunch based on anecdotes).

Funny enough (because it's about AI Vs Artists), you can see some of these scammers here.

https://youtu.be/5GO2xKmZsVo

Because of the massive needs for modern AAA games, budgets have increased dramatically, which leads to more risks for publishers and distributors, which leads to more conservatism in game design. Look at things like open-world games: we cannot have 2 models for a given type of objects, so we have a lot of designers churning out variations. This is mindless, thankless, and hugely expensive. I soir think that more AI to speed up this sort of things would be a good thing. Yes, there would not be as much demand for 3D modellers. Instead of having 20 people, you’d have 3 and a bunch of computers. On the other hand, it would be much easier to create large assets for both AA and AAA games.

As usual, the devil is in the details. But we need more nuance in these debates.

Rather I value AAA titles so little that I'd rather see the price attached to art assets come down so that more companies can afford to enter the field and compete on a level playing field. In short: I want to see more competition, and lowering the cost to enter the market is one way of doing that.

> Computer programmers and tech companies are not just robbing artists, but robbing all of humanity of the necessities that we need in order to have a fair chance at this world

A fair chance at what exactly? Creating corporate memphis for Big Co?

Besides, isn't AI just a tool that humans use? Unless I am missing something, people still prompt the AI, curate it's output, and edit the final results. Perhaps this will make art accessible to more people, thus giving everyone a fairer chance in this world.

You are right in some respects. There are moral issues, and this is a machine coming for (parts of) your job.

That said, it is not theft, however you slice it. What you express is what a lot of other workers feel when they see automation and mechanisation making progress in squeezing them out of their jobs. It is normal to be afraid, but you are not going to stop the tide. Some people will get out of business, some people will keep doing their thing until they retire, and over a generation or two a shift will have happened.

If it makes you feel better, pretty much no job is immune from this, in the same way that all manual labour is susceptible to be replace with robots. Other people will feel the same way you do now before long.

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