I'm probably on the opposite side of the fence. I do find it disheartening that it's opt-out instead of opt-in. The training set should be limited to public domain and CC-0 until such a time it can comply with attribution; then other CC works could be incorporated.
So many artists styles could have gone viral and actually bring those artists some work from the people who tried the AI commercially and got results that weren't completely satisfactory. Now barely anyone will ever have any contact with their art (relatively speaking vs scenario of virality).
Basically the only people who win are the lawyers and handful of artists that were mislead by lawyers primitive argumentation. Everybody else looses. First and foremost artists and art lovers but also AI researchers and hardware manufacturers.
As a photographer, I can’t claim to have or require a fraction of the skills used by creators of hand-made art. And even I am not excited about some AI slurping up my best work and commoditizing it.
> So many artists styles could have gone viral and actually bring those artists some work
I’ve seen this sentiment, but it does not match the reality we see play out on the web every day.
The amount of literal content stealing and “creative reposting” that happens with absolutely zero attribution to the actual artist is quite extensive.
It makes no sense to me that the introduction of an AI tool would suddenly solve the problem of attribution instead of just make it far easier to steal content while making it harder to detect or take action against such theft.
I think I know that little better than lawyers do. Even if only because I had zero financial incentive when I formed my opinions.
> As a photographer, I can’t claim to have or require a fraction of the skills used by creators of hand-made art. And even I am not excited about some AI slurping up my best work and commoditizing it.
I know it doesn't feel great. But your art has already been commoditized. There are hundreds photographers perfectly capable of replicating your style and many of them do it completely accidentally. The value of your art is a personal element not the content itself. What's valuable is your service and the name you made for yourself.
AI gives an artist a ticket to a lottery that can strongly boost their name without doing any additional service.
> The amount of literal content stealing and “creative reposting” that happens with absolutely zero attribution to the actual artist is quite extensive.
I wonder how much money you've lost due to that. Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
As for prompts that don't mention specific authors ... you shouldn't kid yourself that AI won't be able to completely naturally recreate your style from styles similar to yours even it it never seen yours. After all that's what you did to create your style. You created a variation on similar styles you saw during your education as an artist.
> ... just make it far easier to steal content while making it harder to detect or take action against such theft.
steal, theft ... what do artists actually loose in those brazen robberies?
Copyright conglomerates created language that doesn't reflect reality. But it reflects most primitive human instincts evolved in the world of scarcity not abundance.
Fame has a very short half-life and unless you have all the licensing/contractual machinery in place beforehand, you probably won't be able to cash on that boost. The line of thinking you articulate here is extremely familiar to anyone who does creative work. It's the same argument that producers use to get people to work for free or cheap on films, that broadcast or streaming services use to justify very low payouts to content creators, that commercial commissioners use to try and get art for free etc. The creative field is absolutely full of promoters who offer to match artist to audience, with the promoters getting the first cut of ticket sales and the artist getting the last or none.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
Only if you are already kinda famous. Suppose you have a distinctive visual style that's a great fit with a genre, like ghost stories. I, an unscrupulous publisher, note that the market for ghost stories is currently booming and decide to buy, or perhaps generate from AI, and bunch of mediocre ghost stories, and then publish them with 'art in the style of scotty79.' I make a little app offering 'best new ghost stories every day!!' for $1, put it in app stores, and make $7 million before the ghost story fad runs its course. You get nothing, and consumers who got familiar with your style by paying $1 or looking at ads to use my app don't care about you because I never gave you credit and in their mind the style is associated with Best Daily Ghost Stories, not you.
Maybe a few of them will do the work of combing back through the history of the fad and to find which artists influenced the 'daily ghost story' aesthetic. Maybe this will lead to a revival of interest in your work even though the fad it was associated with has come and gone. Good luck with that.
The dirty secret of the creative industries is that if you don't get paid up front for your contribution, you will probably never get paid at all.
I'm not sure how did you manage to miss thousands of artists able to capitalize on sudden and accidental fame for decades without any prior arrangements. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's possible. Also to put this in context compare this with how often very popular artists get completely screwed by huge copyright behemoths earning a score of money but mostly for someone else, someone completely uncreative.
> https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure
Trying to buy something for exposure is absolutely abhorrent because you try to coax someone into doing work for no money. And for nothing basically because people who try to pay with exposure don't really provide any significant exposure 99.99% of times.
If AI people were forcing artist to create new art and paying them with the promise of exposure in their generated works I'll be completely on your side. However it requires zero work from artist to have their already published work to be used as learning material. That's why they never opposed it when other artists were learning from their art. That and of course that target of their wrath would be basically the entire rest of the art community which wouldn't make them very popular.
> Suppose you have a distinctive visual style that's a great fit with a genre, like ghost stories. .... I never gave you credit and in their mind the style is associated with Best Daily Ghost Stories, not you.
That's completely fine in my book. And if those generated stories get really popular so I learn about them I might do just a little bit of online marketing to inject my name in the discussions about them and publish new ones to my fresh new subscribers ahead of time. Heck, I could create my own generated and fine-tuned manually content and sell it just like that guy does since he's already proven a business model for me.
Compare now this with the world of strict copyright where this guy doesn't even know I exist, same goes for swaths of fans of ghost stories. Or let's assume he knows and wants to deal with me. Since he's the one with the money I'll be severely dependent of him and strongly disadvantaged in any deal. But let's assume we struck a deal that's nice for me. There's no way I'll be able to produce new ghost stories every day. Not to mention I wouldn't wish that workload on my worst enemy. So no business happens and many people have their love for ghost stories un-satiated, many didn't discover their love for ghost stories and I am 100% still poor struggling author who's known by nobody.
World without copyright and zero publishing cost is the one where authors and consumers are in control and negotiate through attention economy. World of copyright is the world where copyright hoarding dragon starve both artists and consumers.
> The dirty secret of the creative industries is that if you don't get paid up front for your contribution, you will probably never get paid at all.
And yet you vehemently defend the system that created this situation and refuse to even consider alternatives.
This seems like an odd way to frame this. The reality is closer to "artists were never included in the conversation to begin with". Arguing that "no one forced them to create anything new" seems irrelevant when you consider that without the content, none of this exists to begin with.
The problem is the assumption that artists are or should be universally fine with this.
> World without copyright and zero publishing cost is the one where authors and consumers are in control and negotiate through attention economy. World of copyright is the world where copyright hoarding dragon starve both artists and consumers.
If you want to argue against copyright, that's fine, and I have plenty of issues with the current iteration of this framework of rules. But that is not the same argument as "Tools like Stable Diffusion aren't infringing because xyz technical reasons".
I think it'd be helpful to be clearer about arguments for/against the spirit of the rules themselves vs. arguments about why generative AI tools do or do not create content that infringes those rules as currently designed or require an entirely new framework of thinking about the problem.
They are important but distinct problems.
I don't think anybody assumes all artists will be fine with it. But being disgruntled doesn't automatically mean you should be the one who makes the decisions. Virtually every human has a stake in this because nearly everybody consumes some art. It's time we put stronger emphasis on the rights of everybody else, instead of just mostly people who bought copyright, and artists those people think have the right to exploit.
> "Tools like Stable Diffusion aren't infringing because xyz technical reasons"
I don't think I'm saying there's some technical reasons those tools aren't infringing. Just overwhelming moral, practical and economical reasons that they should be allowed to operate and treated just like human artists who too can mimic and mix styles and nobody can deny them authorship unless they copy specific complex elements nearly verbatim.
Btw if human artist think AI got to close to one of his works he can prove it beyond all doubt by registering their creations on some blockchain with his key and timestamp and I wouldn't be against banning this specific AI artwork that got too close.
Banning use of all published art as teaching material by default is not the way to go in my opinion. Banning imitating specific style is bad too. Imagine portrait painters banned photography from using classical portrait compositions to protect their jobs. Or denied photographers even looking at portraits so they can never learn to imitate.
> I think it'd be helpful to be clearer about arguments for/against the spirit of the rules themselves vs. arguments about why generative AI tools do or do not create content that infringes those rules as currently designed or require an entirely new framework of thinking about the problem.
Maybe, but AI is the wonderful opportunity to discuss the spirit of horrible rules we currently have. Best opportunity we had since creation of social networking sites that chipped those rules away a bit.
This still doesn't give you standing to speak on behalf of artists, and "because I know better than lawyers do" is generally a problematic form of argument. It continues to ignore the key people that matter: the individuals with the creativity and skills to create the content that started this whole IP conundrum in the first place.
> I know it doesn't feel great. But your art has already been commoditized. There are hundreds photographers perfectly capable of replicating your style and many of them do it completely accidentally. The value of your art is a personal element not the content itself. What's valuable is your service and the name you made for yourself.
This is a very one-dimensional view of what makes art, and how the broader community plays a role. I have no illusions about where I stand as an individual photographer among the multitude of photographers in terms of raw technical talent and capability. But I'd argue that you are deeply misinterpreting the implications of that reality, and imposing your own definition of value on a category of human expression that is by definition deeply subjective and far more complex than a simple formula of exposure and conversion rate with some resulting monetary return.
> I wonder how much money you've lost due to that. Besides, attribution is naturally built into those "plagiarist" prompts for AI.
This assumes the only reason I would be upset is because of lost sales. I take photos for the love of it. I don't currently sell them. If someone else starts making money on my work, it takes on a different meaning entirely. And even if I turned this into a business, "lost sales" is still only one of multiple factors.
Regarding prompts, how is attribution built in? Nothing requires an individual to reveal their prompts, currently. There are AI-art sharing communities emerging where prompts are held tight, because the authoring of the prompt is the only thing the "AI artist" brings to the table. Even if prompts were universally provided, that doesn't solve the issue of permission, or imply that this is automatically an acceptable form of attribution to all artists overnight.
When video game companies use stolen artwork, they are ridiculed and derided for blatantly profiting from the work of individuals. Even if it was an honest mistake, this kind of misuse is always a headline.
And yet, when we talk about a system that unlocks a seemingly limitless portal through which the life's work of every artist is made systematically available to the entire world without limit, with no consultation with the original creators, those worries about unattributed benefit just disappear.
I'm curious how you feel about the video game scenario?
Sure. That's why I don't speak on their behalf. I'm just voicing my opinion about harmful silliness of the scheme they allowed themselves to be coaxed into.
> It continues to ignore the key people that matter: the individuals with the creativity and skills to create the content that started this whole IP conundrum in the first place.
Silently ignored in lawyers arguments are all the consumers of culture. All the people who wrote the prompts and all the people who drew great joy from looking at AI creation. They'd get literally nothing if the case of strict copyright so their collective loss is great because they are many.
> But I'd argue that you are deeply misinterpreting the implications of that reality, and imposing your own definition of value on a category of human expression that is by definition deeply subjective and far more complex than a simple formula of exposure and conversion rate with some resulting monetary return.
Sure, opinions may vary. Only actual data can resolve who's wrong. And the number for compensation of artists in copyright industry are not great when compared to viral gains from attention based, open economy.
> If someone else starts making money on my work, it takes on a different meaning entirely.
If you haven't lost anything why do you care? Why do you want to devoid others of joy they draw from availability of artwork?
> Regarding prompts, how is attribution built in? Nothing requires an individual to reveal their prompts, currently.
It's the internet. People talk. Nothing stays secret. And at any point in time original artist or their fan can chip in and say, "yeah, that's exactly like mine, see?". And no-one can do anything about it.
> When video game companies use stolen artwork, they are ridiculed and derided for blatantly profiting from the work of individuals. Even if it was an honest mistake, this kind of misuse is always a headline.
Yeah. Using AI artwork in a very specific style would generate same kind of news. And those games are not very good and they don't make much money. So not only there's no harm, severe ostracism. There's also not much opportunity to have any gain if copyright was strictly observed. And as you noticed it already happens. Darkest Dungeon had very fresh and attractive art-style. Now it's very easy to randomly encounter in Play Store cheap clicker games blatantly ripping off that esthetics. It's not directly stolen, but it's pretty much what AI would do if someone was hell bent on replicating the esthetics. Yet humans did it. What's the loss to Darkest Dungeon graphic designer? Exactly zero.
And I think games that would start with AI art and got really popular ... they'd invite original artist for DLC or to get on the news or for just good will of the public. Public relationships is very important when selling games.
I think it's quite presumptuous to unequivocally state that artists lose with this. Is it a complicated situation? Yes, of course, too complicated for such certainty. That's a wonderful thing to believe, but it's just as plausible (I'd argue far, far more plausible as the tech improves) that clients who would formerly pay for their work no longer have to.
With the volume of AI art generated was an even single actual case of that?
When you consider laws regarding organ donors you might appreciate how socially harmful might be wrong defaults.
I didn't know of any artist (except for long dead ones) that I saw the names of in prompts.
> And therefore people would abandon the AI to pay the artist individually?
If you have particular commercial needs you discovered through the use of AI you might want to go to the source, not for everything, but for some things. It might be easier to explain some of the stuff you need to a live human than to AI. AI images are still very imperfect and prompts are not easy to create.
But who knows how the numbers turn out in the long run. I don't think the artists is the group that's going to get the most annoyed in the next couple of years - copy writers and programmers, 3D artists, basically anybody who's doing grunt work..
I think the main problem with all of this is that it has entered our lives so fast, compared to other revolutions.
People are allowed to view private art, draw inspiration and ideas from it, and execute on those to create new things.
Why should we limit AI any differently?
If the end result is too close to the original - apply the same guidelines you would for any other artist who copied your work.
Otherwise... you're not allowed copyright over a particular style (for damn good reason). While I would like to see artists retain some form of revenue, I don't think this is really the most pressing issue on that front.
This is the crux of the issue for me. It's a different set of rules for AI companies than everyone else. If I started selling pirated copies of Nintendo games they would send an army of lawyers after me and this "opt-out" reasoning would not be a valid defense in court. These AI companies are trying to get away with stealing art and other content with a simple "whoopsie, we promise we won't do it again" when people demand that their own rights be respected.
It's not copying, it's breaking down work to it's foundational features and recombining those features with others to make new things. Literally exactly what humans do when they make art.
If a person was doing what these models are doing it not only wouldn't be illegal, it would be laughable if we even had the discussion.
Current trajectory will only harm original creators, there is zero consideration or benefit for them. On the other side you have companies that stand to make billions off of their work.
Arguing in favor of such a system is, in my mind, appalling. Either ensure that copyright law prohibits unauthorized machine learning from valuable original art or abolish it completely.
First, whether particular features like watermarks end up in the end product or not is not terribly relevant. The particular model implementation that produces that behavior doesn't understand that watermarks are not a desirable part of the transformed end products, whereas humans do. In that way, the AI is certainly a little more 'honest' about what it's doing. It would be trivial to make the AI understand this, and stop reproducing watermarks.
You claim that the model performing this work is somehow different because AI doesn't 'think' about problems, as evidenced by strange artifacts, whereas presumably humans do think about them because of the absence of these artifacts. I'm curious why this makes a difference. If a model was sufficiently advanced that you were unable to differentiate a painting made by a human along certain themes and an AI along certain themes would it be somehow less objectionable? Why or why not? If the end product is of identical quality why should it matter the route you take to get there, in the eyes of the law?
You bring up scale, but scale is also not relevant. Say that I create a school devoted to training legions of artists to produce paintings in the style of a particular artist, while maintaining a transformative aspect. Is this illegal because I'm doing it at scale? No. If that's not illegal, why is it illegal to do it with code? Because it's more efficient? In what other domain is producing creative work more efficiently by transforming existing work illegal?
How's that different from a human artist shackled to a company by some secret agreements in which he's not the stronger side?
It doesn't matter what the law says or what is "right." It comes down to who has the power and who doesn't.
(The other difference between what humans do and what AIs do is a matter of scale. A human imitates by spending many hours to duplicate a work of art. An AI can churn out millions in a second. That's a separate issue, though.)
No, it is transformative just like a computer would. A person would be inspired and create some kind of unique work. A prompt would - given identical start-up conditions - result in the exact same image over and over again no matter who entered the prompt.
Even a trained monkey giving the prompt would result in the same output, as would 'thumper' or the closest local equivalent.
Yeah, it's disheartening. There's also no good way to fix it; the cost of storing copies of their art is negligible, and AI trains the same whether the material is copyright or creative commons. If you get Stability AI to omit your art, then Unstable Diffusion will be trained on your likeness. Opt-out of that one, and some guy in Nevada personally sponsors a bespoke model for making copies of your art.
So, I agree with the parent. The most tragic part is not the short-term fight, it's the long-term consequences. Artists will have to internalize what software developers realized decades ago; creating takes work, and copying is free.
This is very dismissive, the scale is what makes the difference. You can get away with pirating all types of content for personal use.
AI companies are essentially trying to legalize that, but in reverse - taking from small creators to enrich the shareholders of their billion dollar corporations.
If you try to play by these rules and create a million dollar business that distributes various copyrighted content from the internet (e.g. AAA games, movies or music) you'll very quickly realize how much their stance on copyright changes.
Power ultimately belongs to whoever can wield it with the least friction. It's not fair or right, but it's the way they play in the business world.
To continue blindly applying historical understanding to fundamentally new technologies creates huge blind spots, and I’d argue similar to pretending that the creation of ever more destructive weaponry requires no changes to the rules of engagement in warfare.
The game has changed.
What we need is enough computation power to run these models on our own computers, on our phones even. Then we'll be able to do whatever we want and there's nothing they can do about it.
The technology isn't.
The content is.