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Do you want to live in a future where anything 'original' an artist creates has now blocked anyone else on the planet for the next 99 years and you must pay them royalties? Because we already have Disney now and they suck quite a bit.

I honestly want to live in a world where this 'worrying about paying for rent' is not a problem that we're concerned with, and a world with AI that can create and make we far more apt to achieve that than with the status quo we've been following so far.

> Do you want to live in a future where anything 'original' an artist creates has now blocked anyone else on the planet for the next 99 years and you must pay them royalties?

No I don't want that but there's a very clear distinction between people who are truly inspired by each others' work and produce an average human output that maybe covers their bills and AI that can pump out billions of replicates per day to drown out all original work, with entirety of that value captured by some corporation.

> I honestly want to live in a world where this 'worrying about paying for rent' is not a problem that we're concerned with, and a world with AI that can create and make we far more apt to achieve that than with the status quo we've been following so far.

Hey, me too. But those human issues should be addressed first, not after automation is allowed to wipe out people's livelihoods. I'm not anti-AI, I'm anti-big tech that seeks to exploit billions of people's original work for their own benefit.

SD is not big tech since you can run on 4gb gfxcard and opensource

> a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style

This argument is assuming its own conclusion, that such a situation must be bad. But I don't think that's necessarily true.

If somebody can make 1000 different derivatives that the public likes as much as the originals, then it must be that in whatever criteria the public is interested in, these works are just as good. If they were inferior, the public wouldn't accept them as substitutes. The fact that they are (hypothetically) accepted indicates that the public is OK with them.

For my own personal aesthetics, I would like to think that today's popular music, which is written by some combination of algorithm and committee, and produced through tools that correct the performance via autotune, quantization, etc., is inferior to the music that I enjoy. But given that the public seems to like this music (and indeed, they like music generated this way even though it's not even cheaper for them to consume) seems to say that we as a society are getting what they want, and who am I to put a normative judgment on that?

This reduces the motivation to create art to a monetary one, and the value people derive from art to a purely aesthetic one.

In our future AI-infested world, I'll personally seek out "certified non-AI" creators because part of what inspires me is not just the content, but the creation of it.

Art is not just a destination.

I think when most people consume art, they're really treating it as entertainment regardless of its artistic merit.

And as I mentioned above, I think the current music industry is already there: the vast majority (by sales) of music entertainment, produced by algorithm and by a committee in order to drive sales. Despite this, in the genres I care about, at least, the volume of high-artistic-merit music (by variety) that is probably at its highest point in decades, if not ever. To be sure, this has meant that fewer artists are able to make a living purely off their music. But this is a return to the norm: the rise of the "star" in the late 20th century has been an aberration.

On the other side of the coin, AI assistance will be (I expect) a huge democratizing force. Recently we've seen computational photography enabling people to take photos of astounding quality with just their phones. And the results of machine learning is allowing artists to make huge improvements in post production as well.

I imagine that the stuff we've been seeing over the past year, with ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and such technologies, will be purposed towards (among other things) tools that enable greater productivity for the serious artist, and putting the means in the hands of those who would be otherwise unable to get to table stakes. I've started working on a short story myself, using ChatGPT to help me work through some plot points.

So yeah, we'll get a lot of meritless dreck suitable only for base entertainment. But we'll also see a proliferation of art and of artists, as productivity increases and new entrants are enabled.

The technology is coming one way or another. You can stop Stability AI but you can't stop OpenAI (Microsoft) or Google, who can afford to license training data from companies like Shutterstock. A restrictive interpretation of copyright law will just keep it in the hands of the biggest corporations.

You mean the artists who use similar brushes in photoshop and don’t know how to paint and musicians who use logic, auto tune, loop samples and don’t know how to play an instrument?

Copyright what? Someone’s brain? You can copyright a specific work or a character, but you actually want to live in a world where someone can copyright the color red with a dark black line, or the G# chord?

Real artists are going to art, and musicians are going to make music. People who do creative work do it to express themselves, their point of view or to say something.

Corporate art exist to sell you soda - I am not sure your argument lands quite like you want it to.

I am glad this is going to court, because, with my understand of how neural nets work, I fail to see how any copyright is being infringed.

This is the same stupid argument that Mp3 will destroy music instead of embracing the new marketing opportunities it represents.

IMO an artist that wants their name out of the dataset is a moron. In the end , people copying an artist style over and over will just send the price of originals through the roof. This is completely obvious.

Just like when Napster resulted in musicians becoming super rich by selling their originals to people who found their music for free? Those things don't happen in real life.

The music industry is the biggest its ever been... so yes?

> Do you want to live in a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style or merely remix it for marginally $0 cost, washed of all original copyright?

Yes, much in the same way that I am glad I live in a future where scribes aren't required to put text on paper: There is a massive amount of efficiency to be gained and enjoyment to reap for everyone who doesn't happen to be employed as an artist.

I'm not against efficiency improvements, but the value created by these improvements has to flow back towards the society at large in one way or another. I'm not anti-AI, I'm just arguing that artists and other creative professionals should be compensated for their work before their work is included in a for-profit ML model. That's hardly radical.

Current proposals don't have any intention of addressing that, they just silently kick the can down the road. What happens when nearly everything is automated there are no new profitable jobs that people can take on?

The comparison to scribes is a perfect analogy. The 'scribing' of translating the idea of painting to an actual painting is being made more efficient. The actual creativity is what the original idea is, not the skill to put it on paper.

None of that addresses anything I've said.

It does though:

The value will flow to society via the cheap books (art). Value will also flow to authors (artists)[0] due to the facilitation of creation/distribution/replication. Where that value will come from is from the scribes (painters, sculptors, etc.)[1] whose contribution is rote.

[0]The intentional distinction here is that the value is in the conception of art, not in the execution of it in media.

[1]Imagine how much more productive Mozart or Beethoven could have been had an AI-powered orchestra existed in their time.

The claim that the real value in art is in the idea rather than the execution seems to be as true as the claim that the real value in a startup is in the idea. Artists are constantly in dialogue with their tools to produce and define their idea, and to discover new ideas and capabilities along the way, in the same way the Intel head Andy Grove advised technologists to be involved in the engineering & production processes.

> Do you want to live in a future where artists don't make original art, musicians don't make music, book writers don't write, and so on, all because AI companies can replicate 1000 different copies in their style or merely remix it for marginally $0 cost, washed of all original copyright?

My creative output per minute has probably increased threefold in the last few months from incorporating these tools into my workflow. What I've been making doesn't look or sound like anything that anyone else is making.

You're going to have a really hard time using Stable Diffusion to make quirky cartoon daily desk calendars in the style of plaintiff Sarah Anderson. You're going to have a much better time if you think more like a Creative Director and have less of an idea ahead of time of what the tool is going to give you... so you can iterate, much like a painter iterates while working.

These tools require the creative agency from the artist who is using them in order to produce things that people find interesting, entertaining, valuable or otherwise meaningful so I really don't see a "corporation goes brrrrrr" doing anything other than flooding the lowest-common denominator content feed pipes on the internet contrasted with the highest quality art using these tools in incredibly transformative ways.

Just an FYI, many artists create with no financial incentive.

most artists don’t make a living off their work. Only a tiny percent do.