Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?

Ok, but, that system - "how things are" - is exploitative in the extreme to both people and the planet. It's unsustainable, eldritch, profoundly unjust and corrupt.

Using "how things are" (fucked) as a justification to prevent discussion of "how things could be" (amazing) is fucked. I'm sick to the teeth of seeing it.

You’re both right. It’s true the practical aspects many it hard to change laws, but I still appreciate OP’s starting from first principles.

It’s easy to get caught up in debates over how to interpret current laws and conflate what’s legal with what’s (a) ethical (b) conducive to progress. However, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that these laws are merely social contracts and subject to change with enough impetus and savvy.

The comment didn't take a position on whether or not it should be illegal, or whether or not it is exciting.

We can change the licencing models used to release work into the public domain.

In order to do so, we need the conversation and we need to educate inorder to have the conversation in the first place.

Law is evolving.

> That incorrectly presumes that you can make any law you want, have it enforced, and not piss off the vast majority of people

OPs "we" _is_ the vast majority of people. You are answering as if OP said "I".

Of course OPs implementation is complicated, but they are not presuming you can make any law you want.

The parent wrote "We the people", not "I" nor "the government" nor "some corporation".

Analogy time:

Arguing if a new tech is legal is like saying the Earth is flat.

Arguing that we can create and alter the laws and should therefore be discussing if we want this tech to be legal, that's like saying the Earth is a sphere.

Both are wrong, but treating them as equivalent is even more wrong than both of them.

> You can't make any law you want, and keep a free society. You can't tell people they can't train neural nets with publicly available data. You can't tell people they can't run something like stable diffusion without getting output approved by some approved entity.

Depends what you count as "a free society".

There are things which I'm not allowed to take photographs of or record videos of, such as the screen of a cinema while it's playing the latest superhero film.

There are communications I am not allowed to make, such as the sequence of bits required to recreate even an approximation of the new song from that famous pop singer everyone likes.

There is data I'm not allowed to be given or store, like a random stranger's medical records.

You're allowed to be an anarchist and say those things should be legal, but most people don't really care very much about any of that — closest we get is people campaigning to "keep memes legal".

Hmm.

I'm no lawyer, but there's probably one here: what even is the legal status of companies selling the service of searchable archives of screenshots with text on them and short video clips? Is that "fair use" or "probably copyright infringement but nobody cares" or "they all need to be licensed, there was a court case"? (I assume it varies by jurisdiction, an answer in any will do).

That’s the problem. We, the people, are not in control. We, the people, have given up control to bureaucrats who play god with permission. We, the people, make society function and our society will continue to function without the bureaucrats.

We, the people, should be demanding direct democracy.

I love how both sides in this debate immediately claim the other side is huge, faceless and corporate.

In truth both sides are a mix of both individuals and monied interests but this rhetorical tactic seems to be irresistible.

If you're learning from existing works at scale, aren't you less infringing than someone who only learns from a handful of existing works?

I fail to see how that last sentence makes it sound like a photoshop filter. Do you mean if you can express it as an algorithm it cannot be compared to human learning?

What if we can reduce human learning to making predictions based on training data? Then it's not human learning anymore but more like a photoshop filter?

"Everyone knows that the term machine learning doesn't actually have anything to do with human learning, right?" Do you have sources for that? They're not equal but I see a lot of parallels.

> Everyone knows that the term machine learning doesn't actually have anything to do with human learning, right

Unfortunately the answer is definitely no. People have heard the terms “learning” and “train” in this context and have anthropomorphized weak AI.

The level of ignorance on display is sad to witness.

Actually I think I use gradient descent in a lot of situations.

Consider the act of adding salt to chicken broth for example but I can quite easily think of dozens of other things.

Bill is obviously reached, a statute of God. He is starting a Climate religion as we speak, he should hire Tom Cruise for a start. He knows a lot about this profitable startup idea.

> make Jobs more efficient

The important thing here is not if jobs are getting more efficient or not, it's that everyone gets the same boost. All companies will get the same AI, and that makes people the differentiating factor. Let's stop with the theories of job loss by AI automation, competition will have humans+AI and beat your company that uses AI alone.

The early Google for example was also an AI. But it was open to everyone, nobody got exclusive Google access. So we all benefited equally and there were no overall job losses.

Of course he will say that.

‘Microsoft co-founder believes that his company’s own investment in the AI startup that created ChatGPT will change the world.’

It is open source AI models that are large in parameters, transparent and smaller in size that are the ones that will permanently change the world and will disrupt OpenAI’s closed AI SaaS business plans.

If we replace a big chunk of our media with derivative works created by copyright laundering engines, we're destroying the incentives to be original and creative.

But we absolutely need originality and creativity!

Living in a world where everything looks sort of like SEO spam sounds like a dystopia to me.

Note, I don't think those technologies should or will be banned. There just have to be rules in place that allow creators to opt-in to having their work used as training data, with appropriate remuneration.

If that makes some AI business models unworkable, that's fine with me as long as we don't destroy our creative and inventive people's livelihoods.

The point for me is, how can you know if a human was involved?

If you write an 'algorithm' that copies someone's art and distributes it - then you are infringing. It doesn't matter if you 'automated it' and the word 'art' doesn't really apply so much either.

> I don't see how any corporation should be able to consume someone's copyrighted work without their permission and make something of it.

I'm not quite sure where I stand yet on this issue. I wonder, though, if an individual artist studies another long-dead artist's work, practices that style of painting/drawing/whatever, and then produces something in that same vein that is clearly inspired by the artist...is there a copyright issue? My instinct would be to answer 'no' as this is what art and inspiration has always been about. No one had to pay to look at Da Vinci's work or study a Renoir - the art was publicly available.

Now, with OpenAI, the capacity to 'study' an artist and produce something in their style is available to all. If the work is publicly available, is a machine studying/learning from it any different to an art student in a museum? And if OpenAI generates an image in the style of Da Vinci, should it be paying someone for doing so?

Again, my instinct is 'no'. I can understand why an artist working today might see things very differently but unless the source material was locked up or otherwise not available for people to see, study and learn from, I am not yet convinced there is a big difference between thousands of humans studying and imitating a master artist and a machine studying and imitating a master artist.

The article points to two problems, one being corporations profiting from other peoples copyrighted works with just an algorithm. Thats awful for sure, but the actual utility of content generated that way is questionable at best (Also, because it's new, there is a bit of a fad for it). The other is more existential and pertains to AI replacing humans in the cultural process. I don't think it's reasonble to assume this will happen anytime soon, given the state of technology which is just nowhere near enough capable for that. By the time it would be, you'd have a fully artifical human mind.

Sure, it can come from a boring, unoriginal place without any investment and it could be bad art. Work like that is just a waste of time for everyone. People wouldn't listen to music that was created with the same indifference, it would sound awful. I agree it's not a very important question though, it's just a shame that we will have to look at the images AI generates.

Too your first point, I am not sure what constitutes new or novel here. I've seen the AI do exactly the type of borrowing from different sources you describe and producing something that seems very new to me. Though I admit, often these are under human direction with some carefully chosen sentences. Is that enough to generate something really new?

To your second point, most of the work I've seen generated from these models were done for free. It could be argued that these tools add to an artists toolbox rather than take something away. I can see for example where one poor artist could create a computer game of the same quality that it takes a triple-AAA game company to do today. Is that good or bad?

Why would you say AI can't create something new? It should be abler to merge ideas from its training data and create something like "The Name Of The Rose".

ChatGPT is able to write lyrics about a topic of my or its choice in the style of an unrelated philosopher for example. It creates something new by mixing ideas from different modalities.

a_bonobo.... I think you're digging in the right vein here, but to perhaps to make the point clearer we could separate the discussion into two:

In an AI laden world

1) How are artists relevant

2) How are artists fairly compensated

I believe the answer to 1) is as you say, simply in the word 'new'. AI functionally remixes toward a mean. You can improve the impression of this with exquisite sources or more nuanced algorithms, but the result is always, literally, average.

I believe that an artist works out of an authentic story that is much more than the sum of their influences, and is uniquely their own. This story is the value proposition that is offered to an appreciant - it is an expression of identity that rises above the noise, and that can be joined. Mechanisms of payment have changed with the gyrations of technology, culture, and power since the concept of 'art' was birthed. But as long as there is a distinctive story in an artist's work, I believe there will always be a path to compensation.

We're all standing on the shoulders of giants, dwarves, and everything in between. That's not really arguable. Even if you create something "entirely unique" (yeah right), that somehow doesn't draw on any work done before (ha!), you can only communicate it because people made language.

You can only share it because people fed you, clothed you, educated you. Countless squintillions of interactions and evolutions, in nature, in humanity, in culture and science and art and language, in the very cosmos, went into putting you in the position you were when you created the "completely new" thing.

However, one of the things that people do is go into bubbles - religious bubbles, ego bubbles, psychotic delusions, etc. It can be powerful to give yourself all the credit for your work. It can be motivating, comforting, and generally advantageous sometimes to think that God has your back, that your tribe is chosen above others.

Think of all the performers with diva complexes - those complexes serve a role in helping them. It's absurd and kind of sad from the outside, but it works for those people to believe that they're the greatest.

But the truth that they're all forgetting is that they had teachers, helpers, warriors, workers, people of all kinds supporting them to get to the position they're in. They all had ancestors who broke their backs to bring them into the world and protect them. They've all eaten thousands of pounds of food grown with exploited labour. They've all benefited from countless artists and creators enriching the local and global culture.

So, I can see why someone might believe, or even choose to believe that they "made the entirety" of a thing... But it's not the truth - not even close. A wider and less egoistic perspective might not help them create or believe in themselves, but if we're talking about a broader truth than one person's viewpoint, it's utterly absurd, wholly delusional, to give yourself that much credit. I think it's a sign of sickness in our culture that any of this is news to people.

Trying to pretend LAION has any culpability is how you know this is bunk.

It's a list of links to publically available content. The metadata is the alt-text of the linked images.

No one has the ability to demand they not be linked to, because otherwise the simple solution is "stop hosting" or "add authentication" and the ramifications of any other conclusion break the internet (EU right-to-forget would apply, but that compels action after a request, it doesn't imply linking is illegal).

Betteridge’s law of headlines.