No matter where you land on this issue, you have to admit that there is a credible chance of significant societal changes in the near future. But instead of discussing how to best manage these changes or how to support people who may be negatively affected, we waste our time with petty squabbles.
The artists are saying "stop" and the AI side is saying "you can't make me". One side would love a pause to have a productive discussion, and the other side doesn't want a pause at all.
The other side are human beings.
If you don't immediately and intuitively grasp the moral weight of drawing comparisons between animals and humans in this context, perhaps you can at least understand why you're hated for it. "Let's just screw over everybody who we can grind between the gears of our APIs because ha ha, they can't stop us" is not a recipe for a functioning society.
> The other side are human beings.
No, both sides are human beings. They are human beings using different tools in the same domain, and the side that wants to prevent the adoption of newer tools rather than adapt to them is…well, historically, that’s not a winning position, basically, ever. (In broad societal terms; if you want to create your own isolated subculture where certain newer tools are excluded, that can work.)
I think the arguments in this thread for why this is important, by supporters of it, indicate this is wrong. Yes, directly, this aims at preventing style fine-tunes from work of the artist who uses it (even though styles have never been proprietary.) But if you look at the arguments about why this is significant, its not anything connected to the copying of individual styles, but to the way the explosion of capacity of AI art generators is transforming the market. That’s the target. Even if a magic shield protecting every work that the creator wanted to protect from this day forward against style fine tunes (or AI training more generally) wouldn’t deflect that trend even a tiny bit – which it wouldn’t, IMO – that’s what this is aimed at sociologically.
I'm not an artist and I'm excited to use AI art generation to realise visuals I can obtain affordably. I just would like to be able to do that ethically.
The problem with the current discourse is that we're hung up on things that are largely irrelevant to providing an actual solution.
Arguments like "my IP is being violated" completely fall apart under any scrutiny and are readily abandoned in favor of some other useful proxy-concerns like "It's just copy and paste, not art!". I refuse to believe that the art community is stupid enough to make arguments like that without some existential dread clouding their judgment.
Do you really think anyone would complain if AI art didn't threaten their livelihood, in a space that usually celebrates inspiration and recognizes that IP rights often only benefit the biggest players? Do you really think a significant portion of that group would advocate for the strictest possible IP laws, which will wipe out a significant amount of human art as well, without some deeper motivation?
The ultimate issue is that people are losing their livelihoods and the ability to engage in work that is meaningful to them. We need to develop social programs that ease their fall, not run circles around the emotionally satisfying arguments that would "really show the other side what's what!". Ironically, a bunch of people are reducing one side to money hungry thieves and the other to lazy luddites below a comment calling out this exact behavior.
This is what gets me about this whole argument. When you're agreeing with The Mouse about IP law, you know something has gone awry. In reality, we should remove arcane IP restrictions, not continue to add them further into society. Copyright is already, what, 100+ years on average?
> The ultimate issue is that people are losing their livelihoods and the ability to engage in work that is meaningful to them.
Indeed, people are using a moral argument to mask their deeper intent, their fear of the economic damage done to their livelihood. In this case the solution is not to further calcify their work, but to...solve the actual issue, via UBI and the like.
Are you going to buy the necessary number of congressmen to make this happen? Because the people being aggrieved certainly can't afford to--and so "well just pass UBI" is the "just draw the rest of the owl" flavor of not-helping.
Insofar as its about treating “style” as a proprietary entitlement against the rest of the world, despite that it has not ever been proprietary, a kind of entitlement to an extension of copyright which itself is not even notionally a matter of fundamental right but privilege granted in the expectation of externalized utility, I am not convinced that it is a legitimate grievance, even to the extent it is clearly a genuine one.
> Arguing that they’re only saying that because their jobs are being affected is, well, not the best looking argument I’ve ever seen.
I didn’t argue that. I argued that the motivation is not that the threat to their jobs from the thing this would correct even if it worked, but the threat from something which it does not, even in the most optimistic view. That is, yes, its because “AI art” threatens their existing mode of work, but not because “style transfer based on their current and future artwork” moves the needle, in any meaningful way, on the threat. It is fundamentally (whether they are entitled to their existing mode of work or not) misdirected for the motivating concern.
I don’t think style is even the main issue here, although it’s a significant one. You may be right. Without scraping vast troves of copyrighted art, and using it in a way that is not at all clearly fair use, these models would be nearly as good at almost anything. But if that’s a legitimate concern, the fact that it might severely hamper these models is the right outcome. If these companies want to use copyrighted works to train them, maybe they should need to license it.
> historically, that’s not a winning position, basically, ever
In what universe do you think people who are staring down the gunbarrel believe they have any chance to win at all, in anything? When “join up”, if one is even allowed (and let’s be real, they’re not being invited) is also losing?
We are talking about telos here, and tech’s incessant drive to smash it. And this industry offers no alternatives or even the barest minimum of safety to anyone.
AI art literally relies on artist's output to train. It's not horses vs the car, it's horses vs a motor that grinds up horses to generate power.
As the sibling comment notes, only one side here is saying "stop" and only one side is saying "you can't make me."
Your comment was the exact kind of argument I was writing about. You took the emotionally easy path of thinking about a large group of people as some evil cabal that has the power, unity and desire to destroy the livelihoods of others, instead of actually assessing their arguments.
People who are saying that AI can't be stopped are referring to the fact that even if they personally stopped using it - there would be millions of others who would not have such qualms. If OpenAI shut down tomorrow, new companies would open up the next day. If the government banned all AI, other countries would welcome it and start eating said government's lunch.
Striving towards better social programs is the best way forward, and UBI will be thought of as impossible until a large enough group of people campaign for it. If you disagree with that, then argue against it, but don't construct some boogeyman version of the other side in order to dismiss them.
Yes. Literally yes. It sucks. I try to minimize purchases, I research the most ethical sellers I can within the bounds of available information, and I try to reuse as much as is possible.
> That's the main issue at play here and needs to be remedied by fair and empathic argument - not by railing against a group of people who you paint as unequivocally evil.
When they stop acting like their mission in life is to drive everyone else into precarity and then to ruin, or even at least stop acting like it’s so horrible that people in their gunsights are upset about it, I’ll stop drawing from their actions the obvious conclusions.
UBI is a great way forward. Never said it wasn’t! But. It is clearly not on the radar of the people bankrolling this. If it was? They would expend the money and the political capital to do it. They would be on that goddamned stump. But Sam Altman isn’t out there buying congressmen for UBI. Could! But isn’t. So why would I believe that it’s any kind of priority?
But okay, that’s uncharitable, I’m sure. Altman is busy. So show me who should convince me that there is an argument at all beyond “you can’t stop us”, could you? Show me who is making fat stacks off of the AI craze and is also doing the political work, won’t you? Show me who is going “I am now making bank and I want us to give back structurally.” I have looked. I don’t see them. I want to push those messages. But I am reasonably confident they don’t exist. I’d like to be wrong.
I never said that there is any expectation of putting the genie back in the bottle, either. We do need political action, we do need to be emphatic and we do need to push for solutions (and UBI is a good one), and in so doing we might even fix the problems they create…but that doesn’t change their souls. It just means maybe we can work around them.
If you genuinely have a bad conscience about the things I outlined, then you are in the vast minority. 99% of people in developed nations don't care about the sacrifices made for their lifestyle, they feel no compulsion to give back or prevent the abuse of others in the name of profit. They may pay lip service, but they won't sacrifice anything to practice what they preach. Reading about modern slavery in cobalt mines will make them feel bad temporarily, but within days they'll be right back shopping for a new smartphone.
That is the unfortunate reality - our intuitive sense of injustice is strongly biased towards locality. We care when something bad happens to the people near and dear to us, but suffering that is far away or somewhat hidden doesn't really register.
We need to face this reality and work with it, instead of getting heated and self-righteous. Sam Altman's soul is neither worse nor better than the one of your average middle-class American.
Instead of assuming evil intent, assume ignorance. Make convincing arguments, highlight the suffering, offer possible solutions - these are the actions that likely lead to improvement.
And to just add a small reminder: AI isn't all bad. It's a disruptive technology, with great risks and great rewards as well.
I'll be real: the actions that are likely to lead to improvement are buying Congressmen, and I don't have the money. The AI crowd does, and they are positioning themselves to collect ever more of it. If they are in fact Actually Worried about the people downrange of their guns, why is the onus on everybody else? Why are you implicitly holding that normal people are unreasonable for not wanting to be fed into the gears and that it's not the gear-owners' responsibility to not feed people into them?
Don't misunderstand me--I can do a lot of stuff, both tech and not. I'm reasonably confident I'll be fine regardless; if push came to shove, I can enter my disappear-into-the-woods arc. I'm not going to begrudge those who can't refusing to go quietly, and frankly, you shouldn't either. I think you know as well as I do that this crowd isn't looking to talk to the people they seek to grind to dust. They don't think they matter, and if you seriously thought otherwise you'd have answered with examples.
Discussion is a luxury afforded only when all parties are going to be okay at the end of the day. You are, for lack of a better term, tone-policing the scared and the harmed on behalf of the wealthy and the harming. And you are clearly more capable of insight than that.