Hacker News Reader

> the lengths techbros will go for in order to avoid paying an artist for artwork

Hiring an artist removes control, it's not your art, but the artist's what ends up on the wall. That's the reason that I avoid hiring artists when I want some art made.

With that said, I have found that at least for now using AI for art is just too much work and too little control. I want my art on the wall, not whatever the AI model outputs. So, I'm in your camp of "just learn to paint the darn stuff". I find it's a lot more fun.

One of my hobbies is 3D art. I love 3D sculpting, but hate texturing and rigging. This is why I'd like the AI to do the unpleasant parts.

why would he pay for an artist when he's happy with what he has? Why do drawcels feel so entitled to be looped in financially for no reason?

I find the complaint about copyright so strange in this case. Copyright has a purpose, stopping some random person from creating an imagine only they will see and use is not that purpose. In this case it's just spiteful. Ultimately, if you think he's infringing your copyright you should sue him, but I don't think you'd win.

besides whether artists should get paid or not, or whether they should be reimbursed for use of their art or not, using something without permission, or rights, or license, without something that'd actually (legally) enable to do so without violating copyright, is just bad in itself.

there's a great alternative to "not paying/refusing to pay" (but using and stealing stuff anyway) - just, not using other people's stuff. not using stuff that's built on copyright/license violations. not using artwork you don't own, that you don't have rights, licenses, or permissions to use. (yes, simply 'taking something and making a model from it', would be a violation.) one could just not do a shitty thing, and they wouldn't have to jump hoops to find any justification for the shitty thing they did.

they could do a step-by-step art tutorial, and wouldn't have to pay anybody, nor use tools that rely on stolen artwork. but nope.

highly ironic how they made this thing, and promptly showed it off to thousands of people on the internet, immediately invalidating your example

they also promote (just by choosing and mentioning all of these things) those services, like Replicate, that monetize the use of stolen artwork (by selling compute, directly coupled with nn models), and ultimately profit from it (solely, without "giving back to artists whose art they perused" or anything).

they could make art in a way that wouldn't participate in tech art theft racket, but they didn't. and they didn't just participate in it, but promote it and perpetuate it.

Copyright laws evolve together with evolving tech, and it's interesting to think about how they could be refined for this purpose. They're currently very clearly stopping somebody from blatantly selling prints that are copies of another artist's work. Now, you could argue that these models merely look at art that is available for free consumption for humans, and draw inspiration from it, like a human artist would. Just think of the music industry, and how many songs are (legally) similar for the same reason.

Is the solution to prohibit any type of processing of such images, or should it specifically prohibit the calculation of derivatives of the loss function based on those images, or something else entirely?

> yes, simply 'taking something and making a model from it', would be a violation.

is there precedent for this? How are the services you reference operating if it were so clear?

they're operating while ignoring and violating copyrights and licenses, and opening themselves to a possibility of a lawsuit. there's getty v stability so we're gonna find out.

This sounds a lot like wagoners complaining about how these newfangled automobiles are profiting off their wagon designs, and not compensating them for it.

No, a better subject for that analogy would be software engineers complaining about ChatGPT's coding abilities. Wagons & cars are both a matter of mechanical engineering. A digital calculator didn't displace pen-and-paper computers in the way that power drills didn't displace carpenters. Transcribing and operating a printing press are both rote procedures where the skill involved achieves accuracy and the materials involved are mostly the same. But operating Stable Diffusion and painting in PhotoShop with a stylus require wildly different modes of operation, and enjoying or being good at the latter hardly suggests that one would enjoy or be good at the former.

This sort of image generation (especially extrapolating probable upgrades & improvements of just the next few years) displaces artists without providing an upgrade path. It shouldn't take much empathy to understand how that's frustrating and scary that must be for them.

I think pxoe's expression of frustration is totally reasonable. The engineers who made this stuff could have focused on using AI to enable new possibilities, instead of undercutting existing possibilities (to create new markets instead of overtaking existing ones). They could have used 100% consensual training data, but instead felt entitled to exploit a loophole/ambiguity in the social contract under which artists have been sharing their work on the internet.

A more appropriate analogy would be, this sounds a lot like social movements complaining about capitalist co-opting of their symbols, e.g. the use of "communist" rhetoric to build oligarchies (or the sale of "save the earth" mugs made from oil-derived plastics, etc.). Even that isn't a perfect analogy, though, as the co-opted output wasn't itself the displaced work-product, although it does a better job of capturing the emotional side of it, the sense of betrayal. Ultimately, I don't think it's productive to reduce the reaction to the decisions behind Stable Diffusion etc. to a single analogy, and it shouldn't be so hard to say "sorry, you're right, this is bad for you and good for me and you have every right to express your frustration over that irreversible decision".

> A digital calculator didn't displace pen-and-paper computers in the way that power drills didn't displace carpenters.

I'd like to point out that _computer_ used to be a job title for a human worker who would _compute_ things. This is a job that no longer exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

feeling better?