Hacker News Reader

Comment by mminer237 | Hacker News Reader

So every DALL·E, Stable Diffusion, and Firefly image should be jointly and equally owned by millions of artists? All of GPT's and LLaMA's outputs should be jointly and equally owned by essentially everyone who has ever written publicly online?

I can see how compensating the original artists would be desired, but I can't see how that wouldn't completely kill the AI space. There's just no way to develop a suitable set of training data from only people who have signed a licensing agreement.

Edit: And to be clear, CC BY-SA would not be a suitable licensing agreement, so things like Stack Overflow and Codidact and Wikipedia would be completely off-limits.

View on HN

I don't think something being hard, should mean it just doesn't have to happen. "It's too hard to figure out whose work we used, so we just won't?" I also think it's unfortunate that writers, bloggers, photographers, etc. who have seen no financial compensation for their work will watch it go on to enrich a company with a billion dollar valuation.

It costs $0.091 per copy to "cover" a song in the USA, you get this by securing a "mechanical license" and that rate is set by the Copyright Royalty Board[1]. I don't see why there can't be a similar way forward here.

[1] https://www.crb.gov/rate/

Hmm, I hadn't considered that, but I suppose Congress could enact a similar compulsory licensing procedure for AI. The hardest part will be identifying authors though. I can certainly appreciate adherence to the law despite difficulty, but I think once it crosses impossibility, you have to reconsider the public policy benefits. Even if you could force someone to license you their work for a statutory fee, something like Wikipedia would still be off-limits since you could never contact all the anonymous Wikipedia users to send each of them his 4¢ royalty.

Royalty rate increased to $0.12/copy as of January 1, 2023 for songs under five minutes in length (the rate increases from there for longer songs). [1][2]

[1] Case docs for CRB Phonorecords IV (see subpart B): https://app.crb.gov/case/detail/21-CRB-0001-PR%20%282023-202...

[2] Summarizing article: https://variety.com/2022/music/news/songwriters-win-copyrigh...

Yes. We all taught the AI with our words and images and music. We should all own the results.

I never agreed to teach machines.

You never agreed to teach anyone in particular. By publishing something, you agree to people using them fairly though. I don't see on its own a reason that teaching people with a work is considered fair use but training a model is not.

Because scale and intent matter.

> I can't see how that wouldn't completely kill the AI space.

As if that's a bad thing

Do you consider all automation to be bad?

I'd like to express my shock at reading something so uninformed and poorly thought out in a place like HN.

HN goes through its phases; just as the moon waxes and wanes, but this anti-AI, primitivist phase is quite annoying.

If you do not seek progress for humanity and the construction of things that are more meaningful. If you do not have the hacker spirit and want to explore. If you don't want to create just to see what could be... Maybe you're in the wrong place.

And make no mistake, this is poorly thought out.

This technology is never going away. Trying to ban generative AI is an attempt in banning math. Far more powerful people have tried for far more compelling reasons to do the same for a very long time. And when all was said and done, their crusade came undone.

The anti-AI arguments quickly crumble when you start asking questions like,

What was the state of artists before this? Did all artists enjoy a high standard of life in every part of the world? Or, were they barely scraping by on Fiverr?

In a world where copyright is required to train generative AI, who will be the only ones who could train any meaningful system?

What happens if we forbid people from learning and building on art that is already copyrighted?

What happens when people can copyright style? If only one band owned the copyright on Grunge and that whole Nirvana thing was just a non-starter?

What happens if non-human entities (like a LLC or S-corp) can't meaningfully participate in artistic creation?

Based on how the law currently stands, it is the EFF's estimate that there is no way to modify the law to forbid a system from learning and creating derivative works without opening a can of worms and impacting human creativity.

Fundamentally, the point of creative culture is that we add onto each other and that we stand on the shoulders of giants. An artist doesn't have to figure out how to draw in perspective because all the clever people before us have already thought it through for us. An artist doesn't have to figure out how to soften light, because others have done it before.

All culture is fundamentally additive and intellectual property is an artificial restriction that has caused broader cultural stagnation by making sure that nothing comes into the public realm for a hundred years.

The primitivists want to give this system even more power so that now you can't even see the works and be inspired from them. That's a take that's antithetical to HN's ideas of intellectual curiosity.

The EFF's take,

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-cop...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/ai-art-generators-and-...

Easy solution: derative work from AI must me licensed under creative common. Or Gplv3 if it's software.

And so, using the mind and work of the collective, you give back to the collective.

I like the way you think.

The problem isn't with tools being developed, but how they are going to be exploited in the current system that the world exists in. There is outrage for AI generated art because it:

A) is trained on work from existing artists without consent or permission

B) will be used to push artists out of their ability to make money to feed themselves

In a perfect world where artists could sustain themselves while practicing thier craft, this wouldn't be such a devisive issue. If you want to think about things from a counter-culture "hacker" perspective, we should be talking not about limiting AI but how we should be elevating artists to be able to exist despite the advancement in technology removing their jobs.

Its insane to think that artists won't be upset that their entire field, one centered on years and years of practice and learning, is about to be disrupted by a program that can create a thousand works in the span of a few minutes, trained on their own hard work without permission. Especially when these people already often work lower-paying jobs in order to make ends meet so they can work on their passion.

Is it really "hacker" to expect people to have to give up their happy lives doing work they enjoy so they can be shoved into the meat-grinder of a 9 to 5 job, because a program replaced them? Since when is it counter-culture to replace the leisure aspects of life with tech just because we can?

The tools themselves aren't evil and can be very helpful with artists, but it's not insane to see why its receiving push back from the art community who stand to lose the most from it.

Add in the fact that many of the people using or pushing for these tools don't even respect the craft of artists they're stealing from.

Not only in terms of not being interested in understanding the effort taken to develop the craft, but also in terms of understanding aspects of the craft itself. Whenever someone brings up the idea that ML is the same as a human learning from referencing other's art, I feel they giveaway their lack of any genuine exposure to art as that's a purely technical interpretation which misses that very little of art is about pure technical skill.

In a way, I feel the AI imagery stuff has just brought enshittification to art. It's the same overall pattern where some tech"bro" comes in citing disruption, technical legality and the future without any interest in understanding what they're talking about, develops a technology that's good enough for attractive marketing but not actually sufficient for the field, but they bring in so many new people that there's no competing and combined with the shit management from the "techbro", the industry is forced to settle for a new normal that grows ever shittier until all the value has been extracted from it.

I used to be very interested in working on generative AI, it's what got me working on a PhD. But I completely lost interest the moment I saw how irresponsible everyone was with it. The tool is fine, but I am increasingly of the opinion that it's a tool we as a society are not ready to ethically wield.

This is absolutely it. I'm a tech lover at heart, I am constantly playing with all the newest stuff that comes out. And when I first saw some of the things people were doing with Stable Diffusion I was very interested. Quickly mocking up textures for simplistic scenes? Quickly filling in repetitive background elements or flat coloring artwork to save artists time? Smart fill, smart lighting, these are some powerful tools, especially for concept art or speeding up commission work.

But the first thing I saw people do is start generating "good enough" art to get their ideas out, and as an artist, I saw how shit the art looked - but it was enough for the people who were not artists. I have seen quite a few friends lose long-time commissioners who are just generating tons of ideas with clicks.

I don't lament people's ability to generate ideas or become invested in art with tools that make it easy for them. I lament the corporate idiots that are going to try to make fully AI generated movies and paintings and books, and flood the market, kill all the real artists, and yeah, enshittify our art and media.

This is HN. How many computer programs have been created based on existing professional workflows that vastly reduced the amount of people needed to do that job?

An absolute ton. Now that it’s happening to art instead of accountants everyone should care?

Absolutely, because art isnt the same as crunching numbers. No accountant created the math they are crunching and then had a 3rd party come in and vacuum up their work and spit out a computer that creates a facimile of their work to replace them.

You pretty much just described Excel as a whole, not to mention any kind of formula/macro/whatever that gets entered into it. Yeah, they didn't come up with those formulas entirely on their own - they adapted what they learned to their current needs.

Artists also didn't come up with their art style entirely on their own, they adapted what they learned to their current needs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com