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Comment by Garvi | Hacker News Reader

There's too much money at stake for the big players for this not to be labeled illegal any time now.

This isn't the first such poisoning method published is that they are announced, and then quickly its shown that (1) they aren’t really visually acceptable for most real art when you look at images at a bigger size than what is included in the announcement paper, resulting in noticeable quality degradation and/or (2) they can be easily countered, usually, IIRC, both.

I think it seems very likely that that this will always be the case: if it is visually neutral enough to be acceptable for use, there will be a way to train systems to generate art that visually resembles the original based on the output.

Nah, they'll use the easiest/cheapest/fastest way to prevent this, and, in this case, I'm pretty sure that is not litigation, but technical. I'm pretty sure they will be able to filter this stuff out or minimize its impact on training.

That makes a lot of sense. I was going off the assumption the technical way would be impractical and an never ending arms race. We'll see, I guess.

Illegal where? Because I have a hard time believing it'd be illegal in the US due to the First Amendment existing.

Freedom of speech in the US? I'm gonna laugh all the way into negative internet happy points that are gonna teach me a lesson never to say this again, unless this comment gets removed by the local censor :)

Which big players? There are some big players with an interest in facilitating the pervasion of AI, sure, but as far as I can tell there are are least as many big players who stand to lose from the widespread erosion of intellectual property rights that comes with it.

I had Microsoft, Google and Apple in mind as they are heavily invested into AI. Which big players are you talking about?

Publishers, record labels, movie studios, basically all of the businesses that have spent decades lobbying to strengthen the intellectual property laws that are now being undermined.

Yeah, but those guys want to get rid of those greedy artists, so they're all for AI they can leverage. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/08/google-record-labels-work...

Seems incredibly unlikely

The first amendment is going to slap the taste out of their mouths if they try it. If you want to steal my data for your personal use, I am under no obligation to play nice with you.

It's illegal to booby-trap your house with the malicious intent to kill trespassers. With enough lawyers/lobbying, the same argument could work to criminalize the intent to break the product, even if it violates your license (separate offence).

Here in the real world, booby-trapping a house is entirely different than ensuring that your data set is fucked up when you're so lazy that you will just steal from everybody.

You will never get courts to conflate the two issues because they are fundamentally different. I have a constitutional right to my speech. You do not.

Calm down please, you seem to be misunderstanding my comment. I don't justify training without consent, I explain how the argument of the grandparent can be applied in reality. Yes, with enough legal backing they can sue you for the damages if they can prove the intent to poison their model. This intent doesn't have anything with freedom of your speech or the copyright. They might violate the license for your artwork and you can try suing them, but you are also not within your right to damage the rest of their work (which this thing attempts to do). Also the word "theft" can't be legally used in court in copyright infringement cases.

You just conflated homemade booby traps with stealing data, my guy. I am under zero obligation to ensure that my works are compatible with your models. They have the obligation to ask. I don't have the obligation to seek them out to give consent.

But I'll humor you. Let's assume that they sue me. Know what I'm gonna do? I'm going to sue them for the value of their entire corporation for stealing my work.

I don't understand what you're saying here. Why are you upset about creating new tools for current and future humans to be more capable at unleashing their creative visions?

All progress comes at labor from the past. If you didn't utilize past labor, you would not be talking to us now on the internet. You would be banging rocks against some cave wall instead.

If someone is inspired by art and they become an artist creating a similar style, is that stealing from you too? Is using a computer stealing from the engineers that created them? Is sleeping in a house stealing from the architects and builders?

If someone speaks do they need to pay royalties to the creators of the English language?

This technology is the beginning of creating a real life holodeck. Anything someone imagines they can creatively bring to life. How is it possible there are people greedy and self centered enough to not desire that for the future?

It is hard to follow the logic of your stance. I am genuinely curious about your modality of thinking if you would care to elaborate.

This whole "shut up about your intellectual property rights and your ability to make a living being a creator, you greedy self-centered idiot, because your livelihood is getting in the way of my vision of the future" is not convincing to me. Especially when your vision of the future is literally based on science fiction and may never actually come to pass. More likely gen AI will be like every technology, whose inventors and fans promise a post-scarcity world, but in reality it just either makes the rich already richer or swaps out one ruling class for another. We were promised the holodeck and the replicator, and what we got was Amazon drivers having to pee in bottles.

Does someone in a third world country who came up with the exact same idea as you years earlier have "intellectual property rights?" Is that entire conception not just construct of privilege, safeguarding only the well off?

Generative AI is already allowing people to unleash their creativity in miraculous ways, thought impossible previously. I feel your argument is unfortunately extremely dated already. I am also not seeing your connection between holodeck and replicators to Amazon drivers peeing in bottles? I wonder what coal miners have to do to make a living? There are all kinds of grotesque jobs and practices, the aim is to eliminate all of them in time with automated labor, and taking all the necessary supportive actions to make that possible / sustainable. Generative AI distributes creative control and power to everyone instead of those with money to afford it.

I have a right to the things I create. I have a right to modify them. I have a right to destroy them.

You do not. So if you come to steal from me, do not be surprised when I poison the living shit out the well you're attempting to drink from.

The greed here is not from the content creators, but from the wannabe AI overlords who believe they have the right to profit off of other people's work without their knowledge or consent.

You want data to train your AI? Either create it, buy it elsewhere, or pay me according to MY terms. But you won't get it from me for free and I will purposefully make your life hell if you attempt to do so. I don't give a damn about whatever pie in the sky nonsense you can come up with about technology and advancements. Your desire to get rich in the future is not more important than my need to eat today.

>I have a right to the things I create. I have a right to modify them. I have a right to destroy them.

This is absolutely correct. However, the tool in question attempts to poison the entire model, including the work you never created.

Yes, in the same way that the junkie dies from an OD because he steals random unidentified drugs in search of a fix, only in this case, they never had a right to any of my work.

Not my fucking problem.

Unfortunately, the technology is here and your skills are irrelevant. Coupling beautiful creative energy with money and greed was a mistake that you have had many opportunities in life to course correct from. Now you have to adapt. Sorry.

Looks like that type of art gets to be a passion project for people again instead of a way to make a living. Creative, passionate people will still create regardless of the machines. The machines will do all the soulless breadwinning artwork. I am and will continue to celebrate this change where raw and pure creative expression is accessible to more people.

If you don't want to adapt, I am sure your financial needs will necessitate getting a new skill you can still monetize, hopefully one that doesn't involve flipping burgers because of a hard-nosed stance (nothing wrong with burger flipping, it is just those jobs will be done by robots soon too).

The technology is trash and the "work" produced by these things is pathetically bad. And it's always more fun to make gobs of money by becoming a copyright troll to AI companies than it is to do it the old fashioned way. Wanna know where my proof that they've been stealing my work is gonna be? When they come at me for fucking up their models.

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