That's what they're upset about.
If there were no use for 2D artists, then Stability Ai wouldn't be making an AI to replace them.
Key word here is: replace. 2D artists are not becoming obsolete - they're being replaced by a machine that was trained on their works without permission.
If you want to make an AI that does amazing paintings, and doesn't use human training data, more power to you. I can't compete with that. But if you use MY WORK to make a machine that's going to replace me, you do it under the cover of darkness and without permission - yeah i'll get pretty mad.
What happened to visual artists was more like Logitech announcing Logitech CoPilot and revealing they've extracted code from keylogging for the past 20 years.
This is kind of petulant then, respectfully. They got paid to produce that work, and they sold their services for that paycheck and the knowledge that they were putting their work into the world. The fruits of their labor were already being used to make Disney, etc. massively wealthy.
But this is even another step of indirection from that totally fine and reasonable situation: people (or machines) are learning from the work and producing their own. They might as well be angry at interns who learned their style to get junior jobs at Disney and who are now up and coming, replacing them.
A lot of the works were just ripped off Arstation and similar websites. It's likely a very large number was never "paid for".
A lot of that work was never paid for to begin with. It was just spec work by artists who a. might be too young b. might be in between jobs c. just doing passion work.
Again a lot of people at HN don't really seem to know the story very well, or how artists are compensated.
However most of the images that are being used for training data don't come from Disney. Most of the imagery used for Stable Diffusion and Midjourney was from portfolio websites and other sources, afaik. The Artstation website, which is a popular portfolio website, was one of the main targets, alongside many others. Other websites used include DeviantArt and Flickr. You can check using this website https://haveibeentrained.com
A lot of people placed their passion work, personal work, and unpaid work on Artstation, DeviantArt and Flickr. Some of those people are brilliant. Stability AI used their work as training data, without announcing it or asking for permission. The result is that a lot of more profilic and famous artists can see a lot of work that directly seems to be a reference to their own, copying their style.
A lot of the work on these websites is quite simply not commercial work. The only commercial application in fact, so far, is these image engines.
Now someone wants to use one of the songs in an ad. We "got paid" to produce the work, but the people making the ad still have to pay us for that use of the song, because it's a different use than the one we got paid for.
What we have here is someone hoovering up copyrighted and protected content, from all over the internet, and using it to generate income. They then are turning around and claiming that they do not need to pay for these protected works because... Well, it's always something hand-wavy like "machine learn like people" but it boils down to "I want to keep the money."
I'm still confused as to their business model.
I'm not sure what your comment about "Logitech CoPilot" is. GitHub CoPilot exists, was trained on code from the past 20 years, and by and large developers enjoy the additional automation, and are looking for ways to leverage this automation to be more productive. I would think artists and writers would adopt a similar approach. Experience tells me that fighting automation is a waste of time. Best to stay ahead of it.
Yes.
"Under the cover of darkness and without permission" implies quite a bit, but you're coming at it from the wrong angle, which this court ruling affirms. Try thinking of it as a new tool that will act as a force multiplier for your work.
This "but progress" argument is tiring. The Industrial Revolution was a complete failure if you measure quality of life in its first decades. It got turned around by people who you know, fought back, created unions, and demanded fair pay.
Good. That's the goal, and we can stop inventing stupid make-work for people when that happens. Jobs aren't the goal, making robots do all of the work is the goal. You're falling into the myopic trap of assuming that the current way of things won't change along with generative AI becoming commonplace.
My fear is that in between the world we have now and the world where robots do everything, we have a giant valley of madness where robots take all the jobs, all the profits, and a lot of people are left with nothing.
It would take an incredible amount of altruism to share your goal, and you don't become a billionaire by being altruistic.
But progress is part of the foundational purpose of copyright:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
I also take issue with the assumption that AI will "benefit everyone enormously, even if it won't be equally distributed"; I don't see any factual basis for this assumption. On the contrary, it seems much more likely that AI will be used to concentrate wealth even further. Given the high cost, I find it hard to believe it will ever by "equally distributed".
For as long as I can remember big corporations have been merciless in their preservation of "intellectual property". I didn't love it then and I don't love it now. OTOH, the idea that Microsoft can train their LLM on code I've written and then sell access to that LLM for money (sharing no dollars with me) strikes me as outright theft.