It does not contain compressed "copies" of the image. It contains a synthesis of the image.
I have ZERO issue with image generators on their own. They're quite cool technology. The only thing I and tons and tons of other people have requested is they not use images without permission to train them, that's literally it. That's my sole, single, solitary objection and yet every AI interested person, advocate, and company rep will do intellectual back-flips to explain why this is unreasonable.
It's not unreasonable to ask permission before you use something. It just isn't.
It's also not unreasonable to look at and learn from things that people have put on public display.
But if I "copy" the experiential knowledge of your art into my brain by viewing it, I'm not violating your copyright. My brain doesn't contain a copy of the art, it's just been influenced by viewing it, and I might be more capable of producing art that mimics your style.
What these models are doing feels, to me, vastly more like the second case.
In this way, ML training is just not the same as a person being inspired by or even being asked to recreate another person's creative work. Over the course of making something, an artists' "voice" would be best characterized I feel as the tiny choices they make along the way that all point to and reinforce a larger point or purpose to the piece. This "voice" shows up in all creative output, not just spoken word. That is what I feel people are feeling is lacking in generated art: because a machine-learning model does not have a voice, it does not have intent, it has a mandate from a third party from which it tries to draw from, and instead of making numerous, tiny but contributory choices, it instead decides on a weighted average of all the choices made in the art that the model was trained upon, which is simply not the same thing.
It makes all generated art have this very sterile, soulless feeling to it because these tiny choices that would otherwise be made by a person trying to illicit an effect are instead just the machine sort of shrugging and being like "well in most things I've seen where a woman is sitting this way, her hand is tilted this way" but it doesn't know why the hand is tilted or what that means for the subject, which means the hand-tilt might be applied to subjects for whom it makes absolutely no sense at all to tilt the hand.
I am capable of doing this.
> If you show someone a painting and ask them to recreate it, even setting aside the skill gap, you do not get the same painting back. You get a different painting, with some overlap, with the "focus" of it being what the person paid the most attention to during their viewing.
same for ai models. in fact, more true for ai models. You'll have a much harder time recreating an image from popular models than from human memory.
> It makes all generated art have this very sterile, soulless feeling to it because these tiny choices that would otherwise be made by a person trying to illicit an effect are instead just the machine sort of shrugging and being like "well in most things I've seen where a woman is sitting this way, her hand is tilted this way" but it doesn't know why the hand is tilted or what that means for the subject, which means the hand-tilt might be applied to subjects for whom it makes absolutely no sense at all to tilt the hand.
this will surely age well
People are already experimenting and/or deploying systems that run an LLM before doing text2image [1]. This helps a lot with 'understanding'.
The next low-hanging fruit would then be to go back and improve the labeling used for training the image-generation models in the first place (using new multi-modal LLMs).
[1] eg. the current GPT+ standard model will do Prompt -> GPT-4 -> DALL-E
AI companies argue (long story short) that their usage is closest to taking statistical data, and thus doesn't trigger the need for a license.
I do realize that some people find this to be a somewhat unfair outcome as is, but
A) It is the current law as is. (caveat: we still have to see if the courts actually confirm this particular interpretation)
B) I'm not actually sure we should let those people have their way in the first place.
Of course, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
I feel like some creative folks never actually bothered to learn the laws they were working under, or (more charitably) this turned out to be a corner case, and they were caught by surprise.
It can be unreasonable if it makes it harder to society in general to reuse and innovate on previous works. Intellectual property in general can be quite destructive. Heck, take a look at Permission Culture, which is actually a negative thing:
Permission culture is a term often employed by Lawrence Lessig and other copyright activists such as Luis Villa[1] and Nina Paley[2] to describe a society in which copyright restrictions are pervasive and enforced to the extent that any and all uses of copyrighted works need to be explicitly leased. This has both economic and social implications: in such a society, copyright holders could require payment for each use of a work and, perhaps more importantly, permission to make any sort of derivative work.
Lawrence Lessig describes permission culture in contrast with free culture. While permission culture describes a society in which previous creators or those with power must grant people permission to use material, free culture ensures that anyone is able to create without restrictions from the past.
...
An implication of permission culture is that creators are blocked by systemic procedures and this discourages innovation. Requiring permission in this sense means that creators will have to prove their usage of material is fair, even where legally unnecessary,[4] which is a process that some would decide not to continue.[5]
My read on the case is that it happened, John made a big public outrage post, and then gradually after news interest died down, more facts were revealed that made it much more obvious that oculus was in the wrong but nobody cared anymore.
It's also not relevant to making an ai model. That is at best relevant to producing a similar output using an ai model
This an entirely new schema and the endless slap fights between people trying to say "well the computer is just learning like a person does" is just, bafflingly, wildly wrong headed. No it's not. A person learns so they can accomplish a goal, and an ML algorithm by it's nature wants nothing, it is incapable of want, versus the people who are saying "well ML lets people copy other people" which is also wrong headed, because it isn't copies, it's remixes and re-imaginings of similar material are just not productive. On the one side people trivialize the act of learning how to art being just looking at shit and reproducing it, which is just wrong, completely wrong, and on the other side people think it lets the ML model copy artists, which it dooooooes, kind of? But that test also fails because they aren't strict copies and them being copies isn't the goddamn problem. The problem is the style, the vibe, the unique look of a given creative is trivialized into something you can get from stable diffusion after a few tries with the right prompt. This isn't a problem because Sarah Anderson lost a sale or whatever the fuck. It's a problem because it completely undermines the notion of the output of paid creatives having value, which is already a shaky proposition for most people and why tons and tons of prominent creatives cannot earn a living via their creations. This is going to make that situation even worse and no matter how many times this is explained to people, they just run back to this "well I wasn't going to buy things from them anyway" and the entire thing makes me want to fucking scream.
All that to say: AI is not AI, it's ML. ML is not learning like a person does, it's fundamentally different, stop equivocating. If you're so determined to cheer on as silicon valley knocks already struggling creative professions down a hill with systems that COULD NOT POSSIBLY EXIST without their pre-existing output to exploit, without permission, fundamentally unethically, if you just don't give a shit about that and are going to gleefully cheer that process on, then all I really ask is you be honest about that. Just say "I know this is fundamentally corrosive, unethical, and undermines an entire segment of the economy, but now I can get as many over-tuned generic shitty pieces of art as I want, and that's just more important to me." Just say it, and stand by it.
I don't find the rest of this readable tbh