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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

And the synthesis was created with material that the AI company did not license and did not have permission to use for this purpose.

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.

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> It's not unreasonable to ask permission before you use something. It just isn't.

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]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permission_culture

If I take a copy of your art to hang on my wall, I've violated your copyright.

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.

But you are not capable of reproducing from your mind something that is in that artists' style, after that viewing. 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.

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.

> But you are not capable of reproducing from your mind something that is in that artists' style, after that viewing.

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

> 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

Some forms of copying/uses for a work are permitted by law (eu) or permitted by fair use (us) and thus exempt from permission. Eg. it is generally accepted that you are allowed to download works if you're viewing them in a browser, storing them in a search engine database, or are taking statistical data for a research project.

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's not unreasonable to ask for permission.

It's also not unreasonable to look at and learn from things that people have put on public display.

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