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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

This again? A blog post stuffed with stolen art and often heard but absolutely not working advice?

> Every morning, I start my day by planning it out in a custom template that displays my Google Calendar events and Todoist task list.

For real? One of the best ADHD tools I am aware of is called the Anti Planner.

It doesn't take long to find posts like "why to-do lists don't work for people with ADHD" https://coachjessicamichaels.com/2022/03/30/why-to-do-lists-...

Also, this blog post misses body doubling which is incredibly helpful and can even be done virtually with focusmate or a similar service (I use focusmate personally but I do want to spam so no referral link or crap like that). Indeed, for me the only way to swallow a frog is focusmate.

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I feel similar with the “every morning” stuff. The problem is I have a very hard time making some happen every morning.

Same here. I have never been able to intentionally build a routine for just about anything, despite the autistic part of me aggressively wanting routine.

I find I love the ideas of structure and routine, and fully grasp the importance of maintaining invariants and discipline, but utterly fail to apply those concepts to my life. Rather frustrating

Simple steps for ADHD Productivity Management:

1. Do not have ADHD

Reeks of the "don't break the chain" cultism that originates from an urban myth of about how Jerry Seinfeld practiced wiriting jokes.

Yeah but ADHD is different for everyone. Most if not all of the strategies mentioned work for me.

> stolen art

It looked AI-generated to me.

And AI art is theft.

Hell, even a18n have admitted it! https://i.imgur.com/auBNG0N.jpg

Your source does not support your claim. They say that if every single individual piece of data used to train a model was to be paid out, there would be a lot of payouts. You could just as easily say that if you had to pay the state for every step you took on the sidewalk, you would have to pay the state a lot. This does not prove that you are indebted to the state for millions in sidewalk usage because fortunately for you the law has not decided to make you pay for using the sidewalk, just as it has not decided to make training data have to pay per file.

> just as it has not decided to make training data have to pay per file.

That's quite exactly what the copyright law states, though. I never thought the day will come when I root for Getty Images but the techbros have managed to do it. Congrats, I guess?

Source? I heard there was a trial for this but wasn't aware it had resolved.

It didn't resolve yet hence me rooting for Getty. They won't lose, though.

I have grave reservations about AI art, but...nope, that doesn't follow.

It's true that there are a lot of (human) artists in the US. (Something like 80 million, broadly defined.) And it's also true that the art and media each artist views shapes the art they create, including art and media we see quite incidentally - graffiti, ads on bus shelters, paintings in the hallways of office buildings. And in the course of the year each of us will view thousands upon thousands of such pieces of art and meida.

So if we had a licensing scheme such that every artist had to make a non-negligible payment to the rights holder of every bit of media they view, then artists, collectively, would be liable for hundreds of billions of dollars in royalty payments. 80m aritsts * 1k pieces of media * $5 license fee is $400b; that's just basic math.

This calculation is, very obviously, not an argument that all art is theft. It's just some math about a hypothetical licensing scheme, and that's all a18n were doing too.

You may think (and I'm inclined to agree) that a human paging through an artist's ArtStation profile is fundamentally different than an LLM using it as training data, but that's an argument not addressed by a18n in that quote.

What's the difference between stolen art and ai generated stolen art? Both are illegal under the DMCA

Stolen art requires the original to be taken from its rightful owner. The original owner still has their work, meaning no theft has occurred. Also worth a mention is that in the case of AI art the original owner is hard to discern in the first place because the work is often too transformative to pin any part of it to even a single artist.

DMCA defines copying as theft. Derivative artwork requires paying the owner of the original copyright.

> A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work."

Let's tick all that apply:

    - based upon one or more pre-existing works [yep]
    - (...) any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. [yep]

"Sufficiently transformed" isn't enough to not consider it clearly derivative. The code takes in existing copyrighted art, transforms it, and shits out derivatives. Derivative artwork requires a license to the derivative rights to exist, otherwise it's in violation of existing copyright law. This is an incredibly simple case to argue. The derivatives literally cannot exist without that which they are derived from.

> DMCA defines copying as theft.

Then the DMCA would be wrong: Theft requires the original owner to lose their property, which does not occur when copying data. This is no surprise as the DMCA has always sucked.

Frankly you missed my point entirely, the DMCA and my/the technical community's general disdain for it doesn't have much to do with what I wrote. What I'm saying is that in 99% of cases AI art is unique enough that you simply cannot pin it to an existing author and say that they were copied directly. There are obvious exceptions when you prompt it as specifically as possible to try to make a copy as best you can (which is still never quite 1-to-1 with the original), but in 99% of cases, it is pretty much not possible to pay the "original artist" because you cannot identify them. What good is an unenforceable rule?

> Then the DMCA would be wrong

It's encoded in law. I wasn't talking about "what should be", I was talking about "what is".

> it is pretty much not possible to pay the "original artist" because you cannot identify them

there are numerous cases where an AI has spat out "literally just the original image, but badly". It really sucks that AI companies might literally have to- checks notes -"pay the people they're stealing from", though. Oh, my heart weeps for those billionaires that might have to shed a penny from their fortune to help those they sleep upon.

It is mentioned at the bottom of the post that the images are generated by OpenAI‘s DALL-E.

Yes, the morning routine and "at the end of the day" journaling are things that I never successfully implemented.

Thanks for pointing to body doubling and anti planner. They seem like interesting concepts. Do you have any others that are worth checking?

Follow Jesse Anderson's Extra Focus substack (there's a book too), his newsletter helps you understand ADHD much more than anything I know of. And there are useful tips too. Remember, if it works for you, it's not weird :)

Thanks!!

I don't trust every Jesse Anderson's advice on adhd

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Anderson

LOL https://www.extrafocus.com/

Seeing the AI art might've thrown my senses off, but a lot of this reads like ChatGPT-writing.

> post stuffed with stolen art and often heard but absolutely not working advice?

But it gets you to the HN front page!

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