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Comment by IAmGraydon | Hacker News Reader

I do find it entertaining to watch the creative world struggle against this unstoppable force. It's the Luddites and the mechanical knitting machines of the early 19th century all over again. The human race never changes. It will undoubtedly end the same way.

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It's not the same thing. These are people who strived their whole lives to learn to draw and paint and make something of their own. It's not just their livelihood being stolen, it's their own work. They aren't saying not to use generative AI to make art, they are saying they don't want their art to be used to train it.

Artists are still needed to make input for AI, they aren't completely replaced by a machine.

Some said that Napster/KaZaA/etc. was the future of music. They got closed down.

Spotify eventually popped up, and "solved" a big problem in music streaming. But at a cost - the record labels have them by their balls.

You don't see any leading "pirate" Spotify clone dominating the market. Closest thing is YouTube, but monetization goes to the content owners.

So here's what you do, if you're a bunch of creative artists / content owners / etc.:

You find one company that's commercializing the tech, and sue them into oblivion. Force them into signing a deal that ensures they'll never be profitable.

Others will follow.

But, yes, obviously the models are out there. In the same way that people are pirating stuff like they've always done. You can't do much about individuals running models on their own rigs - but that's not the point.

The point is to make it as painful as possible for people that feel the urge to commercialize something at scale. The goal is "Fuck you, pay me" or get dragged through the courts.

It's really easy, "unstoppable" even, to send pirated music files over the internet. It sure was fun to have free music. And yet Napster was sued out of existence, and now the vast majority of people who listen to music pay for it.

And it's way harder to run a pirate AI datacenter than it is to set up a torrent tracker.

Laws will be written, license fees will be paid, and AI will continue to develop but with proper compensation.

>now the vast majority of people who listen to music pay for it.

Well not really, it's just freely available online.

The vast majority listen to ads in order to listen to it for free. Artists make almost nothing on streaming. It completely changed history.

The problem here is that the law has already been written to some extent. Google Books is the most relevant case you can point to that set precedent over what constitutes fair use of copyrighted material and the extent the transformation of those works can be commercially exploited. In that case works were copied without permission with small chunks of those works redistributed verbatim, and that was when it was working as designed. There's an argument to be made that this AI generator stuff is actually less egregious.

I don't think it's the same this time. A mechanical knitting machine can be invented in isolation. Midjourney could not have existed without an extensive database of stolen art. Isn't that something worth fighting against, for artists?

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