On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
catandgirl.com
catandgirl.com
This is the sticking point for me. OpenAI isn't a profit-making company, but it's certainly a valuable company. A valuable company that is built from the work of content others created without transferring any value back to them. Regardless of legalities, that's wrong to me.
Put it this way - you remove all the copyrighted, permission-less content from OpenAIs training, what value does OpenAI's products have? If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content.
But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's copyrighted work, then lock it in a box and don't show it to anyone.
I have some, but diminishing sympathy for artists screaming about how AI generates images too similar to their work. Yes, the output does look very similar to your work. But if I take your work and compare it to the millions of other people's work, I'd bet I can find some preexisting human-made art that also looks similar to your stuff too.
This is why clothing doesn't qualify for copyright. No matter how original you think your clothing seems, someone in the last many thousands of years of fashion has done it before. Visual art may be approaching a similar point. No matter how original you think your drawings are, someone out there has already done something similar. They may not have created exactly the same image, but neither does AI literally copy images. That reality doesn't kill visual arts as it didn't kill off the fashion industry.
I also firmly believe that commercializing models built on top of copyrighted works (which all works start off as) does not qualify as fair use (or at least shouldn't) and that commercializing models build on copyrighted material is nothing more than license laundering. Companies that commercialize copyrighted work in this manner should be paying for a license to train with the data, or should stick to using the licenses that the content was released under.
I don't think your example is valid either. The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. That is literally what they are and how they work. That is very different than people having similar styles.
We are not talking about the eons old human practice of creative artistic endeavor, which yes, is clearly derivative in some fashion, but which we have well established practices around.
We are discussing a new phenomenon of mass replication or derivation by machine at a scale impossible for a single individual to achieve by manual effort.
Further, artists tend to either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge their priors in secondary or even primary material, much like one cites work in an academic context.
Also, the claim:
>But if I take your work and compare it to millions of other people's work...
Is ridiculous. A. you haven't, nor will you ever actual do this. B. This is never how the system of artistic practice up to this point has worked precisely because this sort of activity is beyond the scale of human effort.
In addition, plagiarism exists and is bad. There's no reason that concept can be extended and expanded to include stochastic reproduction at scale.
If you feel artists shouldn't have a say and a future in which capital concentrates even further into the hands of a few technological elite who make their money off of flouting existing laws and the labor of thousands, by all means. But this argument that somehow by analogy to human behavior companies should not be responsible for the vast use of material without permission is absolutely preposterous. These are machines owned by companies. They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do. You may want to consider a distinction in the rules that adequately reflects this distinction in participatory status in a social system.
It feels similar to the ye olden debates on police surveillance. Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with. Collating your behavior across every website and device you own from a data broker is fundamentally the same thing as a single phone’s wiretap, but it obviously feels way grosser and more unethical because it scales way past the point of what you’d imagine as being acceptable.
My main point is that OpenAI is generating an incredible amount of value all hinging on other people's work at a massive scale, without paying for their materials. Take all the non-public domain work off Netflix and Netflix doesn't have the same value they have today, so Netflix must pay for content it uses. Same goes for OpenAI imho.
It's entirely legal for me to leave the pub every time it comes up to my round. It's legal for me to get into a lift and press all the buttons.
It's not unreasonable I think for people to be surprised at what is now possible. I'm personally shocked at the progress in the last few years - I'd not have guessed five years ago that putting a picture online might result in my style being easily recreated by anyone for the benefit mostly of a profitable company.
People keep saying this but it's actually much more complicated, and in many cases you can't view copyrighted content.
An example, MicroSoft employees are not permitted to view or learn from an open source (GPL-2) terminal emulator:
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm...
Another example is proprietary software that may have it's source available, either intentionally or not. If you view this and then work on something related to it, like WINE for example, you are definitely at risk of being successfully sued.
If you worked at MicroSoft and worked on Windows, you would not be able to participate in WINE development at all without violating copyright.
If you viewed leaked Windows source code you also would not be able to participate in WINE development.
An interesting question that I have, is whether training on proprietary, non-trade-secret sources would be allowed. Something like unreal engine, where you can view the source but it's still proprietary.
Another question is whether training on leaked sources of proprietary and private but non-trade-secret code, like source dumps of Windows is legal.
Do you think it's reasonable for me to want some legal framework that allows me to explicitly deny that use of my work? Because I do.
If OpenAI is allowed to be ignorant of copyright, then the rest of us should be allowed, too.
The problem is that OpenAI (alongside a handful of other very large corporations) gets exclusive rights to that ignorance. They get to monopolize the un-monopoly. That's even worse than the problem we started with.
OpenAI built a machine that does exactly that. They just sampled _everyone_.
This artist doesn't complain about work similar to their own being generated, and their artwork is very clearly not clothing.
Well, not exactly. Certain uses are fair. The question is does OpenAI's use count as fair. I don't think your immediate response comes close to addressing that question despite your conviction it does otherwise.
Also, clothing designs are copyrightable. The conviction expressed by some participants in this debate is exhausting in light of their familiarity with actual copyright law.
It's important to consider in any legalistic argument over copyright that, unlike conventional property rights which are to some degree prehistoric, copyright is a recent legal construct that was developed for a particular economic purpose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#History
The existing standards of fair use are what they are because copyright was developed with supporting the art industry as an intentional goal, not because it was handed down from the heavens or follows a basic human instinct. Ancient playwrights clipped each others' ideas liberally; late medieval economists observed that restricting this behavior seemed to encourage more creativity. Copyright law is a creation of humans, for humans, and is subordinate to moral and economic reasoning, not prior to it.
Clothes are inherently consumable goods. If you use them, they will wear out. If you do not use them, they still age over time. You cannot "copy" a piece of clothing without a truly astonishing amount of effort. Both the processes, and the materials, may be difficult or impossible to imitate without a very large investment of effort.
Compare this to digital art: You can copy it literally for free. Before AI, at least you had to copy it mostly verbatim (modulo some relatively boring transforms, like up/down-scaling, etc.). That limited artist's incomes, but not their future works. But in a post-AI world, you can suck in an artist's life's work, and generate an unlimited number of copycats. Right now, the quality of those might be insufficient to be true replacements, but it's not hard to imagine we'll be in a world not so far off when it will be sufficient, and then artists will be truly screwed.
In theory: sure
In practice: not really, especially when you're small and the other side is big and has lots of lawyers and/or lawmakers in their pockets.
Disney ("In 1989, for instance, the company even threatened to sue three Florida daycare centers unless they removed murals featuring some of its characters") and Deutsche Telekom[1][2] ("the company's actions just smack of corporate bully tactics, where legions of lawyers attempt to hog natural resources — in this case a primary color — that rightfully belong to everyone") are just two examples that spring to mind.
[0] https://hls.harvard.edu/today/harvard-law-i-p-expert-explain... [1] https://www.dw.com/en/court-confirms-deutsche-telekoms-right... [2] https://futurism.com/the-byte/tmobile-legal-rights-obnoxious...
and like, what, do you think they're trying their damnedest to keep datasets clean and to not store any images in the process? how do you think they retrain on datasets over and over? it's really simple - by storing terabytes of copyrighted content. for ease of use, of course - why download something over and over, if you can just download it and keep it. and if they really wanted to steer clear of copyright infringement, if there's truly "no good solution" (which is bullshit for compute, oh, they can compute everything but not that part) - why can't they just refrain from recklessly scraping everything, if something were to just 'slip in'? like, if you know it's kinda bad, just don't do the thing, right? well, maybe copyright infringement is just acceptable to them. if not the actual goal.
what they generate is kinda irrelevant - there's plenty of copyright infringement happening even before any training were to be done. assembling of datasets and bad datasets containing copyrighted content are the start and the core of the copyright problems.
there's a really banal thing at the core of this, and it's just a multi-TB storage filled with pirated works.
> [A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticise, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy.
Most use of LLMs and image generation models do not produce criticism of their training data. The most common use is to produce similar works. You can find this very common “trick” to get a specific style of output to add “in style of <artist>”. Is this a direct way "to supersede the use of the original work”?
You can certainly see how other factors more or less put gen ai output into the grey zone.
The fact that clothing doesn’t qualify for copyright doesn’t mean text and images don’t. Or if you advocate that they don’t then you pretty much advocate for abolishment of copyright because those are the major areas of copyright applicability at the moment. Which is a stance to have but you’d probably be better to actually say that because saying that copyright applies to some images and text but not others is a much harder position to defend.
Just like the rest of AI, if your argument is "humans can already do this by hand, why is it a problem to let machines do it?", its because you are incorrectly valuing the labor that goes into doing it by hand. If doing X that has potentially negative side effect Y, then the human labor to accomplish X is the principle barrier to Y, which can be mitigated via existing structures. Remove the labor barrier, and the existing mitigation structures cease to be effective. The fact that we never deliberately established those barriers is irrelevant to the fact that our society expects them to be there.
I presume there are people working on research relating to how to prevent output of raw training data, what is the state of the art in this area? Would it be sufficient to prevent output of the training data or should the models be required to have no significant internal copies of training examples?
Most every fashion company has a legal team that reviews print and pattern, as well as certain other aspects of design, relative to any source of inspiration. My husband works in the industry and has to send everything he does for review in this way. I’m not sure where you got the idea that there are no IP protections for fashion, but this is untrue.
Now, i am worried about companies like OpenAI monopolizing technology through making their technology proprietary. I think their output should be public domain and copyright should only apply to human authors if they should be at all.
You'd have to argue the entirety, everything about copyright law being ethical, to make your version of the argument.
"A new for-profit subsidiary would be formed, capable of issuing equity to raise capital and hire world class talent, but still at the direction of the Nonprofit. Employees working on for-profit initiatives were transitioned over to the new subsidiary."
We've seen zero evidence that the non-profit side of OpenAI meaningfully constrains the for-profit side in any way, and have seen direct evidence that when the non-profit and for-profit groups disagree with each other, the for-profit side wins.
If you sell your art, then art marketplaces and printers and shipping services all profit from your work, but I don't imagine she's complaining about that. What's the difference? In all of those cases, as with social media, companies are making money from your work in return for providing a useful service to you (and one you don't have to use if you don't think it's useful).
I see it differently. To me, if you post your work online as an artist, it's really there for everyone to view and be inspired by. As long as nobody copies it verbatim, don't think you've been hurt by any other usage. If another artist views it, and is inspired by it... so be it. If an AI views it, and is inspired by it, again, no harm done.
You had me till that^ line. In your example if "inspired" human start competing with you, then there is harm. If the inspired human is replaced by an AI, then it also harms. By harm I am referring to competition.
So instead of saying "no harm done", then maybe its more accurate to say "same harm as a other humans being inspired by your work".
There's such thing as consent, I hope you've heard of it.
No artist whose work was used to train the AIs consented to such use.
Particularly if they released their work online before generative AI was a possibility.
>it's really there for everyone to view and be inspired by
Generative AI model is not "everyone". It's a model, a combination of data that goes into it.
It's a thing. A product. A derivative work, to be specific, made by the person who trained it.
>If an AI views it, and is inspired by it, again, no harm done.
Such a romantic notion!
But the same metric, a photocopy machine is an auteur that gets inspired by the work that it happens to stumble into to produce its own original art.
No.
The AI doesn't "view" the work, it has no agency. The human that trains the model does.
And that human is the one that is ripping the artist off.
The AI, as many people said, is just a tool. It doesn't suddenly turn into a person for copyright purposes.
It still remains a tool for people who train the models. A tool to rip off others' intellectual property, in the case we're discussing.
This is not really how copyright works.
> an AI views it, and is inspired by it,
This is a misleading anthropomorphization of how AI works.
Couldn't we say the same thing about search engines?
What value would google have without content to search for?
Is the conclusion we should make search engines pay royalities? That seems unfeasible at google scale. Should google just be straight up illegal? That also seems like a bad outcome; i like search engines i am glad they exist.
I guess i'm left with - i don't like this argument because of what it would imply for other projects if you follow the logic to its natural conclusion.
Use my content, to get people to me. Google's snippets kinda broke that deal and people have indeed complained about that, but otoh you can still technically opt out of being indexed.
It's not clear how you opt out of LLMs.
However, Google does get a lot of criticism when they do slurp up content and serve it back without sending traffic back to the websites! Yelp and others have testified to Congress complaining about this!
What you probably get is a LLM that can perfectly understand well written text as you might find on Wikipedia, but which would struggle severely with colloquial language of the kind found on Reddit and Twitter.
> then it should give some of that value back to the content.
That's literally built into their corporate rules for how to take investment money, and when those rules were written they were criticised because people didn't think they'd ever grow enough for it to matter.
How is OpenAI compensating the owners of IP they trained their models on? Or is that not what you mean? It's certainly how I read the part of the GP comment you quoted.
that sounds like insane bullshit to me. they're trained on the whole internet. there's no way they give back to the whole of the internet, more likely a lot of jobs will be taken away by their work.
plus, there was no consent.
Great. Let's do that then. No good reason to volunteer it for a lobotomy.
But the business model emerged and delivered value to us while enough that we didn’t consider asking for money for our content. We like being searched and linked to. Less so Google snippets presented to users without the users landing on our site. Even less so generated without any interaction. But it’s all still all our content.
I hope I never have to live in a world where such a thing exists.
* People won't notice, or the majority will forget (doesn't seem to be happening). * Raise enough money that you can smash anyone who complains in court. * Make a model good enough that can generate synthetic data and then claim new models aren't trained on anyone's data. * All of the above.
Anyway, I 100% agree with you, the value is in the content that everyone has produced for , they're repackaging and reselling it in a different format.
But they are free to use the fruits of the model, same as anyone else. I suppose the difference is they don't care; they already have the talent to transform their labor into visual art, so what use do they have for a visual-art-generation machine?
I find strong parallels in the building of web crawlers and search indexers, except... Perhaps the indexers provided more universal, symmetrical value. It's hard to make the case that someone crawled and added to a search index doesn't derive value from that strong, healthy index being searchable (even librarians and news reporters thrive on having data indexed and reachable; the index is a force-multiplier, it's not "stealing their labor" by crawling their sub-indexing work and agglomerating it into a bigger index, nor is it cheapening the value of their information-sorting-and-sifting skills when the machine sorts and sifts).
So perhaps there is a dimension of symmetry here where the give-and-take aspect of what is created breaks. Much like the rich don't have to care whether it's legal to sleep under a bridge, artists don't have to care whether a machine can do 60% of the work of getting to a reasonable visual representation of an idea. No, more than that: it's harmful to them if it's legal to sleep under the bridge.
They'd be landlords in this analogy, crying to the city that because people can sleep under bridges the value of the houses they maintain has dropped.
When is AI good enough that the contents it contains can be comparable to human brain content, copyright wise?
And conversely, now that we can read signals from neurons in a human brain, and create images from dreams and audio from thoughts, would not that also break the copyright of the content?
The fact is, the majority of people do not want to steal others work for profit, and for those bottom feeders that do, there are lass to discourage such behavior and to protect the original producer.
If these models were trained on creative commons licensed material only, then you'd have a leg to stand on.
I even had to pay for my tuition, and textbook material. Even if some portion of my knowledge comes from osmosis, I have still contributed at some stage to access training material.
When I was 16, I wanted to learn to code, do you know what I did? I went and purchased coding books because even at 16, I understood that it was the right thing to do. To pay the author for the privilege of accessing their work.
How basic can one get?
Would you like it if I broke into your house and used your things without asking you? Because that's about what's happening her for professionals.
As to the question of worth, obviously OpenAI's models have value without the training data. Just having a collection of images does not make a trained AI. But the total value of the system is a combination of that model and the training data.
If you remove all knowledge gained from learning from or copying others works, what value do you provide?
Nothing on this planet can learn without copying something else. So if we open the can of worms for AI, we should do the same for humans and require paying royalties to those who taught you.
As in: we will change the world, all that is required is that we throw away all previous protections! The ends justify the means!
I do see a much more beneficial trajectory for LLMs vs cryptocurrencies, but yeah, this is gross and unfair.
Note: as the days go on, I continue to realize the pitfalls of Utilariansim. I do miss the simplicity, but nope.
I don't know yet exactly how this compares, I’m trying to think it all through.
AI has different levels - output can be loosely inspired by, style cloning, or near exact reproductions of specific work.
I don't see why Disney or Universal would be more legitimate than OpenAI to profit from stuff made from now dead authors 60 years ago. Both seems as legitimate.
Seriously the audacity of these so called artists.. just because I sang a song one day does not mean I am entitled to own it and force people to pay me to be allowed to sing it. That’s absolutely insane.
(text commentary below the comic, in case your OS has decided to conceal the scroll bar from you and you didn't notice the page is longer)
Boy does that ring true.
Perhaps if you read Gabe's post you could have saved yourself the trouble of making this comment.
One might ask: Under what circumstances would AI art be acceptable then?
For example, does it really matter if these models are created by large corporations? I don't see what the legal or ethical difference would be if it was an individual who created such a model.
Is it relevant whether their artworks were used in the training data? Well, what if a new model that is trained only on public domain photos, videos and artworks turns out to be just as capable? What if a future model is able to imitate an art style after seeing merely one or two examples of it?
It might just be a matter of time until such a model is developed. Would it be alright then? If not, why?
(Personally, I think it's the responsibility of the AI model user to use the AI art legally and ethically, as if the user made the image themselves.)
I hate to make a sort-of standard Internet retort but artists (and "society") don't have any obligation to reserve some space for AI art to be OK within culture. Maybe such a possibility exists and maybe it doesn't. But given that present AI is something like a complex but semi-literal average of the art works various largish companies could find, it seems reasonable to respond to people's objections to that.
It's currently fair use to give an artist paintings and say I want something like this but different in these ways.
You can tell a script writer to watch Star Wars and write something similar.
Questions of copyright will depend on if the output is sufficiently transformative, not if copyrighted work was used as inspiration
Easy!
Under the circumstances where the artists whose art was used to train the model explicitly consented to that (without coercion), licensed their art for such use, and were fairly compensated for that.
Plenty of artists would gladly paint for AI to learn from — just like stock photographers, or clip art designers, or music sample makers.
Somehow, "paying for art" isn't an idea that has entered the minds of those who use the art.
Perhaps because it wasn't asked enough.
> The firm said payment for all of the copyrighted material already used in LLMs would cost the companies that built them "tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in royalty payments."
https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-horowitz-ai-...
Watching the superstars of venture capital whine that copyright is unfair is quite something, though.
- slavers, probably.
Of course slavery != AI, but the argument that we should protect companies from their expenses to enable their bad business model is very entitled and presumptuous.
Thousands of companies have failed because their businesses models didn’t work, and thousands more will.
AI will be fine. It probably won’t be as stupidly lucrative as the current model, but we’ll find a way.
which, as an involuntary donor, is exactly what I want
If only saying it would make it so.
Unfortunately, it's not easy to make this legal argument given how copyright law only protects fixed, tangible expressions, not ideas, concepts, principles, etc. and has a gaping hole called 'fair use.'
It's actually just "anyone making models". If you train a model with other people's art (without their permission) and then distribute the model or output for free, your still stealing their work, even if you make zero profit.
Yes, I know Adobe said so. No, I don't trust them.
Facts:
1. Adobe Firefly is trained with Adobe Stock assets. [1]
2. Anyone can submit to Adobe Stock.
3. Adobe Stock already has AI-generated assets that are not correctly tagged so. [2]
4. It's hard to remove an image from a trained model.
Unless Adobe carefully scrutinize every image in the training set, the logical conclusion is Adobe Firefly already contains at least second-handed unauthorized images (e.g. those generated by Stable Diffusion). It's just "not Adobe's fault".
[1] https://www.adobe.com/products/firefly.html : "The current Firefly generative AI model is trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired."
[2] Famous example: https://twitter.com/destiny_thememe/status/17448423657672255...
However, if other artists are inspired by this style of comic, and it influences their work - that is simply fair use. If that artist is some rando using a tool like Midjourney - that is inspired by the art but doesn't reproduce it - it is not at all clear to me that this is not also fair use.
That already clearly means that they couldn't publish the model directly even if they wanted to, since they don't have the right to distribute copies of those works, even if they are represented in a weird lossy encoding. Whether it's legal for them to give access to the model through an API that prevents returning copyrighted content is a much more complex legal topic.
Of course. The model isn't making a decision as to what may be used as training data. The humans training it do.
>If someone uses Midjourney to produce someone else's IP, that user (not Midjourney) would be in violation of copyright
That's like saying that if a user unpacks the dune _full_movie.zip I'm sharing online, it's them who have produced the copyrighted work. And me, the human who put the movie Dune into that zip file, is doing no wrong. Clearly, there is no compression algorithm that can launder IP, right?
>However, if other artists are inspired by this style of comic, and it influences their work - that is simply fair use
The AI isn't inspired by anything. It's not a sentient being, it's not making decisions, and its behavior isn't regulated by laws because it does not have a behavior of its own. Humans decide what goes into an AI model, and what goes out. And humans who train AI models on art don't get "inspired". They transform it into a derivative work — the AI model.
One that has been shown to be awfully close to dune_full_movie.zip if you use the right unpacking tools. But even that isn't necessary. Using work of others in your own work without permission and credit usually goes by less inspiring words: plagiarism, theft, ripping off.
Regardless of whether you reproduce the work 1:1, and whether you can be punished by law for it.
>tool like Midjourney - that is inspired by the art but doesn't reproduce it
Never in the history of humanity has the word inspired meant something that a tool can do. If it's "inspired" (which is something only sentient beings can do), then we should be crying out about human right abuses the way the AI models are trained and treated.
If it's just a tool, it's not "inspired".
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either pay your computer minimum wage for working for you, or stop saying that it can get "inspired" by art (whether it's training an AI model or creating a zip file).
Like leaded gas, the government can make regulations to deal with anything should they choose to.
Why do you think it's okay for massive companies to freely profit off the work of others?
I would love to know why not.
It's not fair use because you want it to be, and it's not at all legally clear if this defence is valid in the case of AI training. But it's not clear it isn't, either.
This is basically what all the noise and PR money is about, currently, in hope that shaping the narrative will shape the legal decisions.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-...
There are complications, but google can use thumbnails because essentailly they are used to "review" the website.
Has google sampled and hosted the whole image on their own website and made more iamges in the style of say mickey mouse, they would have been taken to town by the owners.
This is why there are no commercial movies on youtube (without an explicit agreement) and why DCMA takedowns exist.
In both cases, we're relying on copyright. The companies are saying that you can access the models under a license. It's not too hard to circumvent that license or get access through a third party or separate service: but doing so would obviously be seen as deliberate circumvention. We can easily compare that to an artist putting up a click-through in front of a gallery that says that by clicking 'agree' you agree not to use their work for training. And in fact, it's literally the same restriction in both cases: OpenAI maintains that they can use copyright to enforce that people accessing their model avoid using their model to train AIs. Paradoxically, they also maintain that artists can not use copyright to block people accessing their images from using those images to train AIs.
Facebook has released model weights with licenses that restrict how those model weights are used. But I can get those models without clicking 'agree' on that license agreement. They're mirrored all over the place. We'll see what courts say, but Facebook's public argument is that their license doesn't stop applying if I download their software from a mirror. So I find it hard to believe that Facebook honestly believes in a fair use argument if they also claim that the same fair use argument doesn't apply to their own copyrighted material that they've released online (assuming that model weights can even be copyrighted in the first place).
This is one of my biggest issues with the fair use argument -- it's not that there's nothing convincing about it, in a vacuum I'd very likely agree with it. I don't think that licenses should allow completely arbitrary restrictions. But I also can't ignore that the vast majority of companies making this argument are making it extremely inconsistently. They know that their business models literally don't work if competitors figure out ways to use their services to rapidly produce competing models. If another company comes up with a training method to rapidly replicate model weights or to augment existing models using their output, none of these companies will be OK with that.
None of these companies believe that fair use invalidates license terms when it comes to their own IP.
The generative AI that is changing the world today was built off the work of three groups - software developers, Reddit comment writers, and digital artists. The Reddit comment writers released their rights long ago and do not care. We are left with software developers and digital artists.
In general, the software developers were richly paid, the digital artists were not. The software developers released their work open to modification; the artists did not. Perhaps most importantly, software developers created the generative AIs, so in a way it is a creation of our own; cannibalizing your own profession is a much different feeling than having yours devoured by another alien group.
If Washington must burn, let it be the British and not the Martians. How might we have reacted if what has been done was not by our own hand?
The technology seems indecipherable to a non-techie.
The law seems indecipherable to a layman.
The ethics seem indecipherable to everyone.
With so much confusion, to feel that one has been treated justly it might not be enough to participate in a class-action lawsuit resolving what happened. It would help with public trust if there were available for example protocols or sites for connecting people who want to sue companies. - Just something that shows that society does support values of equality and justice.
1. Don't do things to people that they don't want to be done to them. 2. Do as you would be done by.
It really is that simple.
It's also not inherently unethical to do things that someone doesn't want, because not all wants are valid or reasonable. A child may not want to have the candy put away, but it is still done anyway.
One one hand I want better AI that can generate whatever image that comes to my mind.
On the other hand I don’t want it to blatantly copy someone else’s style that they spent years making.
US is pretty fucked since it has very little safety net compared to other modern countries if AI really started replacing humans.
This is people’s livelihoods we are talking about.
Will AI cause people to commit suicide? Yeah if it starts replacing them and they lose meaning in life.
Ban private large models trained on public data, require them to be public weights.
If a company wants to train large private model, they can do it with their own data.
But it seems unfair that a company can own such a model. It's not their work, it's a codified expression of basically our entire cultural output as a species. We should all own it.
Maybe, just maybe better to ask artist, who should own it?
The issue here is models generating copy written work verbatim.
People claiming that training on copyrighted work is a violation of copyright (its not) have no legal legs to stand on. They are purposelessly muddying concepts though to make it seem like it is. However any competent judge is going to see right through this.
To draw a parallel in software, we have MIT licenses that allow for-profit, private use of source code in the public. The copyleft license might be more aligned to what you are envisioning?
You can't ban it for open source either.
One might think that tools like mid journey are much within the same category, but I think there is a key difference. The system of reproduction up to this point has largely been centered on successful and renowned artists—the only way you'd make money is by reproducing something that already had a lot of value to people, and it was also incredibly clear that it was a reproduction. In this case, things have changed. Now, the vast works of largely obscure artists are partially reproduced, and in a fashion that further occludes their source. These artists rightly feel robbed as they endure the treatment of a van gogh without the riches of fame or the palliative of death before fame.
https://catandgirl.com/heroes-and-villains/
The universe, I’m sometimes convinced, has a dark sense of humour.
I don’t currently have a MJ subscription or I’d try it.
Lesson being: give yourself a name as an artist that cannot be used easily in an AI prompt.
I think some musicians did this with artist names and track names that meant they couldn't easily be represented as MP3s, but could easily be printed on the tracklisting on the CD inlay.
If you think the work is so great. charge for it. let the market decide. i think twitter/x does this now somewhat.
how is this not similar to thinking google owes me money because my tweet appeared in their search results?
I get it, though I had the day GitHub CoPilot came out and I wanted them to take a long walk off a short pier. (And I still do.)
Yeah, no, you don't get it. Sorry.
The other complaints are mostly about how it has become hard to not share to social media, but that's mostly a complaint about how people are.
He can still just post on a website, it's not really the fault of social media companies that people prefer that.
Their complaint is not being able to post art for its own sake because it will be hoovered up into datasets to train more AI: They are forced to submit to helping train AI or not post their art.
http://www.dorktower.com/2024/01/05/putting-the-ai-into-aiee...
Artists own a copyright to their actual works. Not to a "style". Besides, all artists learned from other artists and borrowed lots of ideas from predecessors.
Why should we hold AI to a higher standard than we hold human artists to?
Why hold it to human standards at all? It cannot be argued with, jailed, or shot. The only vaguely human thing it can do is draw kinda good.
Art has been democratized. It's not going back in the bottle. A kid with a laptop anywhere on the planet will be able to compete with the largest Hollywood studio in the near future.
The same can be said for enforcing intellectual property rights, and we do enforce IP in western countries despite other countries not respecting those rights. We could end up where models can only be legally trained with public domain IP, enforced by regulation, royalties, private causes of action, etc.
You may like things the way they are, but it's false that "nothing" can be done to change it.
Ah yes, the Nirvana Falacy. [0]
Microsoft, Google, etc are corporations that operate within a legal framework. You can quite readily claw back some of their profits from such ill-gotten gains and redistribute them to the creators who they currently intend to put out of work.
"Oh, but some pirate will do it! Oh, but China will do it! So why not let those poor megacorporations do it, too!"
So what. The megaorporations who nominally answer to and respect the rule of law are the lion's share of this problem. They can be made to stop. Solve them and you're 90% there, don't get bogged down in the other 10%.
Make the decisions that suit your current needs, including deciding if it is time to go away for good. If you risk too many times but can't reach any relevant material success in a context that is unfavorable. Where you need to be an entrepreneur to make serious money.
Sometimes deciding to give up can be the only way to see. I'm not endorsing suicide to anyone, but it can be part of everyone's life just once, and then it is finished. 'No suffering' can be now or surely later, and you will most likely "rejoin" in the next chapter of an infinite book of human lives depending on your beliefs in this life because nobody knows the truth behind that.
In whatever direction it takes, art will find what is difficult or obvious for AI to fake and then that will be valued.
Think of it like this, aluminum used to be prized by kings, honored guests would get aluminum cutlery instead of gold. Aluminum got cheap, there are still fancy spoons.
The same reason that photorealism as an artistic movement still exists despite photography existing.
The same reason people still learn to play the piano.
Why do people do anything that has an arguably better and more efficient option available?
Thousands of people do and produce wonderful works of art. Even before the AI craze, not everyone embraced even "plain old" digital art. The physicality of feeling a graphite pencil scratching a blank page is gratifying and cannot be reproduced by typing a prompt somewhere online.
If you paid a bunch of people to just churn out material in the form of text....art....comics....and video and then used it to train you model then is that ethical?
Because plenty of jobs own the intellectual property or copyright if your doing this work on company time....so simply by hiring people to create data for your model bypasses this ethics problem. You could even run a side business publishing articles these employees write.
I think that was exactly their point. And a better one than your.
B: human influenced/inspired by artist's work
In both scenarios (A) and (B), the activity may or may not be commercial.
Why are we so much more worried about (A), when (B) is considered totally fine, even desirable?
Please note neither A nor B involve verbatim copying.
At what point does fair use become unfair, and should that question be considered separately from the context of doing it trillions of times?
And the further context of the resulting computer code being used to make a profit?
The real question is about the scale and how "original" ai works are. Does generative ai enabling this at scale make it different than humans doing it? Is there something special about human authorship?
I personally don't care if my open source code gets trained on by AI, but I'm not sure about the social contract around artistic expression.
We search google then find a spam page repeating our question, then we blame google! LOL
In the old days, if you had an interesting question, you would write down your progress in a draft blog post, you would polish it (or not at all) and present the answer to those looking to do the same or you would leave it to your comment section for others to rage about the problem, sometimes answer it for you, sometimes they would write a post of their own.
If things are good enough someone will link to it... but now? Nothing is ever good enough? If everything is anonymized dumped on on stack overflow no one maintains it. There is no free flow of dialog about the topic. It tries to be all work, no fun. Who wrote this stuff? What else did they do? Why are all these wrong answers on the page?
Anyway, to state the obvious, Google doesn't make websites.
This is naive at best.
Even as a kid, I saw horror stories about how badly artists were exploited.
I watched my parents struggle. I never experienced anything near poverty, but I definitely experienced the fear and anxiety of standing on the precipice of it. I remember taking up the responsibility of helping my profoundly depressed and grieving mother sort through the mail of our family business and seeing how far behind we were. This was a few years before we sold everything to avoid bankruptcy, which was also around the time I left for college.
I'm not complaining about this. I think it was good for me. It bred a cynicism and understanding in me: this world isn't fair. It isn't going to get better. You are going to have to fight for the life you want, and you will probably still lose.
I understand the desire to pass gently over the earth. But this has never been a kind world, and has not become any MORE kind since 1999.
This is, I think, an example of toxic optimism. Many people over-estimate the likelihood of a positive outcome.
Not to make excuses for Midjourney. They should have asked permission from artists to use their work.
Please feel free to include adverts as a means to monetize your work, my first impulse was to disable uBlock on your page.
This is true for everyone. Due to human nature, we will make AI increasingly capable at an exponential pace. Eventually, our efforts to control them will become futile, and humans will no longer be the dominant species.
Luckily, we are uniquely positioned in evolution to prevent this. We must merge with AI.
If all the calligraphers drop dead, the printing press still works. If everyone who hand makes fabrics drops dead, the automatic fabric machines continue to develop.
But midjourney doesn’t work without artists, it depends on them like a parasite depends on its host. Once the host dies, the parasite is doomed.
So it’s value-destroying, more vandalism than capitalism. Or maybe like Viking pillaging. It’s like the people who used to burn millions of penguins alive to convert their fat into oil.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21501-boiled-to-death...
If all artists drop dead, MidJourney still has a trained model that will continue to work.... it relied on artists to become operational (just like the printing press and automatic looms relied on their respective artisans success) but it is not dependent on them to continue to function.
Without artists, midjourney will never learn a new style. It is not capable of advancing.
soon.
I know I'm being unfair but I think it's important to say the quiet part out loud so we can all be aware of which way the wind blows, because I can't be alone in this feeling. If the class action lawsuit presents the justices with a bunch of soyboys clamoring about AI stealing their "hard work" I have a hard time imagining them ruling against AI.
GPL 4 here we come. Training a model with such code will require the model to be open source.
However, in every single conversation about fair use, two followup questions need to be asked:
1. If you're making the argument that AI's "learning" from existing pieces is just like a human learning from existing pieces, then you're indirectly comparing that AI to a human being. So let's be consistent about that analogy: commissioning or working with a human artist to produce a piece of art does not grant you copyright over that art.
To people who are saying that AIs training are just like humans learning from art, do you support the idea that AI-generated works can not be copyrighted? Because that's the consistent view of AI as analogues for human training: commissioning humans doesn't grant you copyright.
2. If we're viewing AI training as fair use, then is it fair use to circumvent the licenses on these models in order to train other models on them? The majority of these commercial tools have explicit clauses in their terms of service to prevent their use when training other AIs. Is it fair use to circumvent that TOS?
If the TOS is in a different category that somehow magically gets rid of the fair use question, then if an artist puts up a TOS in front of viewing a piece of artwork that says it may not be used to train AIs, does training on that art stop being fair use?
It doesn't make sense that one shrinkwrap license would be OK and one wouldn't be. If Midjourney has a legal case that circumventing its TOS and gaining access isn't fair use, then artists should be able to put up a click-through in front of images that includes an agreement not to train and that should be legally enforceable.
If artists can't do that, if artists can't legally enforce terms of use in front of artwork about how that artwork can be used, then commercial companies building these models shouldn't be able to either.
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It's not that the fair use argument doesn't hold any water, it's that people tend to be very selective about how they want that argument applied. And I think that's revealing. Taking a step back from those questions:
It's somewhat frustrating to have debates on this because the debates are very abstract and are disconnected from the completely bad-faith way in which these arguments are often proposed. You're forced to debate in a very dry way, and what you really want to do is step back and say, "none of these companies actually believe in open culture, all of them are copyright maximalists when it's convenient, none of them care about accessibility of art tools, they just want to plunder the culture and insert themselves as middlepeople between art and the people who make art."
We all know this is a grift. We know what these companies actually believe, but we have to pretend we're having some kind of emotionless conversation about "Open" models and to look at their uses as if the primary intended audience is people using image generators to make printouts for their local D&D campaigns.
But come on, that's not the reality that's ever going to happen.
That kind of indie, low-cost usage and Open access can't exist in the long-term if these models are intended to be the commercial powerhouses that companies want. Monetization of their output and access necessarily requires restriction of their output and access. The truth that we all kind of know deep down is that these models are about inserting a monetary layer between human beings and art, a layer that is owned by private corporations and is deliberately used (regardless of its quality or suitability) to devalue labor and to poison the resources that these models were built on in order to reduce competition and to give gatekeepers more leverage over their workforces and their markets. It's a tragedy of the commons being played out in real time: the creation of a service that just like every other privatized platform will become crappier and worse over time as more control over model use is taken away and as prices increase and as restrictions over usage are increasingly layered on top normal individuals who will increasingly need to ask permission in order to create. At the same time, businesses hope that model usage will shrink and dilute the fields that are necessary to sustain those models, fields that are now treated as competitors, and who's destruction is desirable because the elimination of that resource makes it harder to replicate or compete with established AI models.
As is very often the case, the goal is to get up a ladder and then pull the ladder up.
That doesn't mean that this isn't fair use (although as someone who advocates very strongly for expansion of fair use and heavy reduction of copyright, I will say that fair use and morality are two entirely different subjects). But we can advocate for fair use without pretending that the companies and grifters making these arguments actually believe them. Actual ubiquitous open access to AI art tools would be toxic to a company like Midjourney; Midjourney's entire business model relies on them constructing an artificial moat in front of the production of art that forces creators to give them money. And the existence of that moat relies on Midjourney being able to restrict what people can do with their model, it can not exist without strong legal protections around copyright and licensing agreements. If Midjourney actually believed in free culture and free use, they wouldn't be launching a private model behind Discord with a bunch of ridiculous license terms telling people what does and doesn't count as fair use when using Midjourney. They wouldn't be pretending that model outputs are covered by copyright. As far as I'm concerned, every single "license" in front of model weights or model output is an admission that the companies behind those models don't actually believe in the fair use argument. They're just saying it because it's convenient.
I would love to have a purely intellectual debate about AI as a genuinely open tool that can fit into artists' belts alongside other tools. I would love to ignore the hype cycle and the spammers and the grifters who all couldn't care less about making creation accessible or expanding the scope of what artists create. But unfortunately, I can't; there's a real world that exists alongside that hypothetical debate, and we are allowed to look at that real world for context. And I can be sympathetic to the fair use argument while still recognizing the utter hypocrisy behind how companies actually use that argument, and while still recognizing that the direction that large companies are pushing AI and the way they want to use AI is toxic to real artists.
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That doesn't mean I'm panicking about it any more than I'm panicking about GPT trying to program. I understand the limitations of these tools as well, and a little bit of perspective goes a long way. But I still understand why artists are upset. I don't always agree with the specific arguments but it's not just them being sore losers or something, they have a legitimate grievance with the AI market even if they don't always perfectly know how to put it into words.
And in a lot of ways, this doesn't really have anything to do with the quality of the output or about what's "better" or "fair" anyway; that's not really what the debate is about. Midjourney would be perfectly happy to live in a world where all art gets kind of crappy and repetitive as long as everybody uses Midjourney to produce it. They don't care, they just want you to pay them every time you generate a picture. So the social dynamics around the market are very different from the technical dynamics or even the philosophical arguments that people make.
Let's say, during hard times when you don't have a job, fans of the game you worked on notice you on twitter and say "hey I loved your work, here's $5 for your patreon." Now you can pay your medical bills this month.
Their livelihood was taken from them. Midjourney is theft.
It was clear to me over 20 years ago when I realized that I wouldn't be able to earn enough in the arts, and ironically due to creative people sharing so much good content for free.
While I feel for people who didn’t realize this, but it’s no surprise if you try to earn your living by adding digital content to the global network of computer systems that something like the current AI trend was bound to happen.
If you love art - paint a painting, make a sculpture, perform in a play, perform live music, dance, etc. Digital is a dead-end goal in and of itself.
It's not theft though
Not all of us participate in the form of thought control that has been euphemistically pushed as "intellectual property."
Anyway, I don't think there's much I can say to change your mind - talk to other artists, especially those who are artists as their main hustle.
Because . . . they're not creating value with their code. It took them years to learn how to code well. All that effort should be contributed to the world for free.
I mean, there is a plethora of open source work that is actually contributed to the world for free, right?
Bleh.
Let's make an analogy that more people here will understand. If you built an app for your startup, and OpenAI trained on its source code such that any prompter could produce an app that's virtually identical with no effort - would that be OK with you? Would you claim that copyright is in fact irrelevant and that this doesn't constitute copying?
You can't have it both ways. You can either give stuff away and realize that once you give it away you have no control over what anyone does with it, or you can charge for it and get paid up front (and ultimately still have no control over what happens to it after it leaves your hands).
Are you making art because you want to share your vision or what? If so, then share it and be glad that your vision got out there. If not, charge for your work and make sure you get paid first. Don't whine and cry that you didn't get paid after you decided that getting paid was evil or whatever.
Software and source code comes with the most complex licenses and terms of use, but an artist isn’t allowed to make a small request that others don’t profit of her work without people on a software forum saying that is whining and crying…
Fully open source software has probably created more economic value in the past 60 years than anything else in human history. We should be trying to share more knowledge with each other, not come up with new and more complicated ways to restrict it.
I wish too that consumers will grow tired of low-quality stolen/generated content, but that is not the case yet. Take some horrific YouTube Kids content farms that are still churning billions of views for example.
Midjourney is performing the same blending function as regular artists.
It's hard to see why one is any different from the other other than a human is involved.
Hard no. We progress civilization so that we (as humans) may benefit. Progress at any cost is pathological, see universal paperclips as the extreme example.
Irregarding of whether midjourney is exploiting the authors, the author draws a comparison to instagram. He claims him posting his art there is unlaid labour as instagram profits from it, and hence he is being expliited when he does so. That comparison weakens his case for me, as I do not agree with the above implication.
We say it often as a kind of ward against evil. The zero sum thinking that leads one to feel they're getting gypped in a given deal is almost never actually the case in a free market society. You always have the option to, if a deal provides no value to you, simply leave it on the table and move on with your life.
However, I always mentally add an important word to the beginning: Voluntary trade benefits both parties by definition. Who decides what is considered voluntary? If this market square is the only one in town I can sell in without being beaten up, is selling there voluntary? What if it's just the case that no one wants to go to my random grocery stall in the woods?
I've come to conclude that's ultimately an ethical question, not an economic one. Hence the eternal bickering. So from a certain point of view, I could see why my handy ward against evil could just be seen as another way the capitalistic regime imposes its will. One of the fun things about the internet is all the edge cases it creates along this very boundary.
As far fetched as it might sound for obviuos artists: I'm also an artist when i write code and design systems and architect things.
I hate software patents and if i write a really good system, i'm happy to share how i did it.
I would only be pissed at someone if they just copy paste my work not if they got inspired by it.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1098302916395270235/1...
They also have a UI on their website, not sure if it’s still closed or not.