The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings, it just enabled more people to have control over what was on their walls.
Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work.
If it's "just a tool" in and of itself, then there's no problem keeping it away from other people's art.
>The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings
Because the copyright laws were extended to include photographic reproduction of art as something you need to obtain a permission (and a license) for.
The same needs to happen for generative AI.
A photocopy machine is just a tool too. So is the printing press.
So does a human brain.
Which brings us to the other side of the reasoning is that tools like Midjourney and OpenAI enable idiots (when it comes to drawing/animating ... that includes me) to create engaging artwork.
Recently generating artwork like that went from almost impossible to "great, but easily recognizeable as AI artwork". Frankly, I expect the discussion will end when it stops being recognizeable.
I hate Andreesen Horowitz' reasoning, but they're right about one thing: once we have virtual artists that are not easy to distinguish from "real" ones, the discussion will end. It does not really matter what anyone's opinion on the matter is as it will not make a difference in the end.
A major difference between a human training himself by looking at art, and a computer doing it, is that the human ends up working for himself, the computer is owned by some billionaire.
One enhances the creative potential of humanity as a whole, the other consolidates it in the hands of the already-powerful.
Another major difference is that a human can't use that knowledge to mass-produce that art at a scale that will put other artists in the poorhouse. The computer can.
Copyright exists to benefit humanity as a whole... And frankly, I see no reason for why a neural network's output should be protected by copyright. Only humans can produce copyrightable works, and a prompt is not a sufficient creative input.
Utterly ridiculous.
Whether an artist pays for a subscription to openAI or buys paint pots on Amazon.com money is going to a billionaire, it is not a difference between ai and other art.
You are also ignoring the existence of non-commercial open source AI, they exist.
Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.
An LLM takes a prompt and produces a painting. No sane person would say that I 'drew' the painting in question, even if I provided the prompt.
> Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.
We copyright things that require creative input. A list of facts or definitions did not require creative input, and is therefore not copyrightable.
Using an LLM does not meet the bar for creative input.
That sounds like a kinder restatement of the opinion at the top of the thread: "Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too."
Artists might not like the phrasing, but scratch the surface and there's a degree of truth there. It's an argument from self-interest, at core.
(spoiler: bootstrapping yourself up the tech tree gets progressively harder)
Your brain is a neural network, just FYI.
Where is the line? It’s ok for humans to learn from others work but not a machine?
Yes.
The machine doesn't get to make its own choices. Once it does, we'll have a different conversations.
Presently, humans decide what goes into the training set, and what comes out. Those humans are the ones that we need to regulate.
Hot take: The LLM is learning as much as a ZIP file is learning.