Comment by Hoasi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hoasi | Hacker News Reader

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> Incredibly talented people complain when technology lets talentless people make some of the beautiful things that they imagine but never had the talent to make real.

If we are speaking about the democratization of tools, this is not what is happening here.

In effect, prompting Dall-E or Midjourney does not make you a creator.

And herein lies the problem. It doesn't enable the talentless to create something beautiful. It allows anyone to prompt aggregated images, regardless of talent or years dedicated to a craft. These images have no intrinsic value and, on top of that, don't belong to the prompter.

This technology is a collage tool, and it's great, but it doesn't make anyone a creator. If you believe it does, you're in for a rough awakening.

Right now, the best models are only working thanks to bypassing the will of thousands of artists who didn't agree to have their work used for training data. As such, we are not essentially speaking about talent but the democratization of theft.

Again, it's not the technology itself that is the problem. Most artists are pro-technology and don't oppose it. Besides, if you learn how to draw (anybody can learn this skill, come on!), you probably won't be impressed by most Midjourney results.

This is entirely not the point.

I want to see a picture of a 5 kilometre high tower surrounded by spiralling cones of line on an infinite plane made of tessellating fractals.

Now I have that picture. Great.

I did not make than image "to be an artist". I made that image because I wanted that image. If it came out of a search engine rather than an AI, I wouldn't care.

This kind of utilitarian creation of images is like photography for things that don't exist. Fine art? Art? Craft? Search of latent space? Collage? I don't care.

Creator as an identity? I don't care.

Whether machines are allowed to learn from humans is a hot topic. Every working artist studies, in great detail, other artists. They often make exact copies, as exact as they can, of great works to learn how those artists made them.

Be very careful that in banning AI learning you do not also ban human learning. A law that covers one might also cover the other.

> This is entirely not the point.

It's not the point for you. Fine.

For the record, I'm not advocating for laws or banning AI. It's an impressive technology you can use in a myriad of ways. Ethical ways would be preferable.

Using AI does not make you an artist, just as having a pencil in your hand doesn't make you a qualified draughtsman.

AI's whole value, the dada, was obtained without living artists' consent. That's a fact. Without data, there are no images, no spirals, nothing. The unfortunate side effect is that, at scale, it devalues these artworks. Prompting AI tools, you get a synthetic substitute for art made by real people.

If that is what you want, why not? If you sell this spiral as your art, it becomes slightly more complicated.

> Be very careful that in banning AI learning you do not also ban human learning. A law that covers one might also cover the other.

False equivalency.

And again, I'm not advocating for banning anything. AI art, or imagery, if it's not art, who cares, is not going away. Whether AI output is stunning, incredibly beautiful, or cheap, synthetic, the equivalent of junk food, is already pretty clear. The question becomes: who owns it?

Perhaps artists will find ways to make it better and truly impressive. That said, it's not unreasonable for artists to ask back some of the value they unwillingly provided. Or just for their work to be removed from the pool of data scraped by AI companies.

This is pretty simple.

Either we maintain that it is illegal to learn from copyrighted images without a license — which is going to destroy human culture very fast I believe,

Or we accept that anybody can study a copyrighted work and learn from it, including using a machine as their agent.

If a 12 year old kid prints out an image made by Hirst and hangs it in their bedroom that is fair use. If a corporation uses the image on a t shirt they need a license.

Now the same thing, but “in the style of Hirst”

The copyright infringement is generally at the point where somebody is depriving the artist of income and what I’m hearing here is HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC.

No, friends, refusal to enforce monopolies laws is killing music. Home taping is how music survived.

> This technology is a collage tool, and it's great, but it doesn't make anyone a creator. If you believe it does, you're in for a rough awakening.

Hannah Höch would like a word.

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