Ask HN: How can an artist avoid their work being weaponized? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can an artist avoid their work being weaponized?

14 pointsphotoGrant39 comments

I'm not sure how comfortable I am not knowing the sources of these black boxes recently, and the bigger concern is that I cannot as a conscious and conflicted artist, sleep completely soundly not knowing whether I have had my work included in the training material for an AI model such as Sora/OpenAI.

I never truly believed they would announce permission for military use, and now this is fact but their source are closed. Am I potentially contributing to the creation of future AI enabled war weapons, or how could I find out? The reality seems whether homegrown or otherwise, this is the future we accept, but I'd at least like to know.

Thanks!

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HN might not be the best place to ask, though. There's a heavy bias in favor of open-source tech, which explicitly allows any use case (which implies allowing military uses).

Also there's frequently a lot of comments which sing praises to SQLite, which was created literally for military purposes (according to Wikipedia, at least, so take that with a grain of salt).

What I mean with all this is, even if those examples are not related to art, there seems to be a general bias to the opposite of what you're asking for.

> open-source tech, which explicitly allows any use case (which implies allowing military uses).

It seems very plausible until you try to reverse that statement. Are proprietary technologies (Palantir, TikTok, even Microsoft/Google/Apple) exactly peaceful?

If you are developing some FOSS for killing people, you at least gonna name variables correctly, I mean "unsigned long long peopleKilled" will never be named as "kittensSaved".

Eh, "open source" just implies that certain hand-picked conditions are met, nothing more. Being good to society is not one of those conditions.

If you think of open source as a subset of all software, less like a point in some number line and more like a Venn diagram, it makes more sense.

It definitely isn't. I expected most of the responses I've read. But thought and perspective needs not exist in a bubble. I hope my question helps illuminate the concerns people outside of a tech sphere might have with this growing consumption machine.

One tool is called nightshade:

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/index.html

There is a second tool but I forget the name.

[edit]

Found it; name of Glaze: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

[edit]

relevant nightshade discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39058428

[edit]

Unfortunately, I would assume all public works, and many private ones, on the internet have been consumed by LLM training models, and done so illegally, in my opinion. Finding out if it has been consumed is also probably impossible. You could try filing a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA), but that is no simple matter.

Thank you so very much. I'll be looking into using these tools as part of our deliverables workflow. It's as much as I assumed but I'd have hoped for more understanding and dialog on the matter, you're the first to offer anything of value beyond failing to understand. Appreciated!

My pleasure! I have no idea of the efficacy of the tools, but hopefully they help. Unfortunately, I changed my name to EchoChamberMan after reading responses that make it rather clear many people are here to share their opinion, rather than engage in critical analysis, and filling gaps in knowledge. I also find people's name selection fascinating; Elmer Fud was a hunter who devoted his existence to (unsuccessfully) hunting a rabbit.

"Where there is an echo chamber (on HN), EchoChamberMan is there!" ;)

[Edit] One can add an entry to one's robots.txt telling chatgpt not to scan your site, but it's up to them to respect it.

I have an image in my head of a robot drone about to kamikaze its way into my body and I'm holding up a robots.txt print out hoping it'll read it.

Great catch on the usernames thing. Won't unsee now. This place truly is as bubbled as any other faction of ideas.

I think the core problem here is you have this false notion of ownership of a thought that you have released into the world. As if once it is left you you somehow still have absolute control over that. That is a bizarre concept that has only become a legal construct in modern times. This has not been the case for the majority of human history.

If you don't want your creative works consumed by others don't release them anywhere outside of your direct control. That is essentially means don't even share them to your friends. Because once a song has left your voice it's there and anyone can use it. Being conflicted and unable to sleep over this inane concept of ownership of thoughts I think is your root problem here it has nothing to do with AI or other people's uses of things.

This is incredibly insulting as I have no desire to control ownership of thoughts. What is otherwise involved, is production, intent and actually, yes, copyright. I have a case if the work I have released ends up in every Hilton Hotel Lobby.

My concern extends beyond myself and to the countless photographers I hire who relinquish their rights to us. I have a duty to protect their moral requirements too... As a human, you know?

This is wild.

You're taking the word "thought" too literally. Presumably they're referring to "information", as in "bytes".

Your best bet is probably looking up on topics related to DRM or anti-piracy in general.

Well how else should it be taken? A thought, information, bytes are all semantically representing different shifting goalposts of what I was clearly not talking about. Copyright works that involve creation beyond a 'thought'. To derive it down to such is wrong and explicitly ignoring the point.

I mean this in a good way, but try not to miss the forest for the trees. Regardless of the process involved, the end result is (probably) either something digital or physical. And your message implies it's digital.

OP's message brings into focus that if it's something that can be easily copied, you're probably out of luck, regardless of whether you agree on the choice of words or not.

Because most of the time "digital" translates to "any people who wants to see it, literally needs to receive a copy". Hence the emphasis into your attempt to assert ownership over that copy that is already in possession of the other party, and the difficulty of trying to do that (which is what you want, if I interpreted your original post correctly).

So it still boils down to either copyright or patents, and whether you're able to enforce it with more effectiveness than companies that have more money than some countries' GDP.

EDIT: Also, check out stuff about first-sale doctrine[1] and how there's the possibility[2] of someone legally obtaining a digital license from you complying with your terms, but you not being able to enforce further restrictions on how they sell it afterwards (disclaimer, I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and I might be misreading these things).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

[2]: https://archive.ph/20130123101253/http://www.forbes.com/site...

You are still missing the point.

My issue is putting my work on the free web is not a free license to vacuum it up. There is no consent.

The umbridge I have is there is no way currently to know whether OpenAI has used your, or anyone's content, and where from. This is the fundamental issue I have -- how do I find out?

I'm fully aware of the implications of replicant copies and the conversations around authenticity. Walter Benjamin discussed this in 1935. https://www.amazon.com/Work-Art-Age-Mechanical-Reproduction/...

A creative work is a thought that has become realized. So when you say you want to control your creative works to prevent its use in some way that you don't agree with, yes you are attempting to control the thoughts of others.

If we are to reduce this to a vacuum in which we don't exist in a modern society with expectations and agreements, I'd accept your philosophising. Otherwise it's a distraction to the issue. No one has these arguments when their car is stolen. The purchase and disappearance of that car are nothing but manifestations of thoughts according to you.

You're contrived example is contrived and not at all a comparable thing, because a car first of all is not a thought it is physical property as opposed to this intellectual property. Property rights as in physical property rights have been a thing for as long as humans have formed into a society. This concept of intellectual property or the continued ownership of thoughts that you have released into the world have not been a concept since humans have formed societies. It is absolutely a legal fiction that has been created and it is a fairly modern development the idea that you can not only own a thought but continue to exert control over it post sale.

Intellectual property rights attempt to exert continued control of the creator post sale or post delivery of that intellectual property. Even to the point of controlling that in the terms of selling it again it's saying that if I purchase your creative work I don't own that I can't control it I can't do what I want with it. Now if we relate this to your car example car companies have tried this nonsense and you know what it has failed miserably for them. We don't even have to use the idea of an automobile as an example because again it's not really comparable this manufactured thing. Instead we have a very analogous example that has happened in modern times relating to the sale of intellectual property. This comes in the form of books. Authors and publishers of books attempted to exert control of what they believe is their intellectual property post sale. Even to the point of restricting the sale of that book to another person. Even to the point of saying people couldn't modify said book and then sell that item again. This was all thrown out as laughably ridiculous because it is. Yet your argument is somehow you want to exert control of your thing when it's been sold or resold or resold again. This is an absolutely constructed legal fiction and I'm very confident you have lost the reason why society allowed this legal fiction to be constructed.

Societies didn't come up with this concept of copyright and patents and ownership of intellectual property is a legal fiction because they thought it was a good idea for the creators to have some sort of orwellian control in the minds and thoughts and actions of people who chose to consume it. The reason for this is clearly stated when you study history it was so a creator could realize a profit from their work for a limited time to ensure that they would be encouraged to make more works. The key there is for a limited time it is not in perpetuity or effectively in perpetuity and it is not to continue to exercise control of it once it has been sold to another. It is the limited time function that we can say it must be sold but after a while this should return to the public good to enrich the public culture as a whole. Content creators seem to believe that they don't have to honor this deal because we've allowed it to be corrupted and twisted so that it is effectively an infinite thing where you can exercise infinite control over the actions of other people once you've sold it to them. They also seem to believe like you do that there is no bargain with society you have forgotten that it is a legal fiction to encourage you to create more but ultimately creative works are about enriching a society and a culture as a whole and so if those works never return to the culture and to the society at large there is no bargain anymore. Content creators have become Petty slumlord rent collectors who are simply regurgitating trash because they don't have to innovate because of this infinite copyright and this idea you can continue to exercise control over everything that you've ever put out into the world.

If our patent system functions like our copyright system you wouldn't have 90% of the tools you use to create your content. And I don't have any great love for our patent system that has been twisted a bit but it has not gotten to the extent of the idiocracy that we have allowed the copyright system to turn into. Content creators are the court jesters but somehow it has been twisted into them thinking they're the king and so they're going to make the rules and edicts on how their content is used after it's given away.

So absolutely your thoughts are only yours while they remain in your head. Once you share them society is okay with the bargain but not the bargain that you twisted it into. You're attempting to control and destroy a culture by thinking you can control other people and how they want to use the content you're creating. The hubris of someone like that is mind-boggling.

It is a physical property manifested from a collection of thoughts. Much like anything else we create. You wrote a lot but you accept and reject my premise in the same breath because goalposts and personal agenda.

You also seem to miss the fact that I have no concern over thoughts. My concern is over property and military use.

I absolutely hope once copyright expires, and my ability to create more based on the sale of previous runs its course, the work should benefit the public. My distinction is that benefiting the public/society at large is an acceptable argument. But it is not the same as benefiting a military. That is not benefiting a greater good, it benefits the good of the group who wish to exploit it. I argue there should be a distinction... but only for long enough that I have a pulse. Beyond that, I'm dead.

Also, I ask you this. At what point in your mind does something created go from 'manifested thought' to 'physical'.

Why is a bolt physical but a painting not? Why is a roll of film nothing more than thoughts but a car wheel is property?

I have done neither but you are being mentally obtuse in thinking physical property and intellectual property are the same thing. You seem to be missing the basic idea that has permeated all of history physical property and this concept of intellectual property are different. Physical property rights have been a thing since the beginning of time and all societies at some level have understood and respected physical property rights. Intellectual property rights are a modern legal fiction. These two things are fundamentally different.

500 years ago no one would have thought that if they sang a song that somehow they are the exclusive owners of that song and no one can ever repeat it. It is a fundamentally bizarre concept. Creative works as in the intellectual property are intended to enrich a society as a whole because there is zero cost to sharing a concept and resharing a concept over and over and over. And as that concept is shared it grows and it is enriched by every person it passes through. This is not the same for physical property the fact you're trying to relate these two things as being the same shows a fundamental lack of understanding around what property rights are.

I suggest you study and review history and understand why societies have decided that it is okay to have intellectual property rights for a limited time. Because you're assertion seems to be to exert orwellian control in the minds of others. That has nothing to do with it. It is solely about allowing people who are creative and thinkers to realize a profit so they can create and think more. It is not about producers because producers of physical things already have the self-limiting of the thing that they produced can be sold and cannot be easily reproduced. Because as a society having creative works be part of the society in riches the culture as a whole and so it is necessary to encourage this. So answer this for me how many years after Martin Luther King's death has he continued to provide us with inspirational great works? Yet the copyright and the ownership remain. This fundamentally breaks the bargain of saying we want you to realize a profit so you can give us more. Your attitude of trying to control something after the fact is the same because we want you to give us more. We don't want you to try and dictate how we consume it what we think about it or where it's used after we purchased it.

I appreciate you arguing so far past me that you fail to see we agree on half of your points. I'll leave it there. Suggest less, empathise more -- you might find a halfway point where both people have valid points.

> We don't want you to try and dictate how we consume it what we think about it or where it's used after we purchased it.

I didn't sell it to you. That's the whole point. Buy it? Take it. But you've so far missed my argument that you should start again. Art doesn't exist in a 'purchased' state by the entire world. Otherwise, Netflix is free. Please, stop trying to school me.

Your original post was asking how an artist can avoid his work being weaponized. That's your words that's what you. If I purchase your work I should be able to do with it what I want short of duplicating it and passing it off as my own or otherwise during a limited copyright window. But after I purchased your work you don't have any control nor should you and if I decide to weaponize it or not. That's the point you're missing your original statement is what I'm arguing against that you're not getting you don't get to exercise orwellian control over my thoughts on something I've purchased.

Because I'm not arguing for piracy as a blanket thing I'm arguing for limited copyright control but not for this idea you have in your head which is I want to prevent consumers from doing what they want with things that they purchased from you. There is no halfway point when you're trying to willfully exercise control of what someone else purchased. If you don't want someone to do with what they want with something you created and they bought from you don't sell it. But when you don't tell me what to do with it.

I know this is very difficult concept in the age of iPhone and this weird belief in intellectual property. But no one would think twice if someone decided they wanted to take a book cut up the pages and rearrange the sentences and paste them back inside that same book and then sell that book to a friend. The author might get pissed but this is settled case law that this is totally normal and allowed to do. And the author doesn't have any control over that. Somehow you seem to be arguing for the point that whatever your media is someone can't buy it cut it up repaste it back together and then redistribute that singular thing. Because they're using it in a way that you and your hubris don't like as in weaponizing it.

You haven't purchased my work, please stop saying you have. Your argument ends there despite your words continuing far beyond.

That's the thing though. I want my work to be consumed by others. Other human beings. I don't want to anonymously feed someone's AI and be stripped of all credit.

People release information into the world on their own terms. Licensing is hardly a recent legal construct.

Like it or not, people want to feel good about sharing things with the world. Feeding an AI strips all the bits that feel good. You no longer create art for your own audience; you just send it like fungible raw matter to a distant refinery.

Some people are not into that.

It's like arguing that artists should have a say about how they should be paid for their work at the dawn of the mp3 revolution.

If you've ever been in a riot you'll know it's impossible to argue with people once the looting frenzy takes hold.

Maybe once the dust settles we can see what's left over and finally have a serious conversation about protecting our artistic commons against future incursions?

In the meantime I'm just going to leave you with this:

The next time someone tries to convince you that the existence of _any_ black box somehow negates your creative ownership of your work, ask them this:

"Have you ever created any art of your own?"

The responses are illuminating.

I will take you seriously.

If you act in good faith you are not responsible for bad outcomes.

There is no "if only I had ..." You can't go back, it's a waste of energy and you can't know what the outcome would have been.

If you knowingly did something wrong try to seek atonement.

Otherwise keep contributing to the world in the best way you can.

I appreciate the response and I'll take it one step further.

If I don't ask these questions and put good faith effort towards these concerns, then there's an exploration that wasn't executed and an outcome that will never happen. Discovery is okay.

I do still believe I have a right to pick and choose where my talents are used. I've spent a decade plus avoiding working for any smoking brands, why can't I avoid my work being used to train military models?

Apparently the original author says no one is allowed to comment on this post unless you have purchased their work. I'm not sure why they would post something on hacker News asking a question if they're only soliciting answers from those who purchase their work? It would seem to be better to ask the question of their customers of which I'm guessing 99% of hacker News is not.

Being challenged on your core premise is part of answering a question and it does not matter if it is a customer or not.

You make yourself very clear, you have no intent of understanding my position. I appreciate you trying to troll, but my concern as I've stated for the umpteenth time is that I would like to know if my personal work on my personal website was somehow vacuumed up into a training dataset for profit and war of which I had no knowledge, compensation, or information of.

This isn't a hard and difficult thing to understand and yet you remain prudent in assuming because I'm not Netflix, YouTube, Microsoft, I don't have a right to protect the misuse of my material unless licensed or otherwise agreed.

Really, argue on the merit of my points not the ignorance of your claims.

And of course I would ask here. Asking artists only results in nods of agreement, I don't need the echochamber of impasse, but I suppose I hadn't realised the scale of pseudo-intellectual self labelled technocrats that try to do anything other than understand the problem.

I completely understand your point, but what you're missing is that your fundamental premise is wrong. Your premise, as stated, is you want to continue to exercise control over your work after your work has been consumed by another. Now you kind of want to weasel around and make a claim like it's about protecting of your IP as if it's a piracy problem. That was not your original claim. I don't think the current copyright laws are just or beneficial but piracy isn't any part of what I advocated.

You're the one who has actively avoided addressing my core issue that has been clear from the beginning. Why do you believe that you can exercise orwellian thought control over the consumers of your content? Because your original premise is saying how do I prevent my content from being used by my consumers in a way that I don't agree with. Unless you would like to redefine your original premise. Because as stated that's what I will disagree with and there is no compromise or middle ground in this point. You do not get to dictate the thoughts of others as a content creator. The fact that you state that you're losing sleep over this is quite serious. I don't say this lightly you might need to seek help for this thought process about an obsessive need to control. You say you don't want an echo chamber but you stamp your feet and plug your ears to everything that I've said.

Friend, I have agreed with your core issue, you have just assumed my work has already been otherwise 'bought' and argued this fact the entire marathon.

Your assumptions of what I'm trying to get at, are what you're arguing against. My position hasn't changed, it's only been explained to you countless times and in many ways.

I will state it again and you're welcome to argue with the below sentence, but again, otherwise you're continuing to play games.

I have a concern that any work that I, or my fellow artists put into this world that is of a physically created nature. Tangible and unique, cannot be protected from the vacuum of OpenAI and their military contracts the same way I can protect them from being copied and hung in every Hilton Hotel. How do I protect myself from contributing to a pirate and their weapon creation? Tell me I can't, anything beyond the brainstem is an externalisation and fair game to anyone and I'll tell you artists will accept that notion and quit enriching this world with anything that adds value vs the capitalistic endeavour to extract it. Culture becomes an algorithm, humans become farm animals. Enjoy your world.

This is where you have a complete flawed understanding of what I'm saying. You're still attempting to control the minds of the consumer that is the core problem and that's what you're missing in my statements. Whether you're consumer is someone who is consumed it and filtered into a visual effects processor or an audio processor or into some learning machine to derive interesting things from it or whether they have fed it in through their eyeballs or their ears and use their own mind to drive interesting things from it it is ultimately the same thing. Your core position still seems to be you want to exert control post consumption.

Your analogy of thinking you can protect something physically placed in a Hilton hotel is a false analogy. The level of protection you have there is the same level of protection of you selling something to a consumer on a piece of physical media or even through a streaming media. The choice is whether you place it in the Hilton or you don't that is the only level of control that you have. Once you've decided to place something in the hotel you have zero control about how the guests will look at it perceive it if they will take photos of it if it will inspire them to do great things and help humanity or if it will turn them into a psychopath. They can examine it in detail and come up with all kinds of bizarre assertions saying that these works in the Hilton hotel support devil worship or some other bizarre claims. They can run it through image processing algorithms and say they're hidden messages inside. It actually is not uncommon for these kinds of bizarre claims to be made about art in public places. All of that is beyond your control and it's beyond any artist control to force the consumer to only understand it in their specific way.

Trying to place AI as some special thing that is magical beyond what humans have done is not a rational claim. For a consumer of the media to take it and run it through an algorithm to process it to derive some meaning from it is the core thing. Placing a buzzword such as AI only distracts from that. People were playing their records backwards and claiming there was messages from the devil on them. I would suspect the authors of the music didn't like this claim that their music was being perverted by playing it backwards and claiming it was some sort of demonic devil worship song poisoning the minds of children. Yet the authors of the music had no control of people spinning their record players backwards. Feeding things through processing algorithms is a thing consumers are allowed to do with the media that they're consuming to help them derive things from it. AI is not magic. So we're back down to the core thing of attempting to exert control on how the consumer can interpret the creative work. You don't get to choose how a consumer consumes and interprets your creative work.

Propaganda was a thing long before AI became a buzzword. And history bears out that artists will not do anything meaningful, they will continue to be artists and then they will be replaced if they don't want to do it anymore. The world is awash and artists and creatives and we are never at any point in history worried about a shortage. Because if you study your history you will see that artists and entertainers have been around since the beginning of time with no concept of intellectual property ownership. It is important for you to study history on this point because intellectual property ownership is a modern created illegal fiction. So much of what you're talking about blatantly ignores history. Not just the history of where intellectual property legal fiction came from but the idea that artist and creative people have never had to worry about their works of being twisted and misused prior to AI. There is hundreds and hundreds of years of History of creative works being misrepresented from their creators intentions. Somehow it has not stopped people from creating artistic works.

And I would argue that at this point in history those who claim to be artistic creators are not enriching this world. Not anymore not with the copyright that is 100 years and the other onerous things. Those artistic creators are actually holding the culture of the world hostage in an attempt to sell it back to them. The fact that you think that artists are creating new things that are enriching the culture is shocking because when is the last time that an artist in their lifetime has released their work to the public domain? I'm sure it happens it's just so rare it never gets reported. Because you don't enrich a culture as an artist until the public has ownership of the works. So fundamentally you're making a bizarre argument that you want some absolute control over something as an artistic creator but also claiming that you're enriching the culture and the public as a whole. I can't think of any two points which can be further apart in this kind of argument.

I'll see you in court. The law will change.

When you have the ability to even debate the complexities of film photography versus digital and the dual nature this medium falls under versus digital which I'll remind you again is under physical, and IP -- try again. But you can only argue under the merits of what you know and you've shown it to be very little.

I do appreciate your efforts but you've done nothing but double down on your ignorance on the matter.

If you can argue it's ok to protect computational lithography, you can protect me doing the exact same thing in the darkroom. But you don't know what you don't know. I'll leave it here, there's no ground to be made, even if you try to conflate a basic issue with paragraphs more.

> And I would argue that at this point in history those who claim to be artistic creators are not enriching this world

Extremely telling. Truly, say no more.

I like how you clip one statement without the rest. By taking my creative work and twisting it to pull out and remove it from the context from what was said you seem to be doing the exact same thing that you're losing sleepover that others might do to your work. I believe you're free to do that and free to be wrong and your assertion and twist my words but I'm also going to call you a big hypocrite.

That is the most truly telling statement because you believe you're enriching the world by attempting to not only denigrate capitalism in one sense but then hold the world hostage as an artistic capitalist in the next. Enriching the world is adding to the culture as a whole so that the culture itself can consume it and that means contributing to the public domain and not locking things under perpetual copyright.

You speak out of both sides of your mouth. You have levied personal attacks against me saying that I'm trolling and you have now engaged in hypocrisy. The only reason a person does those things is because they cannot argue the merits of their point any longer. So this will be my last response because you have effectively diverged from the core topic and cannot engage in a lively logical debate anymore. And history has proven me correct more than it has proved you correct.

You never even read the post enough to engage on the core topic. Keep confusing yourself. The original question was how to find out, you've done all but conflate your issues with my concerns. I quoted the one portion that expressed your position more than the paragraphs of diatribe trying to hide it. Good luck, goodbye!

You can't. That is the reality we live in now. Tools like Nightshade and Glaze are already behind the curve, decimate the quality of your work visually, and even if they do work, they will always be playing catch up to models.

Skynet and Terminators are inevitable.

That's as maybe, but my contributions shouldn't be.

It's just silly images and videos really. Military use would be using them to spread misinformation about the enemy? Idk that's been a think since forever, you don't really need some text to video model like for that instead of just "traditional" deepfakes and I feel like the impact is gonna be a lot less now that it's on everyone's mind that things can be fake. Actual weapons like drones don't really have much to do with image generators

I really don't think this is true. I've been working with image model training for object detection whilst I convert a Delta 3D Printer into an AI guided fuse finder... enough just to learn... Enough to know you need real photographs and real video to train anything that needs to see like a real human.

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