What Was Sora Trained On? Creatives Demand Answers
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The "what will we do for jobs argument?!?" would've applied to stage actors when movies came out a century ago and farm workers before the invention of tractors. Audio records, printing press, and so on. The world keeps getting better as technology advances, and people will adapt to the new changes.
And if you think art created by real people is more valuable, then there will be a market for the creatives. Focus on that.
Even if it were true that these models learn exactly like humans (which is patently false), we can still differentiate between the two.
Society is built by and for humans. If we want to empower humans over machines, that seems perfectly acceptable.
These machines are also built by and for humans.
> If we want to empower humans over machines, that seems perfectly acceptable.
But that’s not what’s happening here. This is a faction of humans fighting to maintain their power and control over how the rest of humanity is allowed to produce artistic works.
Creatives who fight against generative AI are trying to empower themselves over everyone else. Corporations who develop closed-source AI like OpenAI are also trying to empower themselves over everyone else. The main problem in both cases is the way a select few are trying to amass power for themselves.
Generative AI has fundamentally shifted the scope of what it means to be creative, and prohibiting it from being trained on the collective works of humanity doesn’t empower humans over machines. It empowers some humans at the expense of other humans. Big AI companies acting exploitatively and trying to figure out how to build their own moats so only they are allowed to control the technology does the same thing, so this shouldn’t be allowed to happen either.
This is not the first time, nor is it likely to be the last, that a major disruption happened in creative arts due to technology. The invention of the phonograph decimated live musicians. Hundreds of thousands of jobs in cinemas, radio stations, and restaurants were permanently lost[0], but I don’t think anyone today would argue that we’d be better off if record labels hadn’t been allowed to reproduce the works of other artists.
Instead of retreading the same tired arguments about generative AI itself, let’s instead focus on how to ensure creatives can adapt and not end up homeless and penniless, and on how to ensure a few giant tech companies don’t monopolise an otherwise democratising technology. That, more than anything, will ensure that we are empowering humans over machines.
[0] https://slate.com/transcripts/RS94QUlwS0ZsSnZnakE4UVUzR2loUV...
Everything you argue facilitates the reach of human expression. This pilfers and silences it. This plagiarism machine cannot even deal with 'current stimuli' in ANY way what so ever so it cannot express anything. It can only remember what you've told it, and it can barely do that successfully. It can't hold a fact for 2 messages. It cannot feel, it cannot predict, it cannot agree or disagree. It outputs based on master's filter and its expression based on financial agenda.
To think artists want to retain control over their own voice and ideas, and not have a company steal the aesthetics of it and sell its skeleton at a discount, and not realise the hypocrisy of trying to shift the power away from the individual to a private single for profit company is just... Beautifully poetic in its own right.
> the invention of the phonograph decimated live musicians
What history have you been smoking? The invention of a technology that could mechanically reproduce the message of an artist only sought to spread awareness and increase musical access and interest. It cannot replicate the aura of art which is why people to this day squeeze into expensive live shows. You argue the phonograph has completely cleaned live music off the table. It hasn't. It facilitated its growth.
You can replicate the art, but you can't create the artist. If ever I hear a balanced argument from the other side that includes the word 'aura' I'll have known they didn't just spend half a night researching these matters and deciding it's easier to remain ignorant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
"in the age of mechanical reproduction and the absence of traditional and ritualistic value, the production of art would be inherently based upon the praxis of politics."
I agree that generative AI, due to its nature, trends toward the average and thus is incapable of engaging with the extremes of human experience—but not every creative expression has to be at the extreme. Every Marvel film, every shovelware game, every summer pop jam, panders to the average. There’s enormous value in having a tool that allows professional artists to work more quickly at the average—and, perhaps more critically, for everyday people to approach the average in the first place. I don’t believe it is fair to suggest that such things are valueless “not ART”, but I’m not definitely not here to engage in philosophical discussion of the definition of “art”.
As far as history goes, I did provide a citation, which I encourage you to actually look at (and it cites several dozen more books and other articles if you need more primary sources). You are objectively incorrect in your assertion that the phonograph facilitated the growth of live music(ians), but I suspect you may not even understand what is meant by “live musicians”—not because of you, but because the phonograph was so revolutionary that it fundamentally changed what it meant to be a musician—and even redefined what a “song” is[0].
It is only with the benefit of hindsight that you can state so confidently that audio recording is a net benefit to music. Many felt that the phonograph was an abomination at its conception. They claimed that the essence of music was in its ephemeral nature, that the uniqueness of each performance contained the creative expression and the sheet music itself was just a skeleton for creativity. They said mechanical recordings deprived listeners of the true experience, and that individual artists lost their autonomy. They spoke in terms exactly like you are now, and those ideas were wrong then, and they are almost certainly wrong now.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/phonograph-chang...
Regardless your semantics on your phonograph argument the reality remains. The artist remained as part of the contract of societys growth. Once again, this isn't a blank vinyl or a canvas or an empty parking lot where freedom of expression takes priority. The priority is the financial incentives and retaining control.
For you to argue there's any creativity that would come out of that is like arguing I'm being creative when I put coins into a vending machine and receive cigarettes. I'm as creative as the conditions the puppets of profit have allowed me to be. Money doesn't own this world despite its deep and confused hope. It steals from it.
> They spoke in terms exactly like you are now, and those ideas were wrong then, and they are almost certainly wrong now.
No, they were right then and they're right now. Otherwise based on your argument anything beyond a phonograph would be unnecessary. So why do people seek anything beyond their MP3? Why do they go to live shows? Why do people still visit the Mona Lisa even though they can see it at home for free with a google? Please, as much as you refuse to debate philosophy and art, those are the exact things being debated. So either listen to those who've spent their lives in their domain (it's why I don't falsify my Python accolades) or pretend you know better. But don't conflate. Do read Walter Benjamin's essay from 1935 on Works of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. I know, you won't.
Next you're going to tell me AI hip-hop has the same value, incentive and understanding as the people from Cabrini Greens trying to escape poverty and violence by creating something beautiful and relatable out of the human condition. Then you'll tell me it's not your fault they haven't 'out created' themselves to keep up with the theft of their very self. If the vultures could at the very least just fuck off until the person isn't alive enough to bare witness to it, you could at least feign some IP argument. It's otherwise just hot air hoping.
As for society, that's another topic. People really aren't all that nice to each other very often.
In the future if the Turing test is fully passed I think morality will boil down to preferring humans if and only if it’s a situation of competing scarcities.
In the case of “showing pictures to computer people”, showing pictures to a computer doesn’t prevent you from showing it to a human so this framework imply no moral justification for a human preference.
That's making the very large assumption that there are no qualitative differences among our various leaps in technology. It's not hard to make the argument that AI is a different and larger and more disruptive leap than the invention of the tractor.
This is a complex issue that people on both sides of the argument tend to oversimplify. Figuring out how we should regulate and integrate this new technology is going to take time and a lot of back and forth.
>The world keeps getting better as technology advances
Will it, forever? Is that a given? Technology might also destroy the planet.
And there's no problem with that really -- all humans are a bit influenced by everything they've seen in their lives like you said, including tons of heavily copyrighted and trademarked stuff.
The first part is pseudo-argument. You compare apples and oranges. You treat education and massive steal of IP the same.
The second part seems to be a religious rehash of "The world keeps getting better as technology advances" this is not something guaranteed to continue and the world is not getting better from everyone. You seem to "overfit".
The third part does not guarantee a sustainable income for human creativity. Again your argument is shallow at best.
As for sustainable incomes, I'm sure you heard the arguments about buggy-whip manufacturers going out of business when we got trains and cars. It really wasn't that much of a tragedy in the big picture of things.
As for laws, we're almost in agreement. People want to argue about rights, but it seems to me the rules are a lot more about control. I could ramble on quite a bit about corruption at every level from local police to federal politicians. ... to copyright enforcement.
However, most of the rules were made before the current batch of super rich people got super rich, so there's something oversimplified in thinking it's just about protecting wealth.
My bottom line? Compute problem? Whatever. I think the rest is just more weirdness I can't make sense of.
Art major. I don't drink. I debate hard ideas.
(misquoted you originally, sorry!)
If you take a box and fill it with dog shit. You're more than welcome to chop, blend, dilute, fling or even eat this shit. But in the end, it's still Pepper's Poop.
Sell it like it isn't. Add sprinkles. It's Pepper's Poop.
When Pepper dies. Do you think the model is going to invent Gold all of a sudden?
Are you seriously going to argue that, say, Bach or Shakespeare were not all that creative?
However, I'll assume you know that most of Shakespeare's works were based off of earlier works. And I doubt Bach taught himself from scratch either.
Shakespeare's specialty was writing clever dialog (and to give credit where it's due, he was very, very good at that), not coming up with totally original plays.
If copyright as we know it had existed in Shakespeare's time, he would have been sued into a smoking crater.
Shakespeare got paid by people buying tickets to the Globe Theatre, of which he was part owner. Bach got paid by various princes and the church, and was expected to compose new music every week in return for his pay.
Neither argued that they should continue to get paid for the same work for 90 years.
I'm not sure what's more insulting overall, my sarcasm or your immediate jump to insult any artist based on the fact they're outraged about the financial fall out of this situation and not take them on the merit of every other argument included. Philosophical, moral and otherwise. It's fingers in ears and it's assuming the only thing artists care about is the money leaving their pocket.
We can think a little beyond that cave. It's inclusion in the argument is because it is the guiding star for the greedy to nullify the realities. Visual AI has revealed the trickster.
> No individual is all that creative
It's nice to meet you too. I promise, you underestimate your neighbours.
Your empathy isn't showing so clearly, and honestly I have more friendly discussions with ChatGPT than I am having with you.
As for what artists care about - nobody is taking away their cameras or brushes. They can keep creating all they want. It really seems like it's about money to me.
I'm reiterating this because I think it's important not to simply toss out a platitude and dismiss this staggering, unprecedented situation befalling millions of our fellow humans. If one's goal is to insulate themselves from their fellow humans, they might find it less important to do so.
Indeed, someone with such a goal could invent enough preconditions to caring for their fellow humans that they need never care! Preconditions like 'I don't care about you because I don't think your situation is changing fast enough' or 'I don't care about you because you value money while living in a capitalist society'. Dust hands off, problem solved, goal achieved, am I right?
Now tech thinks its an expert on philosophy, history and art. Hubris is something folks should lead with more often in place of ego.
edit: It'd be real easy to conflate my response to dehumanising each other with the larger arguments at play. Continue to hunt for your 'gotchas'
There it is. If it wasn't obvious, all your posts are really just you being upset about tech advancements threatening your job. You could have just said that instead of the nonsensical posts about ai weapons somehow being rated to diffusion models etc. My advice: move on and adapt like the rest of us
I remember the HN threads covering the FAANG (or whatever they're called now) laysoffs, where people would get flagged just for pointing out that tech workers earning $150-350k-a-year aren't sympathetic, exploited proletarians and that these companies have obligations to shareholders, which includes ordinary Americans with 401(k)s, IRAs, or pension plans (which, even if public sector, are still usually funded with public equities)--not just to people who got lucky and won the FAANG job lottery.
I am not really sure why the reception is so different with “creatives”.
When you take an artists desire to speak to the world through self expression, and believe it's equivalent to building software you're forgetting that one of them is already extremely well compensated, the other is not aligned with those incentives.
But to be extremely well compensated, and then try to rob artists of their livelihoods for profit and convenience -- yes, folks are going to think this argument isn't quite as balanced as you're painting it.
Next: “China will win if copyright is enforced” or “National Supremacy or Copyright, pick one”
They are right of course, but the questions is what “wins” means and what Washington money expects.
I promise, if I'm here asking this week, there's millions more that will be asking next week. Carving out the labour market has more consequences than increasing productivity. It destroys culture, society and a will to live. Wise up.
edit: And before the inevitable responses begin pouring in. Even the argued ethically sourced material scooped up from Shutterstock, et al. is still shrouded in dark patterns, hidden automatically enabled opt-in removal of rights, automated payments to tie up the fact you accepted payment as part of the argument in court. It all stinks, it should all tumble.
edit2: People are great at recognising patterns. I've frequented this platform daily for almost a decade. The speed of engagement in this thread and the fact it doesn't exist on the front page... or the second shows, once again -- the strings can suck it. Stifling reality doesn't change it.
I do know that it is completely unethical. A few large companies should not be able to package up and sell the totality of humanity's creative output at the expense of humanity itself.
The backlash is certainly just beginning. Thus far, AI usage beyond brief exploration have mostly been driven by tech folks. As more people outside of the bubble get clued into what is happening, I think that reputations will take a serious hit.
That's not for you to decide.
>has nothing to do with open source
It has everything to do with open source. If only Disney and getty images are allowed to train ai, there will be extreme monopolisation.
Of course it is, my content my rules.
You don't get to make up your own laws, mang.
They saw Uber get away with it's thing, so they're going to try to get away with theirs. IIRC, when Uber was new, it was literally illegal in many/most of the places it operated.
That arguably slows down the pace of medical advance.
One might note that those massive fees do not go to the "creatives", in this case the scientists. The scientist do the research, write the papers, peer-review the papers of others, edit the journals... and the publisher pockets the money. That's the case with most "intellectual property" -- the person who actually gets paid the lion's share is not the "creative".
The rest is just airing itself like dirty laundry by the second response and ultimately just serves in contributing to a humans ability to quickly adapt to new environments. Which means bullshit just smells more nuanced today.
A private company securing the worlds resources physically, financially and informationally and selling it to anyone of its choosing or not -- is the true startling contempt for human life, especially those that follow along without an ounce of critical thinking.
The world you're arguing for isn't one where small-time artists are adequately compensated for their work. It's one where Disney and Elsevier collect a bunch of rents and hold back development of tools that would radically improve human well-being. Even in the best case, your copyright suggestion will privilege the giant corporations who have the capability to navigate copyright rules against a bunch of other giant corporations, at the expense of smaller researchers and hobbyists.
I'd be more than happy to sign into something saying "a small artist has a right to prevent training on their work without permission for a decade after it's released." But that is not in the cards, unfortunately.
Copyright doesn't really privilege giant corporations. In a world without it, they can just use their market power and immense resources (e.g., SaaS) to protect their interests.
Copyright is one of the few tools the little guy can use to protect their interests against giant corporations. Abolish it, and one of the first things that will happen is the RIAA will stop paying artists anything and become the biggest "pirate" in the world.
It's mind boggling how some people have that so backwards. I'm guessing it stems from only thinking about copyright in the context of "RIAA sues..." articles and complaints about Elsevier, without thinking about it from any other angles.
Ok! I appreciate this insight. At this point I'll be 'scraping' everything from tech and fight this in court with their own words.
You don't get to decide that, certainly not as a blanket statement. We're gonna have to wait for the courts.
With IP, corporations originated their ideas, so executives want to prevent others from copying.
With generative AI, corporations are copying individual's ideas, so executives want to allow this copying.
This is exactly why we need to BAN weaving machines. The will to live is sustained by the work of the skilled artisans who create clothing by hand with looms.
"But I don't want to pay 500 dollars for a t-shirt", you say. What astounding arrogance! Stop destroying culture and accept that we need to protect this valuable craft from technology that threatens to steamroll it.
They skirt around the important details, in that in all those analogies the entire process/field wasn't replaced/impacted by automation, only facets. Advanced generative NNs aren't merely dumb automated tools that still require human craftmanship but rather, at a baseline, take the place of the humans in virtually all respects of design, implementation and continually synthesizing based on others' work.
The analogy presented in your post doesn't account for the designers still involved with the process, the real-world practicalities that involve humans of getting clothing made even with all the automation available. Generative AI doesn't have this goal; it's increasingly allowing for replacement of all humans and processes involved, besides the one wishing upon a genie lamp.
Now one can of course apply their own craftsmanship to such outputs if desired and there are examples of this from existing artists/writers where it fits more like a tool into a workflow (and such analogies would actually apply here), however as we can already observe the vast majority of uses don't and there is still at a minimum a usable result, as the tech advances.
There are also parallels one commonly reads drawn to how humans operate: if a human studied others' artwork then they too would be able to synthesize results. However no human has memory and mind's eye recall like that of advanced NNs, which is plainly observable from the output of human history. It's an unfair comparison. The goal of generative models is to be superhuman yet only human arguments are being applied.
I think there are a bunch of positives and negatives to this but it's hard not to see the impact it will have particularly on human motivation and societal expectations, regardless of financial incentives, apart from the general shut-up-and-take-it attitude one sees. There are some pretty impactful legitimate concerns to be had that warrant thoughtful discussion.
If you think throwing life into a black box and consuming its results will improve productivity and enhance creativity. You're forgetting the only thing we feed this thing is 'results'. You're drinking the piss from a million artists and thinking it's fresh water. Eventually this filtered, censored source of creativity is AI material being used and creating for AI, not humans -- because humans quit being a source of material and nothing more than a requester.
The short sightedness of believing you can commodify the human spirit is the most incredulous shit I've ever seen.
And seemingly harder to reach non-monopoly/oligopoly solutions.
Paying people to move goalposts is expensive, and it might turn out to be a flop, but you could do both with Sora cheaply, and even make it into an interactive movie which, something impossible with conventional read only films.
These two things are connected, actually:
>The FAQ notes that submission rank is impacted by "software which downweights overheated discussions." A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented?tab=re...