Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

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Now that generative AI is here, there will be artists who will try to differentiate themselves from AI, and artists that will embrace it to explore new possibilities. It's not a matter of protecting artists, but of choosing what artists to protect, the first or second group? Should we ban photography as well, how about synthesizers, should home owners band new construction in their neighborhood to protect their investments?

In my opinion any attempt at restricting AI training is also restricting people who would use it to create new things. And it will backfire spectacularly, by scanning for derivative works in AI we automatically need to do the same for every work claimed to be created by a human, because we don't know who's using AI secretly.

And it will create a chilling effect, incidental similarity would be too high a risk to take. Even old works will be revealed, their secret influences laid bare for everyone to see. Excessive scrutiny could deter artists from experimenting with new forms of expression, possibly leading to a homogenized art world where innovation is curtailed.

> In my opinion any attempt at restricting AI training is also restricting people who would use it to create new things.

Won't need to rely on any bunk statistical methods that don't work to detect and suppress ai. Supply and demand and cultural rejection will work just fine. I don't have enough toes and fingers to count the number of creators I respect. I can't name a single AI artist.

You'll have enough fingers if you get your portrait done by a sub-par AI artist.

> I don't have enough toes and fingers to count the number of creators I respect.

heheheh, AI art certainly has more than enough duplicated fingers!

Why do you think artists will be the ones to use ai to create art? Rather than big tech and clusters of corporate ais working together?

If you create art, are you not by definition an artist?

I can get that. There's never a path forward that doesn't leave something on the table. I of course want artistic freedom + technology to advance alongside each other.

But we're also talking about MAKING generative AI models. Not USING generative AI models. Making a model is so far outside of the scope of a single artist it's almost comical. We're talking about a task that, given no bounds, would include the subtask "ingest all human creative output". That's hard to do so therefore it's restricted to the realm of well funded companies.

But even as well off and talented as these companies are, they did very little of the actual work. The total scale of effort that goes into these big lists of coefficients, is beyond human comprehension at this point. We've literally NEVER had to contend with tasks of this magnitude before. Many thousands of centuries of human life hours distilled. Copyright as it's legally inscribed precisely, is ill-prepared to achieve it's end goals in this situation.

But considering:

1) that's kind of cool we can do this

2) it makes interesting things that could better people's lives

3) we still think that humans should be able to make art (ai or not) and not die of starvation ideally

... we need to figure out what to do. Maybe it's not copyright! That was created to solve a specific problem. Now we have new problems. I just think people latch too hard onto the legalese as if it's some magic property of the universe, and NOT a set of systems humans made, for very human goals. I don't want a system where we just say "well look at copyright, it says this is fine, so we will just use everything for free". It's missing the point.

I agree with you that it's asking the hard question of "which artists do we protect". That, I'm not feeling like I have a good answer for right now. I definitely heavily lean towards the talented artists who've honed their craft. That's just more interesting. But I wish more people we're thinking about it, in those terms.

> We've literally NEVER had to contend with tasks of this magnitude before. Many thousands of centuries of human life hours distilled.

And one poem or a page of text is but a drop in this ocean, an infinitesimal contribution. The model is much smaller than the training set. For example Stable Diffusion packs 5B images in 5GB, that's a compression factor of 100,000:1, about 1 byte per training image, not even a pixel. Taking so little from everyone, I am amazed how strong a reaction it creates. The final model doesn't steal almost anything, it doesn't rely on any training example too much, just a compressed abstraction of the training data. You have to overfit it and also prime it to make it regurgitate some training examples, and most attempts fail, resulting in novel outputs.

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