Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists? (2023)
newyorker.com
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Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34751031
Copyright isn't really the issue, it's a company exploiting the work of others. It's literally the only value of the magic box.
Story mode economic feudalism is the last barnacle of history to wash out. It’s from religious times but stripped of the metaphor and analogy.
Automation and physical statistics can keep enough stuff on shelves we don’t riot, communities can solve their last mile problems as their daily work, and noodle on their own artistic thing without having to sell it.
Consider a band releasing a new album they've spent 9 months writing and recording. In our post-financial brave new world, they give it away for free. But they'll read the reviews, and get excited if their music is well received. In short, they are hoping to be "paid" in public acclaim.
Now imagine that the minute they release it, some AI system digests all their new tracks, and a thousand randoms start making songs that are similar to the style and aesthetic they have spent time creating. In short order, the number of synthetic AI tracks will dwarf the originals, and the recognition will go to whoever markets their synthetic tracks the best, rather than the original creator.
The only hope I see for artistic creativity is in training custom, boutique AI systems that accurately encompass the Artist's style. But that's not really creativity to be honest, it's more akin to licensing.
When have we ever put the scope of the impact as part of the judgement of the legality of disruptive businesses? When did the impact of WalMart on small businesses matter legally, or Amazon on independent bookstores, or iTunes music store on independent music stores, or Netflix on video rental stores? Or NAFTA on American factory workers?
Sorry, I don't buy the argument that the scale of the impact transformative impacts the question of legality; it never has before.
If you are talking about the social problem of skilled people willing to work who cannot find meaningful employment: well, let's address that directly, but not by banning generative AI.
To be honest, this is a rabbit hole worth going down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseless_carriage
And from that page is this, and and this cracked a smile on my face.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsey_Horseless
Look at the 1908 Model T.
https://corporate.ford.com/articles/history/the-model-t.html
And then compare that with the Curricle, say:
Still not an apt analogy. Innovation is quite different to overt copying.
A lot of good arguments exist with bad analogies.
But on the broader argument, saying people just don't like it because it puts them out of jobs also seems to miss the point.
Disruptive technologies of the kind that "put people put out of jobs" usually just replace labour, ie. mechanised looms, calculators and computers, rather than replacing the result of one's labour. Often this is a distinction without any meaningful difference, but when we're talking about art and creative work products I think it's significant.
People already buy cheap/shitty art to hang on the walls from Wal-Mart, Target, etc. Artists already lost that market 5 maybe 6 decades ago.
And Frankly, the best art has always been created by people who couldn't afford to do it full time. Art will not suffer.
That's quite the claim.
I'm not sure there's a consistent correlation between "best art" and ability to do it full-time, but there certainly is a long tradition of artists and apprentices who did indeed make art their entire lives.
I am not talking about "technology putting people out of work."
I am talking about "technology enabling the mass copying of a specific person's copyrighted works." I am comparing these two things:
1. a professional imitator, who works for years to develop a mimicked style and then has to work for hours to produce a piece, (and in any case is not legal to claim as original,)
2. a piece of software that could produce millions of copies a day, frankly creating a nontrivial chance that eventually a copy of a specific work would be created and claimed as "original."
You can argue my points here, as I'm not a copyright lawyer, but what you've argued above is irrelevant.
Look up the Digital Markets Act.
TL;DR: Brains and diffuse AI work very differently, and it's short sighted that the meme is so often repeated.
It's really not. Human brains don't categorize inputs by a set of keywords and then use other keywords to compose an output collage of inputs with the same keyword. Humans are lossy, and so our brains are actually quite good at filling in the blanks contextually. We also don't think of keywords, we think of objects. A banana is an object to us with lots of context other than how it looks, whereas it's just a tag to an AI.
Which is all to say, if an AI doesn't have a reference for a particular artists' method of doing a specific paint stroke, it can never create that paint stroke. A person can - they can re-create a paint stroke from everything else they've studied about an artist and style and what kinds of paints they had available to them at the time.
There's a reason that producing decent pieces of art out of an AI can take tens of hours and hundreds of prompts. It's still the human brain driving the final output. They've just handicapped themselves to just using keyword prompts to avoid learning a specific skill set.
This statement here:
> Which is all to say, if an AI doesn't have a reference for a particular artists' method of doing a specific paint stroke, it can never create that paint stroke.
This is unsupported at best. You don't know. Pre-eminent experts in the field don't know. But this is simply a restatement of the weird "it just interpolates" fallacy people constantly spout about AI, which isn't even true of simple mathematical interpolation
A simple example: finding a way to interpolate between points (1,1) and (2,4) would be something like y = 2x. Fairly obviously, that equation will easily tell you how to work outside that range, the distinction is you don't have any more data to verify if this is real. Replace the point geometry with the abstract "paint stroke" algorithm, and an AI model can do exactly the same thing.
That is, it can't interpolate using anything more than two axes (to use your example). A human can interpolate in 4 different axes (if not more).
And let's be frank, the whole "the AI can do the exact same thing" is a disingenuous assertion with nothing backing it other than "we don't know that it can't." I could also be a god, since you don't know that I'm not a god.
Is AI *borrowing concepts* from artists? Yep. Do artists borrow concepts from other artists? Yep. Is AI or humans in a vacuum when creating new art? Nope. Is the cat out of the bag? Yep. Is this the same with text? Code? Literally anything AI generates? Yep.
A major problem is AI being used to replace humans, which of course, is borrowing concepts from humans... which, oops, you just replaced. It's not just artists.
We have much bigger issues than "AI is stealing my art". It's really not. It's just being used to "optimize" you, the human, out of the equation.
Nobody cares that humans learn in principle the same way as AI. Law - which is meant to protect and help individuals to foster healthy competition & innovation without disrupting the social order + prevent monopolies - allows that. Large corporate entities should not be allowed to use that unlicensed content the same way. That's it. That's the whole point. Content was stolen to create commercial AI products.
I can't and won't deny people's feelings on the matter, but if we accept them as true, then they do seem to be using the word "to steal" in a novel way.
And always the same arguments too — not much detail but just throw & go LOL:
“it was the same before AI, so if this is a problem then stuff humans have done is a problem, relax my luddite bro” LOL