Bohemians at the Gate? | Hacker News Reader

Bohemians at the Gate?

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45 pointssurprisetalk62 comments

The analogy is reduced to the point of irrelevancy.

OpenAI isn't trying to produce art. They are trying to replace human creation with artificial creation, but an artificial creation whose entire input was the human creation.

Kawano was not trying to replace Mondrian. And Mondrian was dead.

Personally I'm happy to restrict copyright expiry and AI input to the work of dead people. Right now copyright is too long and AI is happy to ignore entirely. Let's allow AI and humans to both reproduce the work of dead people but leave the living to their benefits of their creation so long as they are alive.

For a number of reasons, I don't like the duration of copyright depending on how long the author lives.

* It's age discrimination against older people.

* If the copyright ends up being owned by some corporation (or effectively owned: some corporation has exclusive rights), which is what usually happens for any valuable copyright, it seems weird that the duration should be based on the lifetime of the author.

* It creates problems later when it's not obvious who the author was or when the author died.

* It could easily be abused by authors adding their grandchildren as co-authors. (I'm a bit wary of mentioning this in case I give anyone ideas. It has happened already, but so far not very often, as far as I can tell.)

If you're going to make these arguments about IP, you can also make them about property rights in general.

What is it about creative IP that makes it different to other kinds of family inheritance, or other kinds of rentier ownership?

Why does the argument that "Ownership rights should expire as soon as possible for the common good" not apply to huge land and property holdings, some of which have been passed down for centuries, with far more obvious economic and political effects than - say - Tolkien's descendants not needing a day job?

> If you're going to make these arguments about IP, you can also make them about property rights in general.

No, physical property are both excludable and rivalrous goods [1], for them ownership is a natural right.

OTOH, IP are naturally non-rivalrous, and only semi-excludable through establishment of copyright law. IP ownership is just societal construct trying to fit market mechanisms to them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods

Also it's important to point out there is another class called anti-rivalrous goods which may be important for the discussion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-rival_good

>An anti-rival good is one where the more people share it, the more utility each person receives. It is the opposite of a rival good. Examples include software and other information goods created through the process of commons-based peer production. The term was coined by economist Steven Weber.

It is unfortunate and confusing that copyright and patents are described as intellectual "property" because intellectual property is fundamentally different than other property rights. Property laws as originally formulated applied to rivalrous goods where consumption by one consumer prevents consumption by others. Copyright and patents apply to non-rivalrous goods.

Rivalrous goods are relatively easier to protect and monetize without the assistance of the state. Non-rivalrous goods are pretty much impossible to protect/monetize without the assistance of a state.

Thanks I never had learned non-rivalrous goods and its'a. great way to explain the IP != property

you wouldn't steal a car, err i mean download, right!

> If you're going to make these arguments about IP, you can also make them about property rights in general.

In general, property rights don't end when someone dies, they're just transferred to someone else. People can even take advantage of the fact that property rights endure by selling the right to take possession after their death.

A lot of physical "property rights" are equally dubious though and probably shouldn't have the reverence people have for them. The reason why land ownership reform (splitting up of big land holdings owned by the wealthy but farmed by the poor) was a big issue in 19th century Britain (and Ireland which was completely part of it then) and still is an issue in the developing world today, is ultimately it is arbitrary that somebody gets to "own" land just because they are descended from aristocrats who conquered it centuries ago.

> OpenAI isn't trying to produce art. They are trying to replace human creation with artificial creation, but an artificial creation whose entire input was the human creation.

And they’re trying to build a business off it as well. There are a whole lot of things we generally excuse when they’re noncommercial (morally, even if not strictly legally), but OpenAI is a business, not a hobby. Similarly, we cast a gentler eye towards someone working towards self-improvement or personal discovery - artists are known to duplicate the work of other artists to hone their techniques, and Kawano was copying Mondrian’s style to understand the use of new technology for making art. OpenAI is doing none of that - the point of their system is to skip all the hard work of learning and self improvement.

I think you could argue that openAI isn’t in the business of making art — it’s their users that make AI art that are in the business of making art.

There are plenty of reasons for a model to ingest the art that are not directly related to creating new derivatives of that art. If you want the model to be able to recognize famous paintings or discuss styles/genres, it needs to get those examples.

But it sure doesn't need to be able to generate them for anything other than generating them.

Serious question: what compelled you to make this argument, overlooking (as sibling points out) the obvious fact that they generate art using the art they trained on?

Sudden uptick in mysterious artist deaths still unexplained

> but leave the living to their benefits of their creation so long as they are alive.

Or pay somehow in the future for the use of them?

Should the people who created the data set that was required for training reap the rewards or be laid off permanently? That is the real world scenario that is already playing out and will continue to ramp. That's the world we are currently living in.

If commercial generative Ai groups that design the algo that relies on that data are heavily reliant on open publishing and open source and depended on and iterated on those things to create what they have created do they deserve to capture all the products value?

Some things are inevitable products of new mediums and regulatory environments (regulation is just cultural byproducts of a nations citizenry) wasn't wikipedia always going to exist? Wasn't Craigslist? Wasn't IMDB? Weren't social media networks?

What amount of profits should a group who scrapes all their core data from other people be morally obligated to hoard for themselves?

If a small number of people profit off this and replace the very people whose data they scraped so that those people lose their jobs and homes and any financial security they have and deaths of despair skyrocket...

Does this seem morally good or just?

What is the dividing line?

If this concentration of wealth is so extreme it destabilizes the very culture and people that birthed it, do we just consider the family losing their homes to be this kind of hilarious ironic thing and fuck 'em the losers?

I think UBI and Paid Re-Skilling needs to be talked about now, I think the mechanisms and evaluations for rolling out UBI and Paid Re-Skilling should be discussed now.

It seems very likely thay paid re-skilling will only exist in the transition and isn't the final state of LLM much less AGI.

Unless we do this in earnest we are effectively committing to cultural decohesion and chasing down the misfortunate "Redundant" with murderbots and culling the now irrelevant laid off to stop unrest.

It does seem like that's the goal, but if Amazon and Elon have their way (and I guess C Y4rvin), we'll have company towns first.

What does Mondrian's estate owe to Oliver Byrne's estate, since he basically stole Byrne's color scheme and style from his version of Euclid's Elements? (And what does Byrne's estate owe to Euclid's estate?)

IP law is a purely practical matter: what most incentivizes intellectual production? If a culture errs too far toward restriction, that country ultimately falls behind. The US itself jumpstarted its industry by mass IP theft and industrial espionage to steal the hard work of British inventors and entrepreneurs; its entire publishing industry got its start by copying British works wholesale in what was then the world's most flagrant IP violation. As an angry sputtering Dickens wrote:

> You take the uncompleted books of living authors, fresh from their hands, wet from the press, cut, hack and carve them... all this without permission, and against his will; and then, to crown the whole proceeding, publish in some mean pamphlet, an unmeaning farrago of garbled extracts from his work, to which your name as author, with the honourable distinction annexed, of having perpetrated a hundred other outrages of the same description.

Americans mostly shrugged, or attacked him as a mercenary scoundrel, before proceeding to build the world's largest publishing industry.

The US needs to make laws governing how copyright applies to generative AI; when it does, those laws should grant expansive fair use rights. Otherwise, the US will be left behind.

> The US needs to make laws governing how copyright applies to generative AI

Ho hum. By the time that happens most AIs will be running in China, most likely. The more restrictive the US laws, the more likely.

China is very old, but geopolitically where the US was over a century ago.

Snowcrash maybe wasn't so wrong . . .

The visual arts are now having their Ikea moment.

Ikea didn't kill woodworking/carpentry/joinery.

I know several people that have invested into a lot of time and *a lot* of money into them as a hobby. It's still an art.

But Ikea did reduce it as a commercially viable avenue profession for more than a handful of people making boutique products.

But the DJ killed the wedding band, and the iPod/Spotify killed the DJ, if we weren't gonna a shed a tear for them (and maybe we should have?), why now?

People will still use art for their personal expression. That's older than recorded history, it's just industrialised commercial-grade investable art that is at risk.

>People will still use art for their personal expression. That's older than recorded history, it's just industrialised commercial-grade investable art that is at risk.

I think the problem here, from the social petspective, is -- how many people can enjoy creating art and what kind of a society we will have, where only a few can earn a living by doing so.

Or from another angle -- how long we can create more ways to create art to outrun the oncoming reign of night that strips away all of the fun thing we had before.

> from the social perspective, is -- how many people can enjoy creating art and what kind of a society we will have, where only a few can earn a living by doing so.

1) Only a few people can make a living out of doing it today

2) It's already the case with woodworkers, knitters, and so many other arts. How many people can make a living making pottery?

> how long we can create more ways to create art to outrun the oncoming reign of night that strips away all of the fun thing we had before.

You can still create the art. When your girlfriend cheats on you and runs away with your best friend and your dog, your still gonna want to write your own country song. Not because it'll sell, but because you want to tell your own story in your words.

>> The visual arts are now having their Ikea moment.

> Ikea didn't kill woodworking/carpentry/joinery.

Ikea made build-it-at-home a thing. Ikea is the "first marriage" and the "recently divorced" furniture shop. Before people can afford better. While it's still helpful for the furniture store to have child care and meatballs. Great place to shop for recently-divorced folks! Would recommend. Five Stars!

Material design is the Ikea of design. Without the humanity. Without even a hint of a desire for fluid exchange.

On the topic of computer-generated Mondrians, in 1966 a researcher at Bell Labs used a computer to produce a semi-random version of Mondrian's "Composition With Lines" (1917). Interestingly, he found that only 28% of people could correctly identify the computer-generated picture and 59% preferred the computer-generated picture.

The researcher points out that "Both patterns were conceived by humans, although certain features of the computer-generated picture were decided by a programmed random algorithm. The computer functioned only as a medium performing its operations under the complete control of the computer program written by the programmer-artist."

The paper with images: http://noll.uscannenberg.org/Art%20Papers/Mondrian.pdf

Scale matters. Reducing an example down to a single artist reproducing a single style of a single other artist isn't theft, it's a fundamentally different thing. Kawano is not making a tool that can predict and reproduce all art produced by all artists with a reasonably high degree of success.

If I use a single sample from a single record (say, drawing from the Amen Break) to build a small number of songs, that's fundamentally different from being able to wholesale lift the musical stylings of every artist across time.

Remix culture is important, and copying small elements out by hand with intention is an important part of remix culture. But the scale matters. The industrialization matters.

A kid taping the radio is different from Spotify selling every piece of music for a subscription and sending (almost) nothing on to the artists. Sure, both cut the artist out, but the scale matters.

> Scale matters.

On what grounds? Very rarely does the law see things that way [1]. Where is the tipping point. What if it did Mondrian _and_ Rothko? Still good? Okay, now add Damien Hirst. Also add Jackson Pollock. Then Roy Lichtenstein. What is your grounds for delineation? If it's just a feeling, then the problem isn't the law, it's you. Monet could just be a Photoshop filter, Pointillism is. Warhol?

[1] Newton v. Diamond is an example I can think of https://www.quimbee.com/cases/newton-v-diamond

We differentiate based on scale all the time. If I steal a pack of gum I expect a very different legal outcome than if I steal the entire contents of a best buy. In violent crime scale matters -- manslaughter is very different from mass murder.

In financial crimes ripping off my friend by not paying back a dinner is very different from embezzling millions from my company. Possessing a dime bag of marijuana is a very different crime from possessing 100 kilos of marijuana.

And in many cases, scale reaches a level of either not being enforced as a crime or not being a crime at all.

Federal sentencing guidelines specifically call out scale several times: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/about/overview/...

That is scaling not differentiating. It doesn’t change in category just severity.

Although we cannot say when something becomes a heap we can nevertheless say that heaps exist.

When discussing the social and ethical implications of a technology there really is a difference based on scale.

From a copyright perspective the only question that matters is this: Do we treat AI models like (Xerox) copiers or do we treat them like artists?

If we treat it like a copier it's the end user that's responsible when they tell it to produce something that infringes on someone else's copyrighted work. No different than if someone walked up to a machine and copied an entire book.

Furthermore, if the end user never even distributes the result of a prompt the question is moot anyway: Copyright only matters when something gets distributed. No distribution == No violation of copyright.

If we treat AI like an artist it is the owner/creator of the AI model that's responsible when it produces something that violates another's copyright. Since it is literally impossible to maintain a database of all copyrighted works that exist (in order to check if something violates copyright or not) this option is untenable. It's not possible to implement unless we go back to requiring all copyrights be registered (and provide that database to anyone that asks—thus, distributing all those copyrighted works which would defeat the purpose).

I very strongly believe that the courts will ultimately settle on treating AI like a copier. It's a tool/machine and should be treated as such by copyright law.

A good argument. however to compare an AI model to a Xerox machine is reductive and not a sound metaphor...

It can not be treated just as a Xerox machine, but it can be treated as a Xerox machine that has within it all the copywritten works (that a user can inventively request combinations there within) which it has trained on (and saved in the form of weights/bias). In this case the AI model itself is the distribution of works under copyright. Encrypting/transforming copywritten works and transmitting it is a violation of copyright (afaik; ianal).

This is all to say, copyright - as it stands - needs heavy reform. I'm rather copyleft. Because all of this is vestigial nonsense from an age where printers from the 1800's setting the rules, and our thinking hasn't updated yet.

What would happen if you made a lossy image compression format derived from tons of scraped, copyrighted images.

There’s no generative ability, but anytime you compress/decompress your image the model uses weights and biases learned from copyrighted works.

Is that a violation?

Nothing. and no:

Only distributing it to others is when copyright is an issue. Private translations/transformations are unenforceable. You can mark up a book you've bought as much as you want.

We treat them as models. We allowed them to be fitted on copyrighted data, arguing the research is an inherent public good. But now that these companies are directly competing with that material's copyright holders, it makes sense to reevaluate that assumption.

A good first step would be to mandate AI labs share their weights and methodology before commercial release or lose that privilege. This would spare universities and non-profits, while requiring commercial labs to contribute something back, be it in licensing fees or usable research.

Treat them as a search engine.

This is wrong on so many counts, you should not be giving legal judgments in comments. As one example, “no distribution == no violation of copyright” is incorrect.

Something I keep thinking about is that nobody would think twice if some young musician gave an interview that said "{older artist} was a huge inspiration. their songs were fundamental in shaping how i think about the artform", nobody would be up in arms claiming that they have stolen from the elder artist. it's art inspiring other artists the way it always has.

so why does it feel different when LLM ingests some music to "fundamentally shape how it 'thinks' of the artform"?

i can create loads of speculation about what that difference is, but to be honest it all feels pretty post-hoc and hand-wavy.

> so why does it feel different when LLM ingests ...

Most-ish people are biased in favor of both "the little guy", and in favor of "artists" (whether authors, musicians, painters, or whatever).

Because an LLM is not an artist, an artist is working to improve themselves and putting something new into the world that aligns with some desire or vision they have.

The LLM lacks all desire and vision, it is a machine that can produce a trillion variations of something that sounds like Miles Davis, for example, without an ounce of intention to what it wants to do, what art it wants to make.

Fundamentally the LLM is not a living thing that interacts with other living things and has an idea of how it wants to influence itself and others. it is just a printing press capable of flooding the marketplace with lookalikes and slop.

[Despite my tone, I appreciate the prompt, it's a subject I'd like to write on at more length than an HN comment]

Because it can produce millions of variations, the value add is in separating the wheat from the chaff. The art is in the selection. That has intention. If the first result is bad, respin.

I don't think existing copywright law matters with respect to AI. AI generated art is unprecedented and I'd argue there is a moral imperative to distribute the wealth generated by AI to those whose creative work enabled the technology even if we don't have a legal (or technical) framework for doing this in place yet.

"The Baroness Kidron amendment would require companies to provide a log of all of the URLs their models were trained on, and keep this up-to-date every month."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39xj284e14o

MPs rejected that amendment and sent the Bill back to the Lords.

"Kidron's amendment will not provide certainty of anything except for certainty of more uncertainty, of continuous regulations stacked one upon another in a pile of instruments...

"Jumping the gun on one issue will hamstring us in reaching the best outcome on all the others and especially because this is a global issue and we cannot ringfence the UK away from the rest of the world."

However, Kidron said her amendment "does not challenge the primacy of the Commons" and pushed ahead.

The result was a decisive defeat for the Government, with 287 votes in favour of Kidron's amendment and 118 against - a majority of 169 - and the Bill will now be sent back to the Commons.

What doesn’t seem to be addressed is the name, Artificial Mondrian. The works may not be infringing on Mondrian’s copyright (and I don’t think they are or should be), but the use of Mondrian’s name would almost certainly be infringing on Mondrian’s moral rights, if not legal ones as it implies an endorsement by Mondrian or his estate (although if Mondrian didn’t have a trademark on his name, which seems unlikely, he doesn’t have legal recourse).

I live in walking distance from the place the brothers Grimm sourced their version of Snow White.

Ai image generator frequently refuse to create illustrations featuring the character, everybody is afraid of Disney.

Similar, Disney’s Winnie the Puh just looks like Magarete Steiffs plush bear with a red shirt.

Very often those who claim to have created an original work themselves just produced derivatives, at least those should not be protected to the detriment of humankind.

Pooh. Winnie the Pooh. <3

It's possible the parent comment was thinking of the Soviet version, Винни-Пух, Vinni Pukh. The drawing style is different than Disney's, but also really cute.

I got about halfway through before giving up on this article. I thought it was just taking a long time to get to the point then I realized one wasn't coming.

Thinking it was all a Duchamp-esque drollery, I checked to see if it was AI-generated and alas, it isn't.

Artists have enjoyed privileged standing because current society depends on high intensity propaganda to be at all viable, since about the industrial revolution or the world wars. Now they cry when they lose their monopoly.

Here I thought it would be about denizens of Bohemia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemia

I'm not ripping off your song / photo / artwork. No, I'm democratizing it. You should thank me !

I can make a collage from art/music/writing/etc under fair use, and it's protected by copyright. What AI does is less direct than that, and most of the people who use AI for creative purposes are themselves using AI output to create a new collage, or using it like a filter to tweak the style of an input or make it more aesthetically consistent.

If you have a problem with people vomiting unedited low-effort AI slop all over the internet, call that out and we can have a conversation, but your stance against making tools that can enable a new generation of creators to focus on the things that really matter (aesthetics, composition, structure) rather than things that don't so much (brush technique, instrument skill, word repertoire) smacks of elitism.

I like bgwalter's post above. I'd like to "democratize" Facebook. Can I download the entire set of profiles and photos and make my own mashups? Let's see what the facebook lawyers have to say over that.

There is a social good for artists making derived art/music/writing under fair use. There is only social harm in letting billionaire-owned AI's spit out trillions of garbage derivations with zero social value. We can make a choice as a society.

If they're public, it'd be fair use, and I guess they could stop you by not letting you download them in the first place, but if they're out there it's fair game. WRT the original point you were trying to make, I agree that using the pile/libgen is questionable, but so are publishers trying to gouge companies who use the materials for training by charging them a higher price than they'd charge people with the intention of reading the book.

If your problem is billionaires, that's separate from AI (which can be open source and run on commodity systems), and we can also have a conversation there. Shitting on AI because some unethical actors are pursuing it is like shitting on top hats and monocles because rich people wear them though.

For some reason the many obsequious software engineers never suggest democratizing Zuckerberg's island or nationalizing Google.

It is always the output of individuals who cannot fight back that is "democratized".

there is enough capital circulating now among certain groups such that there is no practical driver to change anything about the current economics.. "let them eat cake" basically? Appearing to look cultured while arguing for the effective economic demise of the artisan, at scale, is the hot take today here

It's not even a hot take. This is the straight neoliberal party line. There's some original research here, but no original thought - down to the debunked "Don't tax rich people or they'll leave" line, which even economists will tell you is objectively untrue.

Ultimately it's about freedom and values - not the capitalist take on freedom, which is all about property rights and the "freedom" to consume and pick one of a number of performative lifestyles, some of which are labelled dissenting, but the freedom of imagination to reinvent culture and technology in completely original ways.

You might think the AI companies are doing that, but they're doing the opposite. They're automating privilege - reinforcing and amplifying the existing system of economic disenfranchisement, value enclosure, and diminishing accountability.

Let's take a step back and recognize this for what it is - juridification - the replacement of social relations with legally enforced economic relations. It assumes, incorrectly, that everything made by people is subject to exchange. It's not, and for the most part, that's not how artists themselves conceive of art.

The artist community mostly operates on attribution. That is, influences are appropriately stated and attribution is the social currency. Unattributed works violate social norms. The problem is when these social relations are codified as economic relations. It's weird, like when Milton Friedman argued that children owe their parents for raising them[3].

As much as some people believe that this would imply the creation of rights, it misses the point. Freedom to choose does not include freedom from having to choose. The infinite variety of rich human relations are flattened into one dimension - economic. That erases what's most important to the human experience.

1. Insomuch as art is literary, musical, or artistic work

2. https://www.sv.uio.no/arena/english/research/publications/ar...

3. https://periferiaactiva.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/201...

You're not wrong, but without copyright how do artists eat? While artists are happy to operate by attribution, commercial entities don't give a shit about such things and would be happy to use or distribute popular works copyright-free without attributing anything. For example, Spotify is a terrible deal for artists, but in a copyright-free world Spotify would just pay nothing to artists - an even worse deal.

The article is a bit lengthy, which makes it hard to distill any message. Perhaps the vagueness is on purpose, since it ends with the classic "But what about China?" FOMO.

Clearly "AI" is plagiarism. There are YouTube voice translations now that are trained on the original speaker's voice. How is this not a derivative work?

If you train an AI on 1,000,000 voices so it can pretend to "create" an average voice, that voice is still the derivative work of all input voices.

The EU making "AI" scraping opt-out is disgraceful. It should be opt-in.

Vance and Trump (mentioned in the piece) are irrelevant. Watch Vance in his latest meeting with von der Leyen and Meloni, where Vance suddenly was very friendly when von der Leyen mentioned a total trade volume of $1 trillion.

Von der Leyen also called Meloni (who was previously designated as a "fascist") by her first name. They all were best friends forever.

> Watch Vance in his latest meeting with von der Leyen and Meloni, where Vance suddenly was very friendly when von der Leyen mentioned a total trade volume of $1 trillion.

I haven’t seen this, do you have a clip?

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