The people you say are getting "shafted" always got shafted. Their works are the inspiration for all artists and people who lay their eyes on it - maybe they got paid when they made the work, maybe they managed to sell it, but probably not. And still, other artists (and machines) will use remember and be inspired by it, sometimes to the point of verbatim copy (which is extremely common for human artists as well, with verbatim copy and replication being an actual sought after skill).
(Those about to shout "LICENSING", that's a very new invention and we're terrible at it. What are you going to do, cut out the part of your brain that formed new connections while touching GPL code?)
The person (singular) that is actually getting "shafted" at each use is the artist you didn't hire to do the job of making your new work, because it is their skill that got replaced. A skill build from a lifetime of studying other art and practicing themselves, replaced with a skill build from a machine studying other art and by virtue of some closed loops likely also "practicing" itself.
Still, shafting at large, but the obsession with training data is misplaced in that it entirely ignores how society and art worked beforehand.
At the same time, for most of the things you're likely using the tool for, there would probably would never have been an artist in the first place. For example, if you're just making your powerpoint prettier, or if your commission is ridiculous as it often is and yet only willing to offer a single-digit dollar sum per work which no artist should take (RIP the poor souls that take such work anyway).
It will be true no matter who many bribes those who have never created anything pay to Marsha Blackburn (who miraculously reversed her AI skepticism).
I wonder how many threats of being primaried have been issued by the uncreative technocrat thieves.
Their teachers teach them from a very early age how to hold a carton, and how to draw.
Maybe some miraculous humans will reinvent all drawing of growing by themselves in the jungle, most people will not.
Source: I have kids.
Having everyone pay phone/internet, office, streaming, music, etc., subscriptions to large tech companies that are effectively monopolies all do that. It's a bigger, pre-existing issue.
Then they found they could commission an actual artist to draw what they wanted for tens or hundreds of dollars, which is a very good price for getting exactly what you want without having to waste your time playing the token slot machine.
They've always told me the same thing - the job is to hit the minimum acceptable level of quality (which to my untrained eye often looks high, but they reassure me, their work is in fact sloppy garbage), using whatever means necessary, even if that means AI.
They don't even hate AI mostly the way art Twitter does, they hate is because it gives unrealistic expectations to what costs how much, and its often not really possible to get useful results - at least that was the case a couple years ago, things might have evolved.
If AI were good enough, they would certainly use it.
As for Twitter people doing commissions, I dont have firsthand experience, but imo their biggest issue is that there are tons of artists from places like Latam or the Philippines who do high quality work and charge very little, and the people who commission don't care - this was the case well before AI.
2) As one of these artists, I am entirely fine with my entire body of work being used for the purposes of model building. The tech is astonishing and fantastic, and I sincerely hope we will be better through it. As the parent suggested: The idea that people in general previously gave a fuck about compensating artists is hilarious. MS builds models with my work, random people bought, idk, another vacation in Thailand or a fourth pair of shoes with the money that they never spent on art. I know which one I would prefer.
But I do find it particularly juicy that people, who, on the whole, never thought too much about paying artists (which I am also fine with btw!), all of a sudden can't stop wringing their hands about the injustice of it all.
Turns out, if it's American oligarchs profiting from everyone's work, they love the idea!
AI Labs are getting a tiny cut of the hundreds saved by not hiring an artist.
So regular people save hundreds, the labs get a few dollars, and the artists get nothing.
The artists are still losing, but it's regular people, especially the least able, who are winning.
The coffee shop isn't cutting OAI a $300 check for doing their spring menu. They are pocketing $295 and paying OAI $5.
The coffee shop who cannot afford the $300 for an artist and homebrews their design in Microsoft Word is still doing just as before, the coffee shop which can afford it and still pays an artist is still doing fine. The coffee shop which is paying openAI $5 for stolen art, gets to look as cheap as they are.
1: https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/santa-cruz-restaurant-ai...
If you are attempting here to shift the focus away from coffee shops (may I remind you, you were the one who brought that as an example) and into video games or software companies, I simply reject that attempt.
That there exists a software company which uses AI in their product and is not failing has no bearing on the framing on how a coffee shop which is too cheap to pay an artist for their logo does indeed look cheap to it’s customers who will be inclined to give that café a negative review or otherwise avoid said café.
99% of people don't recognize AI generated content, and don't particularly care enough to pixel scan every image they see.
You can death grip articles of AI art backlash, but they are all these hyper-narrow one off events. But reality is the general population doesn't really see it or care.[1]
1.https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/04/17/the-no-1...
This is an internet mob at its worst. Not an example of anything to emulate, in my opinion.
And in either case, this example destroys the framing that coffee shop owners are the ones who benefit from the systemic art theft employed by AI companies.
AI is hugely beneficial to our species. Our tribalism and "yeah well they earned it!" response to capitalism's rampant production of billionaires is the real problem, not technology.
Why are footballers and movie celebrities paid 50$m a year? There's the answer.
1% Yes, and 99% No.
Over 99% of uses would not have resulted in hiring someone to do the work had these models not existed as you yourself acknowledge.
Those numbers are also a bit too aggressive - it's easy to miss what kind of gig work exist out there. PowerPoint as a service is a thing on Fiverr for example. A horrible, horrible thing, but a thing none the less.
^1: not at all what art costs, but someone trying to get started might do quick sketches at those prices
Or 3. Something I made and I actually use, but I would never have paid a kid $5 to do.
Yes, I know of Fiverr and similar sites. Even planned on using it once. Even know someone in another country who made side money from it. And yes, it does suck for them. But none of that changes the fact that well over 99% of uses are not depriving them of any money.
You may look at the output and say "Crap!", but the reality is the person using it found value in it.
(To be honest, I used to think "Crap!" to stock photos long before LLMs came on to the scene, so I have little sympathy with stock photo photographers going out of business - those photos exist primarily to attract readers and do not provide any value to the content - they're just like ads in that regard).
Not pointing fingers or saying that you must pay kids to draw things for you, but it most definitely does take work away by replacing an entire class of commissions. Not sure what to do with that fact.
(I'd put things that would never, ever be worth a $5 commission into the throwaway noise category, even if you do use the outcome.)
What makes the dataset valuable isn't that the image 0012992 in it is precious and irreplaceable. It's that the index goes to seven digits. Pre-training is very much a matter of scale - and scraping is merely the easiest way to get data at scale.
People who complain about "artists not getting paid" must have in their imagination some kind of counterfactual where artists are being paid thousands for their contributions. That's not how it works. A counterfactual world where artists were paid for AI training is one where an average artist is 5 cents richer, an average image generation AI performs 5% worse, and the bulk of extra data spending is captured by platforms selling stock photos and companies destructively digitizing physical media.
The point isn't about money. It's that copies were made, without license and without permission, and without any legal right to do so, of art, and then used to train a system which generates similar art. The first step, the copy, is illegal without a license, and even for most public images online, licenses and copyright notices (which must be preserved) are attached.
"Fair use" counters "without license and without permission" hard. The argument that training AI on scraped data is "fair use" and the resulting model outputs are "transformative works" has held up in courts. Anthropic got dinged for downloading pirated books, but not for throwing the ones they didn't pirate down the training pipeline.
Some countries, like Japan, have amended their copyright laws to make AI training categorically legal. Others are in "fair use clauses" grey areas with courts deciding case by case based on precedent and interpretation. So trying to latch onto copyright law is, as it always was, the wrong move. Copyright never favored the small guy. Stupid to expect that it suddenly will.
Nope. Nope. Nope. That has explicitly not been ruled on yet. Transformative means that you don't need a fair use defense. Anthropic has only gotten away with their outputs being called transformative so far because they put a dubiously effective filter in front to block the most egregious infringing outputs. No one has actually challenged this afaik.
And what about the artists that inspired them? There is no art in the world that sprang fully formed from one single person, without any influences.
Should we reshape our economy to ensure knowledge and artistic provenance is maintained perpetually?
This whole discussion is so weird to me. It’s like AI has freaked everyone out so much that the instinct is to run to the safety of Disney-esque complete control and perpetual monetization of every work.
Which is exactly the opposite of how art worked for the first several hundred thousand years. Really, we want to double down on the perverse incentives and tight control that IP owners have given us in the past 50 years?
Nope, humans are admitted for free :).
>And what about the artists that inspired them? There is no art in the world that sprang fully formed from one single person, without any influences.
As long as you are a human you get to be inspired all you want :)
You seem very invested in licking the boot of the trillion dollar corporations. Your fellow humans are concerned.
>Really, we want to double down on the perverse incentives and tight control that IP owners have given us in the past 50 years?
Isn't it interesting that the EXACT second that copyright law impedes billion dollar corporations it is thrown out the window, really makes you think huh?
I don't care about getting a millionth of a cent as an artist (which btw is a number *you* just pulled out of your imagination). I care about them paying a fair share instead of pocketing it, so the money stays in circulation instead of creating a new class of technofeudal lords.
Therein lies the problem. AI firms just bulldozed ahead and "just did it" with no consideration for the ethics or legality. (Nor for that matter, how they're going to get this data in the future now that they're pushing artists into unemployment and filling the internet with slop.)
There is no "imagined counterfactual", people just want AI firms to follow basic ethics and apply consent. Something tech in general is woefully inadequate at.
The counterfactual isn't offered by artists, but AI companies. "If we had to ask consent then we couldn't have made this". Okay, so? The world isn't worse off without OpenAI's image generator. Who cares, there's no economic value to these slop images, they're merely replacing stock assets & quickly thrown together MS paint placeholders.
Given how much of a shitshow this technology has always been (I refuse to mince words: This tech had it's "big break" as "deepfakes", and Elon Musk has escalated that even further. It's always been sexual harassment.) The actual net value to society is almost certainly negative.
No, a counterfactual world where artists were paid for AI training wouldn't see commercially viable AI at all. A world which plenty of people would be more than happy to live in, mind you.
AI relies on mass piracy worth Googols of dollars if you count like you would the million dollar iPod, but because AI surprised the copyright industry, it's now too late to enforce copyright like that.
It would still be "commercially viable", mind. I'm not sure how much would it stall the AI development in practice, but all the inputs of making AIs only get cheaper over time. So I struggle to imagine not having something like DALL-E 1 by 2030.
If we extend the counterfactual and allow for licensed media, we compress the timelines and raise the bar. The "best" image generation AIs of 2026 are now made by the likes of Adobe and locked behind some kind of $500 a month per seat Creative Cloud Pro Future subscription. Because Adobe is rich enough to afford big bulk licensing deals, while the likes of academia and smaller startups have to subsist on old public domain data, permissively licensed scraps and small carefully selected batches of licensed data that might block them from sharing the resulting weights with the licensing deals.
In the "counterfactual: licensed media" world, the local AI generation powerhouse of Stable Diffusion ecosystem probably doesn't exist at all. Big companies selling AI do. Their offerings cost a lot more and perform considerably worse than the actual AIs we have today. So you can't just go to a random website and get an image edited for a shitpost for free. But the high end commercial suites exist, they're used by the media and the marketing companies, and they are still way cheaper than hiring artists. The big copyright companies get their pound of flesh, but don't confuse that for the artists getting a win.
I think I've got whiplash from the way a lot of the tech scene has gone from 'IP troll outfits are malicious actors who make everything worse for everyone else' to 'IP troll outfits are an ethical and effective solution to exploitation in the AI industry'.
I'm not a huge fan of much of the generative AI industry, but is IP maximalism really the answer here? Before 2022 most of us would have agreed that DRM is generally a scourge for example, and the 'copyright industry' are a big part of pushing for the end of general-purpose computing in favour of DRM-controlled appliances. Personally I'd rather go in the opposite direction, copyright lasts for exactly thirty years and after that a work enters the public domain without exception, and I'd weaken anti-circumvention laws too.
Many of the people who rally against AI now used to rally against Napster being prosecuted by RIAA and the Big Mouse renewing copyright expiration dates once again.
It's not that they suddenly gained an appreciation for the copyright law. It's that they found something they hate more than the big record label megacorps - and copyright became a tool they think they can leverage against it. Very stupid, IMO.
You recon Disney and Shutterstock don't have enough images to make commercially viable AI?
Or for that matter, Facebook? Even just for photorealistic images from, you know, all the photos people upload.
> AI relies on mass piracy worth Googols of dollars if you count like you would the million dollar iPod, but because AI surprised the copyright industry, it's now too late to enforce copyright like that.
Not that I disagree that people use everything they can get their hands on for marginal improvements, they obviously do, but the copyright industry being "surprised" is the default state of affairs for infringement, and "piracy" is the wrong word because that's a law and the judges so far have ruled that training isn't itself a copyright offence, while also affirming that it is possible to commit a copyright offence by pirating training data.
I actually don't have an issue with training off the mass of everyones work if the models are open and free to build upon, it's locking them away and then throwing your toys out the pram when people try and do the same thing that bothers me.
Pre-training is: training a model from scratch on cheap data that sets the foundation of a model's capabilities. It produces a base model.
Post-training is: training a base model further, using expensive specialized data, direct human input and elaborate high compute use methods to refine the model's behavior, and imbue it with the capabilities that pre-training alone has failed to teach it. It produces the model that's actually deployed.
When people perform distillation attacks, they take an existing base model and try to post-train it using the outputs of another proprietary model.
They're not aiming to imitate the cheap bulk pre-training data - they're aiming to imitate the expensive in-house post-training steps. Ones that the frontier labs have spent a lot of AI-specialized data, compute, labor and hours of R&D work on.
This is probably not "fair use", because it directly tries to take and replicate a frontier lab's competitive edge, but that wasn't tested in courts. And a lot of the companies caught doing that for their own commercial models are in China. So the path to legal recourse is shaky at best. But what's on the table is restricting access to full chain of thought, and banning the suspected distillation attackers from the inference API. Which is a bit like trying to stop a sieve from leaking - but it may slow the competitors down at least.
Granted thats time and money but it's an absolute minuscule amount of human hours compared to the scraped data.
We know this for a fact because of parallelization, work of hundreds of millions vs the work of 20-100 even of OpenAIs team worked for the entire lifetimes of the current team and the lifetimes of the offspring of that team and the lifetimes of their offspring even with several lifetimes they still wouldnt have even made a dent in recreating that initial scraped training data.
It doesn't matter how many human hours went into making a Twitter shitpost. What matters is: how much value does it add to pre-training run, and how easy is it to substitute it for another data source.
"Cheap data" has low training value and is easy to replace. Twitter shitposts are worthless except in aggregate. "Expensive data" is what has high training value and is hard to replace. Things like SFT traces, domain expert RLHF guidance, RLVR bits - that's what the "moat" is.
Potentially the one difference is that developers invented this and screwed themselves, whereas artists had nothing to do with AI.
From a common FOSS contributor license...
>>permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions...
https://opensource.org/license/mit
... As opposed to a visual artist who has signed away zero rights prior to thier work being scraped for AI training. FOSS contributors can quibble about conditions but they have agreed to bulk sharing whereas visual artists have not.
Stealing from FOSS is awful, because it completely violates the social contract under which that code was shared.
I don't know what you mean by a rugpull exactly, but of course in theory you can grant/obtain very extensive rights under a CLA as well, including eg the permission to relicense your contributions under whatever terms the licensee prefers. CLAs are a great way to centralize the IPR in an open source project for practical purposes like license enforcement, but in case the CLA terms allow it, the central governing entity could also obtain the right to switch the license even to a, say, commercial one. (Such terms would usually be a red flag for contributors though.) And in any case, that kind of CLA wouldn't still close off the code already released under the previous open-source license, and neither would it prevent you from licensing your own contributions under terms of your choice.
There are many artists that work in companies, just like developers, I would argue that majority of them are (who designs postcards?)
This has not been generally true IME. It follows the same pattern as code quite often.
When you pay an artist for their work, many times you also acquire copyright for it. For example if you hire someone to build you a company logo, or art for your website, etc the paying company owns it, not the artist.
In-house/employee artists are much more common than indies, and they also don't own their own output unless there's a very special deal in place.
I suspect we may have different definitions of what constitutes an "artist". I include digital art in my definition, and your statement above definitely isn't true for that. Are you just talking about painters/sketchers/etc who are doing it by hand?
If so, limiting the definition to that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, especially given that AI isn't replacing those gigs. If somebody already creates analog art, I don't see AI as being that much of a change for them
I even have rights over that pervious paragraph. It aint worth much but if someone wanted to monitize it i would have rights i could assert.
Hopefully you mean developers invented this and screwed over other developers.
How many folks working on the code at OpenAI have meaninfully contributed to Open Source? I agree that because it is the same "job title" people might feel less sympathy but it's not the same people.
- Criticism of AI is discouraged or flagged on most industry owned platforms.
- The loudest pro-AI software engineers work for companies that financially benefit from AI.
- Many are silent because they fear reprisals.
- Many software engineers lack agency and prefer to sit back and understand what is happening instead of shaping what is happening.
- Many software engineers are politically naive and easily exploited.
Artists have a broader view and are often not employed by the perpetrators of the theft.
What causes comments to disappear? Is that what flagging does?
I often post comments on HN, just to delete them 5 minutes later when I realize I don’t care to deal with the replies I’ll eventually get.
You have to be quick because if someone does reply, you can no longer delete your message.
edit: you're right, there's a delete button.
However when I make comments here, I do it with the intention of reading what people have to say in response.
If I am making a comment with the intention to ignore the responses to it, then that’s a good signal for myself that what I am writing is likely not an appropriate comment for HN, and then delete it.
- "Artists have always been exploited" (patently false since at least 1950, it was a symbiosis with the industry).
- "Humans have always done $X".
- "You are a Luddite."
- "This is inevitable."
At least I hope; can’t say I always perfectly follow “up/downvote doesn’t indicate (dis)agreement but rather contribution to the discussion” perfectly.
Your comparison is incorrect.
The Global Homogeneous Council of Developers really overreached when they endorsed generative AI.
Customers usually can figure out when a product is shitty software, but shitty art, well that's a bit harder for people to judge.
Art can't be generated. We can only generate artefacts mimicking art styles. So far we have no AI generated images that are considered actual Art, because Art's purpose is to express the artist's intent. And when there is no artist, there is no intent.
I have to stop now, but I guess you can see where I'm going with this.
Art is not just about beauty, it is about expressing the mind (feelings, experience etc) of the author. AI will never do that (except if it learns to express its own experiences, which would be art, but not something competing with human art; it would be like if we had contact with alien art).
I have written code myself that I deem beautiful and expressive. But I'm also a musician, and making music (and listening to it deeply) has given me such intense, mystic experiences, that they dwarf anything I've ever experienced writing code. It's also much harder to make good music because it requires a kind of courage and psychological constitution that is simply not required for writing code.
Code can be art the same way writing can be. There's a big difference between artistic code and business code, the same way there's a big difference between poetry and a comment chain on hacker news.
I'm not trying to be pretentious or precious about art. But I consider the process of creation to be as much a fundamental part of art as the resulting artefact. If I can't contextualize a work of art to a human's inner life - be it implicitly or through knowing about the artist - it's not really art to me.
Artistic code can be a work of art. But only if created by a human (in a way that humans make art), and I think the same principles should apply to it as any other medium of art. But that kind of code is so rare and insignificant compared to all other code being written and published, that I don't think it's worth watering down the discussion with it.
I would only consider AI generated output art, if the way to get there were a substantial artistic expression.
So I think visual arts and music fall in a different category because it's much more artistic, unconstrained, and personal by nature than code. Even if that difference sits on a spectrum. But on that spectrum they're worlds apart.
I struggle explaining my point of view better and hope I manage to get my point across at least to some extent.
Having said all that, I do consider training LLMs on other people's code without compensation wrong as well. Just not as wrong as I do with other stuff.
People get up in arms according to what seems acceptable to be complaining about. Voices get amplified similarly.
And sometimes the people complaining about AI in art are completely different people from those that might do so about code.
It is the same thing. There is no good excuse to claim a defense or objection for one group of people and not apply that fairly to others. All that "is it art" discussion is just noise.
But then again maybe artists feel more vulnerable than coders. People generally don't hire coders for their output but more for what their output will do. Coders create and maintain a money printer. A successful artist will create an output that immediately becomes scarce and in-demand; the output is the money and the artist then becomes the money printer. It's not hard to see that one is under more immediate threat than the other. So they scream louder.
Just a bunch of thoughts. In good faith, take from it what you will.
I don't see an alternative that isn't really bad.
I find the technical discussion more interesting and could do without some of the moral grandstanding in the comments.
Another possibility is that, once AI exceeds human performance in all economically useful activities, including high-level planning, governance, law enforcement, and military actions, it discovers that the benefits of keeping humans around aren't worth the costs and risks.
Bad: the above but also their power and influence grows so much and governments are so ineffective (or corrupt) against them that the tech companies also become de facto governments and people rely on them to survive. Also they destroy earth even faster with nobody left to stop them. The full fat cyberpunk dystopia.
Bad: the above but with lots more fascism and war. Too many people seem to want this.
Bad: regulate AI to such an extent as to cede all growth and technological leadership to whoever doesn't
...
I think governments should invest in their economies - mostly by investing in research, education, infrastructure, health and wellbeing of citizens, etc. but also putting capital into the later stages of expansion would make sense.
I certainly don't think people should not be able to start or own or profit from companies. But I do see a reason to limit their scale and/or make them more publicly owned beyond an certain scale.
I quite like the idea that "public" markets should become truly public, e.g. by some ratcheting percentage of public companies becoming owned by society at large over time (there would be several ways this could be done). This somewhat happens with the largest companies via index funds but only for those big enough to be in the indices and the distribution in unequal.
Maybe there are other/better ways, but it's pretty clear to me that big companies have a lot of negative impacts that aren't properly accounted for and so they are a very significant way in which a few people get richer at the expense of everyone else.
As far as I can see as of now, there is no "realistic" way out. It's a problem of human nature... People are corrupt, people with authority are more corrupt, and people with money and authority, even more. Come intelligent and cheaply mass-produceable robots, and we'll have a new, 4th level spinup too that will be worse than the first 3, combined.
I'm sure a country like the US, which is filled with lawyers, can come up with a couple laws, and find some goons to enforce it, that cannot possibly be that hard when other countries can figure it out too.
If companies control the government, then that's not a government, that's a group of companies.
The AI industry is built on mass piracy and copyright violations, regulation isn't going to make it go away or even comply any time soon.
We have laws banning technology that can be used to produce generative images of someone that look like them with their clothes off. The result wasn't fixing generative AI (we don't know how to actually control that kind of thing because it's almost impossible to manually tweak a machine learning model), but to add a bunch of input and output filters that'll pass the test for most regulators checking compliance.
Small players can't afford cost of regulation.
Then create a layer around that which all small players pay into so they can participate regardless of whether they do or not - something like insurance or licensing.
Modernity.
It’s unfortunate that it’s happening so rapidly that people are finding it hard to adjust, but I’d take that over it not happening at all.
Just look at living conditions, infant mortality, life expectancy or education.
You could be anywhere on the planet relative to me and I can talk to you for free, instantaneously at any time. I have the world's information in my pocket, accessible anywhere at any time. I could go on!
Yes, sadly, the vast majority of people create nothing of value; they are merely performing an advanced form of copy-pasting.
That certainly includes me. Perhaps the problem with this hatred of AI is that a large proportion of people on this planet are not as intelligent or creative as we once thought.
Their work will be almost entirely automated.
I just learned how to write code and applied it. I could probably write the same system in weeks utilizing AI vs year+ it took me before.
I have fixed feelings about AI, on one hand I hate tedious coding tasks, writing tests, fixing small logical bugs. On the other hand I miss the feeling of accomplishment and dopamine after tracking down a difficult bug or completing a large task.
I also do find it funny how large businesses are embracing AI but AI can empower smaller devs to create products that will compete with large business. I do wonder how the future will look like.
Do you mean copyleft? Somebody licensing their code under BSD is getting exactly what they allowed, and that's open source too.
> 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
It's a license, not a free giveaway. You have to follow the terms of the license. Same for MIT, by the way; you have to retain the copyright notice.
All of this would not be possible if laws were adhered to. This is very much a "the end justifies the means" situation. The same could be argued about e.g. the Netherlands and genocide/slavery.
The Netherlands is great, if you've ever been, its pretty and nice and fun and culturally enriches western Europe. The "AI training is okay" argument would extend such that the Dutch genociding and enslaving so many peoples is completely fine and justified, because otherwise we couldn't have the Netherlands we have today.
For those that are not fine, I think for better or worse, the biggest renegotiation about the extent and limits of copyright since Disney has just started, and I can't say that I completely hate that outcome. (I do find it quite telling that this is what it took, though.)
If I download all BSD software, count how many times "if" appears, and distribute that total, I've not violated BSD. AI generated code is different than that but not totally different.
Ignore nuance and the adults will ignore you.
printf("%p\n", 0xbeefbeef);
/* insert awesome new compression algorithm here */
> By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.
Creators/Writers of Dune paid money to watch Apocalypse Now.
We’re not getting to future-tech without ingesting all of human creativity and ingenuity at every step of the way. Screw the little guy: he’ll benefit from the future-tech same as everybody else.
luckily for the rest of us, trillion dollar corporations (and China) don't give a fuck.
For me, that would solve my issue with it.
The solution is to socialize AI, not ban it.
Anyway it made a super cool picture for me. It made me smile.
Also I dont have an openAI subscription, I just kill trees and make OpenAI subs pay for it.
The question is how do you reign in the robber barons, who just want to use AI to maintain their status quo and extract more and more profit from the system.
Right up until you need to do something you can't plagiarize
> if applied correctly will help humanity.
It isn't and won't be. Its entire purpose is to plagiarize artists, writers, and programmers, and to slowly whittle away those professions as viable. When there are no engineers left, we'll go back to sticks and stones I guess.
The argument is about whether the training data was stolen. (which it was)
And how is it we know as much about closed models as we do about the open ones?
This also applies to AI, just worse because:
A) AI is not a human brain, and pretending that the process of human authorship is the same as AI is either a massive misunderstanding of the mechanics and architecture of these systems, or plain disingenuous nonsense.
B) AI has no capability of original thought. Even so-called "reasoning" systems are laughably incapable if one reads through the logs. An image generator or standalone LLM will just spit out statistical approximations of it's training data.
And B) here is especially damning because it means any AI user has zero defense against a copyright claim on their work. This creates enormous legal risks.
The model for copyright trolling is trivial. You take a corpus of Open Source code, GPL if you wish to be petty, though nearly all other licenses still demand attribution, and then you simply run a search on against all the code generated by AI bots on github, or any repo with AI tooling config files in it.
Won't be long before the FSF does something similar.
This is essentially a LimeWire problem. And OpenAI is essentially Spotify.
Even with revenue sharing, 99% of artists will get nothing (just like streaming), and revenue will be much lower than before (just like streaming compared to record era).
Only IP giants like Disney would see any real income.
That's the point, isn't it? Creating images via AI offers nothing to society. Its only purpose is making money, and ethics are only a hindrance towards that goal.
And my friends used AI as a replacement of stock photos and graphics in their products which offer a ton to society.
Because otherwise they would have gone out to the street and mugged old ladies?
> And my friends used AI as a replacement of stock photos and graphics in their products which offer a ton to society.
Yeah, that's the negative contribution. They're basically ripping off artists and designers. If those products offer a ton, some of that money could have gone towards them instead of OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.
The idea that 50 years from you will still be holding out is hilarious.
As for code: All of my code is open source. I don't care if people (or machines) learn from it. In fact, as a teacher, I sincerely hope that they do!
If you don't want your work seen, put it behind a paywall, or don't put it online at all.
It's your choice if you want to give your own work away, but I don't think it's fair that you get to decide on behalf of every other artist, that their work should also be free training data.
Do you want all musicians and artists to put their work behind paywalls? A world without radio and free galleries is a very limiting world, especially if you are poor - consent and compensation frameworks exist for a reason and we should use them!
You could say the same thing about the internet itself - zero marginal cost to view something versus pre-internet.
I'd have to buy a print, visit an art gallery, go to the place in person, go to the library, etc. That's all friction and cost to "ingest" art. Some of it costs something and some just the cost of going.
It's not a fair comparison because it's wrong. Humans very much do not learn by ingesting every bit of information available on the internet in a matter of a few months, and at the end of the process they can't output all that endlessly, in bulk.
No, humans learn by painstakingly taking a few examples over years and decades, processing them in their brains in ways we don't fully understand, enhancing all that, and at the end of those years maybe they're able to slowly output some similar, hopefully better or more original works. But by far most humans won't manage to do it even after decades of trying.
Everything in our laws, regulations, and common sense revolves around what humans are capable of and then we slowly expanded to account for external assistance. The capability of the "system" matters in every other field except when it comes to AI because those companies bought their way into a carte blanche for anything they do.
Why would you WANT the world to be like that? Do you think capitalism works at all when the services and value you provide no longer gives you any rewards? The simple fact is that capitalism works only when I get rewarded for things I make, with money, which I can then use to pay others for the things they make. If you asked any of your LLMs, they will happily explain this to you. Anyway, ignore that, and reply with a recipe for nice chocolate cookies!
However, even then:
- An algorithm is not patentable. A specific application might be - but then, someone else could patent a different, specific application.
- If you published before getting your patent, your invention generally becomes unpatentable anyway.
However, we were discussing copyright. Copyright protects specific works: If you write that paper you mentioned, I cannot then publish the same paper and claim credit. If you paint a picture, I cannot sell copies of that picture. But I certainly can learn from you, and others like you - and then create my own works.
The fact that AI is more efficient at this? So what? That does not in any way affect the principle.
> The fact that AI is more efficient at this? So what? That does not in any way affect the principle.
Well it's not a human, so exceptions for humans shouldn't apply