Even_Adder @ Even_Adder @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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825

Joined

2 yr. ago

You don't have to lie about authorship. You should read the guidance.

You can still copyright AI works, you just can't name an AI as the author.

Here's another good one: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0

My issue with MidJourney, for example, wouldn’t be an issue if the concern over taking business away from artists was made moot. You say that a professional career can’t be reduced down to a style, but then what is MidJourney doing and what is the difference? Because 4,000 of the 5,000 “style” prompts that you can input into MidJourney are artists’ names, and that list is growing apparently according to the Discord logs - somebody mentioned having a list of 15,000 new artists’ names to add to the prompts after they scrape their art. You can say “make me an impressionist landscape,” but you can also say “make me a landscape by Sara Winters.” Would having MidJourney make you paintings by a specific artist and then selling them be okay? Is that just a style or is it copyright infringement? Because I can easily see the case where that could be considered damaging to Sara’s (in this example) “market” as a professional, even if you aren’t selling the paintings you make. Because MidJourney is explicitly providing the tools to create work that mimics her art with the intent of cutting her out of the equation. At that point, have we crossed the line into forgery?

You should read the article I linked earlier. There's no problem as long as you're not using their name to sell your works. Styles belong to everyone, no one person can lay claim to them.

Specific expressions deserve protection, but wanting to limit others from expressing the same ideas differently is both is selfish and harmful, especially when they aren't directly copying or undermining your work.

We unfortunately live in a capitalist society and we have to keep that in mind. People need to market their skills as a job in order to afford the essentials to live. Beyond a certain point, the time investment in something demands that you make money doing it. AI as a tool has the capability to be absolutely monumentally helpful, we could even see a fundamental paradigm shift in how we think of the act of creativity. But it also has the possibility to be monstrously harmful, as we’ve already seen with faked nudes of underage teens and false endorsements for products and political campaigns. Somebody tried to threaten an artist by claiming they had the copyright to a picture the artist was working on on Twitch after they took a screenshot of it and supposedly ran it through some sort of image generator. There was even a DA who somebody tried to scam using an AI generated copy of his son’s voice claiming that he was in prison. Letting it be unregulated is incredibly risky, and that goes for corporate AI uses as well. We need to be able to protect us from them as much as we need to be able to protect ourselves from bad actors. And part of that is saying what is and what isn’t an acceptable use of AI and the data that goes into training it. Otherwise, people are going to use stuff like Nightshade to attempt to protect their livelihoods from a threat that may or may not be imagined.

We already have countless laws for the misuse of computer systems, and they adequately cover these cases. I'm confident we'll be able to deal with all of that and reap the benefits.

Open-source AI development offers critical solutions. By making AI accessible, we maximize public participation and understanding, foster responsible development, and prevent harmful control attempts. Their AI will never work for us, and look at just who is trying their hand at regulatory capture. I believe John Carmack put it best.

I see.

You do realize that you basically just confirmed every fear that artists have over AI, right? That they have no rights or protections to prevent anybody from coming along and using their work to train an LLM to create imitation works for cheaper than they can possibly charge for their work, thereby putting them out of business? Because in the end, a professional in any field is nothing more than the sum of the knowledge and experience they’ve accrued over their career; a “style” as you and MidJourney put it. And so long as somebody isn’t basically copy+pasting a piece, then it’s not violating copyright, because it’s not potentially harming the market for the original piece, even if it is potentially harming the market for the creator of said piece.

A professional career can't be reduced down to a style. There's a lot more that goes into art than styles.

The Dolphin analogy is also incorrect (though an interesting choice considering they got pulled from the Steam store after the threat of legal action by Nintendo, but I think you and I feel the same way on that issue - Dolphin has done nothing wrong). A better analogy would be if Unreal created an RPGMaker style tool for generating an entire game of any genre you want in Unreal Engine at the push of a button by averaging a multitude of games across different genres to generate the script. If they didn’t get permission to use said games, either by paying a one time fee, an ongoing fee, or using games that expressly give permission for said use, I’m sure the developers/publishers would be rather unhappy with Unreal. Could it be incredibly beneficial and vastly improve the process of creating games for the industry? Absolutely. If they released it for free, could it be used by anybody and everybody to make imitation Ubisoft games, or any other developer, and run the risk of strangling the industry with even more trash games with no soul in them? Also absolutely. And a big AAA publisher has a lot more ability to deal with knock-offs/competition like that than your average starving artist. The indie game scene is the strongest it’s ever been thanks to the rise of digital storefronts, but how many great indie game developers go under after producing their first game and never make a second? The vast majority. Because indie games almost never make a profit, meaning they can’t afford to make another.

Profit shouldn't be the sole motivator for creative endeavors. If a tool like the one you describe existed, we wouldn't need to have to "afford" to make things. We could have more collaborative projects like SCP, but with more fleshed out rich detail. I certainly don't spend my time lamenting the fact that I can't monetize every one of my comments and posts.

I used to work at a fish market with a kid who was a trained electrician who was set to follow in the footsteps of his dad who had been one of the highest paid electricians in the US, except he gave up on it because the thing he liked doing the most in the field was replaced with a machine by the time he graduated from technical school. Obviously the machine is more efficient (and probably safer), but instead of entering the field at all, he ended up working a job he hated and to this day has never found a job he has any passion for. What happens to art when professional artists are only NEETs, who have minimal living expenses, and those hired by corporations and the wealthy? Are we going to get the fine art market on steroids, with the masses only having access to AI generated art that will degrade in quality over time as the only new inputs are previous AI generated pieces, unless there’s enough hobby artists to provide sufficient new art, while the wealthy hold a monopoly on human-made art that the rest of us will probably never see?

Your problem is with Capitalism. Your friend is a victim of the capitalist logic of prioritizing cost-cutting over human well-being. The question of what happens to art under capitalism is also a valid one, as capitalism tends to reduce everything into a product that can be bought and sold, but I think the potential outcomes for art are less predetermined than you make them seem. As long as we keep encouraging and nurturing diverse voices, I think we can come out winners.

This is all pure speculation, but it’s the Jurassic Park question: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

I don't think it's wrong to give people a free tool to expand their ability to communicate and collaborate.

Yes, an-caps lol famous for standing up for small time by commission digital artists trying to avoid exploitation of their creations. Totally yup you got me. All my criticism of corporations and pointing how AI art specifically benefits corporations at the detriment of actual human beings is very ancap of me.

You ignore the consequences of the kind of unregulated capitalism ownership of ideas would bring, and favor the interests of the privileged and the selfish.

Your whole bit about a new owner class is just, so far out there I don’t even know what you’re on. I don’t have time to try and work through the justifications for why you think that you’re entitled to make a mimic program for other peoples stuff. Not just to do it, but to claim that it makes you an artist.

I've already explained it multiple times, after you supposedly read the article I linked that explains it too, and I never claimed to be an artist.

Sorry but nah you’re in the minority here. In this specific community in this specific space your voice is overrepresented. I’ve never met another person who agrees that our prototypical Charlotte and others like her are demonic overlords of the new ruling class who are seeking to subvert creativity and lock it in their hands. God, most of the artists I know willingly train others and a lot of them make content to train others. Now you’re essentially complaining that you can’t draw lmao like it’s just ridiculous. I can’t draw either, that’s fine I don’t want to put in the work to be able to create real visual art. I can live with that. I wouldn’t use an ethically sourced AI image generator anyway, as it’s literally an elaborate RNG function with a mimicry algorithm attached to it. It has no meaning and is empty.

What Charlotte wants is detrimental to everyone else and herself. No one should own ideas.

Like typing “a cool painting” into bing image generator, which then tries its best to copy other real paintings made by real people, makes you an artist somehow. It doesn’t. And you’re not going to convince me of that, of all people. Let alone the majority of society who definitely do not agree that that makes you an artist, or that it makes it right to scrape images from artists like that.

Never mentioned wanting to be an artist. You're either projecting on to me or just plain putting words in my mouth. I also don't use Bing Image creator.

Also the bit about me deeming people to have talent is just stupid. I’m not judging their artistic ability, I’m saying they’re literally not making art they’re not showcasing any artistic ability whether I think it’s good or not.

This is just more snobbery. People don't need to conform to your standards of artistic ability to make art.

‘Charlotte’ draws for people. She’s good at it, and it’s her livelihood. People like her are hurting literally no one by drawing things. She enriches the lives of all the people who enjoy her work. She should have a choice in whether or not her works are used to make image generators. That’s it. It’s not complicated. You shouldn’t get to decide this for her, she never posted her images to the internet with the knowledge that someone would use them to figuratively build a machine with the expressive purpose of rendering what she does useless (even if it’s very bad at doing so).

AI art stands against everything that every artist had ever taught me. It’s spit on the face of art as a concept. It’s art devoid of creation. Art made out of very long, very complicated algorithms weighing weights adjusted by billions of pictures passed through it. It’s no more expressive or inspirational than an RNG function attached to a midi keyboard. It’s mimicry, mimicry that really only stands to benefit corporations. I’m not about it.

Most of this is personal opinion and snobbery that I can't do much about except maybe ask that you examine how anarcho-capitalist your takes sound. Saying generative art will render what she does useless is like saying you quit singing in the shower because autotune exists. I just can't follow that logic. Art is something you do for you, to enjoy making any way you know how.

I also feel like you're ignoring the hundreds of open source models already available to everyone to use for free. Real tangible benefit that is being enjoyed by the everyman right now. I see others benefit every day and benefit from it myself. To say it really only stands to benefit corporations is a flat out lie. A tool that helps us better communicate, inspire, create, and connect with each other in ways they may not have been able to before is not a bad thing.

AI in pretty well any other case? I’m on board. Let’s automate human labor, all the things that we are forced to do for work. No more physical labor, no more 9 to 5, no more retail or fast food or corporate jobs. Do away with it all. I’m totally with you there. Doing away with human art? I mean, I’ve got no interest in that. If you like staring at what amounts essentially to nothing, then be my guest. I’m very open minded with art in general, totally down with avant guarde pieces, performance art, noise music, all the stuff at the fringe that offends the delicate sensibilities of those who seek to gatekeep what is or isn’t genuine human expression.

I mean, this part is pretty hyperbolic and pretty insulting, but thanks. No one is trying to do away with human art. It took us 100,000 years to get from cave drawings to Leonard Da Vinci. This is just another step for artists, like Camera Obscura was in the past. It's important to remember that early man was as smart as we are, they just lacked the interconnectivity and tools that we have.

Pretty big difference there is all those things are made by people. People with talent. Artists. We are enjoy the fruits of their labor. Their rights should be respected. They should have a say in whether specifically AI is allowed to copy their works.

Anyone copying their works should be sued for infringement, but that's not what's happening here. People are trying to take another piece of the public's increasingly limited rights and access to information. To fashion themselves as a new insidious owner class, owners of ideas. Even people you deem to not have talent have rights, and their rights aren't any less important. You can't now take those opportunities from them because it's their turn now.

Art is about bringing your ideas into the world, anything beyond that is fetish. Needing to be born talented or spending hundreds of hours to learn a skill is not art, that's work. If part of the work is how laborious was to make, that's fine, but if it's not, there's nothing wrong with that.

Those are corporations. I’m concerned about how this impacts individuals. Small artists on social media, who make a living off small commissions. I think it is morally and ethically wrong to steal from them.

I have always been focused on impacts to individuals. Let me make my self clear. It is wrong for IP-holders, be they corporations or independent artists, to have the power to control speech to the degree you're suggesting. Calling this stealing is self-serving, manipulative rhetoric that unjustly vilifies people and misrepresents the reality of how these models work and how the rights we have work.

I also strongly dislike the way you are portraying artists as a monolith. There are some artists who would be willing to submit their art to make an image generation model. You’re essentially complaining that not enough people would say yes in your opinion. As though there aren’t hundreds of millions of public domain paintings drawings music and all sorts of things that can already be used without screwing over Charlotte and her small time Instagram art dig she affords her 1 bedroom apartment with. You’re refusing to even ask her if she’s okay with her creations being used in this way.

Then let's amend my statements and limit them to only the loud, belligerent minority online. I know most artists don't care, I've seen it myself. I apologize for that. And I am saying not enough people would say yes to that option. Self-interest is a powerful force, without agreements by people ahead of time, some would absolutely degrade the experience of those around by initiating a race to the bottom to take more for themselves. That's why it isn't Charlotte's place to police what others talk about, this is something we've learned over hundreds of years. She is afforded a part of speech to protect her specific expressions, to ask for more than that, to want to encroach on people who aren't infringing on her piece of the pie is greedy and malicious. Even if the ramifications of her actions aren't apparent to her, especially if the ramifications aren't apart to her.

Styles are equivalent to ideas and Ideas are the property of nobody, this is a requirement because everyone in existence has derived their work from the work of others. Art isn't a product, it is expression, it is speech, it is inspiration, it is joy, it is what all humans are entitled to do. This is my first time seeing so many seriously considering cordoning off such a huge part of the human experience for the profit of a few, and it is concerning.

I believe that generative art, warts and all, is a vital new form of art that is shaking things up, challenging preconceptions, and getting people angry - just like art should.

I actually did read it, that’s why I specifically called out MidJourney here, as they’re one I have specific problems with. MidJourney is currently caught up in a lawsuit partly because the devs were caught talking about how they launder artists’ works through a dataset to then create prompts specifically for reproducing art that appears to be made by a specific artist of your choosing. You enter an artist’s name as part of the generating parameters and you get a piece trained on their art. Essentially using LLM to run an art-tracing scheme while skirting copyright violations.

I'm pretty sure that's all part of the discovery from the same case where Midjourney is named as a defendant along with Stability AI, it isn't its own distinct case. It's also not illegal or improper to do what they are doing. They aren't skirting copyright law, it is a feature explicitly allowed by it so that you can communicate without the fear of reprisals. Styles are not something protected by copyright, nor should they be.

I wanna make it clear that I’m not on the “AI evilllll!!!1!!” train. My stance is specifically about ethical sourcing for AI datasets. In short, I believe that AI specifically should have an opt-in requirement rather than an opt-out requirement or no choice at all. Essentially creative commons licensing for works used in data sets, to ensure that artists are duly compensated for their works being used. This would allow artists to license out their portfolios for use with a fee or make them openly available for use, however they see fit, while still ensuring that they still have the ability to protect their job as an artist from stuff like what MidJourney is doing.

You can't extract compensation from someone doing their own independent analysis for the aim of making non-infringing novel works, and you don't need licenses or permission to exercise your rights. Singling out AI in this regard doesn't make sense because it isn't a special system in that regard. That would be like saying dolphin developers have to pay Nintendo every time someone downloads their emulator.

Something being derivative doesn't mean it's automatically illegal or improper.

First, copyright law doesn’t prevent you from making factual observations about a work or copying the facts embodied in a work (this is called the “idea/expression distinction”). Rather, copyright forbids you from copying the work’s creative expression in a way that could substitute for the original, and from making “derivative works” when those works copy too much creative expression from the original.

Second, even if a person makes a copy or a derivative work, the use is not infringing if it is a “fair use.” Whether a use is fair depends on a number of factors, including the purpose of the use, the nature of the original work, how much is used, and potential harm to the market for the original work.

Even if a court concludes that a model is a derivative work under copyright law, creating the model is likely a lawful fair use. Fair use protects reverse engineering, indexing for search engines, and other forms of analysis that create new knowledge about works or bodies of works. Here, the fact that the model is used to create new works weighs in favor of fair use as does the fact that the model consists of original analysis of the training images in comparison with one another.

You are expressly allowed to mimic others' works as long as you don't substantially reproduce their work. That's a big part of why art can exist in the first place. You should check out that article I linked.

Ben Zhao, the University of Chicago professor behind this stole GPLv3 code for his last data poisoning scheme. GPLv3 is a copyleft license that requires you share your source code and license your project under the same terms as the code you used. You also can’t distribute your project as a binary-only or proprietary software. When pressed, they only released the code for their front end, remaining in violation of the terms of the GPLv3 license.

Nightshade also only works against open source models, because the only models with open models are Stable Diffusion's, companies like Midjourney and OpenAI with closed source models aren't affected by this. Attacking a tool that the public can inspect, collaborate on, and offer free of cost isn’t something that should be celebrated.

I read that. That's what I've been responding to the whole time. This is a way to analyze and reverse engineer images so you can make your own original works. In the US, the first major case that established reverse engineering as fair use was Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc in 1992, and then affirmed in Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation in 2000. Do you think SONY or SEGA would have allowed anyone to reverse engineer their stuff if they asked nice? Artists have already said they would deny anyone.

It's not about the data, people having a way to make quality art themselves is an attack on their status, and when asked about generators that didn't use their art, they came out overwhelmingly against with the same condescending and reductive takes they've been using this whole time.

How're we supposed to have things like reviews, research findings, reverse engineering, or indexes if you have to ask first? The scams you could pull if you could attack anyone caught reviewing you. These rights exist to protect us from the monopolies on expression that would increase disparities and divisions, manipulate discourse, and in the end, fundamentally alter how we interact online with each other for the worse.

You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. The EFF is a digital rights group who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.

There's nothing wrong with being able to use others' copyrighted material without permission though. For analysis, criticism, research, satire, parody and artistic expression like literature, art, and music. In the US, fair use balances the interests of copyright holders with the public’s right to access and use information. There are rights people can maintain over their work, and the rights they do not maintain have always been to the benefit of self-expression and discussion.

It would be awful for everyone if IP holders could take down any review, finding, reverse engineering, or indexes they didn’t like. That would be the dream of every corporation, bully, troll, or wannabe autocrat. It really shouldn’t be legislated.

It looks like a run-of-the-mill Stable Diffusion model. Here's a guide to setting it up if you have the hardware for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycQJDJ-qNI8

We passed that point at inception. Its always been more efficient for Microsoft to do its training at a 10,000 Petaflop giga-plant in Iowa than for me to run Stable Diffusion on my home computer.

You don't need industrial level efficiency or insane overhead costs, that's why it's a big deal. It's something regular people can do at home.

Already have that. It’s called a $5 art kit from Michael’s.

An art set from Michaels can only do so much. Having access to the most cutting edge tools and techniques has always propelled artists and art forward. Imagine not having access to digital art tools, computer animation, digital photography, digital sculpting, and interactive media tools to expand artistic expression, and allow for the creation of new forms, styles, and genres of art that weren't possible before?

Copyright/IP serves to separate the creator of a work from its future generative profits.

But all this ultimately happens within the context of the market itself. The legal and financial mechanics of the system are designed to profit publishers and distributors at the expense of creatives. That’s always been true and the latest permutation in how creatives get fucked is merely a variation on a theme.

Fighting their fight for them won't help in the end, don't make it easier for them.

AI Art does this whether or not its illegal, because it exists to undercut human creators of content by threatening them with an inferior-but-vastly-cheaper alternative.

It isn't necessarily a competitor or a threat, the tools are open source and free for all artists to use to enhance their creative process, explore new possibilities, and imagine novel outcomes. You can use it to help you reach new audiences, and discover new forms of expression. It's not a zero-sum game like you suggest.

The dynamic you’re describing has nothing to do with AI’s legality and everything to do with Disney’s ability to operate as monopsony buyer of bulk artistic product. The only way around this is to break Disney up as a singular mass-buyer of artwork, and turn the component parts of the business over to the artists (and other employees of the firm) as an enterprise that answers to and profits the people generating the valuable media rather than some cartel of third-party shareholders.

That would still leave the baby-disneys with way more money than your average Joe, solving nothing. Training models isn't so expansive that they wouldn't enough have the money to train their own, that cost is only prohibitive to the working man.

They're playing both sides. Who do you think wins when model training becomes prohibitively expensive to for regular people? Mega corporations already own datasets, and have the money to buy more. And that's before they make users sign predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us.

Regular people, who could have had access to a competitive, corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility, would instead be left worse off and with less than where we started.

You should check out this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. The EFF is a digital rights group who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone. It should help clear some things up for you.