frog 🐸 @ frog @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Definitely appreciate you posting this! And it's legit an incredible photo too. I don't think I've ever seen a dragonfly land on someone before. Thank you for sharing! 😍

Very well said! Creativity is definitely a skill that requires work, and for which there are no short cuts. It seems to me that the vast majority of people using AI for artwork are just looking for a short cut, so they can get the results without having to work hard and practice. The one valid exception is when it's used by disabled people who have physical limitations on what they can do, which is a point that's brought up occasionally - and if that was the one and only use-case for these models, I think a lot of artists would actually be fine with that.

Personally I think the claim that the entire contents of ArtStation will lead to working technology that fixes climate change is the bolder claim - and if there was any merit to it, there would be some evidence for it that the corporations who want copyright to be disapplied to artists would be able to produce. And if we're saying that getting rid of copyright protections will save the planet, then perhaps Disney should give up theirs as well. Because that's the reality here: we're expecting humans to be obliterated by AI but are not expecting the rich and powerful to make any sacrifices at all. And art is part of who we are as a species, and has been for hundreds of thousands of years. Replacing artists with AI because somehow that will fix climate change is not only a massive stretch, but what would we even be saving humanity for at that point? So that everybody can slave away in insecure, meaningless work so the few can hoard everything for themselves? Because the Star Trek utopia where AI does all the work and humans can pursue self-enrichment is not an option on the table. The tech bros just want you to think it is.

Average humans, sure, don't have a lot of understanding and insight, and little is needed to be able to draw a doodle on some paper. But trained artists have a lot of it, because part of the process is learning to interpret artworks and work out why the artist used a particular composition or colour or object. To create really great art, you do actually need a lot of understanding and insight, because everything in your work will have been put there deliberately, not just to fill up space.

An AI doesn't know why it's put an apple on the table rather than an orange, it just does it because human artists have done it - it doesn't know what apples mean on a semiotic level to the human artist or the humans that look at the painting. But humans do understand what apples represent - they may not pick up on it consciously, but somewhere in the backs of their minds, they'll see an apple in a painting and it'll make the painting mean something different than if the fruit had been an orange.

OpenAI are not going to make the source code for their model accessible to all to learn from. This is 100% about profiting from it themselves. And using copyrighted data to create open source models would seem to violate the very principles the open source community stands for - namely that everybody contributes what they agree to, and everything is published under a licence. If the basis of an open source model is a vast quantity of training data from a vast quantity of extremely pissed off artists, at least some of the people working on that model are going to have a "are we the baddies?" moment.

The AI models are also never going to produce a solution to climate change that humans will accept. We already know what the solution is, but nobody wants to hear it, and expecting anyone to listen to ChatGPT and suddenly change their minds about using fossil fuels is ludicrous. And an AI that is trained specifically on knowledge about the climate and technologies that can improve it, with the purpose of innovating some hypothetical technology that will fix everything without humans changing any of their behaviour, categorically does not need the entire contents of ArtStation in its training data. AIs that are trained to do specific tasks, like the ones trained to identify new antibiotics, are trained on a very limited set of data, most of which is not protected by copyright and any that is can be easily licenced because the quantity is so small - and you don't see anybody complaining about those models!

Either you're vastly overestimating the degree of understanding and insight AIs possess, or you're vastly underestimating your own capabilities. :)

When you think about it, all companies would make so much more money if they didn't have to pay their staff, or pay for materials they use! This whole economy and capitalism business, which relies on money being exchanged for goods and services, is clearly holding back profits. Clearly the solution here is obvious: everybody should embrace OpenAI's methods and simply grab whatever they want without paying for it. Profit for everyone!

I'm increasingly convinced of that myself, yeah (although I'd favour 15 or 20 years personally, just because they're neater numbers than 14). The original purpose of copyright was to promote innovation by ensuring a creator gets a good length of time in which to benefit from their creation, which a 14-20 year term achieves. Both extremes - a complete lack of copyright and the exceedingly long terms we have now - suppress innovation.

If we're going by the number of pixels being viewed, then you have to use the same measure for both humans and AIs - and because AIs have to look at billions of images while humans do not, the AI still requires far more pixels than a human does.

And humans don't require the most modern art in order to learn to draw at all. Sure, if they want to compete with modern artists, they would need to look at modern artists (for which educational fair use exists, and again the quantity of art being used by the human for this purpose is massively lower than what an AI uses - a human does not need to consume billions of artworks from modern artists in order to learn what the current trends are). But a human could learn to draw, paint, sculpt, etc purely by only looking at public domain and creative commons works, because the process for drawing, say, the human figure (with the right number of fingers!) has not changed in hundreds of years. A human can also just... go outside and draw things they see themselves, because the sky above them and the tree across the street aren't copyrighted. And in fact, I'd argue that a good artist should go out and find real things to draw.

OpenAI's argument is literally that their AI cannot learn without using copyrighted materials in vast quantities - too vast for them to simply compensate all the creators. So it genuinely is not comparable to a human, because humans can, in fact, learn without using copyrighted material. If OpenAI's argument is actually that their AI can't compete commercially with modern art without using copyrighted works, then they should be honest about that - but then they'd be showing their hand, wouldn't they?

Yep! I switched to Notepad++ almost 15 years ago, and have never regretted it. It's one of very, very few softwares that I've never had any complaints about, not even any mild "that's kind of annoying" moments. Although apparently I've been missing out on a digital fidget spinner. :D

Microsoft has been greatly improving Notepad on Windows 11 in recent years, adding a dark mode, tabs, character count, features like autosave and automatic restoration of tabs, and even a virtual fidget spinner.

Apart from the fidget spinner, Notepad++ has all these features, but without all of Microsoft's creepy baggage. :)

Although I am now wondering if I could get a fidget spinner addon for it...

Yep, looks really suspect. Even if it's true that they forgot to get someone to record the lines, it does seem implausible that they couldn't source any voice actor (or even someone on their own staff) to record the dialogue and get it added to the game, even at short notice.

Perhaps a fair compromise would be doing away with copyright in its entirety, from the tiny artists trying to protect their artwork all the way up to Disney, no exceptions. Basically, either every creator has to be protected, or none of them should be.

I definitely do not have the optimism that in 20 years time we'll all be leisurely artists. That would require that the tech bros who create the AIs that displace humans are then sufficiently taxed to pay UBI for all the humans that no longer have jobs - and I don't see that happening as long as they're able to convince governments not to tax, regulate, or control them, because doing so will make it impossible for them to save the planet from climate change, even as their servers burn through more electricity (and thus resources) than entire countries. Tech bros aren't going to save us, and the only reason they claim they will is so they never face any consequences of their behaviour. I don't trust Sam Altman, or any of his ilk, any further than I can throw them.

"28 Days Later" is one of my favourite films of all time. Not because of the zombies, which are not really my thing, but because it was brilliantly and intelligently written. In many ways it wasn't really about the zombies at all - they were just props for telling a very human story. I wasn't convinced of a need for a sequel when "28 Weeks Later" was released, and I still feel that way now.

That said, since "28 Years Later" is coming from the team that created the original (whereas "28 Weeks Later" was written and directed by different people), I'm willing to keep an open mind.

It seems that most of the people who think what humans and AIs do is the same thing are not actually creatives themselves. Their level of understanding of what it takes to draw goes no further than "well anyone can draw, children do it all the time". They have the same respect for writing, of course, equating the ability to string words together to write an email, with the process it takes to write a brilliant novel or script. They don't get it, and to an extent, that's fine - not everybody needs to understand everything. But they should at least have the decency to listen to the people that do get it.

My understanding of the open source community is that taking copyrighted content from people who haven't willingly signed onto the project would kind of undermine the principles of the movement. I would never feel comfortable using open source software if I had knowledge that part or all of it came from people who hadn't actively chosen to contribute to it.

I have seen a couple of things recently about AI models that were trained exclusively on public domain and creative commons content which apparently are producing viable content, though. The open source community could definitely use a model like that, and develop it further with more content that was ethically obtained. In the long run, there may be artists that willingly contribute to it, especially those who use open source software themselves (eg GIMP, Blender, etc). Paying it forward, kind of thing.

The problem right now is that artists have no reason to be generous with an open source alternative to AIs, when their rights have already been stomped on and certain people in the open source community are basically saying "if we can't steal from artists too, then we can't compete with the corporations." So there's literally a trust issue between the creative and tech industries that would need to be resolved before any artists would consider offering art to an open source AI.

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

What people always seem to miss is that a human doesn't need billions of examples to be able to produce something that's kind of "eh, close enough". Artists don't look at billions of paintings. They look at a few, but do so deeply, absorbing not just the most likely distribution of brushstrokes, but why the painting looks the way it does. For a basis of comparison, I did an art and design course last year and looked at about 300 artworks in total (course requirement was 50-100). The research component on my design-related degree course is one page a week per module (so basically one example from the field the module is about, plus some analysis). The real bulk of the work humans do isn't looking at billions of examples: it's looking at a few, and then practicing the skill and developing a process that allows them to convey the thing they're trying to express.

If the AI models were really doing exactly the same thing humans do, the models could be trained without any copyright infringement at all, because all of the public domain and creative commons content, plus maybe licencing a little more, would be more than enough.

I feel like the level of mass education about the lack of free will required to make sure all judges and juries understand that murderers have no free will, would probably end up educating a lot of people with violent tendencies that they have no free will too - and if free will does exist, they now have an excuse not to even try to control themselves. Which the article did note has been observed in other studies.

Obviously I can't speak for all countries, but in mine, an artist and a programmer with the same years of experience working for the same company will not be getting the same salary, despite the fact that neither could do the other's job. One of those salaries will be slightly above minimum wage (which is currently lower than the wage needed to cover the cost of living), and the other will be around double the national average wage. So there are in fact artists using food banks right now, and it's not because the creatives aren't working as hard as the tech professionals. One is simply valued higher than the other.