You are allowed to use copyrighted content for training. I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven’t already. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
The comparision doesn’t work. Because the AI is replacing the pencil or other drawing tool. And we aren’t saying pencil companies are selling you Mario pics because you can draw a Mario picture with a pencil either. Just because the process of how the drawing is made differs, doesn’t change the concept behind it.
An AI tool that advertises Mario pcitures would break copyright/trademark laws and hear from Nintendo quickly.
I don’t think how you interact with a tool matters. Typing what you want, drawing it yourself, or clicking through options is all the same. There are even other programs that allow you to draw by typing. They are way more difficult but again, I don’t think the difficulty matters.
There are other tools that allow you to recreate copyrighted material fairly easily. Character creators being on the top of the list. Games like Sims are well known for having tons of Sims that are characters from copyrighted IP. Everyone can recreate Barbie or any Disney Princess in the Sims. Heck, you can even download pre made characters on the official mod site. Yet we aren’t calling out the Sims for selling these characters. Because it doesn’t make sense.
I don’t buy the pencil comparison. If I have a painting in my basement that has a distinctive style, but has never been digitized and trained upon, I’d wager you wouldn’t be able to recreate neither that image nor it’s style. What gives? Because AI is not a pencil but more like a data mixer you throw complete works in into and it spews out colllages. Maybe collages of very finely shredded pieces, to the point you could even tell, but pieces of original works nontheless. If you put any non-free works in it, they definitely contaminate the output, and so the act of putting them in in the first place should be a copyright violation in itself. The same as if I were to show you the image in question and you decided to recreate it, I can sue you and I will win.
That is a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works. It does not shred the art and recreate things with the pieces. It doesn’t even store the art in the algorithm. One of the biggest methods right now is basically taking an image of purely random pixels. You show it a piece of art with a whole lot of tags attached. It then semi-randomly changes pixel colors until it matches the training image. That set of instructions is associated with the tags, and the two are combined into a series of tiny weights that the randomizer uses. Then the next image modifies the weights. Then the next, then the next. It’s all just teeny tiny modifications to random number generation. Even if you trained an AI on only a single image, it would be almost impossible for it to produce it again perfectly because each generation starts with a truly (as truly as a computer can get, an unweighted) random image of pixels. Even if you force fed it the same starting image of noise that it trained on, it is still only weighting random numbers and still probably won’t create the original art, though it may be more or less undistinguishable at a glance.
AI is just another tool. Like many digital art tools before it, it has been maligned from the start. But the truth is what it produces is the issue, not how. Stealing others’ art by manually reproducing it or using AI is just as bad. Using art you’re familiar with to inspire your own creation, or using an AI trained on known art to make your own creation, should be fine.
As a side note because it wasn’t too clear from your writing, but the weights are only tweaked a tiny tiny bit by each training image. Unless the trainer sees the same image a shitload of times (Mona Lisa, that one stock photo used to show off phone cases, etc) then the image can’t be recreated by the AI at all. Elements of the image that are shared with lots of other images (shading style, poses, Mario’s general character design, etc) could, but you’re never getting that one original image or even any particular identifiable element from it out of the AI. The AI learns concepts and how they interact because the amount of influence it takes from each individual image and its caption is so incredibly tiny but it trains on hundreds of millions of images and captions. The goal of the AI image generation is to be able to create vast variety of images directed by prompts, and generating lots of images which directly resemble anything in the training set is undesirable, and in the field it’s called over-fitting.
Anyways, the end result is that AI isn’t photo-bashing, it’s more like concept-bashing. And lots of methods exist now to better control the outputs, from ControlNet, to fine-tuning on a smaller set of images, to Dalle-3 which can follow complex natural language prompts better than older methods.
Regardless, lots of people find that training generative AI using a mass of otherwise copyrighted data (images, fan fiction, news articles, ebooks, what have you) without prior consent just really icky.
You show it a piece of art with a whole lot of tags attached. It then semi-randomly changes pixel colors until it matches the training image. That set of instructions is associated with the tags, and the two are combined into a series of tiny weights that the randomizer uses.
Anyways, the end result is that AI isn’t photo-bashing, it’s more like concept-bashing
That’s what I’ve meant by “very finely shredded pieces”. Ioversimplifed it, yes. But what I mean is that it’s not literally taking a pixel off an image and putting it into output. But that using the original image in any way is just copying with extra steps.
Say, we forego AI entirely and talk real world copyright. If I were to record a movie theater screen with a camcorder, I would commit copyright infringement, even though it’s transformed by my camera lens. Same as If I were to distribute the copyrighted work in a ZIP file, invert colors, or trace every frame and paint it with watercolors.
What if I was to distribute the work’s name alongside it’s SHA-1 hash? You might argue that such transformation destroys the original work and can no longer be used to retrieve the original and therefore should be legal. But, if that was the case, torrent site owners could sleep peacefully knowing that they are safe from prosecution. Real world has shown that it’s not the case.
Now, what if we take some hashing function and brute force the seed until we get one which outputs the SHA-1’s of certain works given their names. That’d be a terrible version of AI, acting exactly like an over-trained model would: spouting random numbers except for works it was “trained” upon. Is distributing such seed/weight a copyright violation? I’d argue that’d be an overly complicated way to conceal piracy, but yes, it would be. Because those seeds/weights are are still a based on the original works, even if not strictly a direct result of their transformation.
Anyways, the end result is that AI isn’t photo-bashing, it’s more like concept-bashing
Copying concepts is also a copyright infringement, though
Regardless, lots of people find that training generative AI using a mass of otherwise copyrighted data (images, fan fiction, news articles, ebooks, what have you) without prior consent just really icky.
It shouldn’t be just “icky”, it should be illegal and be prosecuted ASAP. The longer it goes on like this, the more the entire internet is going to be filled with those kind-of-copyrighted things, and eventually turn into a lawsuit shitstorm.
The problem is that you might technically be allowed to, but that doesn’t mean you have the funds to fight every court case from someone insisting that you can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to. There are some very deep pockets on both sides of this.
Nah all information should be freely available to as many people as practically possible. Information is the most important part of being human. All copyright is inherently immoral.
Go on etsy search mickey mouse and go report all the hundreds of artists whose whole career is violating the copyright of the most litigious company on the planet.
“Artists don’t deserve to profit off their own work” is stupid as shit. Complain about copyright abuse and lobbying a la Disney and I’ll be right there with you, but people shouldn’t have the right to take your work and profit off it without either your consent or paying you for it.
Artists and other creatives who actually do work to create art (not shitting out text into an image generator) should take every priority over AI “creators.”
Equating training AI to not being able to profit is stupid as shit and the same bullshit argument big companies use to say “we lost a bazillion dollars to people pursuing out software” someone training their AI on an art work (that is probably under a creative commons licence anyway) does suck money out of an artists pocket they would have otherwise made.
Artists and other creatives who actually do work to create art (not shitting out text into an image generator) should take every priority over AI “creators.”
Why are you the one that gets to decide what is “work” to create art? Should digital artists not count because they are computer assisted, don’t require as much skill and technique as “traditional” artists and use tools that are based on the work of others like, say, brush makers?
And the language you use shows that you’re vindictive and angry.
They said IP, IP protects artists from having their work stolen. The fact AI guzzlers are big mad that IP might apply to them too is irrelevant.
Digital artists do exactly as much work as traditional artists, comparing it to AI “art” from an AI “artist” is asinine. Do you actually think digital artists just type shit in and a 3D model appears or something?
And yeah I’m angry when my friends and family who make their living as actual artists, digital and traditional, have their work stolen or used without their permission. They aren’t fucking corporations making up numbers about lost sales, they’re spending weeks trying to get straight up stolen art mass printed on tshirts and mugs removed from online sale. They’re going outside and seeing their art on shit they’ve never sold. Almost none of them own a home or even make enough to not have a regular job, it’s literally taking money out of their pockets to steal their work. This is the shit you’re endorsing by shitting on the idea of IP.
Do you actually think artists using AI tools just type shit into the input and output decent art? It’s still just a new, stronger digital tool. Many previous tools have been demonized, claiming they trivialize the work and people who used them were called hacks and lazy. Over time they get normalized.
And as far as training data being considered stealing IP, I don’t buy it. I don’t think anyone who’s actually looked into what the training process is and understands it properly would either. For IP concerns, the output should be the only meaningful measure. It’s just as shitty to copy art manually as it is to copy it with AI. Just because an AI used an art piece in training doesn’t mean it infringed until someone tries to use it to copy it. Which, agreed, is a super shitty thing to do. But again, it’s a tool, how it’s used is more important than how it’s made.
Lmao, I’ve used AI image generation, you’re not going to be able to convince me any skill was involved in what I made. The fact some people type a lot more and keep throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks doesn’t make it art or anything they’ve done with their own skill. The fact none of them can control what they’re making every time the sauce updates is proof of that.
If it’s so obviously not IP violating to train with it then I’m sure it’ll be totally fine if they train them without using artists’ work without permission, since it totally wasn’t relying on those IP violating images. Yet for some reason they fight this tooth and nail. 🤔
Isn’t this a completely different conversation than the one we were having and kind of missing the point? Yes, imo you should be allowed to do that. Still, AI Companies are using the labor of millions of artist for free to train their AIs, which are then threatening to eliminate ways of these artist to gather income.
How is that related in any way to the ways that copyright has been exploited against fanmade art?
The conversation began with ‘fuck copyright,’ so no, restraints on new works are at least as relevant as money.
Restraints on derivative works seem directly relevant to railing against AI training. I don’t think fanart goes on your side of the table. You’re taking a stand for amateur references to immense professional works. Presumably on the basis that Disney can keep doing its thing no matter how many people draw their own weird Zootopia comics - yeah? I for one would argue the environment someone grew up in is fair game for them to build from, as much for Star Wars as for ancestral fairy tales.
The environment of the internet is a pile of everyone’s JPGs. We think nothing of amateur galleries where people mimic popular styles, borrow characters, and draw frankly unreasonable quantities of low-quality pornography. I’m not up-in-arms about AI because it’s more of the same. I barely understand the objection. An entity learned English from library books? Yeah, that’s how everything that can read English learned to read English. You couldn’t understand this sentence without exposure to countless examples of text that were not explicitly provided for your education. So if there’s a pile of linear algebra that can emit drawings, and it was shaped by looking at a ton of drawings that other people posted-- then-- as opposed to what?
The economic concerns are simpler: Hollywood is doomed. This is refrigeration, and they sell ice for iceboxes. They imagine it’s going to make ice much easier to sell, since they won’t need people to harvest and import it. In reality their entire business model is fucked, because their customers also won’t need people to harvest and import it.
If they don’t need a studio full of artists to make a cartoon movie… neither do you. Neither do all the artists they cast off. We cannot be far from models that tween pretty damn well on their own, and can be guided to tween flawlessly. The near future is not about to have less human art. No more than when Flash obviated colored paint on clear plastic.
Whether or not that’s going to make anyone appropriate amounts of money under late capitalism is another question entirely, but it’s not like artists were famously well-off before, and in any case Disney delenda est.
Even if text to image generators are able to improve to be better than human artists, people won’t stop making art just because a computer can do it faster.
No. Fuck that. I don’t consent to my art or face being used to train AI. This is not about intellectual property, I feel my privacy violated and my efforts shat on.
Unless you have been locked in a sensory deprivation tank for your whole life, and have independently developed the English language, you too have learned from other people’s content.
Well my knowledge can’t be used as a tool of surveillance by the government and the corporations and I have my own feelings intent and everything in between. AI is artifical inteligence, Ai is not an artificial person. AI doesn’t have thoughts, feelings or ideals. AI is a tool, an empty shell that is used to justify stealing data and survelience.
Hard disagree, the neural connections in the brain can be modeled with matrix math as well. Sure some people will be uncomfortable with that notion, especially if they believe in spiritual stuff outside physical reality. But if you’re the type that thinks consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from our underlying biology then matrix math is a reasonable approach to representing states of our mind and what we call thoughts.
Yet we live in a world where people will profit from the work and creativity of others without paying any of it back to the creator. Creating something is work, and we don’t live in a post-scarcity communist utopia. The issue is the “little guy” always getting fucked over in a system that’s pay-to-play.
Donating effort to the greater good of society is commendable, but people also deserve to be compensated for their work. Devaluing the labor of small creators is scummy.
I’m working on a tabletop setting inspired by the media I consumed. If I choose to sell it, I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay royalties to the publishers of every piece of media that inspired me.
If you were a robot that never needed to eat or sleep and could generate 10,000 tabletop RPGs an hour with little to no creative input then I might be worried about whether or not those media creators were compensated.
It absolutely should, especially when the “creator” is not a person. AI is not “inspired” by training data, and any comparisons to human artists being inspired by things they are exposed to are made out of ignorance of both the artistic process and how AI generates images and text.
It’s impossible to make any comparison between how AI and how humans make decisions without understanding the nature of consciousness. Simply understanding how AI works isn’t enough.
When, not if, such a robot exists, do you imagine we’ll pay everyone who’d ever published a roleplaying game? Like a basic income exclusively for people who did art before The Training?
Or should the people who want things that couldn’t exist without magic content engines be denied, to protect some prior business model? Bear in mind this is the literal Luddite position. Weavers smashed looms. Centuries later, how much fabric in your life do you take for granted, thanks to that machinery?
‘We have to stop this labor-saving technology because of capitalism’ is a boneheaded way to deal with any conflict between labor-saving technology… and capitalism.
I know this is shocking to people who have never picked up a brush or written anything other than internet arguments after the state stopped mandating they do so when they graduated high school, but you can just create shit without AI. Literal children can do it.
And there is no such thing as something that “couldn’t exist” without the content stealing algorithm. There is nothing it can create that humans can’t, but humans can create things it can’t.
There’s also something hilarious about the idea that the real drag on the artistic process was the creating art part. God almighty, I’d rather be a Luddite than a Philistine.
If that sounds needlessly blunt, no, it’s far kinder than your vile opening insult, which you can’t even keep straight - immediately noting that everyone, even children, has done an art at some point.
So maybe this discussion of wild new technology versus 17th-century law and the grindstone of capitalism isn’t about individual moral failings of people who disagree with you.
Those 10000 tabletop RPGs will almost certainly be completely worthless on their own, but might contain some novel ideas. Until a human comes by and scours it for ideas and combines it. It could very well be that in the same time it could only create 1 coherent tabletop RPG idea.
Should be mentioned though, AIs don’t run for free either, they cost quite a lot of electricity and require expensive hardware.
Then don’t post your art or face publicly, I agree with you if it’s obtained through malicious ways, but if you post it publicly than expect it to be used publicly
If you post your art publicly why should it be legal for Amazon to take it and sell it? You are deluding yourself if you believe AI having a get out of jail free card on IP infringement won’t be just one more source of exploitation for corporations.
Taking it and selling it is obviously not legal, but taking it and using it for training data is a whole different thing.
Once a model has been trained the original data isn’t used for shit, the output the model generates isn’t your artwork anymore it isn’t really anybody’s.
Sure, with some careful prompts you can get the model to output something in your style fairly closely, but the outputting image isn’t yours. It’s whatever the model conjured up based on the prompt in your style. The resulting image is still original of the model
It’s akin to someone downloading your art, tracing it over and over again till they learn the style and then going off to draw non-traced original art just in your style
Care to point to those Ls in court? Because as far as I’m aware they are mostly still ongoing and no legal consensus has been established.
It’s also a bit disingenuous to boil his argument down to what you did, as that’s obviously not what he said. You would most likely agree that a human would produce transformative works even when basing most of their knowledge on that of another (such as tracing).
Ideas are not copyrightable, and neither are styles. You could use that understanding of another’s work to create forgeries of their work, but hence why there exist protections against forgeries. But just making something in the style of another does not constitute infringement.
“U.S. District Judge William Orrick said during a hearing in San Francisco on Wednesday that he was inclined to dismiss most of a lawsuit brought by a group of artists against generative artificial intelligence companies, though he would allow them to file a new complaint.”
"The judge also said the artists were unlikely to succeed on their claim that images generated by the systems based on text prompts using their names violated their copyrights.
“I don’t think the claim regarding output images is plausible at the moment, because there’s no substantial similarity” between images created by the artists and the AI systems, Orrick said."
Hard to call that an L, so I’m eagerly awaiting them.
That’s true, but the reason behind that is reasonable. There has been no human intervention, and so like photos taken by animals, they hold no copyright.
But that’s not what you should be doing anyways, a tool must be used as part of a process, not as *the process*.
If the large corporations can use IP to crush artists, artists might as well try to milk every cent they can from their labor. I dislike IP laws as well, and you can never use the masters’ tools to dismantle their house, but you can sure as shit do damage and get money for yourself.
Luckily, AI aren’t the master’s tools, they’re a public technology. That’s why they’re already trying their had at regulatory capture. Just like they’re trying to destroy encryption. Support open source development, It’s our only chance. Their AI will never work for us. John Carmack put it best.
AI algorithms aren’t the masters tools in the sense that anyone can set up a model using free code on cheap tech, but they do require money to improve and produce quality products. The training data requires labor of artists to produce, the computers the model runs on require labor to make, and the electricity that allows the model to continuously improve requires, you guessed it, labor. Labor will always, and should always, be expensive, making AI most useful to those with money to spend.
IP is only one tool in the masters’ tool box, but capitalism is their box, and the other forms of capital can be used to swing the public’s tools far harder than a wage laborer.
Hence why it’s important that open source models should keep the support of the public. If they have to close shop, what remains will be those made by tech giants. They will be censored, they will be neutered, except if you pay enough for them. The power should remain with the artists, and not those with the money.
Intellectual property is fake lmao. Train your AI on whatever you want
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You are allowed to use copyrighted content for training. I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven’t already. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
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The comparision doesn’t work. Because the AI is replacing the pencil or other drawing tool. And we aren’t saying pencil companies are selling you Mario pics because you can draw a Mario picture with a pencil either. Just because the process of how the drawing is made differs, doesn’t change the concept behind it.
An AI tool that advertises Mario pcitures would break copyright/trademark laws and hear from Nintendo quickly.
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I don’t think how you interact with a tool matters. Typing what you want, drawing it yourself, or clicking through options is all the same. There are even other programs that allow you to draw by typing. They are way more difficult but again, I don’t think the difficulty matters.
There are other tools that allow you to recreate copyrighted material fairly easily. Character creators being on the top of the list. Games like Sims are well known for having tons of Sims that are characters from copyrighted IP. Everyone can recreate Barbie or any Disney Princess in the Sims. Heck, you can even download pre made characters on the official mod site. Yet we aren’t calling out the Sims for selling these characters. Because it doesn’t make sense.
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I don’t buy the pencil comparison. If I have a painting in my basement that has a distinctive style, but has never been digitized and trained upon, I’d wager you wouldn’t be able to recreate neither that image nor it’s style. What gives? Because AI is not a pencil but more like a data mixer you throw complete works in into and it spews out colllages. Maybe collages of very finely shredded pieces, to the point you could even tell, but pieces of original works nontheless. If you put any non-free works in it, they definitely contaminate the output, and so the act of putting them in in the first place should be a copyright violation in itself. The same as if I were to show you the image in question and you decided to recreate it, I can sue you and I will win.
That is a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works. It does not shred the art and recreate things with the pieces. It doesn’t even store the art in the algorithm. One of the biggest methods right now is basically taking an image of purely random pixels. You show it a piece of art with a whole lot of tags attached. It then semi-randomly changes pixel colors until it matches the training image. That set of instructions is associated with the tags, and the two are combined into a series of tiny weights that the randomizer uses. Then the next image modifies the weights. Then the next, then the next. It’s all just teeny tiny modifications to random number generation. Even if you trained an AI on only a single image, it would be almost impossible for it to produce it again perfectly because each generation starts with a truly (as truly as a computer can get, an unweighted) random image of pixels. Even if you force fed it the same starting image of noise that it trained on, it is still only weighting random numbers and still probably won’t create the original art, though it may be more or less undistinguishable at a glance.
AI is just another tool. Like many digital art tools before it, it has been maligned from the start. But the truth is what it produces is the issue, not how. Stealing others’ art by manually reproducing it or using AI is just as bad. Using art you’re familiar with to inspire your own creation, or using an AI trained on known art to make your own creation, should be fine.
As a side note because it wasn’t too clear from your writing, but the weights are only tweaked a tiny tiny bit by each training image. Unless the trainer sees the same image a shitload of times (Mona Lisa, that one stock photo used to show off phone cases, etc) then the image can’t be recreated by the AI at all. Elements of the image that are shared with lots of other images (shading style, poses, Mario’s general character design, etc) could, but you’re never getting that one original image or even any particular identifiable element from it out of the AI. The AI learns concepts and how they interact because the amount of influence it takes from each individual image and its caption is so incredibly tiny but it trains on hundreds of millions of images and captions. The goal of the AI image generation is to be able to create vast variety of images directed by prompts, and generating lots of images which directly resemble anything in the training set is undesirable, and in the field it’s called over-fitting.
Anyways, the end result is that AI isn’t photo-bashing, it’s more like concept-bashing. And lots of methods exist now to better control the outputs, from ControlNet, to fine-tuning on a smaller set of images, to Dalle-3 which can follow complex natural language prompts better than older methods.
Regardless, lots of people find that training generative AI using a mass of otherwise copyrighted data (images, fan fiction, news articles, ebooks, what have you) without prior consent just really icky.
That’s what I’ve meant by “very finely shredded pieces”. Ioversimplifed it, yes. But what I mean is that it’s not literally taking a pixel off an image and putting it into output. But that using the original image in any way is just copying with extra steps.
Say, we forego AI entirely and talk real world copyright. If I were to record a movie theater screen with a camcorder, I would commit copyright infringement, even though it’s transformed by my camera lens. Same as If I were to distribute the copyrighted work in a ZIP file, invert colors, or trace every frame and paint it with watercolors.
What if I was to distribute the work’s name alongside it’s SHA-1 hash? You might argue that such transformation destroys the original work and can no longer be used to retrieve the original and therefore should be legal. But, if that was the case, torrent site owners could sleep peacefully knowing that they are safe from prosecution. Real world has shown that it’s not the case.
Now, what if we take some hashing function and brute force the seed until we get one which outputs the SHA-1’s of certain works given their names. That’d be a terrible version of AI, acting exactly like an over-trained model would: spouting random numbers except for works it was “trained” upon. Is distributing such seed/weight a copyright violation? I’d argue that’d be an overly complicated way to conceal piracy, but yes, it would be. Because those seeds/weights are are still a based on the original works, even if not strictly a direct result of their transformation.
Copying concepts is also a copyright infringement, though
It shouldn’t be just “icky”, it should be illegal and be prosecuted ASAP. The longer it goes on like this, the more the entire internet is going to be filled with those kind-of-copyrighted things, and eventually turn into a lawsuit shitstorm.
I agree.
The problem is that you might technically be allowed to, but that doesn’t mean you have the funds to fight every court case from someone insisting that you can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to. There are some very deep pockets on both sides of this.
Let them come.
I like your moxy, soldier
What a tough guy you are, based AI artist fighting off all the artcucks like a boss 😎
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Nah all information should be freely available to as many people as practically possible. Information is the most important part of being human. All copyright is inherently immoral.
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If copyright was vigorously enforced a lot more people would starve than would be fed
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Go on etsy search mickey mouse and go report all the hundreds of artists whose whole career is violating the copyright of the most litigious company on the planet.
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“Artists don’t deserve to profit off their own work” is stupid as shit. Complain about copyright abuse and lobbying a la Disney and I’ll be right there with you, but people shouldn’t have the right to take your work and profit off it without either your consent or paying you for it.
Artists and other creatives who actually do work to create art (not shitting out text into an image generator) should take every priority over AI “creators.”
Equating training AI to not being able to profit is stupid as shit and the same bullshit argument big companies use to say “we lost a bazillion dollars to people pursuing out software” someone training their AI on an art work (that is probably under a creative commons licence anyway) does suck money out of an artists pocket they would have otherwise made.
Why are you the one that gets to decide what is “work” to create art? Should digital artists not count because they are computer assisted, don’t require as much skill and technique as “traditional” artists and use tools that are based on the work of others like, say, brush makers?
And the language you use shows that you’re vindictive and angry.
They said IP, IP protects artists from having their work stolen. The fact AI guzzlers are big mad that IP might apply to them too is irrelevant.
Digital artists do exactly as much work as traditional artists, comparing it to AI “art” from an AI “artist” is asinine. Do you actually think digital artists just type shit in and a 3D model appears or something?
And yeah I’m angry when my friends and family who make their living as actual artists, digital and traditional, have their work stolen or used without their permission. They aren’t fucking corporations making up numbers about lost sales, they’re spending weeks trying to get straight up stolen art mass printed on tshirts and mugs removed from online sale. They’re going outside and seeing their art on shit they’ve never sold. Almost none of them own a home or even make enough to not have a regular job, it’s literally taking money out of their pockets to steal their work. This is the shit you’re endorsing by shitting on the idea of IP.
Do you actually think artists using AI tools just type shit into the input and output decent art? It’s still just a new, stronger digital tool. Many previous tools have been demonized, claiming they trivialize the work and people who used them were called hacks and lazy. Over time they get normalized.
And as far as training data being considered stealing IP, I don’t buy it. I don’t think anyone who’s actually looked into what the training process is and understands it properly would either. For IP concerns, the output should be the only meaningful measure. It’s just as shitty to copy art manually as it is to copy it with AI. Just because an AI used an art piece in training doesn’t mean it infringed until someone tries to use it to copy it. Which, agreed, is a super shitty thing to do. But again, it’s a tool, how it’s used is more important than how it’s made.
Lmao, I’ve used AI image generation, you’re not going to be able to convince me any skill was involved in what I made. The fact some people type a lot more and keep throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks doesn’t make it art or anything they’ve done with their own skill. The fact none of them can control what they’re making every time the sauce updates is proof of that.
If it’s so obviously not IP violating to train with it then I’m sure it’ll be totally fine if they train them without using artists’ work without permission, since it totally wasn’t relying on those IP violating images. Yet for some reason they fight this tooth and nail. 🤔
“I can” and “you can’t” are not opposites.
I have no idea what you’re trying to convey here.
“Artists don’t deserve to profit off their own work” is not what anyone said.
Even if people can just take your shit and profit off it - so can you.
This is not a complete rebuttal, but if you need the core fallacy spelled out, let’s go slowly.
Why are you entitled to profit off the labor of someone else?
Why am I not entitled to profit from my own work building on stories I enjoy?
Isn’t this a completely different conversation than the one we were having and kind of missing the point? Yes, imo you should be allowed to do that. Still, AI Companies are using the labor of millions of artist for free to train their AIs, which are then threatening to eliminate ways of these artist to gather income.
How is that related in any way to the ways that copyright has been exploited against fanmade art?
The conversation began with ‘fuck copyright,’ so no, restraints on new works are at least as relevant as money.
Restraints on derivative works seem directly relevant to railing against AI training. I don’t think fanart goes on your side of the table. You’re taking a stand for amateur references to immense professional works. Presumably on the basis that Disney can keep doing its thing no matter how many people draw their own weird Zootopia comics - yeah? I for one would argue the environment someone grew up in is fair game for them to build from, as much for Star Wars as for ancestral fairy tales.
The environment of the internet is a pile of everyone’s JPGs. We think nothing of amateur galleries where people mimic popular styles, borrow characters, and draw frankly unreasonable quantities of low-quality pornography. I’m not up-in-arms about AI because it’s more of the same. I barely understand the objection. An entity learned English from library books? Yeah, that’s how everything that can read English learned to read English. You couldn’t understand this sentence without exposure to countless examples of text that were not explicitly provided for your education. So if there’s a pile of linear algebra that can emit drawings, and it was shaped by looking at a ton of drawings that other people posted-- then-- as opposed to what?
The economic concerns are simpler: Hollywood is doomed. This is refrigeration, and they sell ice for iceboxes. They imagine it’s going to make ice much easier to sell, since they won’t need people to harvest and import it. In reality their entire business model is fucked, because their customers also won’t need people to harvest and import it.
If they don’t need a studio full of artists to make a cartoon movie… neither do you. Neither do all the artists they cast off. We cannot be far from models that tween pretty damn well on their own, and can be guided to tween flawlessly. The near future is not about to have less human art. No more than when Flash obviated colored paint on clear plastic.
Whether or not that’s going to make anyone appropriate amounts of money under late capitalism is another question entirely, but it’s not like artists were famously well-off before, and in any case Disney delenda est.
Even if text to image generators are able to improve to be better than human artists, people won’t stop making art just because a computer can do it faster.
What entitles someone to take another person’s work and profit off it?
No.
The subject is intellectual property, in general.
Why am I not entitled to share culture?
Why am I not entitled to create, if similarity exists?
Why does someone get to own an idea, just because they wrote it down first?
Fuck your sophistry.
If you don’t want to discuss this, leave.
No. Fuck that. I don’t consent to my art or face being used to train AI. This is not about intellectual property, I feel my privacy violated and my efforts shat on.
Unless you have been locked in a sensory deprivation tank for your whole life, and have independently developed the English language, you too have learned from other people’s content.
Well my knowledge can’t be used as a tool of surveillance by the government and the corporations and I have my own feelings intent and everything in between. AI is artifical inteligence, Ai is not an artificial person. AI doesn’t have thoughts, feelings or ideals. AI is a tool, an empty shell that is used to justify stealing data and survelience.
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AI doesn’t have thoughts? We don’t even know what a thought is.
We may not know what comprises A thought, but I think we know it’s not matrix math. Which is basically all an LLM is
Hard disagree, the neural connections in the brain can be modeled with matrix math as well. Sure some people will be uncomfortable with that notion, especially if they believe in spiritual stuff outside physical reality. But if you’re the type that thinks consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from our underlying biology then matrix math is a reasonable approach to representing states of our mind and what we call thoughts.
Shut the fuck up tech bro xD
Yet we live in a world where people will profit from the work and creativity of others without paying any of it back to the creator. Creating something is work, and we don’t live in a post-scarcity communist utopia. The issue is the “little guy” always getting fucked over in a system that’s pay-to-play.
Donating effort to the greater good of society is commendable, but people also deserve to be compensated for their work. Devaluing the labor of small creators is scummy.
I’m working on a tabletop setting inspired by the media I consumed. If I choose to sell it, I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay royalties to the publishers of every piece of media that inspired me.
If you were a robot that never needed to eat or sleep and could generate 10,000 tabletop RPGs an hour with little to no creative input then I might be worried about whether or not those media creators were compensated.
The efficiency something can be created with should have no bearing on whether someone gets paid royalties.
It absolutely should, especially when the “creator” is not a person. AI is not “inspired” by training data, and any comparisons to human artists being inspired by things they are exposed to are made out of ignorance of both the artistic process and how AI generates images and text.
It’s impossible to make any comparison between how AI and how humans make decisions without understanding the nature of consciousness. Simply understanding how AI works isn’t enough.
When, not if, such a robot exists, do you imagine we’ll pay everyone who’d ever published a roleplaying game? Like a basic income exclusively for people who did art before The Training?
Or should the people who want things that couldn’t exist without magic content engines be denied, to protect some prior business model? Bear in mind this is the literal Luddite position. Weavers smashed looms. Centuries later, how much fabric in your life do you take for granted, thanks to that machinery?
‘We have to stop this labor-saving technology because of capitalism’ is a boneheaded way to deal with any conflict between labor-saving technology… and capitalism.
I know this is shocking to people who have never picked up a brush or written anything other than internet arguments after the state stopped mandating they do so when they graduated high school, but you can just create shit without AI. Literal children can do it.
And there is no such thing as something that “couldn’t exist” without the content stealing algorithm. There is nothing it can create that humans can’t, but humans can create things it can’t.
There’s also something hilarious about the idea that the real drag on the artistic process was the creating art part. God almighty, I’d rather be a Luddite than a Philistine.
Fuck off.
If that sounds needlessly blunt, no, it’s far kinder than your vile opening insult, which you can’t even keep straight - immediately noting that everyone, even children, has done an art at some point.
So maybe this discussion of wild new technology versus 17th-century law and the grindstone of capitalism isn’t about individual moral failings of people who disagree with you.
Those 10000 tabletop RPGs will almost certainly be completely worthless on their own, but might contain some novel ideas. Until a human comes by and scours it for ideas and combines it. It could very well be that in the same time it could only create 1 coherent tabletop RPG idea.
Should be mentioned though, AIs don’t run for free either, they cost quite a lot of electricity and require expensive hardware.
what a shitty argument. AI isn’t people
Then don’t post your art or face publicly, I agree with you if it’s obtained through malicious ways, but if you post it publicly than expect it to be used publicly
If you post your art publicly why should it be legal for Amazon to take it and sell it? You are deluding yourself if you believe AI having a get out of jail free card on IP infringement won’t be just one more source of exploitation for corporations.
Taking it and selling it is obviously not legal, but taking it and using it for training data is a whole different thing.
Once a model has been trained the original data isn’t used for shit, the output the model generates isn’t your artwork anymore it isn’t really anybody’s.
Sure, with some careful prompts you can get the model to output something in your style fairly closely, but the outputting image isn’t yours. It’s whatever the model conjured up based on the prompt in your style. The resulting image is still original of the model
It’s akin to someone downloading your art, tracing it over and over again till they learn the style and then going off to draw non-traced original art just in your style
“You don’t understand, it’s not infringement because we put it in a blender first” is why AI “art” keeps taking Ls in court.
Care to point to those Ls in court? Because as far as I’m aware they are mostly still ongoing and no legal consensus has been established.
It’s also a bit disingenuous to boil his argument down to what you did, as that’s obviously not what he said. You would most likely agree that a human would produce transformative works even when basing most of their knowledge on that of another (such as tracing).
Ideas are not copyrightable, and neither are styles. You could use that understanding of another’s work to create forgeries of their work, but hence why there exist protections against forgeries. But just making something in the style of another does not constitute infringement.
EDIT:
This was pretty much the only update on a currently running lawsuit I could find: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-finds-flaws-artists-lawsuit-against-ai-companies-2023-07-19/
Hard to call that an L, so I’m eagerly awaiting them.
Biggest L: that shit ain’t copyrightable. A doodle I fart out on a sticky pad has more legal protection.
That’s true, but the reason behind that is reasonable. There has been no human intervention, and so like photos taken by animals, they hold no copyright. But that’s not what you should be doing anyways, a tool must be used as part of a process, not as *the process*.
A court saying “nobody owns this” is closer to the blender argument than the ripoff argument.
Go fuck yourself AI bitch :3
If the large corporations can use IP to crush artists, artists might as well try to milk every cent they can from their labor. I dislike IP laws as well, and you can never use the masters’ tools to dismantle their house, but you can sure as shit do damage and get money for yourself.
Luckily, AI aren’t the master’s tools, they’re a public technology. That’s why they’re already trying their had at regulatory capture. Just like they’re trying to destroy encryption. Support open source development, It’s our only chance. Their AI will never work for us. John Carmack put it best.
AI algorithms aren’t the masters tools in the sense that anyone can set up a model using free code on cheap tech, but they do require money to improve and produce quality products. The training data requires labor of artists to produce, the computers the model runs on require labor to make, and the electricity that allows the model to continuously improve requires, you guessed it, labor. Labor will always, and should always, be expensive, making AI most useful to those with money to spend.
IP is only one tool in the masters’ tool box, but capitalism is their box, and the other forms of capital can be used to swing the public’s tools far harder than a wage laborer.
Hence why it’s important that open source models should keep the support of the public. If they have to close shop, what remains will be those made by tech giants. They will be censored, they will be neutered, except if you pay enough for them. The power should remain with the artists, and not those with the money.
“They have the plant, but we have the power.”
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
They have the plant, but we have the power
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Based take.