71–80 of 146 posts
It's just what a segment of the art world does - mess with the definition of the art world. Look at Banksy's million dollar shredder.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An appropriate analogy in this case would be someone putting up a sign that explicitly says that nobody has to thank them, then getting mad that nobody thanked them.
This dude set up a "this is for free" sign and then some other dudes just swooped in saying "we'll take all of this" and then just replaced the sign with "$500k". The problem with this is that it disincentivizes the sharing mentality. Nobody wants to be the guy who gets taken advantage of, yet everyone benefits from free sharing of knowledge. And then once in a while you have dudes who swoop in and make everyone look…
This loses the important nuance that them swooping in and slapping a price tag on their own use of the implementation doesn't deprive anyone of access to the original on the same terms they were able to access it.
No one has lost anything in this scenario.
>The problem with this is that it disincentivizes the sharing mentality.
Personally, I feel arguing over how people make use of freely shared knowledge does more harm a culture of sharing than usage of said knowledge, even when that usage pushes right up to the bounds of what is allowed under whichever license.
Twitter thread from the author of the original algorithm: https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 (worth reading the whole thread, the art collective reply) GitHub link: https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-dcgan The README was last edited 6 months ago and contains the bolded text: "When using any outputs of the models, credit me. Don't sell the outputs of the pre-trained models, modified or not. If you…
So Hugo asks for help with setup because he can't get it to work, and Robbie (original author) replies "working on a rewrite of the codebase, should be soon" while Hugo keeps pushing for updates. Turns out it's trickier than expected so Robbie says "sorry, might take longer". Hugo's response?
> "Ok, really disappointed. Could you at least provide the code for the 128x128 Gan in Keras ?"
He's literally sitting there for months pushing for poor Robbie to do the free work for him so that he can try to profit from it.
Maybe they really did make a lot of changes to the model. But from the conversation in that issue thread and the striking similarities between the painting and the other ones that Robbie had made over a year ago, it doesn't feel likely to me that that's the case.
Hopefully some justice will come out of this situation.
As an aside, according to his bio Robbie's only 19 (and already doing this level of research!). Sad to see younger researchers being taken advantage of like this.
https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-DCGAN/issues/3#event-140...
I'd buy art (and listen to music) generated by an AI, but I'll admit that I think some creative products lose a bit of their essence when not created by humans. We know math and science can be found within art: measures and half measures in music, the golden ratio in painting, etc. Optimizing for these mathematical properties seems a bit like cheating for lack of a better word. There are many musicians and artists wi…
That debate goes way, way back. In 1966, a researcher at Bell Labs used a computer to generate an image in the style of Mondrian. The images were presented to 100 people; not only were test subjects unable to identify the computer-generated image, but the majority liked the computer-generated image better. The computer-generated art is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's collection.
http://thekidsroad.com/assets/images/blog/blog-content/mushu...
Twitter thread from the author of the original algorithm: https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 (worth reading the whole thread, the art collective reply) GitHub link: https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-dcgan The README was last edited 6 months ago and contains the bolded text: "When using any outputs of the models, credit me. Don't sell the outputs of the pre-trained models, modified or not. If you…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you spent at least five hours ... and it took a considerable amount of effort, THAT is a profound piece of work. Got it. work >= 5hrs == TRUE REAL PROFOUND ART, work Art is purely expression. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to express what you're expressing. Pollock may have just splattered painting on a canvas. But it was still a true expression . John Cage made a composition where the orchestra doesn't…
And an expression can be boring and trite, and we can judge it for being such. The fact that rich people are willing to pay for some bland expression does not confer anything but monetary value to it. It doesn't become less garbage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what right do you have to complain that people are using that code in accordance with that licence? It’s not legally required to credit the author of the original code, but it’s a jerk move not to do so, especially if the work is primarily not your own. All it does is discourage developers from releasing things open source, which is very bad in the long run.
> but it’s a jerk move... What on earth are you on about!? The author has every possible opportunity to set out whatever he wants in the license. If he wants anyone who uses it to name their firstborn after him he can put that in there. If he doesn’t then there is absolutely no issue or nothing jerk-like of anyone who follows to the letter he license the author decided to use. It’s up to the author to specify what he…
I hear an increasing amount of talk as if ethics is or can be entirely contained within law, as if behaving legally is all that can or should be asked of us as humans. I don't know if it's the pervasive influence of lawyers and corporate 'culture' or what. In that "greed is good" etc mindset, 'being a jerk' isn't a bad thing, it's merely not being a sap, using your freedoms, using accepted business principles etc. Your whole comment smells of that total absence of ethics, beyond obeying the law, i.e. no ethics. Sorry if I misunderstood. Maybe your "What on earth are you on about!?" etc was exaggerated for rhetorical effect, and not what it seemed - having no clue why someone might call it 'a jerk move', or feel it was unfair/rude/graceless/exploitative etc.
Twitter thread from the author of the original algorithm: https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 (worth reading the whole thread, the art collective reply) GitHub link: https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-dcgan The README was last edited 6 months ago and contains the bolded text: "When using any outputs of the models, credit me. Don't sell the outputs of the pre-trained models, modified or not. If you…
Oh gosh, he even links an issue where one of the guys who sold the painting (Hugo Caselles-Dupre, hence the username Caselles) literally asks for help setting up. So Hugo asks for help with setup because he can't get it to work, and Robbie (original author) replies "working on a rewrite of the codebase, should be soon" while Hugo keeps pushing for updates. Turns out it's trickier than expected so Robbie says "sorry,…
Also the DCGAN architecture is from Chintala et al, and that itself is based on work by Goodfellow et al. Where does this end? Does Robbie Barrat 'own' the DCGAN NN architecture now?
Twitter thread from the author of the original algorithm: https://twitter.com/DrBeef_/status/1055285640420483073 (worth reading the whole thread, the art collective reply) GitHub link: https://github.com/robbiebarrat/art-dcgan The README was last edited 6 months ago and contains the bolded text: "When using any outputs of the models, credit me. Don't sell the outputs of the pre-trained models, modified or not. If you…
I feel like this screencap posted by Obvious was the most illuminating part of that twitstorm: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DqVdWJSW4AAOtXD?format=jpg