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Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

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191–200 of 233 posts

Re: Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

#191

People here, as always, get hung up on legalese bullshit, but miss the overall picture. The dynamics in play is highly questionable. Countless artists and photographers put effort into creating their works. They put they work online to get some attention and recognition. A company comes along, scrapes all of it and starts selling access to the model to generate something that looks highly derivative. The original coh…

The law fundamentally needs to evolve. Latent embeddings of large corpuses of copyrighted works is something we are going to have to wrangle with more directly, it’s not clear to me how we even ought to want it to work in terms of the rights of the copyright holders for data it was trained on.

With the release of spectral diffusion, arguably the genie is out of the bottle now, so there’s probably a ceiling on how much the law can evolve to claw back any retroactively determined rights to copyright holders.

Re: Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

#192

People here, as always, get hung up on legalese bullshit, but miss the overall picture. The dynamics in play is highly questionable. Countless artists and photographers put effort into creating their works. They put they work online to get some attention and recognition. A company comes along, scrapes all of it and starts selling access to the model to generate something that looks highly derivative. The original coh…

Somewhat ironically, wasn't it openai's main mission for AI to benefit humanity?

Re: Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

#193
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been reading some folks saying that "prompt engineering" is a legit future vocation in a world where AI has taken over a lot of creative work And from my experience getting high-quality output from AIs takes a bit of finesse. Not quite unlike crafting a good Google query so... yes

Is command language the ultimate interface? I doubt it. Similar to how GUI supersedes CLI in most use cases, we should be able to indicate "warmer" / "colder" preference to generate new images from previous attempts.

I'm not a huge fan of controlling things with text prompts but it does seem to be the best way to describe the image you're looking for

Re: Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

#194

These are the absolute worst DALL-E images I've seen. Do people generally just share the amazing ones and most of the output is actually complete shite? Like Instagram presenting the top 1% of people's lives.

For diversity, Dalle 2 has a random chance of injecting "women" or "black" after a prompt. When this happens, at least for me, it generally destroyed the quality of the images. Probably "King" was identified as a gendered word. You can find some discussion of this on the subreddit r/dalle2. Sometimes the images are quite poor, but in this case, openAI is doing additional tampering.

A twitter user figured out which words they were using by generating a lot of images with the starting prompt "A sign being held that says "

Re: Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

#195
post #171
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s going to be interesting what the stock companies will do. Maybe they will make their own Image Generator. Perhaps we will see a case based on the new factor that is AI. An AI is not artist; they can’t be conflated. A decent artists can churn out maybe 5-10 works if he is productive. AI can churn out by the hundreds or thousands if needed. The process also isn’t the same. Anyway it will be interesting to watch th…

AI generated images cant be copyrighted.

Given the iterative contribution of a artistically-talented human prompter, I'm not sure that precedent – set by the Copyright Office in the US, rather than a clear statute or court decision – will hold up. A court might decide differently, or a statutory update could overrule the copyright office, especially in cases where an individual output is the mix of human & AI effort.

Re: Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

#196
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autogenerated, often fantastical, never-seen-before AI images strike me as a paradigmatically 'transformative' use. It's novel. It's shocking to many practicioners how flexible & high-quality the images can be. It will unlock all sorts of new downstream creation. The representation that feeds the generation is statistical, even to the point of being plausibly factual : these things/people/places/concepts can be abstr…

"AI artist" doesn't add any of its "own flair". It builds exclusively on past experience and work of humans. And it also directly completes with them without any thought of credit or compensation. People are really underplaying how damaging this is going to be for the industry. It's going to completely decimate it. You can already see people using names of artists in the DALL-E prompt to get "their" work for few doll…

The synergistic effect of all the AI's inputs absolutely results in a unique new 'flair', with extensions, reversals, and mash-ups of styles just as in human-made artistic styles.

And AI "builds exclusively on past experience and work of humans" just like any young new human artist equally does. In many cases, you can even tell the different models' outputs apart, not by raw quality or glitches, but by hard-to-describe aesthetic tendencies.

I share your concern on the effect on human artists – both the market for their work, and even their morale, when learning, knowing that decades of practice will still be outproduced by seconds of computation.

But I don't think the genie will be put back in the bottle, by either expansive interpretation of existing copyright law, or even new laws.

Re: Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

#197
post #90
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still not seeing the "transformative" argument: the point of transformation isn't "it is in a different format" but (to quote Wikipedia, which is, of course, dumb... I'm sorry ;P) where one "builds on a copyrighted work in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original". The reason a search engine thumbnail is transformative isn't because it has been transformed to make it smaller... it is becaus…

Autogenerated, often fantastical, never-seen-before AI images strike me as a paradigmatically 'transformative' use. It's novel. It's shocking to many practicioners how flexible & high-quality the images can be. It will unlock all sorts of new downstream creation. The representation that feeds the generation is statistical, even to the point of being plausibly factual : these things/people/places/concepts can be abstr…

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your argument, but my counterexample would be: if a human digital artist transformed a Getty image, resulting a fantastical, never-before-seen result, using software like Photoshop, that use would be no more defensible. If anything, the vast scale at which this occurs in AI makes it worse.

Re: Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

#198

People here, as always, get hung up on legalese bullshit, but miss the overall picture. The dynamics in play is highly questionable. Countless artists and photographers put effort into creating their works. They put they work online to get some attention and recognition. A company comes along, scrapes all of it and starts selling access to the model to generate something that looks highly derivative. The original coh…

Did I hear "fair use"?

Here's some more fair use:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220511194954/https://fairuseif...

(previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27796124 )

Re: Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

#199

These are the absolute worst DALL-E images I've seen. Do people generally just share the amazing ones and most of the output is actually complete shite? Like Instagram presenting the top 1% of people's lives.

Top 1% is a bit exaggerated, but there is definitely a lot of not good stuff. I find that Dall-E does especially poorly with underspecified prompts too, unlike something like Midjourney which can give visually pleasing photos for even the most abstract concepts. Dall-E tends to do better with concrete and specific prompts. Here's an example: Stressful Shapes Dall-E: https://i.imgur.com/JBkSh0y.png Midjourney: https:/…

> On the other hand, here's a specific prompt: "nerdy yellow duck reading a magical book full of spells"

> Dall-E: https://i.imgur.com/FMKZ8zc.png

How well it learned all the common prejudices!

"nerdy" == wears glasses

I'm applauding.

I'm looking already forward to AGI based on the current approaches… It will lead us finally into a better world, for sure. /s

Re: Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feeling is that while these things may be technically falling under fair use, I really feel like they are running roughshod over a lot of ethical and moral lines and that perhaps "fair use" needs to be redefined to explicitly exclude this kind of processing. And if it kills these things, oh well. "Being an artist" is a precarious enough existence in this world as is, I'd be delighted to stop worrying about having…

You will still be competing against it. It'll just be outsourced and presented as manual work.

True. But there wouldn’t be a growing number of easily accessible websites happily letting everyone type whatever prompt they desire, and there wouldn’t be further development being done in this area.

“Zero people trying to disrupt my job with art generators” would be ideal, but “a lot fewer people trying to disrupt my job with illegal art generators they can get in trouble for using” is still better than “hey we released this great copyright infringement machine for anyone to use for free”.

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