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Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

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Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#11

Post by makeitdouble »

thurn wrote: post #3

One positive aspect of the status quo in the United States is that AI-generated images are not currently eligible for copyright. I think this is a great direction to go in, I highly doubt Wizards of the Coast or whoever is going to want their premium products to lose copyright protections, so they'll need to keep paying artists. I'd love for us to lean into this -- you can make all the AI art you want, but it automat…

Won't they move to trademark protection instead, as it's a lot more flexible with less restrictions ?

Basically the same way Disney let copyright go but will fight for trademark to the bitter end ?

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#12

Post by tavavex »

srackey wrote: post #4

I get why artists are trying to stop them, but this battle has already been lost. These tools have been out too long, open source models proliferate freely, and jurisdictions that don’t care about IP law will continue publishing these models. By the time it works it’s way through the courts the situation will be even worse.

You can publish these models in all jurisdictions, including ones that do care about IP law. There's no rulings saying that models trained on datasets of images are direct derivatives of the original images (in a way that's copyright-violating), let alone whatever is produced using these models. Now, this isn't settled law by any means, but it feels like people give too much credence to all the theft accusations by assuming that it's some slam dunk case that can make all generative AI suddenly vanish.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#13

Post by kmeisthax »

nothercastle wrote: post #5
thurn wrote: post #3

One positive aspect of the status quo in the United States is that AI-generated images are not currently eligible for copyright. I think this is a great direction to go in, I highly doubt Wizards of the Coast or whoever is going to want their premium products to lose copyright protections, so they'll need to keep paying artists. I'd love for us to lean into this -- you can make all the AI art you want, but it automat…

I do wonder if its a fruit of the poisoned tree argument and any AI derived work can’t be copyrighted because it used already dubious source material.

No, it's a Butlerian Jihad[0] argument. The Copyright Office's argument holds even for a fully public domain training set. US copyright law is already speciesist[1] - you can't assign authorship to an animal - so computers are also forbidden from authorship.

[0] In the Dune universe, the "Butlerian Jihad" refers to a legal ban on thinking machines.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#14

Post by skydhash »

srackey wrote: post #4

I get why artists are trying to stop them, but this battle has already been lost. These tools have been out too long, open source models proliferate freely, and jurisdictions that don’t care about IP law will continue publishing these models. By the time it works it’s way through the courts the situation will be even worse.

Lockpicking tools are widely available, and designs of locks can be found on the web if someone search hard enough. But entering another's home is illegal. It's why businesses pay for licenses even if cracked softwares exists. I hope that artists win these and make using or creating an illegal model an high-risk activity, not worth it for any commercial activity.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#15

Post by jwells89 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #8
srackey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely unenforceable. How can you even tell if an image was made by AI? What if AI created an outline that was worked on by a human artist (or vice versa)? Who would the burden of proof be on? Steam has a “no AI art” policy, and it’s rapidly turning into a “no obvious AI art policy”. How could they tell?

The thing about AI art is that, absent lots of prompt engineering, seed grinding, and touchups, you're likely to have a bunch of images that are obvious tells if your entire project is AI. Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. There's also another advantage to having a "no obvious AI art" policy; and that's to cut down on spam. AI is extremely useful to people w…

And this will continue to be an issue until ML models have achieved something resembling sentience, because many of these tells are the result of the model not truly comprehending the subject matter and thus struggling to maintain internal consistency in everything from geometry and kinetics of human bodies to lighting and physics.

Less obviously, ML models also lack the ability to bake in intent. In human made pieces, everything is as it is for a reason; it’s communicating something. In ML generated pieces, things are the way they are because that’s what’s statistically likely for the type of generated image.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#16

Post by tavavex »

kmeisthax wrote: post #8
srackey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely unenforceable. How can you even tell if an image was made by AI? What if AI created an outline that was worked on by a human artist (or vice versa)? Who would the burden of proof be on? Steam has a “no AI art” policy, and it’s rapidly turning into a “no obvious AI art policy”. How could they tell?

The thing about AI art is that, absent lots of prompt engineering, seed grinding, and touchups, you're likely to have a bunch of images that are obvious tells if your entire project is AI. Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. There's also another advantage to having a "no obvious AI art" policy; and that's to cut down on spam. AI is extremely useful to people w…

> Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves.

The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing - we don't know if it'll ever reach the threshold, but the amount of effort required to stamp out all the wonkiness from an AI generation has been going down ever since the first viable algorithms appeared.

I don't think that this was an anti-spam policy - Steam already manually reviews all new applicants that want to publish a game, so they don't need to forbid anything to turn it down. I'm guessing that this policy was because they don't want to be entangled in IP legislation if some copyright exception is carved out to forbid the use of generative AI.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#17

Post by bsder »

srackey wrote: post #6
thurn wrote: post #3

One positive aspect of the status quo in the United States is that AI-generated images are not currently eligible for copyright. I think this is a great direction to go in, I highly doubt Wizards of the Coast or whoever is going to want their premium products to lose copyright protections, so they'll need to keep paying artists. I'd love for us to lean into this -- you can make all the AI art you want, but it automat…

Completely unenforceable. How can you even tell if an image was made by AI? What if AI created an outline that was worked on by a human artist (or vice versa)? Who would the burden of proof be on? Steam has a “no AI art” policy, and it’s rapidly turning into a “no obvious AI art policy”. How could they tell?

> Completely unenforceable.

Complete wrong. You just flip the defaults--something is AI unless you can prove otherwise.

This is done already and has precedent. Producing porn requires that you keep artifacts demonstrating that who the performers were, that they were of age, etc.

If you claim a work is not AI generated, you should have to produce some artifacts to back up that claim.

In the case of a corporation, that would be easy as you have payment records.

In the case of an individual doing digital only, that's a little harder. You probably have to keep some intermediate artifacts.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#18

Post by newZWhoDis »

skydhash wrote: post #14
srackey wrote: post #4

I get why artists are trying to stop them, but this battle has already been lost. These tools have been out too long, open source models proliferate freely, and jurisdictions that don’t care about IP law will continue publishing these models. By the time it works it’s way through the courts the situation will be even worse.

Lockpicking tools are widely available, and designs of locks can be found on the web if someone search hard enough. But entering another's home is illegal. It's why businesses pay for licenses even if cracked softwares exists. I hope that artists win these and make using or creating an illegal model an high-risk activity, not worth it for any commercial activity.

[flagged]

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#19

Post by kmeisthax »

tavavex wrote: post #12
srackey wrote: post #4

I get why artists are trying to stop them, but this battle has already been lost. These tools have been out too long, open source models proliferate freely, and jurisdictions that don’t care about IP law will continue publishing these models. By the time it works it’s way through the courts the situation will be even worse.

You can publish these models in all jurisdictions, including ones that do care about IP law. There's no rulings saying that models trained on datasets of images are direct derivatives of the original images (in a way that's copyright-violating), let alone whatever is produced using these models. Now, this isn't settled law by any means, but it feels like people give too much credence to all the theft accusations by a…

I used to agree with this, but there's been research coming out of Google that has altered my opinion. Specifically, Google's gotten rather good at making AI spit out unaltered training set data[0]. This is only possible if the AI is remembering large portions of the original trained-on works, which would make the weights infringing.

[0] In the most egregious case, they found that just asking ChatGPT to repeat a word over and over again will make it spit out training set data verbatim. OpenAI's response was to stop any conversation with over a page of repeated words, so you can't replicate this.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#20

Post by Osmose »

Looking at the source tweet[1], this isn't a list of artists specifically used to train Midjourney, but instead is a list of artists used to pre-render additives that can be added to an existing prompt much faster than an arbitrary addition.

The assumption is that these artists probably are in the Midjourney dataset, but Midjourney doesn't specifically go out and find these artists' art and steal it—they steal art indiscriminately.

[1] https://x.com/JonLamArt/status/1741545927435784424?s=20

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