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On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

catandgirl.com

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Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#81

Post by caconym_ »

ben_w wrote: post #71
madeofpalk wrote: post #36

> But I can't even get cartoons to most people for free now, without doing unpaid work for the profit-making companies who own the most use channels of communication This is the sticking point for me. OpenAI isn't a profit-making company, but it's certainly a valuable company. A valuable company that is built from the work of content others created without transferring any value back to them. Regardless of legalities…

> Put it this way - you remove all the copyrighted, permission-less content from OpenAIs training, what value does OpenAI have? What you probably get is a LLM that can perfectly understand well written text as you might find on Wikipedia, but which would struggle severely with colloquial language of the kind found on Reddit and Twitter. > then it should give some of that value back to the content. That's literally bu…

> That's literally built into their corporate rules for how to take investment money, and when those rules were written they were criticised because people didn't think they'd ever grow enough for it to matter.

How is OpenAI compensating the owners of IP they trained their models on? Or is that not what you mean? It's certainly how I read the part of the GP comment you quoted.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#82

Post by ClumsyPilot »

My 2 cents - people often compare this AI to automation that came before say the printing press, or automatic fabric production . But it’s actually far worse.

If all the calligraphers drop dead, the printing press still works. If everyone who hand makes fabrics drops dead, the automatic fabric machines continue to develop.

But midjourney doesn’t work without artists, it depends on them like a parasite depends on its host. Once the host dies, the parasite is doomed.

So it’s value-destroying, more vandalism than capitalism. Or maybe like Viking pillaging. It’s like the people who used to burn millions of penguins alive to convert their fat into oil.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21501-boiled-to-death...

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#83

Post by homefree »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #2

Yeah, there really needs to be a solution to situations like this honestly.

Arguably there is - training is not a copyright violation imo. I think it's more akin to you viewing the art and then later making your own thing, you get an intuition/inspiration from what you've seen.

The other complaints are mostly about how it has become hard to not share to social media, but that's mostly a complaint about how people are.

He can still just post on a website, it's not really the fault of social media companies that people prefer that.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#84

Post by lolinder »

spookie wrote: post #25
andy99 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair use. Licenses like that are enforced under copyright, if the use is not subject to copyright, the license terms are irrelevant.

I'm not sure if it applies here. Midjourney's use intends to substitute the artists' work, and is commercial.

That's the question that is currently working its way through the courts in many different cases. We don't yet know the answer.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#86

Post by yieldcrv »

ineptech wrote: post #32
wlesieutre wrote: post #11

On the same topic from another webcomic: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/01/03/terminarter (text commentary below the comic, in case your OS has decided to conceal the scroll bar from you and you didn't notice the page is longer)

> I'm always reticent to fully engage in "The Dialogue," regardless of its momentary configuration. It's a smoothie made from shibboleths; you have to be able to detect them at only a few parts per million because once these things metastasize, they stop being about whatever they were about and instead become increasingly loud recitations of various catechisms and loyalty oaths. Boy does that ring true.

but if you call it virtue signaling, you get categorized into the group that uses that loyalty oath most often, instead of the non-group member that is simply frustrated by the accuracy of it occurring

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#87

Post by fouc »

larrik wrote: post #52
madeofpalk wrote: post #36

> But I can't even get cartoons to most people for free now, without doing unpaid work for the profit-making companies who own the most use channels of communication This is the sticking point for me. OpenAI isn't a profit-making company, but it's certainly a valuable company. A valuable company that is built from the work of content others created without transferring any value back to them. Regardless of legalities…

I thought this was more of a reference to Facebook, etc. I could be wrong, though, it's pretty vague.

Yes, OP knows that the quote is referring to platforms/media channels like youtube/facebook/google, etc. But it's also referring to profit-making companies on the internet, like OpenAI.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#88

Post by chrisknyfe »

Those of you who are desperately trying to soften the blow - "they're talking about facebook, not OpenAI", "it's fair use, the license terms are irrelevant", "nothing has been taken from them" - you need to allow yourself to think the thought that maybe your AI startup's business model is only valuable because of theft. You need to let yourself entertain the idea that maybe you are only getting paid a cushy tech salary because you're aiding and abetting theft. You need to at least try to learn how to draw hands, the hard way, before hopping on Midjourney and saying "art is easy, why do these artists think they deserve to get paid for this?".

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#89

Post by tsimionescu »

jeremyjh wrote: post #21
rimeice wrote: post #5

The sooner anyone making profit from models trained on creators proprietary content start paying for the content they’re using the better for creators, society and even the AI companies. It’s pretty tiring hearing people argue about whether copyright law applies to AI companies or not. It applies. Just get on and sort out a proper licensing model.

It applies - but how it applies is simply not settled. Clearly, there is no statistical model that can launder IP. If someone uses Midjourney to produce someone else's IP, that user (not Midjourney) would be in violation of copyright if they use it in a way that does not conform to the license, such as by creating their own website of cat and girl comics and running Adsense on it. However, if other artists are inspir…

The point is that Midjourney itself, the model weights, is possibly a derivative work of all of the works that went into its training. The fact that it can produce almost identical copies of some of them, especially if not carefully prevented from doing so through secondary mechanisms, is obvious proof that it directly encodes copies of some of these works.

That already clearly means that they couldn't publish the model directly even if they wanted to, since they don't have the right to distribute copies of those works, even if they are represented in a weird lossy encoding. Whether it's legal for them to give access to the model through an API that prevents returning copyrighted content is a much more complex legal topic.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#90

Post by ganzuul »

It has to be very hard to overcome the bad vibes of being in a situation like this.

The technology seems indecipherable to a non-techie.

The law seems indecipherable to a layman.

The ethics seem indecipherable to everyone.

With so much confusion, to feel that one has been treated justly it might not be enough to participate in a class-action lawsuit resolving what happened. It would help with public trust if there were available for example protocols or sites for connecting people who want to sue companies. - Just something that shows that society does support values of equality and justice.

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