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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

#101
post #69

> 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…

This was a reference to Instagram, et. al., where distributing your illustrations there implicitly allows thier Ad machine to profit from your work

This seems like a strange criticism to me - if you're posting your illustrations on social media, it's presumably because you feel that you're getting value out of doing so. Who cares if they're also getting value out of you doing it, particularly when that value comes at no cost to you?

If you sell your art, then art marketplaces and printers and shipping services all profit from your work, but I don't imagine she's complaining about that. What's the difference? In all of those cases, as with social media, companies are making money from your work in return for providing a useful service to you (and one you don't have to use if you don't think it's useful).

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

#102

I wonder what effects AI ripping off today's artists will have on the next generation. They will grow up with AI "art" generators. Will they be concerned enough about AI-ripping them off that the don't put out novel, "human-made" works of art? Will they put down the AI tools long enough to learn "manual" forms of art?

The same effect type writers and printing had on Scribes and Scriptoriums - they won't be around, they won't be needed, people will not pay for them except for extremely niche scenarios.

Artists create new things, scribes copied pre-existing works.

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

#104
post #69

> 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…

This was a reference to Instagram, et. al., where distributing your illustrations there implicitly allows thier Ad machine to profit from your work

you decide to put your stuff on Instagram, you don't decide to put your work in midjourney

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

#105
I'm a little skeptical that this artist's work was "used to train Midjourney" just because their name appears on that list. My understanding is that the list in question is just a scraped list of artist names from Wikipedia, and was used as a list of possible styles to try in prompts, to see if CLIP happened to know them. I don't think that being on the list necessarily means that an artist's work was used to train Midjourney, nor does not being on the list mean it wasn't.

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

#106

[flagged]

You may believe it's the future and be happy to be included, but that's certainly not for everyone.

> I don't get the complaint here.

> Sure their ability to choose whether or not their art was commercialized was taken away

That is exactly the complaint: that their agency was taken away. It's entirely reasonable to lament that loss.

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

#107

[flagged]

> I'd love to have been added to something like MidJourney.

The thing they are railing against is that they can't do that anymore

1) because someone is generating art in their style

2) because all the channels that drive traffic are controlled by apple, Google, Meta and now microsoft.

3) what little money the did make has now evaporated.

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

#109

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 sala…

nothing has been taken from them

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

#110

> 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…

that's arguably true for humans learning from the content as well
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