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

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

#141

Post by teaearlgraycold »

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 wonder if AI shrinks the economy. Not that such a metric is the most important ruler by which to measure goodness, but it would be ironic to have a massive tech company that produces less value than it removes from the world.

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

#142

Post by jazzyjackson »

chankstein38 wrote: post #85

[flagged]

we actually get to collectively decide what the future is through legislation, it's kind of the whole idea of democracy, that we don't have to just let the richest couple of companies determine what's best for us

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

#143

Post by ParetoOptimal »

homefree wrote: post #83
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 m…

Its not like looking and getting inspiration, its looking and being able to almost perfectly duplicate the style.

Their complaint is not being able to post art for its own sake because it will be hoovered up into datasets to train more AI: They are forced to submit to helping train AI or not post their art.

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

#144

Post by theLiminator »

I'm not sure how to feel about this, ultimately any work you put on the internet can be used in a way to enrichen other people. If you write free software, if you write a poem, if you draw art, etc. People will be free to heavily copy or be inspired by your work (and the distinction between copy and inspire is very muddy/gray).

The real question is about the scale and how "original" ai works are. Does generative ai enabling this at scale make it different than humans doing it? Is there something special about human authorship?

I personally don't care if my open source code gets trained on by AI, but I'm not sure about the social contract around artistic expression.

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

#145

Post by notpachet »

robertlagrant wrote: post #56
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…

It would be good to see how much it changes if you only include work that is public domain.

Any prompt response longer than 30 characters inevitably devolves into verbatim passages from The Iliad.

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

#146

Post by seurimas »

Jasper_ wrote: post #41
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.

> "The bottom line is this," the firm, known as a16z, wrote. "Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development." > The firm said payment for all of the copyrighted material already used in LLMs would cost the companies that built them "tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in royalty payments." https://www.bus…

Doesn't that kind of demonstrate the value being actively stolen from the creators, more than anything? Copyright law killed Napster, too. That doesn't mean applying copyright law was wrong.

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

#147

Post by chrisknyfe »

endo_bunker wrote: post #109
chrisknyfe wrote: post #88

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

The understanding you're missing is that artists benefit when they are credited for their work. Let's say you drew concept art for a videogame, and your name appears in the credits. You can now go to recruiters and hiring managers and say "I worked on a game that shipped" and get hired.

Let's say, during hard times when you don't have a job, fans of the game you worked on notice you on twitter and say "hey I loved your work, here's $5 for your patreon." Now you can pay your medical bills this month.

Their livelihood was taken from them. Midjourney is theft.

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

#148

Post by spamizbad »

jMyles wrote: post #124
make3 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is that boundary something that the internet is likely to be able to recognize or enforce though? In 100 years? In 500? What are we building for here?

If the boundary isn't enforced you'll likely see art move increasingly to a patronage system, whereby a select elite will get to choose what art is suitable for your consumption. Maybe you'll like that, maybe you won't.

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

#149

Post by ben_w »

make3 wrote: post #117
ben_w wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. " that sounds like insane bullshit to me. they're trained on the whole internet. there's no way they give back to the whole of the internet, more likely a lot of jobs will be taken away by their work. plus, the…

If they make a model that's good enough to actually take away jobs rather than merely making everyone more productive — is it a tool or a human level AI, I'm not sure either way though I lean toward the latter — the only possible compensation is UBI… which they're funding research into.

> plus, there was no consent.

I agree with you about this. That's a different problem, but I do agree.

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

#150

Post by KaiserPro »

andy99 wrote: post #7
muststopmyths wrote: post #4

If the artist's license was for non-commercial use, isn't using it for training an AI for commercial use a clear violation ? I would love to know why not.

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

I don't think its fair use.

https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-...

There are complications, but google can use thumbnails because essentailly they are used to "review" the website.

Has google sampled and hosted the whole image on their own website and made more iamges in the style of say mickey mouse, they would have been taken to town by the owners.

This is why there are no commercial movies on youtube (without an explicit agreement) and why DCMA takedowns exist.

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