I wasn’t familiar with cat and girl, so I looked at a few random comics, and stumbled across this one:
https://catandgirl.com/heroes-and-villains/
The universe, I’m sometimes convinced, has a dark sense of humour.
On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
181–190 of 957 posts
Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
#182> 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…
> A valuable company that is built from the work of content others created without transferring any value back to them.
But they are free to use the fruits of the model, same as anyone else. I suppose the difference is they don't care; they already have the talent to transform their labor into visual art, so what use do they have for a visual-art-generation machine?
I find strong parallels in the building of web crawlers and search indexers, except... Perhaps the indexers provided more universal, symmetrical value. It's hard to make the case that someone crawled and added to a search index doesn't derive value from that strong, healthy index being searchable (even librarians and news reporters thrive on having data indexed and reachable; the index is a force-multiplier, it's not "stealing their labor" by crawling their sub-indexing work and agglomerating it into a bigger index, nor is it cheapening the value of their information-sorting-and-sifting skills when the machine sorts and sifts).
So perhaps there is a dimension of symmetry here where the give-and-take aspect of what is created breaks. Much like the rich don't have to care whether it's legal to sleep under a bridge, artists don't have to care whether a machine can do 60% of the work of getting to a reasonable visual representation of an idea. No, more than that: it's harmful to them if it's legal to sleep under the bridge.
They'd be landlords in this analogy, crying to the city that because people can sleep under bridges the value of the houses they maintain has dropped.
Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
#183Those 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…
You are using the word "theft" in a way which does not describe conduct that is actually theft. Not all of us participate in the form of thought control that has been euphemistically pushed as "intellectual property."
Hey, sorry, I read your profile briefly before replying... do you play bluegrass as your main gig or as a side hustle? Your new album is a bop.
Anyway, I don't think there's much I can say to change your mind - talk to other artists, especially those who are artists as their main hustle.
Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
#184> 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 nice if you used a label you had to pay a fee for whoever owns the label, if you don't want to pay a fee to the owners of an artstyle, then you can always use public domain works. Hell, this might be even better for public domain works and restoration if a small fee went to them as well.
> owners of an artstyle
I hope I never have to live in a world where such a thing exists.
Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
#185> 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's products have? If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content Couldn't we say the same thing about search engines? What value would google have without content to search for? Is the conclusion we should ma…
Search engines don't replicate the content, they index and point to it. When search engines have been caught replicating content they have been sued or had to work out licenses.
Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
#186Those 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…
Honestly digital media in general has greatly cheapened the value of images, music, illustration, etc. and this has been been a long time coming.
It was clear to me over 20 years ago when I realized that I wouldn't be able to earn enough in the arts, and ironically due to creative people sharing so much good content for free.
While I feel for people who didn’t realize this, but it’s no surprise if you try to earn your living by adding digital content to the global network of computer systems that something like the current AI trend was bound to happen.
If you love art - paint a painting, make a sculpture, perform in a play, perform live music, dance, etc. Digital is a dead-end goal in and of itself.
Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
#187I 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?
"Art" will move into a direction that's harder to copy, artists will use ML models to help them create, people will develop a sense of what is AI generated and it will begin to feel cheap. It's already pretty obvious, like the blog posts with AI generated images on the top. There's already a trend of people taking out of focus and motion blurred selfies. In whatever direction it takes, art will find what is difficult…
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Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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.
And now the guy who started Napster is on the board of Spotify who just decided they weren’t going to pay small time artists for their music anymore. Go figure.
Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
#189I 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.
It’s not the same effect. People learned how to read and write, then the means of creation got cheaper. Now no one is learning how to draw and paint, they just create a random mashup of others works.
Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if it applies here. Midjourney's use intends to substitute the artists' work, and is commercial.
No one is using Midjourney to replace artists. Artists are using Midjourney to speed up the most tedious parts of their work.
The term is used here in its legal meaning, therefore as competing in the same space as the original