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

catandgirl.com

201–210 of 957 posts

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

#201
post #122

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 curious if Gabe over at penny-arcade would be upset if his comics were used in an art class to train a new generation of artists.

Training people and training AI are completely different things, and this tired argument is disingenuous.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

well yeah, because you'd have to be virtuous to be able to virtue signal, and the ones who bring that up generally aren't.

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

#203

> 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…

>> 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. But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's…

I'm not as interested in making a technical/legal argument, as I'm just sharing my feelings on the topic (and eventually, what I think the law should be), but during training copies are made of copyrighted material, even if the model doesn't contain exact copies of work. Crawling, downloading, storing (temporarily) for training all involve making copies, and thus are subject to copyright law. Maybe those copies are fair use, maybe it's not (I think it shouldn't be).

My main point is that OpenAI is generating an incredible amount of value all hinging on other people's work at a massive scale, without paying for their materials. Take all the non-public domain work off Netflix and Netflix doesn't have the same value they have today, so Netflix must pay for content it uses. Same goes for OpenAI imho.

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

#204
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be missing the point. The artist has already compromised their personal ethics by choosing to post their work to social media. Now, with AI, they don't even have a choice in the matter.

nobody is forced to post to social media

"And now even that nominal opt-in option is gone. They just take it."

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

#205

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?

Yeah, it's over. Why would a kid want to spend thousands of hours practicing with pencil and paper, when they can get a much more impressive result by typing a couple of words on a web site?

Because they want agency, creating something using a process where they have total control. It’s why people make music, do sculpting, write poetry. You can pay someone to do this for you, but it’s more gratifying to do it yourself.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better explanation is that the vast majority of users don't try any prompt parameters or different styles and just rely on its default settings

Nah. Even the "good" stuff feels cheap. It's the art version of ho-hos and twinkies. Every once in a while I see one and think, "oh, neat, wonder how they got it to do that?", but usually I'm just left slightly queasy and with a bad taste.

I've been using Midjourney to generate assets and textures that I Photoshop into new images, such as album covers, banners, and flyers. It has been excellent for speeding up my workflow. My small audience has found a high amount of visual appeal in the results

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

#207
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#208

> 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…

>> 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. But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's…

I agree with the other commenters about the scale of this “deriving inspiration from others” is where this feels wrong.

It feels similar to the ye olden debates on police surveillance. Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with. Collating your behavior across every website and device you own from a data broker is fundamentally the same thing as a single phone’s wiretap, but it obviously feels way grosser and more unethical because it scales way past the point of what you’d imagine as being acceptable.

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

#209

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…

Spot on. Most ai model value is in the stolen content. These criminals need punishment.

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

#210
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still closed. It's hacky because Discord is generally a messaging app. You can wedge things into messaging apps but the UI is suboptimal. I did an AI art symposium at Google towards fall 2022 and it was __impossible__ to explain to a designer how to use it in under 2 minutes. Ended up dropping it entirely.

I find it very hard to believe that it was impossible to explain how to use the basics midjourny’s discord bot in 2 mins.

Discord is just Kryptonite to some people, myself included.

I eventually got used to it but I don't enjoy it. First time trying to log in it didn't believe I was a human + the way most servers have you add a react emoji to confirm you read the rules and only then do you actually see the channels available to you, not to mention all the alert sounds with no visual indication of what just alerted, something about it just makes me feel old.

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