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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

#281

Post by [deleted] »

bawolff wrote: post #170
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'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…

[deleted]

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

#282

Post by gandalfgeek »

A: model is influenced by artist's work, output of model influences human work.

B: human influenced/inspired by artist's work

In both scenarios (A) and (B), the activity may or may not be commercial.

Why are we so much more worried about (A), when (B) is considered totally fine, even desirable?

Please note neither A nor B involve verbatim copying.

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

#283

Post by voidhorse »

sandworm101 wrote: post #118
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…

>> 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…

Sorry, but these arguments by analogy are patently ridiculous.

We are not talking about the eons old human practice of creative artistic endeavor, which yes, is clearly derivative in some fashion, but which we have well established practices around.

We are discussing a new phenomenon of mass replication or derivation by machine at a scale impossible for a single individual to achieve by manual effort.

Further, artists tend to either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge their priors in secondary or even primary material, much like one cites work in an academic context.

Also, the claim:

>But if I take your work and compare it to millions of other people's work...

Is ridiculous. A. you haven't, nor will you ever actual do this. B. This is never how the system of artistic practice up to this point has worked precisely because this sort of activity is beyond the scale of human effort.

In addition, plagiarism exists and is bad. There's no reason that concept can be extended and expanded to include stochastic reproduction at scale.

If you feel artists shouldn't have a say and a future in which capital concentrates even further into the hands of a few technological elite who make their money off of flouting existing laws and the labor of thousands, by all means. But this argument that somehow by analogy to human behavior companies should not be responsible for the vast use of material without permission is absolutely preposterous. These are machines owned by companies. They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do. You may want to consider a distinction in the rules that adequately reflects this distinction in participatory status in a social system.

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

#284

Post by realusername »

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…

That's not enough to say that, all companies are benefiting of what has been made before, nothing exists in a vaccum. AI adds into the current landscape.

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

#285

Post by madeofpalk »

ben_w wrote: post #119
caconym_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So far, looks like funding a UBI study. As the IP owners are approximately "everyone" in law, UBI is kinda the only way to compensate all the IP owners. https://openai.com/our-structure

Until my check from OpenAI shows up, they're not.

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

#287

Post by derangedHorse »

Osmose wrote: post #139
sandworm101 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Because we are humans and our capability of abusing those rights is limited. The scale and speed at which LLMs can abuse copyrighted work to threaten the livelihoods of the authors of those works is reason enough to consider it unethical.

"abusing those rights" is a subjective phrase. What about it is "abuse"? If I learned how to draw cartoon characters from copying Family Guy and released a cartoon where the characters are drawn in a similar style, would that be abuse (assuming my show takes some of Family Guy's viewership)? Is your ethical hangup with the fact it's wrong to use the data of others to influence one's work (which could potentially be an algorithm) or that people are losing opportunities based on the influenced work?

If it's the latter how do we find the line between what's acceptable and what's not? For example, most people wouldn't be against the creation and release of a cure for cancer developed in this way. It would lead to the loss of opportunities for cancer researchers but I believe most people would deem that an acceptable tradeoff. A grayer area would be an AI art generator used to generate the designs for a cancer research donation page. If it could potentially lead to a 10% increase in donations, does that make it worth it?

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

#288

Post by niceice »

mirekrusin wrote: post #67

There is simple way to fix this. Ban private large models trained on public data, require them to be public weights. If a company wants to train large private model, they can do it with their own data.

It's not simple since you can't ban it everywhere. China, India, et al.

You can't ban it for open source either.

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

#289

Post by Vegenoid »

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…

There are many areas of research, technological advancement, and construction which would proceed much more quickly than their current pace if we didn't force them do things in the way that society has decided is correct and just.

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

#290

Post by itishappy »

dmazzoni wrote: post #155
seshagiric wrote: post #97

An independent artist who was already struggling now got bamboozled by Midjourney. Instead of listing the Artist somewhere in the midst of a million attributions, every instance Midjourney draws a cartoon in the Artist's style should at least have a (clickable link) attribution to the artist's website.

But today there are thousands of (human) artists who create original works "in the style of" other famous artists, and my understanding is that this is completely legal. Artists own a copyright to their actual works. Not to a "style". Besides, all artists learned from other artists and borrowed lots of ideas from predecessors. Why should we hold AI to a higher standard than we hold human artists to?

> Why should we hold AI to a higher standard than we hold human artists to?

Why hold it to human standards at all? It cannot be argued with, jailed, or shot. The only vaguely human thing it can do is draw kinda good.

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