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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

#301

Post by [deleted] »

pmcp wrote: post #128
ineptech wrote: post #32

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.

Side comment: I respect the author’s right to choose words that ring well to them, but jeez, as a non native english speaker, reading this, i am happy my device has a dictionary function.

[deleted]

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

#302

Post by madeofpalk »

Aeolun wrote: post #211
tedivm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward. I also firmly believe that commercializing models built on top of copyrighted works (which all works start off as) does not qualify as fair use (or at least shouldn't) and that commercializing models build on copyrighted material is nothing more than license laundering. C…

If I read a lot of stories in a certain genre that I like, and I later write my own story, it’s almost by definition going to be a mish-mash of everything I like. Should I pay the authors of the books I read when I sell mine?

Put differently - if you perfectly memorise Harry Potter, write it down into a book and sell it, you'll get into trouble.

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

#303

Post by scythe »

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…

>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.

It's important to consider in any legalistic argument over copyright that, unlike conventional property rights which are to some degree prehistoric, copyright is a recent legal construct that was developed for a particular economic purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#History

The existing standards of fair use are what they are because copyright was developed with supporting the art industry as an intentional goal, not because it was handed down from the heavens or follows a basic human instinct. Ancient playwrights clipped each others' ideas liberally; late medieval economists observed that restricting this behavior seemed to encourage more creativity. Copyright law is a creation of humans, for humans, and is subordinate to moral and economic reasoning, not prior to it.

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

#304

Post by BizarreByte »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #13
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.

It's pretty tiring hearing people think anything like what you're saying is going to happen. The horse is out of the barn already, deal with it.

> The horse is out of the barn already, deal with it.

Like leaded gas, the government can make regulations to deal with anything should they choose to.

Why do you think it's okay for massive companies to freely profit off the work of others?

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

#305

Post by thomastjeffery »

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…

Copyright is a bad idea in the first place, and should just be thrown out entirely; but that isn't the whole picture here.

If OpenAI is allowed to be ignorant of copyright, then the rest of us should be allowed, too.

The problem is that OpenAI (alongside a handful of other very large corporations) gets exclusive rights to that ignorance. They get to monopolize the un-monopoly. That's even worse than the problem we started with.

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

#306

Post by ineptech »

petercooper wrote: post #157
ineptech wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a little oblique, but isn't there a parallel to the music piracy debates of the 90s here? The defense of those who steal training data, "It's not stealing because I'm only taking a little tiny piece from a whole bunch of people", seems like a neat inversion of the defense offered by people torrenting mp3s in their dorm rooms. It's worth noting that, back when it suddenly became technically feasible to copy al…

I like a good metaphor, so I see your point, though it doesn't quite fit for me. To me, training a model is less like redistribution and more like reading something and having it influence your thoughts. You may be able to reproduce certain memorable sections of things you've read verbatim (common with poetry, for example) and you may well be able to reproduce a 'style', but you don't have the entirety of the source…

I agree that copying music is not all that similar to an AI model using training data, but they're both examples of a superficially similar activity being transformed by automation and scale. The difference between manually copying a song on cassette for a friend and uploading that song to napster resembles the difference between a human learning to draw in an established artist's style to an AI model learning to draw in an established artist's style. In both cases, the offender's defense is a variation on, "It was okay when humans did this slowly..."

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

#307

Post by downWidOutaFite »

soulofmischief wrote: post #241
fragmede wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you not pay them when you bought their book to read it in the first place? That dead trees don't lend themselves to that sort of payoff is a limitation of the technology. In music, sampling is a well-accepted mechanism for creating new music, and the original authors of the music they used do get paid when the new one is used.

No, I bought the books used for 25 cents at a local booksale, and the authors did not benefit from my secondary market transaction.

You got that via the legal "first sale doctrine" which has been killed for digital works.

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

#308

Post by the_af »

brigadier132 wrote: post #272
0xf00ff00f wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why would anyone play chess? Also, why did we all assume that art of all things was the pinnacle of human achievement?

Why wouldn't we assume this?

What is the pinnacle of human achievement? I guess anything you say, someone else will claim that's not it either.

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

#310

Post by skydhash »

shadowgovt wrote: post #182
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…

> 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 craw…

No one wants to live under the bridge even if it was perfectly legal.
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