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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

#341

Post by mvolfik »

gandalfgeek wrote: post #282

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.

I think a good reason to be more worried about A is outlined in this sibling thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39017576 - humans have limited capacity, AI models are able to produce content at unmatched speed and quantity

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

#342

Post by yreg »

croes wrote: post #23
artninja1988 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair use, if it does indeed apply, doesn't care about license

I doubt it's still fair use if you become one of most valuable companies, hence the word "fair" in fair use.

The value of a company has nothing to do with whether copyright applies.

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

#343

Post by autoexec »

madeofpalk wrote: post #203
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…

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 f…

> 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

I'd feel a lot better about that argument if we had sane copyright laws and anything older than 7-10 years was automatically in the public domain. Suddenly, netflix is looking a lot more valuable with just public domain works and there'd be a ton of public domain art to train AI models with. I suspect that the technology would still leave a lot of artists concerned in that situation though, because even once the issue of copyright is largely solved the fact remains that AI enables people who aren't artists to create art.

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

#344

Post by blibble »

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…

> Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development.

which, as an involuntary donor, is exactly what I want

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

#345

Post by throw10920 »

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.

> anyone making profit from models

It's actually just "anyone making models". If you train a model with other people's art (without their permission) and then distribute the model or output for free, your still stealing their work, even if you make zero profit.

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

#346

Post by kevingadd »

munchler wrote: post #168
ska wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair use is a defence you can use when you infringe copyright [edit for clarity] or in other words the action you take would otherwise infringe. It's not fair use because you want it to be, and it's not at all legally clear if this defence is valid in the case of AI training. But it's not clear it isn't, either. This is basically what all the noise and PR money is about, currently, in hope that shaping the narrative…

Fair use is not copyright infringement! It’s a limitation placed on copyright to balance the interests of copyright holders with the public interest.

Fair use is a legal defense that requires you to pass multiple tests. It's not a "thing" that you can just assert all AI training is and expect people to believe you.

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

#347

Post by madeofpalk »

unnamed76ri wrote: post #188
seurimas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spotify and the rights holders come together and agree on the right price. Unfortunately, since long before Spotify ever existed, it's usually the record labels who owns the rights to the music and the actual creators still get shafted.

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

#348

Post by ta8645 »

nonbirithm wrote: post #333
ta8645 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a matter of perspective. AI's do not make a copy of the source material. It very much just adjusts their internal weights, which from a broadminded perspective, can be seen as simple inspiration, and not copying. Of course, just like a human artist, it could probably closely approximate the source material if it wanted to, but it would still be its own approximation, not an exact duplicate. As for plagiarism,…

> AI's do not make a copy of the source material. It very much just adjusts their internal weights, which from a broadminded perspective, can be seen as simple inspiration, and not copying. I think the term "AI" is one of the most loaded and misleading to come up in recent discourse. We don't say that relational databases "pack and ship" data, or web clients "hold a conversation" with each other. But for some reason…

You make a good point.

My own perspective is that humans do not have an exclusive right to intelligence, or ultimately to personhood. I am not anthropomorphizing when I defend the rights of AI. Instead, I am doing so in the abstract sense, without claiming that the current technology should be rightly classified as AI or not. But since the arguments are being framed against the rights of AI to consume media, I think the defense needs to be framed in the same way.

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

#349

Post by kelseyfrog »

rafaelero wrote: post #194
itishappy wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Progress is more important than your right to... Hard no. We progress civilization so that we (as humans) may benefit. Progress at any cost is pathological, see universal paperclips as the extreme example.

I don't think we even have a choice here. It's unstopable.

Human laws are not natural products of the universe.

It was a mistake to accept the validity of Aquinas and Hobbes arguments because we end up with conclusions like this. The concept of intellectual property is a legal fiction, a fabrication invented from whole cloth and somehow we've ended up here where it's assumed part of the natural universe.

When we reverse the direction of laws from being products of human creation to reflecting the laws of the universe we're forgetting the power of their authors and in turn giving up one our agency in drafting laws from myriad possibilities, any number of which, if had been picked by chance, would have been equally erased in authorship and told to us was a natural, universal, unstoppable law.

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

#350

Post by bluefirebrand »

csallen wrote: post #294
bluefirebrand wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn't hold individual humans and ML models to the same standards, because ML models themselves are products capable of mass production and individual humans are not even remotely at the same scale. If you write that book, chances are you will gain some fans that are also fans of other authors in that genre. If ML models write that genre, they can flood that genre so full that human artists won't be able to com…

Computers and machines have been capable of mass production for decades, and humans have used them as tools. In the past 170 years, these tools of mass production have already diminished many thousands of professions that were staffed by people who had to painstakingly craft things one at a time. Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? Why should we kill this techno…

> Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not?

It shouldn't be.

As soon as someone makes an AI that can produce it's own artwork without requiring ingesting every piece of stolen artwork it can, then I'm on board.

But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as that.

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