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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

#391

Post by Humdeee »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #256
Aeolun wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

It's an interesting predicament. Assuming these stories between person and machine are indistinguishable and of same quality, then the difference here is the ability to scale. Without giving bias because of humanity reasons, why should we give entitlement to output derived from a human over something else of same quality?

I hate making analogies, but if we make humans plant rows of potatoes, should that command a higher price and seen more valuable than planting potatoes by tractor 20 rows wide?

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

#392

Post by whywhywhywhy »

skydhash wrote: post #205
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?

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.

It doesn’t matter second you get a job you’ll have to prompt.

Knowing any non-prompt skill just becomes a frustration, you know the machine can make the finished product in 5 seconds yet you have to spend the 20 hours it used to take when the output will just be judged against how many promptings could be done in those hours.

It’s like a musket against the A10 gatling gun

I’d never advise anyone to bother learning anything that’s promptable.

Just embrace it because honestly everything else is over.

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

#393

Post by ilc »

morelisp wrote: post #65

As someone who still has a couple physical Cat and Girl zines, and who spent those same years writing free software for real people and not to pad a resume or force a standards committee's hand... this hits really hard.

While I don't have the Cat and Girl zines. I've spent years convincing companies to open up what source code they can, or working for open source companies.

I get it, though I had the day GitHub CoPilot came out and I wanted them to take a long walk off a short pier. (And I still do.)

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

#394

Post by bluefirebrand »

csallen wrote: post #364
bluefirebrand wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you know any artists that lived in a box their whole life and never saw other art? Do you know any writers who'd never read a book? Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings? Also, FYI, you can't steal digital artwork. You can only c…

> Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you know any artists that lived in a box their whole life and never saw other art? Do you know any writers who'd never read a book?

> Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings?

This still is pretending that humans and AI models are equivalent actors and should have the same rights

Emphatically no they shouldn't. The capabilities are vastly different. Fair use should not apply to AI.

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

#396

Post by bayindirh »

beernutz wrote: post #370
bayindirh wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter. You pay the artist for their style of rendering things. Consider XKCD, PHD Comics, Userfriendly, etc. At least 50% of the charm is the style, remaining 50% is the characters and the story arc. You can't copyright style of a Rolex, but people pay a fortune to get the real deal. Same thing. > My word, the lawsuits that would arise between artists... Artists imitate/copy artists as a compliment, at least…

No, you pay them for the finished product. The STYLE is independent. Lots of artists have similar styles. They don't all pay each other for copying their styles.

Every artist has their own style, because it's their way of creating the product.

Pixar, Disney and Dreamworks have different styles, same for actors, writers, and designers, too. You can generally tell who made what by reading, looking, listening, etc.

I can recognize a song by Deep Purple or John Mayer or Metallica, just by their guitar tone, or their mastering profile (yes, your ear can recognize that), in a couple of seconds.

If style was that easy, we could have 50 Picassos, 200 John Mayers, 45 Ara Gulers (A photographer) which you can't tell them apart, but it doesn't work that way.

XKCD took a couple of guest artists because of personal reasons. It was very evident, even if the drawing style was the same.

People, art, and hand made things are much more complex than it looks. Many programmers forget because everything is rendered with their favorite font, but no two hand-made thing is ever the same. Eat the same recipe from two different cooks, even if you measure the ingredients independently and give them beforehand, you'll have different tastes.

Style is a reflection of who you are. You can maybe imitate it, but you can't be it.

Heck, even two people implementing the same algorithm in the same programming language doesn't write the same thing.

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

#397

Post by kopecs »

tedivm wrote: post #177
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 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…

> I firmly believe that training models qualifies as free use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward.

I don't think this is as cut-and-dry and you make it out here. If I train a model on, say, every one of New York Times' and release it for free and it finds use as a way of circumventing their paywall I have difficulty justifying that as fair use/fair dealing. The purpose/character of the model should indeed be a factor but certainly not nearly as dispositive a one as I think you're suggesting.

To the extent that training the model serves a research purpose I think that the general use / public release of the trained model does not in general serve the same research purpose and ought to have substantially lower protection on the basis of, e.g., the effect on the original work(s) in the market.

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

#398

Post by bluefirebrand »

Ukv wrote: post #371
bluefirebrand wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

> 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. Do you feel the same way about tools like Google Translate?

Tbh I'm not familiar enough with how Google Translate is built, but if it's ingesting tons of people's work without their permission so it can be used to replace them then yes I do.

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

#399

Post by refulgentis »

dartos wrote: post #64
refulgentis wrote: post #35

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.

I would have going in, but it seems obvious in retrospect.

#1 Remember, designers, these aren't people who know who or what or when an IRC is.

#2 To even get going, you have to be able to mentally model the chat entry as a command line, and have an intuitive understanding of a slash command.

#3 The conceit was there were 3 laptop stations, one for Dall-E, one for Midjourney, one for Imagen, and they were rotating stations every couple of minutes. Adding time pressure didn't help.

Another way to think about it, real dialogue we had: wait, I'm at a chat app...okay where you chat, you want me to type slash...okay then imagine...wait whoa what was the menu that popped up after slash...wait whoa why did it go away...okay slash, and what do i type after that?...okay, imagine...wait, no space? okay '/imagine'...wait can I just load Dalle-E that was easier?

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

#400

Post by [deleted] »

enjo wrote: post #122
wlesieutre wrote: post #11

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.

[deleted]
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