On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by mkipper » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:48 PM UTC

unfamiliar wrote: post #178

Osmose wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t think it is. What you describe is similar to any other industry disruption, and I don’t think those are unethical. I’d actually argue that preventing disruption is often (not always) unethical, because you artificially prolong an inefficient or inferior alternative.

Do you really feel that way universally? Would it be ethical to disrupt the pharmaceutical industry by removing all restrictions around drug trials? Heck, you could probably speed things up even further if you could administer experimental drugs to subjects without their consent.

Obviously this is a bit facetious, but basing your ethical framework on utilitarianism and _nothing_ else is pretty radical.

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

#402

Post by ben_w » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:48 PM UTC

edc117 wrote: post #229

ben_w wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good catch, hadn't seen that. So the researchers, shareholders, and leadership of OpenAI will be happy to give up being ridiculously wealthy so they can be only moderately wealthy, and everyone else gets a basic income? I'm also just skeptical of UBI in general, I suppose - 'free' money tends to just inflate everything to account for it, and it still won't address scarcity issues for limited physical assets like land…

I agree UBI can have that problem, but I think it can be avoided if e.g. the government owns the means of production.

There are still risks in this scenario.

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

#403

Post by halostatue » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:48 PM UTC

philomath_mn wrote: post #332

madeofpalk wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The question is about someone/something writing a book _influenced_ by Harry Potter -- do they owe JK Rowling royalties?

That depends on a variety of factors. You may find yourself in trouble if you write about a wizard boy called Perry Hotter going to Elkwood school of magic and he ends up with two sidekicks (a smarter girl and a redhead boy).

It could be argued quite convincingly that stories like Brooks's Shannara and Eddings's Belgariad are LOTR with the serial numbers filed off — but there is more than enough difference in how various pieces work for those series to make them unique creations that do not infringe on the properties or cover too much the story. (Although I cringe at putting the execrable Belgariad books in any class with either LOTR or Shannara.)

The "best" modern example of this is the 50 Shades series. These are Twilight fan fiction (it is acknowledged as such) with the vampire bits filed off. They are inspired by Twilight, but they are not identifiably Twilight in the end. It might be hard to tell the quality of writing from that which an LLM can produce, and frankly Anne Rice did it all better decades before (both vampires and BSDM).

Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. They can produce statistically approximated mishmashes of the original works themselves, but there is no act or spark of creation, insight, or influence going on that makes the sort of question you’re asking silly. LLMs are just math. Humans may be just chemistry, but there’s qualia that LLMs do not have any more than `fortune` does.

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

#404

Post by bluefirebrand » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:49 PM UTC

Humdeee wrote: post #391

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…

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 hig…

> Without giving bias to humanity

No, we should absolutely be giving bias to humanity. Flesh and blood humans matter, their lives matter, their thoughts matter and their work matters.

Machines are tools for them to use not entities given the same rights and same consideration.

I reject your whole premise.

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

#405

Post by csallen » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:49 PM UTC

nullptr_deref wrote: post #355

csallen wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Redacted.

Mass production hasn't killed art and never will.

What's killing art is this idea by a vocal minority of "artists" that they need to mass produce their work, enter the market, and attempt to make millions of dollars by selling and distributing it to millions.

That's not art. That's capitalism. That's competing to produce something that customers will want to buy more than what your competitors offer.

If you want to compete on the capitalistic marketplace, then compete on the capitalistic marketplace. But if you want to be an artist, be an artist.

Art is still alive and well and always will be. Every day I see people singing because they love singing, making pottery because they love making pottery, writing because they love writing. Whether other people love or enjoy their art, the artist may or may not care. Whether they can profit from their art, the artist may or may not care. But many billions of artists will keep creating, crafting, and designing day after day, and they will never be stopped by AI or anything else.

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

#406

Post by derangedHorse » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:49 PM UTC

mondrian wrote: post #197

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…

Does copyright law say you can ingest copyrighted work at very large scale and sell derivates of those works to gain massive profit / massive market capitalizations? Honestly wondering. This seems to be the crux issue here.

Like how Google has parsed webpages of content to develop their page rank algorithm for searching on the web? I'm assuming it does.

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

#407

Post by ska » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:49 PM UTC

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?

There are two problems with this (very common) line of argument.

First, the law is pretty clear that yes if your story is too similar to another work, they have rights. Second, it's not at all obvious we can or should generalize from "what a human can do" and "what a bunch of computers can do" in areas like this.

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

#408

Post by ReflectedImage » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:49 PM UTC

Regular artists take a large number of other artists work and combine them together to produce new art works.

Midjourney is performing the same blending function as regular artists.

It's hard to see why one is any different from the other other than a human is involved.

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

#409

Post by bink » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:49 PM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #280

cmiles74 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI is very much a for-profit company with the same incentives to make money as every other US for-profit company. I understand that there's another company that is a non-profit and that company bosses the for-profit company. In my opinion, that's more of a footnote in their governance story, it doesn't make OpenAI a non-profit. Their website says... "A new for-profit subsidiary would be formed, capable of issuing…

They might be a for-profit company, but I don't believe they have made a profit. I wasn't even thinking of the murkey non-profit status.

They have over a billion dollars in revenue per year. They aren't making a profit because they're reinvesting all of that money into growing the company.

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

#410

Post by Ukv » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 7:49 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #394

csallen wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Fair use applies even to use of traditional algorithms, like the thumbnailing/caching performed by search engines. If I make a spam detector network, why should it not be covered by fair use?