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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

#421

Post by morelisp »

ilc wrote: post #393
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.)

> convincing companies to open up what source code they can, or working for open source companies.

Yeah, no, you don't get it. Sorry.

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

#422

Post by halostatue »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #357
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.

Because we are humans and our capability of abusing those rights is limited. The scale and speed at which looms can abuse copyrighted work to threaten the livelihoods of the seamstresses of those works is reason enough to consider it unethical. Replace loom for printing press etc, you realize you're a luddite?

Ned Ludd was onto something. He wasn't anti-progress. He was anti-labour theft. The problem was not that people were losing their jobs, but that they were being punished by society for losing their jobs and not being given the ability to adapt, all to satisfy the greed of the ownership class.

I am hearing a strong rhyme.

Commercialized LLMs are absolutely labour theft even if they are useful.

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

#423

Post by ta8645 »

kevingadd wrote: post #339
ta8645 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Based on the comment you replied to, it seems they are indeed producing verbatim copies. Well i'll leave it to the legal system to decide if that's true. But in any case, that's no different from a human with a photographic memory doing the same thing after reading a paragraph. We don't blame them for their superior memory, or being inspired by the knowledge. We don't claim they've violated copyright because their…

If I tell you water is wet and the sky is blue, will you be waiting for a court case to grind through the appeals process on that as well? The examples in the filing were unambiguous. You can go look it up and see them, they were also cited in all the news articles I saw about it. The AI regurgitated many paragraphs of text with very, very few small modifications.

The issue at hand is not if some words were copied; it's a legal issue of whether that constitutes legal or otherwise fair use or not. And I'm not a lawyer, and am happy to wait for the court to decide.

But to be honest, I don't really care one way or the other, since it doesn't get to the heart of the matter as I see it. To my mind, it's no different than a human with a good memory doing the same thing.

Specifically, it isn't the consumption of the media that is the problem, or even remembering it very well. Rather, it is the public verbatim reproduction of it, which a human might inappropriately do as well. AI's need to be trained to avoid unfair use of source material, but I don't think that means they should be prohibited from consuming public material.

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

#424

Post by Wissenschafter »

BizarreByte wrote: post #304
Wissenschafter wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Leaded gas isn't open source software. Try again.

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

#425

Post by andy99 »

dylan604 wrote: post #295
px43 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is using Midjourney to replace artists. Artists are using Midjourney to speed up the most tedious parts of their work.

That's just BS. If people weren't replacing artists, there would be no need to prompt with "in the style of ___". are you honestly saying that only artistX is using the prompt "in the style of artistX"?

Making a picture in the style of an artist is not replacing them. I don't know why anyone could get that idea. I can sing in the style Janice Joplin, pretty sure I'm not replacing her and that nobody thinks I am.

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

#426

Post by csallen »

nullptr_deref wrote: post #420
csallen wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Redacted.

Jobs have never been less soul crushing, or more creative, in the history of humanity. And that becomes increasingly true every decade.

Do you know what a job does? What a company does? It contributes to society! It produces something that someone else values. That they value so much they're willing to pay for it. Being part of this isn't a bad thing. It's what makes society work.

A job/company entertains. It keeps things clean. It transports people to where they need to go. It produces. It gives people things they want. It creates tools, and paints, and nails, and shirts. I look out my window, and I see people delivering furniture, chefs cooking food and selling it out of trucks, keepers maintaining grounds, people walking dogs.

Being useful to the fellow members of your society for 40 hours a week is not "soul crushing."

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

#427

Post by ls612 »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #417
ls612 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright only makes any sense for goods with a high fixed cost of production and low to zero marginal cost. Any further use beyond solving that problem is pure rent seeking behavior Also, with computers being functional copyright has become a tool of social control; any function in a physical object can be taken away from you at a whim with no recourse so long as a computer can be inserted into the object. Absent a…

No, copyright only makes sense insofar that it provides a net positive value for society: that it promotes/protects more creativity leading to economic output than it prevents. That is, does the amount of creative/economic output dissuaded by allowing AI (preventing people who would not be able to or not want to create art if they couldn't get paid) exceed the creative/economic output of letting people develop and us…

GenAI reduces the fixed cost of creating images/text/whatever which all else equal will increase the amount created. Whether or not you think that is a good thing is probably mostly a function of do you make money creating these things or do you pay money to have these things created.

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

#428

Post by chrisknyfe »

niceice wrote: post #311

Whether this is bad or good or should be banned or not is functionally irrelevant. There is nothing that can be done short of terminating the global internet. Sure you could ban it in the US and Europe, but you can't in China, et al. You can't ban it everywhere. You can't ban open source. Art has been democratized. It's not going back in the bottle. A kid with a laptop anywhere on the planet will be able to compete w…

And yet, Comcast and AT&T will gladly terminate any customer on their network pirating copyrighted works from large corporate owners. It seems to me like we very much can do something about AI infringement.

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

#429

Post by freejazz »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #268
mondrian wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does. See app stores and the endless copy-cat games and apps, right down to the art style.

I sue people for copyright infringement frequently. It's rare that I have a defendant whose defense is "the internet is full of other infringers, why should I be held responsible?" Never have they won. This debate would go better if people didn't base it on assumptions they gleam from the world around them, but with regard to the actual law and not specious reasoning like "well, they did it too!!"

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

#430

Post by rideontime »

Ukv wrote: post #410
bluefirebrand wrote: post #394

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? 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?

No idea on the legality, but common sense suggests that the difference would be that a spam detector doesn't replace the products that it was trained on, while AI-generated "art" is intended to replace human artists.
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