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

> That can be said by the development of any technology. Fear of capital concentration is more a critique on capitalism than it is on technological development.

Technology does not exist in a vacuum. All of the utility and relevance of technology to humans is dependent on the social and economic conditions in which that technology is developed and deployed. One cannot possibly critique technology without also critiquing a social system, and typically a critique of technology is precisely a critique about its potential abuses in a given social system. And yes, that's what I'm attempting to do here.

> I don't think this adds anything to the argument besides you using this as a reason analogies with humans can't be used to compare the specific concept of inspired works? I don't think this holds up.

This is a fair point. One could argue that an LLM, properly considered, is just another tool in the artist's toolbox. I think a major distinction though, between and LLM and, say, a paintbrush or even a text-editor, or photoshop, is that these tools do not have content baked into them. An LLM is in a different class insofar as it is not simply a tool, but is also partially the content.

The use of two different LLMs by the same artist, with a the same prompt, will produce different results regardless of the intent of the so called artist/user. The use of a different paintbrush, by the same artist, with the same pictorial intention may produce slightly different results due to material conditions, but the artist is able to consciously and partially deterministically constrain the result. In the LLLM case, the tool itself is a partial realization of the output already and that output is trained on masses of works of unknown individuals.

I think this is a key difference in the "AI as art tool" case. A traditional tool does not harbor intentionality, or digital information. It may constrain the type of work you can produce with it, but it does not have inherent, specific forms that it produces regardless of user intent. LLMs are a different beast in this sense.

Law is a realization of the societal values we want to uphold. Just as we can't in principle claim that training of LLMs on scores of existing work is wrong solely due to the technical function of LLMs, we cannot claim that this process shouldn't be subject to constraints and laws due to the technical function of LLMs and/or human beings, which is precisely what the arguments by analogy try to do. They boil down to "well it can't be illegal since humans basically do the same thing" which is a hyper-reductive viewpoint that ignores both the complexities and novelty of the situation and the role of law in shaping willful societal structure, and not just "adhering" to natural facts.

I wouldn't be able to guess.

Plus side: Smaller more focused model with lower rate of falsehoods.

Minus side: it kant reed txt ritten liek this, buuuut dat only matters wen nrml uzers akchuly wanna computr dat wrks wif dis style o ritin lol

I suspect there is a lot of value in the latter, and while I don't expect it to be as much as the value in the former, I wouldn't want to gamble very much either way.

Hey. Thanks. Sorry about wasting your time. Shouldn't have started in the first place. It was my fault for trying to make a silly point.

Too mid to understand your point.

And profit off of it?