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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

#511

Post by Ukv »

bawolff wrote: post #485
Ukv wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Fair use applies to humans and the things they do (including AI). It is not something that applies to algorithms in themselves. AI's are not people, the people who use them are people and fair use may or may not apply to the things they do depending on the circumstances of whatever it is they do. The agent is always the human not the machine.

True; consider the "it" in my question ("If I make a spam detector network, why should it not be covered by fair use?") as "my making (and usage) of the network".

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

#512

Post by Vvector »

Osmose wrote: post #139
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…

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.

Are photocopy machines illegal? Are CD-ROM burners illegal? Both allow near-unlimited copies of copyrighted material at a scale much faster than a human could do alone.

The tools are not the problem, it's how humans use them.

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

#513

Post by jMyles »

make3 wrote: post #162
jMyles wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that boundary something that the internet is likely to be able to recognize or enforce though? In 100 years? In 500? What are we building for here?

you mean, is the right of an individual human to property and the rule of law be recognized in 100 or 500 years? hopefully yes, unless you foresee some inescapable transfer to dictatorship, which you'll have to argue for to maintain your argument

I meant something softer and simpler, like power structures which somehow convince learning machines to avert their gaze when media from a forbidden domain appears.

That just doesn't seem like the direction of the internet to me.

As for the rule of law, it seems that what we're talking about here is what authority can be capable of supplying the law. I highly doubt that a confusing and contradictory set of mandates from nation states will continue to be "the law" on the internet.

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

#514

Post by californical »

sandworm101 wrote: post #338
huimang wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many books can you write per second? How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style? I don't think any person who actually has worked on anything creative in their life would compare a personal style to a model that can output in nearly any style at extreme speeds. And even if you're inspired by a specific author, invariably what happens is it becomes mix of yourself + thos…

>> How many books can you write per second? On my laptop, using modern tools backed by AI? ... many. >> How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style? Thanks now to AI, hundreds. I can plug the output of the book-reading AI into the input of the tool I use to write my books and thereby update my personal style to incorporate all the latest trends. Blame the idiots who are payi…

This is clearly a bad-faith response to the point that the GP was making

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

#515

Post by Workaccount2 »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #143
homefree wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably there is - training is not a copyright violation imo. I think it's more akin to you viewing the art and then later making your own thing, you get an intuition/inspiration from what you've seen. The other complaints are mostly about how it has become hard to not share to social media, but that's mostly a complaint about how people are. He can still just post on a website, it's not really the fault of social m…

Its not like looking and getting inspiration, its looking and being able to almost perfectly duplicate the style. Their complaint is not being able to post art for its own sake because it will be hoovered up into datasets to train more AI: They are forced to submit to helping train AI or not post their art.

Most skilled artists are perfectly capable of generating near identical copies of other artists work. This is something that has been going on for millennia.

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

#516

Post by isoprophlex »

shadowgovt wrote: post #445
pmcp wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side comment: I respect the author’s right to choose words that ring well to them, but jeez, as a non native english speaker, reading this, i am happy my device has a dictionary function.

That's Jerry's "thing." Jerry Holkins has always enjoyed how weird English is and what you can do to someone's brain with a few precisely-chosen words aligned in the right order; it's his writing style. If he applied his approach to Python coding, he'd be one of those folks who isn't happy until their entire program is a single `do()` method that executes by using decorators to synthesize classes and metaclasses out…

Which is all fun and game until you want to get some actual shit done, or in this case, communicate...

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

#517

Post by chlorion »

sandworm101 wrote: post #118
madeofpalk wrote: post #36

> But I can't even get cartoons to most people for free now, without doing unpaid work for the profit-making companies who own the most use channels of communication This is the sticking point for me. OpenAI isn't a profit-making company, but it's certainly a valuable company. A valuable company that is built from the work of content others created without transferring any value back to them. Regardless of legalities…

>> 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…

>We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it.

People keep saying this but it's actually much more complicated, and in many cases you can't view copyrighted content.

An example, MicroSoft employees are not permitted to view or learn from an open source (GPL-2) terminal emulator:

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10462#issuecomm...

Another example is proprietary software that may have it's source available, either intentionally or not. If you view this and then work on something related to it, like WINE for example, you are definitely at risk of being successfully sued.

If you worked at MicroSoft and worked on Windows, you would not be able to participate in WINE development at all without violating copyright.

If you viewed leaked Windows source code you also would not be able to participate in WINE development.

An interesting question that I have, is whether training on proprietary, non-trade-secret sources would be allowed. Something like unreal engine, where you can view the source but it's still proprietary.

Another question is whether training on leaked sources of proprietary and private but non-trade-secret code, like source dumps of Windows is legal.

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

#518

Post by tedivm »

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?

Is your mishmash going to be a literal statistical model built on top of those other stories?

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

#519

Post by csallen »

rideontime wrote: post #324
csallen wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course these are just opinions. It just doesn't seem like a perspective that's serving them well, except to make them feel bad about the art that they've been putting out… in the same way… for years and years… unchanged… with no tangible new issues for them or their readers… except the optional sadness that comes from this optional choice to be upset that other people are making money.

If you can't understand why somebody would "choose" to be upset that they're struggling to subsist while a company worth billions is using their labor without compensation to generate revenue, you're not worth discussing this with.

I understand it. It's called jealousy.

Their struggle to subsist has literally nothing to do with this other party's profits.

By their own admission, their struggle to subsist was a choice. It was a choice they made before these social media companies even existed. And they deliberately chose to continue with the same poorly-performing model that didn't make money, because they preferred doing it that way.

And now they are sad that others have not made that same choice, and are making money.

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

#520

Post by rspoerri »

kansface wrote: post #455
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…

> The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. Ah, just like humans who train against the output of other humans. AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard, only scope, and even that isn't perfectly obvious to me a priori.

Humans who train on material usually buy a book of it, pay for an entry to an exhibition or even pay to own an original.

Maybe they release it for free, possibly supported by ads, at least to get some recognition and a job if it is perceived well.

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