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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

#551

Post by ShamelessC »

tapoxi wrote: post #521
CrimsonRain wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pull the right levers, you can also copy the NYT article fully.

Yeah and that's copyright infringement. That's why if you're reverse engineering something it needs to be done in a clean room environment, your prior exposure to the copywritten material poisons the well for any derivative you create. This extends to music as well, if someone hears a song and is inspired by that in their work, the original artist gets credit.

> someone hears a song and is inspired by that in their work, the original artist gets credit.

I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty certain that’s not actually how things work.

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

#552

Post by cornel_io »

wheelie_boy wrote: post #467
encomiast wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure, that could be an instance of infringement depending on how it is used. But that's a minuscule percentage of the output and still might be fair use (read the decision in Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc.). But even if that instance is determined to be infringement, it doesn't mean the process of training models on copyrighted work is also infringement.

I can see 3 ways that you can guarantee that the output of a model never violates copyright 1. Models are trained with 100% uncopyrighted or properly licensed input data 2. Every output of the ML model is evaluated to make sure it's not too close to training data 3. Copyright law is changed to have a specific cutout for AI #1 is the approach taken by Adobe, although it generally is harder or more expensive to do. #2…

The much more likely outcome:

4. A ruling comes down that enshrines what all the big companies have been doing (with the blessings of their armies of expensive, talented, and conservative legal teams) as legitimate fair use

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

#553

Post by ta8645 »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #443
tapoxi wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI doesn't get inspired. It's not human. It adds everything about it to its endless stream of levers to pull, and if you pull the right ones, it will just give you the source verbatim as proven by the NYT lawsuit filing where it was just outputting unaltered copywritten NYT article text.

If you pull the right levers, you can also copy the NYT article fully.

This is literally impossible for the general case. There isn't a way to compress everything that an AI consumes down to the finite number of weights. That would represent a perfect compression algorithm, that is mathematically impossible.

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

#554

Post by Vvector »

chlorion wrote: post #528
Vvector wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>CD-ROM burners They can be used in an illegal way if used to copy copyrighted material, yes.

Same as an LLM, they can be used in an illegal way if used to copy copyrighted material. So I can't tell it to reproduce a copyrighted work. But it can create new material in the style of another artist.

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

#555

Post by ronsor »

edent wrote: post #368
ganzuul wrote: post #90

It has to be very hard to overcome the bad vibes of being in a situation like this. The technology seems indecipherable to a non-techie. The law seems indecipherable to a layman. The ethics seem indecipherable to everyone. With so much confusion, to feel that one has been treated justly it might not be enough to participate in a class-action lawsuit resolving what happened. It would help with public trust if there we…

I think the ethics are pretty clear. 1. Don't do things to people that they don't want to be done to them. 2. Do as you would be done by. It really is that simple.

I personally don't care if my work is used to train a large AI model.

It's also not inherently unethical to do things that someone doesn't want, because not all wants are valid or reasonable. A child may not want to have the candy put away, but it is still done anyway.

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

#556

Post by KuriousCat »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #536
KuriousCat wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going by this logic, why is OpenAI forbidding use of the content it generates for training other models?

Well, mostly because of corporate greed of ownership. But the underlying issue is that Ai training in AI is a recipe for ruining the entire training set. At least in these early stages.

Not just greed, they want to silence copyright holders whose works they freely use and at the same time prevent others from using theirs. It is like having different set of rules for them. I don't believe training itself is ruining anything, it is the proposed model of value capture and marginalizing content creators that poses greater threat.

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

#557

Post by tapoxi »

ta8645 wrote: post #548
tapoxi wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and that's copyright infringement. That's why if you're reverse engineering something it needs to be done in a clean room environment, your prior exposure to the copywritten material poisons the well for any derivative you create. This extends to music as well, if someone hears a song and is inspired by that in their work, the original artist gets credit.

> This extends to music as well, if someone hears a song and is inspired by that in their work, the original artist gets credit. That's only true in a very narrow set of circumstances. Imagine the case where someone listens to 10,000 songs, and then takes the sum total of that experience and writes their own. There's no credit given to the inspiration that each of those 10,000 songs gave. And that is in fact much clo…

If we're discussing the current situation, where ChatGPT is outputting entire articles of NYT copyrighted content, then it certainly matches say, Bittersweet Symphony containing a small sample of a Rolling Stones song resulting in the Stones getting credit for the entire work.

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

#558

Post by johnnyanmac »

theLiminator wrote: post #454
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…

What about code? Or what about if we eventually robot labourers that is trained on observing human labourers?

Code has licenses too. And we've had very high profile lawsuits based on "copying code".

>what about if we eventually robot labourers that is trained on observing human labourers?

Interesting point, but by that point in time I don't think generative art will even be in the top 10 ethical dilemmas to solve for "sentient" robots.

As it is now, robots aren't the ones at the helm grabbing data for themselves. Humans give orders (scripts) and provide data and what/where to obtain that data.

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

#559

Post by derangedHorse »

voidhorse wrote: post #432
derangedHorse wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your argument is predicated on the scale of inspired work being the problem? > They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do 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. Algorithms participati…

> 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 critiqu…

> They are not human beings and they do not participate in the social systems of human beings the way human beings do.

Your original quote was not using the impact of the technology, it was disparaging the algorithmic source of the inspired work (by saying it does not participate in social systems the way humans do).

> 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

LLMs, despite being able to reproduce content in the case of overtraining, do not store the content they are trained from. Also, the usage of "content" here is ambiguous so I assumed you meant the storage of training data.

To me, the content of an LLM is its algorithm and weights. If the weights can reproduce large swaths of content to a verifiable metric of closeness (and to an amount that's covered by current law) I can understand the desire to legally enforce current policies. The problem I have is against the frequent argument to ban generative algorithms altogether.

> 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.

I would counter this by saying the prompts constrain the result. How deterministically depends on how well one understands the semantic meaning of the weights and what the model was trained on. Also, as a disclaimer, I don't think that makes prompts proprietary (for various different reasons).

> I think this is a key difference in the "AI as art tool" case. A traditional tool does not harbor intentionality, or digital information

Assigning "intent" is an anthropomorphism of the algorithm in my opinion as they don't have any intent.

I do agree with your last paragraph though, one (or even a group of) individual's feelings don't make something legal or illegal. I can make a moral claim as to why I don't think it should be subject to constraints and laws, but of course that doesn't change what the law actually is.

The analogies are trying to make this appeal in an effort to influence those who try to make the laws overly restrictive. There are many laws that don't make sense and logic can't change their enforcement. The idea is to make a logical appeal to those who may have inconsistencies in their value system to try and prevent more non-sensical laws from being developed.

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

#560

Post by pushedx »

idopmstuff wrote: post #101
pushedx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a reference to Instagram, et. al., where distributing your illustrations there implicitly allows thier Ad machine to profit from your work

This seems like a strange criticism to me - if you're posting your illustrations on social media, it's presumably because you feel that you're getting value out of doing so. Who cares if they're also getting value out of you doing it, particularly when that value comes at no cost to you? If you sell your art, then art marketplaces and printers and shipping services all profit from your work, but I don't imagine she's…

> Who cares if they're getting value out if it.

Perhaps your artwork has an anti-capitalist message, and you do not want it to appear anywhere near an Ad for the latest beauty cream.

In the early days of the Internet, there were places to promote a webcomic with no commerical interest, like usenet and forums, and it was typical to visit an artist's website directly.

These days, the average new Internet user might not even be aware of the concept that an artist can have their own website, and own the user experience of visitng that website from end to end. Web design in the early 2000s had a lot of creativity and easter eggs built into the experience of navigating the pages themselves.

An artist absolutely has the right to not want to upload their creative work (which takes days and weeks to produce), onto a bland social media site with it's own terms and conditions with regard how that content is treated and monetized.

Places like Instagram are bleak compared to what was pushing creative boundaries of the web in the mid to late 2000s. Sure, there are still fun websites like this but they are difficult to find (what happened to StumbleUpon?)

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