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

#571

Post by ronsor » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:06 PM UTC

Cheer2171 wrote: post #152

jMyles wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are using the word "theft" in a way which does not describe conduct that is actually theft. Not all of us participate in the form of thought control that has been euphemistically pushed as "intellectual property."

I'm just curious if you believe that physical property or real estate is similarly a form of "thought control" that does not actually exist. "Property is theft" is a common saying in some intellectual-political circles, especially about land.

Your question is disingenuous IMO. Physical property is about physical things, not thoughts. "Intellectual property" is literally about thoughts and work based on them - it's in the name.

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

#572

Post by croes » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:10 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #342

croes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it's still fair use if you become one of most valuable companies, hence the word "fair" in fair use.

The value of a company has nothing to do with whether copyright applies.

Unless the value of the company is based on one product with alleged copyright infringement.

OpenAI has one asset: GPT.

>Commercial use does not automatically make the use copyright infringement, but it is an important deciding factor.

https://saltiellawgroup.com/2021/10/%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8Bcan-yo...

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

#573

Post by Tao3300 » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:11 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #71

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…

> Put it this way - you remove all the copyrighted, permission-less content from OpenAIs training, what value does OpenAI have? What you probably get is a LLM that can perfectly understand well written text as you might find on Wikipedia, but which would struggle severely with colloquial language of the kind found on Reddit and Twitter. > then it should give some of that value back to the content. That's literally bu…

> What you probably get is a LLM that can perfectly understand well written text as you might find on Wikipedia, but which would struggle severely with colloquial language of the kind found on Reddit and Twitter.

Great. Let's do that then. No good reason to volunteer it for a lobotomy.

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

#574

Post by csallen » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:12 PM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #545

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…

>Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? Because in this case the art is still necessary for the machine to work. You don't need horse buggies to make a car, nor existing books to make a printing press. You DO need artist's art to make these generative AI tools work. If these worked purely off of open source art or from true scratch, I wouldn't personally have an is…

> We don't need to kill it. Just pay your dang labor.

> But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it.

That's just it, nobody looking to get paid by OpenAI actually did any labor for OpenAI. They did labor for other reasons, and were happy with it.

OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet benefits by learning from the images of their fellow artists. OpenAI just uses technology to do it much more efficiently.

This has never been considered labor in the past. We've never asked artists to "properly compensate" each other for learning/inspiration in the past. I don't know why it should be considered labor or proper compensation now.

But we shall see what the courts decide!

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

#575

Post by ParetoOptimal » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:15 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #515

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's different though because there are social and legal reasons not to do it.

Also, the pool of people that can imitate a skilled artist is much smaller than those who can prompt "in the style of Picasso...".

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

#576

Post by the_af » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:16 PM UTC

brigadier132 wrote: post #330

the_af wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't we assume this? What is the pinnacle of human achievement? I guess anything you say, someone else will claim that's not it either.

Why would we assume anything? What is the pinnacle of human achievement? Clearly not art if we measure it by how easy it is to automate. Is that why artists took pride in themselves? Because they thought they couldn't be automated? Because some one said that art was important because of feelings?

> Why would we assume anything? [...] What is the pinnacle of human achievement?

I dunno, you introduced this line of questioning. You're the one who talked about assumptions. Isn't it up to you to answer it?

> Clearly not art if we measure it by how easy it is to automate

No, "clearly" nothing. I'm disagreeing with you here.

> Because some one said that art was important because of feelings?

Is anything that humans do important to you? If so, why? If not, why not?

I'm going to show all my cards here: I think the nihilistic view that nothing ultimately matters so why worry about anything at all, and let's concede all battles, is antithetical to human existence. You're not outright espousing this nihilistic worldview, but you're coming quite close in my opinion.

If you don't care about art, then pick something you do care about. If you don't care about anything enough, then all debate will be fruitless.

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

#577

Post by shkkmo » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:16 PM UTC

chlorion wrote: post #517

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…

>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…

Your link isn't very clear, but I think your are talking about the "clean room design" strategy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

The way this works is they way many of us are arguing that AI and copyright should work.

Vieiwing (or training on) copyrighted work isn't copyright infringement.

What can be copyright infringement is using an employee who has viewed (or a model that was trained on) copyrighted work to create a duplication of that work.

In most of the examples of infringing output that I've seen, the prompt is pretty explicit in its request to duplicate copyrighted material.

Models that produce copyrighted content when not explicitly asked for will have trouble getting traction among users who are concerned about the risk of infringement (such the examples you listed.)

I also see this approach opening an opportunity for models that acquire specific licenses for the content they train on that would grant licenses to the users of the model to duplicate some or all of the copyrighted works.

The responsibility for how a model is used should rest primarily on the user, not the model trainers.

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

#578

Post by andy99 » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:17 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #491

munk-a wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have laws covering close derivatives - in this case it might not be clear who is the inspiration but there is no novel creativity... everything these networks produce is derived from artists - there is no added novelty.

Imagine how rich you would be if you were the first artist to make a red health bar in a video game.

I think that's exactly the sort of flawed analysis these copyright trolls do. They see something they never would have had a hand in and count it as "theirs", and then greed kicks in. It's like the old MPAA/RIAA calculations of lost revenue that assume someone would have bought a CD if they didn't download a song. Only worse because at least in the downloading case, they are a 1:1 substitute.

In almost all cases I'd guess that artists whose style is being copied by many genAI users are getting way more exposure than in some alternate universe where midjourney didn't exist. But nobody looks at it that way, they just see somebody else making profit and think they deserve some.

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

#579

Post by joegibbs » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:17 PM UTC

0xf00ff00f wrote: post #43

ssgodderidge wrote: post #26

I wonder what effects AI ripping off today's artists will have on the next generation. They will grow up with AI "art" generators. Will they be concerned enough about AI-ripping them off that the don't put out novel, "human-made" works of art? Will they put down the AI tools long enough to learn "manual" forms of art?

Yeah, it's over. Why would a kid want to spend thousands of hours practicing with pencil and paper, when they can get a much more impressive result by typing a couple of words on a web site?

20 years ago people said “It’s all over for artists. You don’t even need to practice at it, you just press a few buttons in Photoshop and get a better result.” And 100 years ago they said “It’s all over for art, all you need to do is press a button on a camera and you get a perfect recreation.”

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

#580

Post by ChadNauseam » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:18 PM UTC

mkipper wrote: post #401

unfamiliar wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If having those restrictions makes the world worse overall, then it would be ethical to remove them. But I assume the restrictions are designed by intelligent people with the intention of making the world better, so I don’t see any reason to think that’s the case.

I agree that the current crop of artists are worse off with AI art tools being generally available. But consumers of art, and people who like making art with AI art tools, are better off with those tools being available. To me it’s clear that the benefit of the consumers outweighs the cost to the artists, and I would say the same if it was coders being put out of jobs instead. You can prove this to yourself by applying it to anything else that’s been automated. Recording music playback put thousands of musicians out of work, but do you really regret recorded music playback having been invented?

P.S. Adobe firefly is pretty competent and is only trained on material that adobe has the license to. If copyright were the real reason people didn’t like AI art tools, you would see artists telling everyone to get Adobe subscriptions instead of Midjourney.