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

catandgirl.com

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

#581
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I hope you payed for the book you read. If openai would pay usage fees for the training material per user its generating content for - it would never be profitable - artist would be fine off. But even all the shares are owned by people who have given this system none of it‘s knowledge.

>If openai would pay usage fees for the training material per user its generating content for - it would never be profitable

In that case, good? I thought if nothing else, these past year or two would teach companies about sinking money into unsustainable businesses and then price gauging later (i know it won't, the moment interest rates fall we are back to square one). If it isn't profitable, scale down the means of production (which may include paying C class executives one less yatch per year, tragic), charge more upfront to the customers, or work out better deals with your 3rd parties (which is artists in this case).

I also find some scheudenfredre in that these companies are trying to sell "less enployees" to other companies but would also benefit from said scaling down as they throw out defenses of "we can't afford to pay every copyright" .

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

#582
post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I dunno, you introduced this line of questioning

> 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?

No I did not introduce this line of questioning.

Anyway, it seems like a lot of "meaning" people get out of thing is actually completely based on pride and if there is something out there that can do it better it's not worth doing because their sense of pride is destroyed.

In essence, humans reject the potential for a scarcity free paradise because of lack of "meaning" (aka pride). It's almost biblical.

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

#583
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question is "is it a derivative work of the original?" - not if it is a generative work. If that was the distinction to be made, using ChatGPT as a classifier would be acceptable while using it to write new spam (see the "I am sorry" amazon listings of the other day) would be unacceptable. If two different uses of a tool allow for both infringing and non-infringing uses (are photocopiers allowed to make copies(!)…

Yeah, I really think it should fall on the user as opposed to the tool.

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

#585

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…

So, zero. You yourself: zero.

You completely ignored the premise of the question.

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

#586
post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I dunno, you introduced this line of questioning > 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? No I did not introduce this line of questioning. Anyway, it seems like a lot of "meaning" people get out of thing is actually completely based on pride and if there is something out there that…

Yes, yes you did. Plus I edited my comment to elaborate more on why I disagree with your comment.

Edit: so you don't care about meaning? It's one of the fundamental human traits, I think. Just existing isn't enough for a lot of people, and I disagree there's something biblical about this.

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

#587
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…

Don't put the cart before the horse. What art will we have for AI to copy if there's no more artists next generation?

The future of good AI art is Adobe Firefly; a tool in a picture editor which gives users great productivity for certain tasks. Artists won’t go extinct; they will be able to produce a lot more art.

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

#588
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I firmly believe that training models qualifies as free use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward. I don't think this is as cut-and-dry and you make it out here. If I train a model on, say, every one of New York Times' and release it for free and it finds use as a way of circumventing their paywall I have difficulty justifying that as fair use/fair dealing. The purpo…

Wouldn't that depend on the use case? If you just had the model regenerate articles that roughly approximate its source material that is much a more clear cut violation of a paywall. But if you use that data as general background knowledge to synthesize aggregative works such a history of the vietnam war, or trends in musical theatre in the 1980s relative the 1970s, or shifts in the language usage of formal honorific…

Yes, I think this is a rather fact-specific inquiry. My main point is that the research/commercial distinction is not the only factor (and not even the most important one).

> if you use that data as general background knowledge to synthesize aggregative works such a history of the vietnam war, or trends in musical theatre in the 1980s relative the 1970s, or shifts in the language usage of formal honorifics, then that seems to me to be clearly fair-use categories

I don't think this is clear. If someone were to train a model on several books about the Vietnam War and then publish my own model-created book on history of the Vietnam War, I would be inclined to say that that is infringement. And if they changed the dataset to include a plurality of additional books which happen to not be about Vietnam, I don't think that changes the analysis substantially.

I think it is hard to earnestly claim that in that instance the output (setting aside the model itself, which is also a consideration) is transformative, and so I would think, absent more specific facts, that all four fair use factors are against it.

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

#589
post #41
post #5

The sooner anyone making profit from models trained on creators proprietary content start paying for the content they’re using the better for creators, society and even the AI companies. It’s pretty tiring hearing people argue about whether copyright law applies to AI companies or not. It applies. Just get on and sort out a proper licensing model.

> "The bottom line is this," the firm, known as a16z, wrote. "Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development." > The firm said payment for all of the copyrighted material already used in LLMs would cost the companies that built them "tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in royalty payments." https://www.bus…

Well. Fuck those guys.

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

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new York Times has examples where GPT will reproduce world for word exactly paragraphs of their (copyrighted) text if you ask it to You are forgetting the massive asterisk that you need to provide multiple paragraphs of the original article in order to get verbatim output from chatgpt. In what world are people doing that to avoid paying the NYT?

This is absolutely not true. Here is an article where ars technica tried it https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/ny-times-sues-op... And this is a screenshot of their session whith copilot https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Scree...

This does not match what GP claimed, that when prompted with the start of an article, GPT 3 (mostly) faithfully completes it. The original article also claimed that it seemed to have been patched shortly after publication.
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