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

#611

Post by godelski » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:53 PM UTC

spamizbad wrote: post #148

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?

If the boundary isn't enforced you'll likely see art move increasingly to a patronage system, whereby a select elite will get to choose what art is suitable for your consumption. Maybe you'll like that, maybe you won't.

> you'll likely see art move increasingly to a patronage system

It is?

But also this is dismissive without understanding either system at play. Traditional art has galleries because no one wants to buy art that they haven't seen. But this creates a problem if our galleries are on the internet. It no longer matters how much you attempt to stop a user from downloading or copying the art, they still can. We even see efforts to watermark art on public posting but we also see efforts to remove the watermarks. It's very clear to me that this is becoming a more complex time to be an artist than it was, say 5 years ago. Maybe better than 100 years ago, but that would be ridiculous to compare to as we'd have to get into an argument about the point of societies and if a goal is to make life better.

Strangely this is something some in the NFT crowd were attempting to solve. We can all agree that there were lots of scams (I'd even say dominated by scams and grifting) in the area and that there was poor execution of even good faith attempts, but I'm just trying to say that this was motivation for sum. They weren't even trying to solve as difficult of a problem, they were just trying to solve the problem of proof of ownership. It's not like you can use timestamps or public/private key pairs for proof. It still wouldn't even solve the problem of redistribution or training. It wouldn't prevent someone from even buying the art and training on it even if the artist specified that that was against the TOS (a whole other philosophical debate about TOS and physical ownership that I don't want to get into).

I think you're simplifying the problem and being ready to dismiss without adequately demonstrating an understanding of the issues and environment. I don't know what the answer is but I sure as hell know it is a lot more complex than "let the 'free market' run its course".

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

#612

Post by sudobash1 » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:53 PM UTC

isoprophlex wrote: post #516

shadowgovt wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think the point is that this is an artistic choice. I consider that paragraph to be halfway between poetry and prose. It's not the style of writing that you would want for most forms of communication, but if you think of it as being akin to a bit of poetry, then perhaps you will find it more acceptable.

I for one really appreciate seeing language being used so artistically. (Though if I was reading a technical spec, product description, legal contract, etc... absolutely not.)

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

#613

Post by kelnos » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:54 PM UTC

pushedx wrote: post #69

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…

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

Yes, and I'm sure somewhere in the Instagram terms of service, users have agreed to license their work to Instagram for those purposes.

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

#614

Post by kelnos » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:55 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #444

tedivm wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search engines don't replicate the content, they index and point to it. When search engines have been caught replicating content they have been sued or had to work out licenses.

I mean, generative AI basically involves turning content into vectors in order to try and find related content. If that's not an index structure i don't know what is.

The technical definition of how something works is often irrelevant in the eyes of the law. What matters is the output, and its effects.

The output of a search engine is nothing like the output of generative AI.

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

#615

Post by godelski » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:56 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #444

tedivm wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search engines don't replicate the content, they index and point to it. When search engines have been caught replicating content they have been sued or had to work out licenses.

I mean, generative AI basically involves turning content into vectors in order to try and find related content. If that's not an index structure i don't know what is.

Most ML are certainly compression systems, as you imply. But reproduction and redistribution of copyright material is quite different than generating a service that allows someone to find said material. The question about caching is a different one, but I doubt it falls under the same intent, as Google is incentivized to cache content to better facilitate the search __and redirection__ service, not to facilitate distribution.

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

#616

Post by kelnos » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:57 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #119

caconym_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's literally built into their corporate rules for how to take investment money, and when those rules were written they were criticised because people didn't think they'd ever grow enough for it to matter. How is OpenAI compensating the owners of IP they trained their models on? Or is that not what you mean? It's certainly how I read the part of the GP comment you quoted.

So far, looks like funding a UBI study. As the IP owners are approximately "everyone" in law, UBI is kinda the only way to compensate all the IP owners. https://openai.com/our-structure

That... doesn't seem sufficient, or legal, or (if legal) ethical. You can't just "compensate" people for using their copyrighted works via whatever means you've decided is fair.

I think funding UBI studies and lobbying for that sort of thing is a public good, but is entirely unrelated to -- and does not make up for -- wholesale copyright infringement.

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

#617

Post by danShumway » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:57 PM UTC

cmiles74 wrote: post #231

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…

OpenAI is very much a for-profit company with the same incentives to make money as every other US for-profit company. I understand that there's another company that is a non-profit and that company bosses the for-profit company. In my opinion, that's more of a footnote in their governance story, it doesn't make OpenAI a non-profit. Their website says... "A new for-profit subsidiary would be formed, capable of issuing…

Particularly after the whole Sam Altman debacle, regardless of one thinks that the board was being logical or not and regardless of whether anyone thinks that Sam Altman should have been fired, it's still very clear that the non-profit side of the company is not in control of the for-profit side.

We've seen zero evidence that the non-profit side of OpenAI meaningfully constrains the for-profit side in any way, and have seen direct evidence that when the non-profit and for-profit groups disagree with each other, the for-profit side wins.

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

#618

Post by edent » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:58 PM UTC

ronsor wrote: post #555

edent wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's fine. You can donate your work. But you cannot forcibly donate the work of others.

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

#619

Post by edent » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 9:59 PM UTC

nojvek wrote: post #505

edent wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People and them are quite varied though. One one hand I want better AI that can generate whatever image that comes to my mind. On the other hand I don’t want it to blatantly copy someone else’s style that they spent years making. US is pretty fucked since it has very little safety net compared to other modern countries if AI really started replacing humans. This is people’s livelihoods we are talking about. Will AI c…

> People and them are quite varied though.

So ask permission. Do you want to have our model ingest your work? Y/N

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

#620

Post by makomk » Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 10:01 PM UTC

jacobr1 wrote: post #527

kopecs wrote: 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…

Quite a lot of what news publications like the New York Times do is precisely regenerating articles that roughly approximate source material from some other publication. If I remember rightly, a lot of smaller, more local news organisations aren't happy about this because of course it's a more or less direct substitute for the original and a handful of big news organisations (particularly the New York Times) are taking so much of the money that people are willing to pay for news that it's affecting the viability of the rest - but it's not illegal, since facts cannot be copyrighted.