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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

#631

Post by the_gastropod »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #580
mkipper wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

> If having those restrictions makes the world worse overall, then it would be ethical to remove them

Worse how? As defined by whom?

You could make a pretty compelling argument that "the world" would be better off by, e.g., forcing cancer patients through drug trials against their will. We basically could speed run a cure to cancer!

These longtermist, ends justify the means, ideas can easily turn extremely gross.

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

#632

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

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.

(1) means that taxes, the legal and justice systems, much of the public education system, criticism, begging on the street, and protest are all unethical, among I'm sure many others. Not to suggest you believe they are- I'm sure that you can present very strong arguments for some or all of these- but that makes it much less simple and leaves room for debate about whether this situation is also an exception.

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

#633

Post by freejazz »

ls612 wrote: post #587
freejazz wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the future of AI art - but is AI art the future of art? if AI artists can't maintain any profit from their work, how are they going to afford the compute time?

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

#634

Post by yieldcrv »

spookie wrote: post #25
andy99 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair use. Licenses like that are enforced under copyright, if the use is not subject to copyright, the license terms are irrelevant.

I'm not sure if it applies here. Midjourney's use intends to substitute the artists' work, and is commercial.

Direct duplicates are fair use as they are evaluated for criticism and the novelty of it being an actual duplicate at all

Everything else is a derivative work which falls outside of copyright claims

How would you like the law to change? That’s part of the equation too

Of course there are models trained only on licensed materials already, which reaches the same result of the material creators obsolescence

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

#635

Post by Wissenschafter »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #595
crazygringo wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well obviously AI isn't at the level of replacing Hollywood yet. But once it is? I mean, yeah, it'll replace Hollywood. People will tell Netflix, "hey I want a move about X in the style of Y and I want Z to star in it", and bam -- your own bespoke movie. I mean, once the capability's there, it's just inevitable. And yeah -- acting will become a hobby, just like sewing is today.

Then people will see how empty and inferior it is and want movies with actual people and writers again.

Then the market will decide, won't it? Why the fuss about generative AI then? If you're so confident about its inferiority, you shouldn't have to worry about it, right? The better product will win, right?

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

#636

Post by KuriousCat »

kelnos wrote: post #603
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?

Because any company, hypocrisy be damned, will use every legal lever at their disposal to protect their business model.

Hope we are not normalizing hypocrisy, usually it is very destructive.

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

#637

Post by Wissenschafter »

bayindirh wrote: post #510
crazygringo wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well obviously AI isn't at the level of replacing Hollywood yet. But once it is? I mean, yeah, it'll replace Hollywood. People will tell Netflix, "hey I want a move about X in the style of Y and I want Z to star in it", and bam -- your own bespoke movie. I mean, once the capability's there, it's just inevitable. And yeah -- acting will become a hobby, just like sewing is today.

Honestly, that'll be boring. I don't want to be a star of a movie, that's not what pulls me in. I want to see what the person has imagined, what the story carries from the author, what the humans in it added to it and what they got out of it. When I read a book, I look from another human's eyes, with their thoughts and imagination. That's interesting and life-changing actually. Also, the author's life and inner world…

"This is what makes human creation special.", that's a load of garbage. There is nothing inherently special about human creation. Some AI artwork I've seen is incredible, the fact it was AI generated didn't change its being an incredible piece of art.

Thinking our creation has some kind of 'specialness' to it is like believing in a soul, or some other stupid thing. It's pure hubris.

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

#638

Post by ClumsyPilot »

its_ethan wrote: post #196
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #82

My 2 cents - people often compare this AI to automation that came before say the printing press, or automatic fabric production . But it’s actually far worse. If all the calligraphers drop dead, the printing press still works. If everyone who hand makes fabrics drops dead, the automatic fabric machines continue to develop. But midjourney doesn’t work without artists, it depends on them like a parasite depends on its…

> If all the calligraphers drop dead, the printing press still works. If all artists drop dead, MidJourney still has a trained model that will continue to work.... it relied on artists to become operational (just like the printing press and automatic looms relied on their respective artisans success) but it is not dependent on them to continue to function.

Printing press does not rely on work of calligraphers at all, not to become operational, not to continue functioning. new fonts and typefaces are created by an entirely different profession. Printing industry is still advancing and the number of calligraphers is basically zero.

Without artists, midjourney will never learn a new style. It is not capable of advancing.

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

#639

Post by spookie »

KuriousCat wrote: post #556
johnnyanmac wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, you've condensed the problem in display quite well here. It's not even just hypocrisy, but also short sighted behaviour.

Artists will learn to not trust the web, if they haven't already. The greatest time to train a model was yesterday, eventually no novel ideas, expressions, art will prosper on the "open" web. Just a regurgitation of some statistical idea of words, and pixels.

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

#640

Post by amplex1337 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #431
bluefirebrand wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh I'm not familiar enough with how Google Translate is built, but if it's ingesting tons of people's work without their permission so it can be used to replace them then yes I do.

For what it's worth: that's pretty much how Translate works. Translate operates at a large-chunk resolution, and one of the insights in solving the problem was the idea that you can often get a pretty-good-enough translation by swapping a whole sentence for another whole sentence. So they ingest vast amounts of pre-translated content (the UN publications are a great source, because they have to be published in the la…

I would argue that Translate being fed by paid UN translators who likely agreed to the use of their transcriptions in a TOS or something is not an equal comparison to unpaid artists having their art submitted online to sites which become part of a training set used in for-profit models such as OpenAI, that they never consented to. OpenAI is a nonprofit parent company, but this spawned a child for-profit company OpenAI LP which most of their staff work for, which is meant to return many-fold returns to their shareholders who are effectively profiting from the labor of all the artists and sources in their training.
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