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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

#641

Post by kelseyfrog »

rafaelero wrote: post #627
kelseyfrog wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human laws are not natural products of the universe. It was a mistake to accept the validity of Aquinas and Hobbes arguments because we end up with conclusions like this. The concept of intellectual property is a legal fiction, a fabrication invented from whole cloth and somehow we've ended up here where it's assumed part of the natural universe. When we reverse the direction of laws from being products of human crea…

You have a three line sentence. Come on. Write clearer. The reason I said it is unstopable is not because of a philosophical/deterministic argument. It was a figure to speech to verbalize the fact that the incentives are so strong for allowing AI to use copyright data that going against it would be a societal backwards decision. Similar to what avoiding agriculture was for previous societies that don't exist anymore.

I crafted an argument which is impossible to refute. Luckily for you I wrote a different set of words that you took literally(how silly of you). You're more than welcome to still try though.

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

#642

Post by BizarreByte »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #626
BizarreByte wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the big AI models aren't open source and even if they were? You can absolutely regulate them.

[flagged]

> Go ahead and legislate it, in a free economy world your country is fucked, and stupid, if they do.

This is a tired argument that has been repeated every time almost any regulation has been proposed let alone implemented.

We could be more economically competitive with the world if we had no holidays and worked 13 hour days too.

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

#643

Post by pas »

godelski wrote: post #597
idopmstuff wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This seems like a strange criticism to me On the contrary, I think it is very natural. The environment changed, and thus the deal. There's no clear way to negotiate the terms of the deal. It may be easy to say to just drop off the platform, but we've seen how difficult it can be to destroy a social media platform. Sure, Myspace and Google+ failed, but they didn't have the network base that Facebook and Twitter do w…

The author reminisces of a time that was favorable to them, and implies that back then somehow it was free to distribute and this was taken away. Which is interesting, because there were ads back then too. A lot. Banners. Toolbars. Google made money a shitton of money back then too. And there are amazing non-FAANG spaces today like the Fediverse where the author can distribute their work, and the number of users there are easily comparable to the 'old internet' user counts.

But that points at the main question, what was this magical old way of distribution that was somehow pure that's now gone? Mailing lists. Still there. RSS? Still here, Google Reader died (peace be upon it), but the next day others started to grow as its shadow was gone. IRC? Forums?

So maybe the author is really missing the audience? Sure, platforms and powerful interests shape userbases, but it's not like those old sites were run on pure air.

Of course now there's a new possible way to use copyrighted works, and while it's very similar in effect of what human artists can do (and of course sometimes do), there's a very clear difference in scale, economics, control and thus it's natural that politics is involved.

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

#644

Post by Tao3300 »

px43 wrote: post #123
spookie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No one is using Midjourney to replace artists. Artists are using Midjourney to speed up the most tedious parts of their work.

We're a stone's throw from publishers no longer needing illustrators. That job is going to be gone. It'll be the cheapest choice, so the market will make it the only choice.

My children's children are going to have a few classic books that were illustrated by humans, but anything new or reissued won't be.

Magazines, articles, and covers that might have featured human illustration will be gone. It'll be too easy to throw pennies for "draw something topical to article title in the style of artist that appeals to target demographic".

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

#645

Post by Workaccount2 »

freejazz wrote: post #630
Workaccount2 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to be the lawyer of the first anime artist then.

Why engage with nearly 200 years of copyright jurisprudence when you can just insist you are right because anime ?

No, I can insist they are copying my style, which is anime.

Or maybe you cannot copyright style, and all those apps do fall on legal ground?

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

#646

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

Vastly inappropriate comparison- there are millions of pages of text out of copyright, you can get a good translation engine using public domain.

That’s is not the case for art, vast majority of art used by midjourney is not public domain.

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

#647

Post by brigadier132 »

the_af wrote: post #586
brigadier132 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I care more about peoples lives being better.

I didnt introduce this line of questioning. Learn to reread and maybe tjink a little more deeply about the good outcomes of automating intelligence.

You just have to be a complete moron to think more intelligence in the world is a bad thing.

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

#648

Post by ClumsyPilot »

csallen wrote: post #574
johnnyanmac wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 bene…

> 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

Nobody working on a new cancer drug actually did any work for me. They did labour for other reasons, and were happy with it.

There it is okay for me to steal their recipe and sell their cancer drug.

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

#649

Post by freejazz »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #645
freejazz wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why engage with nearly 200 years of copyright jurisprudence when you can just insist you are right because anime ?

No, I can insist they are copying my style, which is anime. Or maybe you cannot copyright style, and all those apps do fall on legal ground?

Style is not copyrightable. Please make an actual effort to engage with copyright law and not just ask me smarmy questions because you think you are right because you've made no efforts past looking at things immediately in front of you.

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=is+style+copyrightable

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

#650

Post by chlorion »

Vvector wrote: post #554
chlorion wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The difference is that the LLM is still copying copyrighted material in your case, but if I burn a Linux ISO, that is not happening.

You do not have to produce an exact copy of something to violate copyright, and I think anything the LLM outputs is violating copyright for everything it has ever trained on, unless the operator (the person operating the LLM and/or the person prompting it) has rights to that content.

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