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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

#661

Post by Aeolun »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #652
csallen wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? Do you know any artists that lived in a box their whole life and never saw other art? Do you know any writers who'd never read a book? Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings? Also, FYI, you can't steal digital artwork. You can only c…

> Are there any humans that can produce artwork without ingesting inspiration from other art? This sounds so detached from human experience that I am tempted to ask if you are a human or just a disembodied spirit that haunts the internet. When the first neanderthal drew a deer on the walls of a cave, where did they get inspiration? When a little child draws a tree for the first time, where do they draw inspiration? D…

Yeah, but that’s not really your sole source of inspiration. My son has been ‘inspired’ by the art of all other kids in his kindergarden. Certainly by the time he gets to the age where he does it professionally he’s been inspired by an uncountable number of people.

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

#662

Post by ben_w »

kelnos wrote: post #616
ben_w wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I take no position at all about legality, if scraping is or is not legal and if LLMs are or are not "fair use" is quite beyond my limited grasp of international copyright law.

But moral/ethical, and/or sufficient compensation?

IMO (and it is just opinion), the damage GenAI does to IP value happens when, and only when, an AI is good enough to make some human unemployable, and that happens to all e.g. novelists around the same time even those whose IP was explicitly excluded from training the model. So, twist question: is it fair to pay a UBI to people who refuse to contribute to some future AI that does end up making us all redundant? (My answer is "yes, it's fair to pay to all even if they contributed nothing, this is a terrible place for schadenfreude").

Conversely, mediocre regurgitation of half-remembered patterns that mimic the style of a famous author cannot cause any more harm when done by AI than when done by fan fiction.

Right now these models are pretty bad at creative fiction, pretty good at writing code, so I expect this to impact us before novelists, despite the flood of mediocre AI books reported in various places.

Other damage can happen independently of IP value damage, like fully automated propaganda, but that seems like it's not a place where compensation would go to a copyright holder in the first place.

Sufficient compensation? If AI works out, nobody will have any economic advantage, and UBI is the only fair and ethical option I am yet aware of for that.

It's what happens between here and there that's messy.

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

#663

Post by c0pium »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #256
Aeolun wrote: 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?

We shouldn't hold individual humans and ML models to the same standards, because ML models themselves are products capable of mass production and individual humans are not even remotely at the same scale. If you write that book, chances are you will gain some fans that are also fans of other authors in that genre. If ML models write that genre, they can flood that genre so full that human artists won't be able to com…

These models are not conscious, they’re not acting on their own. If I make art using a generative model it’s no more the model doing it than it’s sketchbook doing it if I were to use that. I’m making art using whatever tool, sometimes that tool is more or less powerful. But I’m the one doing it.

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

#664

Post by c0pium »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #646
shadowgovt wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> vast majority of art used by midjourney is not public domain

Is that true? How did you establish that?

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

#665

Post by csallen »

egypturnash wrote: post #624
csallen wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There are many ways an artist can compensate their influences. Some of them are monetary. When discussing our work, we can name them. When one of our influences comes out with a new body of work, we can gush about it to our own fans. When we find ourselves in a position of authority, we can offer work to our influences. No animation studio is really complete without someone old enough to be a grandfather hanging out…

Most people know 20,000-40,000 words. Let's call it 30,000. You've learned 99.999% of those 30,000 people from other people. And don't get me started on phrases, cliches, sentence structures, etc.

How many of those words do you remember learning? How many can you confidently say you remember the person or the book that taught you the word? 5? 10? Maybe 100?

That's how brains work. We ingest vast amounts of information that other people put out into the world. We consume and it incorporate it and start using it on our own work. And we forget where we even got it. My brain works this way. Your brain works this way. Artists' brains work this way. GPT-4 works this way.

The idea that a visual artist can somehow recall where they first saw many of the billions of images stored in their brain -- the photos, movies, architecture, paintings, and real-life scenes that play out every second of every day -- is laughable. Almost all of that goes uncredited, and always will.

This is what it is to learn.

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

#666

Post by Aeolun »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #404
Humdeee wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting predicament. Assuming these stories between person and machine are indistinguishable and of same quality, then the difference here is the ability to scale. Without giving bias because of humanity reasons, why should we give entitlement to output derived from a human over something else of same quality? I hate making analogies, but if we make humans plant rows of potatoes, should that command a hig…

> Without giving bias to humanity No, we should absolutely be giving bias to humanity. Flesh and blood humans matter, their lives matter, their thoughts matter and their work matters. Machines are tools for them to use not entities given the same rights and same consideration. I reject your whole premise.

So you instead want to what? Ban the tools because they interfere with doing things the human way?

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

#667

Post by rafaelero »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #641
rafaelero wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok

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

#668

Post by chlorion »

derangedHorse wrote: post #566
chlorion wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is not producing something that competes with or is comparable to what it's parsing and displaying, which makes it very different. Google is displaying the exact content and a link to the source, and is functioning as a search engine. Copying music (or whatever), and then outputting music based on the copied music is not the same thing as a search engine, it's outputting a new "art" that is competing with the…

The goal of my post was not to answer what differentiates google search with LLMs and other generative models, it was to respond to the original post above: > Does copyright law say you can ingest copyrighted work at very large scale and sell derivates of those works to gain massive profit / massive market capitalizations The reasons as to why I don't think training on copyrighted data are stated in my other comments…

Googles search engine is not selling derivative works.

If you search for a Disney movie on Google search, it does not try to sell you a film derived from the movie.

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

#669

Post by Aeolun »

Humdeee wrote: post #456
bluefirebrand wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without giving bias to humanity No, we should absolutely be giving bias to humanity. Flesh and blood humans matter, their lives matter, their thoughts matter and their work matters. Machines are tools for them to use not entities given the same rights and same consideration. I reject your whole premise.

Exactly; their flesh, blood, energy, etc. does matter. This is my argument for it, not for your argument against it, lmao. There's nothing more remarkable about my planted potato row vs the tractor planted rows, and my energy can be spent elsewhere. I am not entitled to making a living hand planting potatoes if there's not a market for it. People have the choice to continue making stories and they'll have a fanbase f…

> with the potential to surpass

I think AI art will by definition never surpass human art. Humans can be inspired by things other than the art of others.

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

#670

Post by c0pium »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #535
Humdeee wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly; their flesh, blood, energy, etc. does matter. This is my argument for it, not for your argument against it, lmao. There's nothing more remarkable about my planted potato row vs the tractor planted rows, and my energy can be spent elsewhere. I am not entitled to making a living hand planting potatoes if there's not a market for it. People have the choice to continue making stories and they'll have a fanbase f…

> For transparency, I am an advocate for human made art, If you believe AI tooling is an artform then you categorically are advocating against human made art as far as I am concerned.

This is just gatekeeping. Art is not better because it was made by hand as opposed to with technology. If I use a generative model to make art then I’m an artist.
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