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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

#691

Post by fragmede »

hermitdev wrote: post #621
munificent wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI models are fundamentally different because a computer is a lump of silicon which is neither a moral subject nor object. A human author is a living sentient being that needs to earn a living and is deserving of dignity and regard.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to fundamentally disagree with you. One does not get a morality pass because "the computer did it". People are creating these AI models, selecting data and feeding the models data on which to be trained. The outcome of that rests upon _both_ the creators of the models and the users prompting the models to achieve a result.

To make it even more stark, people don't kill people, it's the gun that does it.

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

#692

Post by Wissenschafter »

BizarreByte wrote: post #642
Wissenschafter wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

[flagged]

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

#693

Post by twism »

rideontime wrote: post #275
twism wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you've given it to them

Much in the same way I've "given" my wallet to a thief by leaving it my unlocked car.

how is posting something in public space analogous to leaving an item in an unlocked car where either you either did not mean to leave it there and/or leave the car unlocked?

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

#694

Post by Dylan16807 »

csallen wrote: post #665
egypturnash wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 informatio…

Individual words aren't comparable to the things people are worried about getting copied. People are much more able to tell you where they learned about more sophisticated concepts and styles.

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

#695

Post by tga_d »

csallen wrote: post #665
egypturnash wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 informatio…

I tend to fall more on the "training should be fair use" side than most, but your comment seems to be missing the point. Nobody is arguing that models are violating copyright or social norms around credit simply because they consume this information. Nobody ever argued/argues that the traditional text generation in markov models on your phone's keyboard runs afoul of these issues. The argument being made is that these particular models are now producing content that very clearly does run into these norms in a qualitatively different way. You cannot convincingly make the argument that the countless generated "X, but in the style of Y" images, text, and video going around the internet are exclusively the product of some unknowable mishmash of influences -- there is clearly some internalized structure of "this work has this name" and "these works are associated with this creator".

To take it to an extreme, you obviously can't just use one of the available neural net lossless compression algorithms to circumvent copyright law or citation rules (e.g., distributing a local LLM that helpfully displays the entirety of some particular book when you ask it to), you can't just tweak it to make it a little lossy by changing one letter, or a little more lossy than that, etc., while on the other hand, any LLM that performs exactly the same as a markov model would presumably be fine, so there is a line somewhere.

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

#696

Post by halostatue »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #623
halostatue wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ned Ludd was onto something. He wasn't anti-progress. He was anti-labour theft. The problem was not that people were losing their jobs, but that they were being punished by society for losing their jobs and not being given the ability to adapt, all to satisfy the greed of the ownership class. I am hearing a strong rhyme. Commercialized LLMs are absolutely labour theft even if they are useful .

Capatalism has really done a number on the human psyche, WE WANT OUR LABOR STOLEN. That's the whole point, so we don't have to labor anymore. Boggles my mind how warped peoples thinking is.

We do not want our labour stolen. We want to labour less, and we want to be fairly compensated for when we have to labour.

The Luddites and the original saboteurs (from the French sabot) had a problem where the capital class invested in machines that let them (a) get more work done per person, (b) employ fewer people, and (c) pay those fewer people less because now they weren't working as hard. The people they fired? They (and the governments of the day — just like now) basically told them to go starve.

> The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers which > opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the > machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines > in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and > drive down wages by producing inferior goods.[1][2] Members of the group referred to > themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver > whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and > government officials.[3]

Yes, we want to work less. But fair work should result in fair compensation. Ultimately, this is something that the copyright washing of current commercialized LLMs cannot achieve.

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

#697

Post by ParetoOptimal »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #635
ParetoOptimal wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, because the market isn't fair.

What will actually happen is people will think "meh good enough", shitty AI art will become the norm, and we'll be boiling frogs and not realize how shitty things have become.

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

#698

Post by csallen »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #694
csallen wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 informatio…

Individual words aren't comparable to the things people are worried about getting copied. People are much more able to tell you where they learned about more sophisticated concepts and styles.

The same principle applies, though. They can tell you maybe a dozen, maybe a few dozen, concepts they've learned and use in their work. But what about the thousands of concepts they use in their work they can't tell you about? The patterns they've noticed, the concepts that don't even have names, but that came from seeing things in the world world that were all created by other people?

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

#699

Post by csallen »

tga_d wrote: post #695
csallen wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 informatio…

I tend to fall more on the "training should be fair use" side than most, but your comment seems to be missing the point. Nobody is arguing that models are violating copyright or social norms around credit simply because they consume this information. Nobody ever argued/argues that the traditional text generation in markov models on your phone's keyboard runs afoul of these issues. The argument being made is that thes…

A company hires an artist. That artist has observed a ton of other artists' work over the years. The company instructs that artist to draw, "X but in the style of Y", where Y is some copyrighted artwork. The company then prints the result and puts it on their packaging.

A company builds an AI tool. That AI tool is trained on a ton of artists' work over the years. The company opens up the AI tool and asks it to draw, "X but in the style of Y," where Y is come copyrighted artwork. The company then prints the result and puts it on their packaging.

What's the difference?

I'd argue there isn't one. The copyright infringement isn't the ability of the artist or the AI tool to make a copy. It's the act of actually using it to make a copy, and then putting that out into the world.

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

#700

Post by tedivm »

chx wrote: post #538
tedivm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward. I also firmly believe that commercializing models built on top of copyrighted works (which all works start off as) does not qualify as fair use (or at least shouldn't) and that commercializing models build on copyrighted material is nothing more than license laundering. C…

> I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use There's a hell lot of money to be made from this belief so of course the HN crowd will hold it. Some of us here who have been around the copyright hustle for a little longer laugh at this bitterly and pray that the courts and/or Doctorow's activism saves us. But there's so much money to be made from automatized plagiarism and the forces against are so weak…

I literally met and worked with Doctorow on a protest back in 2005, so I'm not exactly new to this. I also think that the only way you could have written your comment was by grossly misinterpreting my comment.
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