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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

#721

Post by freejazz »

Aeolun wrote: post #661
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Being inspired isn't against the law. copying is. it'd be one thing if this conversation could be had with useful terminology that's actually on point. instead we have you, insisting that there is no creative process, there is only experiencing other art and inevitably copying (because apparently you think that's the only thing humans can do!). It's all so telling. Yet its tragic because so many here don't even realize it. I'm sad for your inability to engage with creativity and creative acts.

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

#722

Post by freejazz »

c0pium wrote: post #664
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

OpenAI has basically admitted it. Is OpenAI even disputing that it ingested all the works its being sued over? Not as far as I can tell.

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

#723

Post by freejazz »

bawolff wrote: post #480
bluefirebrand wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel like the issue here, is you are giving AIs agency. AIs are not magic. They are tools. They are not alive, they do not have agency. They do not do things by themselves. Humans do things, some humans use AI to do those things. Agency always rests with a combination of the tool's creator and operator, never the tool itself. Is there really a difference between a human flooding the market using AI and a human floo…

It'd be a good point if it wasn't for the fact that search engines didn't exist until google, because of technology, and that courts didn't need to consider the issue until then. So where does your point get us? We are here now.

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

#724

Post by kiba »

sandworm101 wrote: post #118
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…

>> If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content. But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's…

AI doing things that human laboriously learned and inspired from is just different. After all, sheer quantity can be its own quality, especially with AI learning.

Now, i am worried about companies like OpenAI monopolizing technology through making their technology proprietary. I think their output should be public domain and copyright should only apply to human authors if they should be at all.

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

#725

Post by throwaway17_17 »

freejazz wrote: post #719
mlyle wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, we already have doctrine that starts to encompass some of these concepts with fair use. The four pronged test in US case law: - the purpose and character of use (is a machine doing this different in purpose and character? many would say yes. is "ripping-off-this-artist-as-a-service" different than an isolated work that builds upon another artist's art?) - the nature of the copyrighted work - the amount…

The problem with this conversation is that its being had by people that make the top level comment here stating that clothing is not copyrightable. It is. Clothing design is copyrightable. This was a huge recent case, Star Athletica. They know nothing about copyright law and they just build intuitions from the world around them, but the intuitions are completely nonsense because they are made in ignorance of the actu…

Your sentiment is probably correct in that there are many aspects of copyright law that are not strictly aligned with the public’s intuition. But your example is a bit of a reach. Star Athletica was a relatively novel holding that allows for a specific piece of clothing, when properly argued, could qualify as copyrightable as a semi-sculptural work of art, however this quality of a given piece is separate to its character as clothing. In fact, the USSC in Star Athletica explicitly held a designer/manufacturer has “no right to prohibit any person from manufacturing [clothing] of identical shape, cut, and dimensions” to clothing which they design/manufacture. That quote is directly from a discussion of the ability to apply copyright protections to clothing design. I think the end result is that trying to argue technical legal issues around a poorly implemented statutory regime is always fraught with errors. That really leave moral and commercial arguments outstanding and advocacy should try and focus on that, when not fighting to affect change in the law these copyright determinations are based on.

And just to be clear, this post does not constitute legal advice.

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

#726

Post by doublespanner »

fragmede wrote: post #202
yieldcrv wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but if you call it virtue signaling, you get categorized into the group that uses that loyalty oath most often, instead of the non-group member that is simply frustrated by the accuracy of it occurring

well yeah, because you'd have to be virtuous to be able to virtue signal, and the ones who bring that up generally aren't.

It's the implication of virtue signalling that it's a facade?

If Steve the megarapist is writing articles about the latest popular injustice, does that make Steve virtuous?

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

#727

Post by Minor49er »

rideontime wrote: post #441
Minor49er wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it. Though Midjourney can certainly be pushed beyond its fingerprint, so you might not be aware that a given image you've seen was generated by it or not

Let me be clear: it is the knowledge that an image was created with midjourney that repulses me, not the visual appeal of the image itself.

That is unfortunate

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

#728

Post by joe_the_user »

kibbi wrote: post #414

I'd find it hard to argue against this, or the Penny Arcade's statements, since I'm having trouble understanding their concrete arguments in between the rhetoric. I'd be hesitant to even discuss this in their comment sections or social media channels. One might ask: Under what circumstances would AI art be acceptable then? For example, does it really matter if these models are created by large corporations? I don't s…

Under what circumstances would AI art be acceptable then?

I hate to make a sort-of standard Internet retort but artists (and "society") don't have any obligation to reserve some space for AI art to be OK within culture. Maybe such a possibility exists and maybe it doesn't. But given that present AI is something like a complex but semi-literal average of the art works various largish companies could find, it seems reasonable to respond to people's objections to that.

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

#729

Post by williamcotton »

tedivm wrote: post #177
sandworm101 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content. But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's…

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…

So what about the fact that these cartoons look like Keith Haring meets Cathy Guisewite meets Scott Adams? These cartoons are artistically derivative. They are obviously not derivative from the perspective of copyright as style is an idea, not an expression.

These models were not trained on just the cartoonist in question, nor just their inspirations. The intent was to train on all images and styles. The expression of the idea using these models is not going to match the expression of the idea of all images, even those conforming to a certain bounded prompt.

For the life of me I can't get DALL-E or Stable Diffusion to produce anything like Cat and Girl nor anything coherent for the above mentioned inspirations. DALL-E flat out refuses to create things in the style of the above and Stable Diffusion has insane looking outputs, overwhelmed by Herring.

Most importantly, copyright is concerned with specific works that specifically infringe and whose damages are either statute or based on quantifiable earnings from infringement. Copyright does not cover all works, especially when again, the intent is to learn all styles that rarely, if at all, reproduces direct expressions.

The only point at which these images are directly copied are when in the machine's memory, which has already has case law for allowance, followed by back propagation that begins the process of modifying the direct copies for the underlaying formal qualities.

It seems like a lot of people are going to be upset when the courts rule eventually rule in favor of the training and use of these models, if not only because the defendant has a lot of resources to throw at a legal team.

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

#730

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

c0pium wrote: post #670
bluefirebrand wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Seriously asking: if I customize my order at a fast food joint am I a chef? How is that different from prompt engineering to generate art?
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