Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

catandgirl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 957 posts

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

#751

Post by guappa »

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…

> They did labor for other reasons, and were happy with it.

They were happy until their copyright got stolen, I guess. Then got unhappy.

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

#752

Post by guappa »

csallen wrote: post #364
bluefirebrand wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? It shouldn't be. As soon as someone makes an AI that can produce it's own artwork without requiring ingesting every piece of stolen artwork it can, then I'm on board. But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as tha…

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?

Do you think art was there before humans? Or humans made art?

If you believe the 1st proposition… please tell me about your very unique religion!

If not… you've answered your own question.

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

#753

Post by midtake »

I find it difficult to sympathize with stick figure artists. At least penny arcade has a distinct style. But with the stick figure artists I just feel a sense of disgust and don't really care if their "art" gets consumed by diffusion models.

I know I'm being unfair but I think it's important to say the quiet part out loud so we can all be aware of which way the wind blows, because I can't be alone in this feeling. If the class action lawsuit presents the justices with a bunch of soyboys clamoring about AI stealing their "hard work" I have a hard time imagining them ruling against AI.

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

#754

Post by [deleted] »

c0pium wrote: post #655
chx wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Generative models are just a tool. Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too. The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings, it just enabled more people to have control over what was on their walls.

[deleted]

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

#755

Post by imgabe »

Considers profit "unethical", gives work away for free, mad that people take free work and use it for their own purposes.

You can't have it both ways. You can either give stuff away and realize that once you give it away you have no control over what anyone does with it, or you can charge for it and get paid up front (and ultimately still have no control over what happens to it after it leaves your hands).

Are you making art because you want to share your vision or what? If so, then share it and be glad that your vision got out there. If not, charge for your work and make sure you get paid first. Don't whine and cry that you didn't get paid after you decided that getting paid was evil or whatever.

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

#756

Post by transcriptase »

unnamed76ri wrote: post #531
madeofpalk wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify and the rights holders come together and agree on the right price. Unfortunately, since long before Spotify ever existed, it's usually the record labels who owns the rights to the music and the actual creators still get shafted.

Except in this case, 10s of thousands of rights holders are just getting nothing as of the start of 2024 and I can tell you, Spotify certainly did not “come together” with any of us.

Didn’t they basically say they’re no longer going to bother paying for songs earning under $3 USD per year.

It seems like the only people that will be impacted are the abusive auto-generated spammer accounts with thousands of garbage tracks uploaded garnering 1200 streams a year by people accidentally playing them via Google Home misinterpretations etc.

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

#757

Post by fnordpiglet »

imgabe wrote: post #755

Considers profit "unethical", gives work away for free, mad that people take free work and use it for their own purposes. You can't have it both ways. You can either give stuff away and realize that once you give it away you have no control over what anyone does with it, or you can charge for it and get paid up front (and ultimately still have no control over what happens to it after it leaves your hands). Are you ma…

Giving something for free doesn’t mean giving it for others to make a profit. We have copyright and other legal rules for a reason. Likewise, many open source licenses don’t allow for people to profit off what you donated to the world. It’s not a forgone conclusion that everything must be exploited for money by someone.

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

#758

Post by tga_d »

csallen wrote: post #740
tga_d wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but then that's an an argument subject to the critiques made upthread that you were initially trying to dismiss? You can't claim that AI doesn't need to worry about citing influences because it's just doing a thing humans wouldn't cite influences for, then proceed to cite an example where you would very much be expected to cite your influences, and AI wouldn't, as evidence.

I never argued that AI doesn't need to worry about citing influences. If I am a person using a tool to create a work, and the final product clearly resembles some copyrighted work that I need to reference and give credit to, what does it matter if my tool is a pencil, a graphics editing program, a GPT, or my own mind? I can cite the work.

Like I said, this is exactly what the comment you first replied to was explaining. It is very clearly not the same as a pencil or a graphics editing program, because those things do not have a notion of Cat & Girl by Willem de Kooning embedded in them that they can utilize without credit. It is clearly not the same as your mind, because your mind can and, assuming you want to stay in good standing, will provide credit for influence.

Again, take it back to basics: do you believe it is permissible to share a model itself (not the model output, the model), either directly or via API, that can trivially reproduce entire copyrighted works?

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

#759

Post by nrabulinski »

ben_w wrote: post #149
make3 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That's literally built into their corporate rules for how to take investment money, and when those rules were written they were criticised because people didn't think they'd ever grow enough for it to matter. " that sounds like insane bullshit to me. they're trained on the whole internet. there's no way they give back to the whole of the internet, more likely a lot of jobs will be taken away by their work. plus, the…

If they make a model that's good enough to actually take away jobs rather than merely making everyone more productive — is it a tool or a human level AI, I'm not sure either way though I lean toward the latter — the only possible compensation is UBI… which they're funding research into. > plus, there was no consent. I agree with you about this. That's a different problem, but I do agree.

It’s not a matter of “is it good enough to replace humans”, as despite all of us here knowing it’s not, we could list many companies (and even industries) where it’s already happening

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

#760

Post by 3asdf123 »

csallen wrote: post #294
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…

Computers and machines have been capable of mass production for decades, and humans have used them as tools. In the past 170 years, these tools of mass production have already diminished many thousands of professions that were staffed by people who had to painstakingly craft things one at a time. Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? Why should we kill this techno…

Well art predates other professions by like thousands of year so it rightfully earned it's privileges.
Post reply on HN