On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney • Hacker News Board

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

#761

Post by skydhash » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 6:49 AM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #388

dazed_confused wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they lost means of income? Like is this a difficult concept? Livelihoods will most likely be lost and probably never really coming back. Sure we can say industries change; however, we had protections in place to prevent artists losing money due to people copying… A company has said “screw the rules, here’s a supercharged printer.”

Imagine someone came up with a way to print houses for nearly-free. Anyone needs shelter? Bam, instant house. Landlords would lose income left and right. The relevant question is: would society stop the building of these free houses to protect the interest of the landlords? (Now, take that analogy and throw it in the trash. ;) Housing is essential; art is fundamentally a luxury good. If we want to, we can have a soci…

> Imagine someone came up with a way to print houses for nearly-free. Anyone needs shelter? Bam, instant house.

Money is just paper. And now with cashless systems, it's now only bits on some computers. But no one sane wants to maximize everyone accounts or print cash to hand out. Art takes hours, days, even years or human labor to produce. Copyright laws set an artificial scarcity, because if it can be replicated at no cost, there's no way for the author to recoup the cost of production.

In the analogy you provided, you'd still have to deal with land scarcity and environmental impact.

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

#762

Post by imgabe » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 6:50 AM UTC

fnordpiglet wrote: post #757

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.

In theory, sure. In practice, if you don't have the money to file the lawsuits to enforce it, no you don't. And if you think making money is unethical or exploitative, then it's unlikely you are going to be able to have the money to enforce whatever rules you think anyone who uses the stuff you put out there for free should follow.

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

#763

Post by throwaway2037 » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 6:50 AM UTC

csallen wrote: post #699

tga_d wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> What's the difference?

Ultimately, only high courts in each jurisdiction can decide. I can imagine a case where some highly advanced nations decide different interpretations that cause conflict. Then, we need an amendment to the widely accepted international copyright rules, the Berne Convention. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

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

#764

Post by ChatGTP » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 6:50 AM UTC

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…

In my opinion, the play is thus, steal everything, build the models, then:

* People won't notice, or the majority will forget (doesn't seem to be happening). * Raise enough money that you can smash anyone who complains in court. * Make a model good enough that can generate synthetic data and then claim new models aren't trained on anyone's data. * All of the above.

Anyway, I 100% agree with you, the value is in the content that everyone has produced for , they're repackaging and reselling it in a different format.

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

#765

Post by godelski » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 6:56 AM UTC

freejazz wrote: post #717

godelski wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it is quite difficult to prove your work was used in the models and it is also quite expensive legally while being very time consuming. So in practice does it matter? I still believe in presumption of innocence, but that isn't to say that it can't be exploited and that the system itself is expensive (monetarily and temporally). I think you're just oversimplifying the issue and dismissing before considering…

what am I dismissing? I think these AI companies are stealing these works. Nerds here are equivocating the creation of art with what LLM output, simply out of their own inexperience making art. It's terrible and I hate it.

I believe I misinterpreted, it sounded like you were just suggesting it was copyright and thus could empower the artist to sue the companies. As if the process was rather straightforward and thus the fault on the artist for not pursuing. I'll admit that I'm primed by other comments which do express this sentiment explicitly. Sorry if I misunderstood.

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

#766

Post by inference-lord » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 6:57 AM UTC

xyproto wrote: post #279

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 remove all the copyrighted, permission-less content from a human's training, what value does the human have, in connection with work? When is AI good enough that the contents it contains can be comparable to human brain content, copyright wise? And conversely, now that we can read signals from neurons in a human brain, and create images from dreams and audio from thoughts, would not that also break the copyrig…

There is absolutely zero comparison between living in the world and experiencing it, and building a model, loading in copyrighted, carefully curated material and then charging for the outputs of said model without paying royalties. It's hard to even believe people can't understand the difference.

The fact is, the majority of people do not want to steal others work for profit, and for those bottom feeders that do, there are lass to discourage such behavior and to protect the original producer.

If these models were trained on creative commons licensed material only, then you'd have a leg to stand on.

I even had to pay for my tuition, and textbook material. Even if some portion of my knowledge comes from osmosis, I have still contributed at some stage to access training material.

When I was 16, I wanted to learn to code, do you know what I did? I went and purchased coding books because even at 16, I understood that it was the right thing to do. To pay the author for the privilege of accessing their work.

How basic can one get?

Would you like it if I broke into your house and used your things without asking you? Because that's about what's happening her for professionals.

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

#767

Post by imgabe » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 6:57 AM UTC

tapoxi wrote: post #166

ta8645 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless of legalities, that's wrong to me. I see it differently. To me, if you post your work online as an artist, it's really there for everyone to view and be inspired by. As long as nobody copies it verbatim, don't think you've been hurt by any other usage. If another artist views it, and is inspired by it... so be it. If an AI views it, and is inspired by it, again, no harm done.

AI doesn't get inspired. It's not human. It adds everything about it to its endless stream of levers to pull, and if you pull the right ones, it will just give you the source verbatim as proven by the NYT lawsuit filing where it was just outputting unaltered copywritten NYT article text.

...and if you ask a human artist to exactly reproduce an artwork, that is copyright infringment, or forgery. I don't see how this is any different? The person using the AI to make exact replicas would be the one committing the copyright infringement, not the AI.

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

#768

Post by CaptainFever » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 7:01 AM UTC

romwell wrote: post #749

causal wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That question - "Under what circumstances would AI art be acceptable then?" - is definitely not asked enough. And I think taking time to make it acceptable is a worthwhile goal, part of the path, not an obstacle.

> "Under what circumstances would AI art be acceptable then?" Easy! Under the circumstances where the artists whose art was used to train the model explicitly consented to that (without coercion), licensed their art for such use, and were fairly compensated for that. Plenty of artists would gladly paint for AI to learn from — just like stock photographers, or clip art designers, or music sample makers. Somehow, "payi…

This only makes it harder for open, non-profit models to compete with large corporations in making AI models. Examples: Adobe Firefly. Getty's AI. Probably Disney's internal AI. Are those acceptable, then? I'd say Stable Diffusion is more acceptable than any of them.

Information wants to be free, and you shouldn't need consent to reuse information. Furthermore, this isn't coercion -- I could just as easily make the case that artists are trying to use coercion (government power via copy-restriction laws) to impose restrictions on AI trainers.

I would say the better approach is to try and pirate the large models as much as possible -- using them to train smaller, open models, so we aren't forced to use commercial AI as much.

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

#769

Post by aspenmayer » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 7:02 AM UTC

doublespanner wrote: post #726

fragmede wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, so they say.

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

#770

Post by waffleiron » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 7:07 AM UTC

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…

> Don't whine and cry that you didn't get paid after you decided that getting paid was evil or whatever.

Software and source code comes with the most complex licenses and terms of use, but an artist isn’t allowed to make a small request that others don’t profit of her work without people on a software forum saying that is whining and crying…