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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

#771

Post by moi2388 »

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…

It basically just looked at them. It’s absolutely preposterous that you can own a painting, thereby claiming nobody is allowed to draw that anymore, and now people can’t even look at your shitty drawing without paying? Then don’t put it online in the first place..

Seriously the audacity of these so called artists.. just because I sang a song one day does not mean I am entitled to own it and force people to pay me to be allowed to sing it. That’s absolutely insane.

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

#772

Post by CaptainFever »

edent wrote: post #619
nojvek wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People and them are quite varied though. One one hand I want better AI that can generate whatever image that comes to my mind. On the other hand I don’t want it to blatantly copy someone else’s style that they spent years making. US is pretty fucked since it has very little safety net compared to other modern countries if AI really started replacing humans. This is people’s livelihoods we are talking about. Will AI c…

> People and them are quite varied though. So ask permission. Do you want to have our model ingest your work? Y/N

[No answer]. Then what?

Permission isn't the end-all-be-all. I don't ask for your permission to exist or walk down the street, for example. You could try to make the case that people need to ask for permission first, on a balanced-harms argument, but it's not self-evident to be true.

"It's also not inherently unethical to do things that someone doesn't want, because not all wants are valid or reasonable. A child may not want to have the candy put away, but it is still done anyway." - ronsor

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

#773

Post by imgabe »

waffleiron wrote: post #770
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…

I would be against those software licenses as well. Where I make my own code public I try to use MIT license whenever possible. If I don't want people to copy my code ... I don't make it public. It's not that complicated.

Fully open source software has probably created more economic value in the past 60 years than anything else in human history. We should be trying to share more knowledge with each other, not come up with new and more complicated ways to restrict it.

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

#774

Post by waffleiron »

CaptainFever wrote: post #768
romwell wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 c…

> This only makes it harder for open, non-profit models to compete with large corporations in making AI models.

This is not a good argument to not pay people. Minimum wage and labour laws make it harder to compete, but they are still a good thing for society.

We don’t let companies use unpaid labour of non consenting others in different cases just to make it easier to compete.

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

#775

Post by CaptainFever »

mirekrusin wrote: post #67

There is simple way to fix this. Ban private large models trained on public data, require them to be public weights. If a company wants to train large private model, they can do it with their own data.

This is a great compromise, honestly. Only slightly related, but what if copy"right"-law was opt-out? You could ignore it if you want, but you aren't allowed to hold any either. I would join.

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

#776

Post by CaptainFever »

deely3 wrote: post #523
amenhotep wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see many people suggesting this, but I also quite like this way of thinking about it. The idea that it should be illegal for models to learn from artists, or that artists have a right to extract payment from the model, doesn't make much sense to me, it's too much of a radical departure from the way we treat human learning. But it seems unfair that a company can own such a model. It's not their work, it's a co…

> We should all own it. Maybe, just maybe better to ask artist, who should own it?

Which artist? There are billions.

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

#777

Post by PeterStuer »

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…

What about ML models that only publish 1 or 2 books a year?

Is it realy about volume?

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

#778

Post by candiodari »

romwell wrote: post #732
c0pium wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Generative models are just a tool. Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work . If it's "just a tool" in and of itself , then there's no problem keeping it away from other people's art. >The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings Because the copyright laws were extended to include photographic reproduction of art as something you need to obtain a permission (and a license) f…

> Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work.

So does a human brain.

Which brings us to the other side of the reasoning is that tools like Midjourney and OpenAI enable idiots (when it comes to drawing/animating ... that includes me) to create engaging artwork.

Recently generating artwork like that went from almost impossible to "great, but easily recognizeable as AI artwork". Frankly, I expect the discussion will end when it stops being recognizeable.

I hate Andreesen Horowitz' reasoning, but they're right about one thing: once we have virtual artists that are not easy to distinguish from "real" ones, the discussion will end. It does not really matter what anyone's opinion on the matter is as it will not make a difference in the end.

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

#779

Post by huytersd »

voidhorse wrote: post #283
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…

Sorry, but these arguments by analogy are patently ridiculous. We are not talking about the eons old human practice of creative artistic endeavor, which yes, is clearly derivative in some fashion, but which we have well established practices around. We are discussing a new phenomenon of mass replication or derivation by machine at a scale impossible for a single individual to achieve by manual effort. Further, artist…

It’s not replication and that’s all there is to it.

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

#780

Post by edent »

CaptainFever wrote: post #772
edent wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People and them are quite varied though. So ask permission. Do you want to have our model ingest your work? Y/N

[No answer]. Then what? Permission isn't the end-all-be-all. I don't ask for your permission to exist or walk down the street, for example. You could try to make the case that people need to ask for permission first, on a balanced-harms argument, but it's not self-evident to be true. "It's also not inherently unethical to do things that someone doesn't want, because not all wants are valid or reasonable. A child may…

Do you understand the concept of consent?

Absence of "no" is not the same as "yes".

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