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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

#791

Post by WereAllMadHere »

vkou wrote: post #783
candiodari wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

> So does a human brain. A major difference between a human training himself by looking at art, and a computer doing it, is that the human ends up working for himself, the computer is owned by some billionaire. One enhances the creative potential of humanity as a whole, the other consolidates it in the hands of the already-powerful. Another major difference is that a human can't use that knowledge to mass-produce tha…

Visual artists cannot create without tools. Whether that tool is a brush and paint, a camera, or a neural network.

Whether an artist pays for a subscription to openAI or buys paint pots on Amazon.com money is going to a billionaire, it is not a difference between ai and other art.

You are also ignoring the existence of non-commercial open source AI, they exist.

Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.

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

#792

Post by imgabe »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #789
imgabe wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see, so theft is right so long as you get away with it? Fortunately you actually can lodge lawsuits in such cases even if you can’t afford it so long as you find either a lawyer who works on contingency in expectation of a settlement or one who believes in something. In this case, almost any lawyer in the field of copyright would be eager to simply make their name with a case that sets precedent in such an importan…

Copying is not theft.

> I think it’s unethical and exploitive to take my labor given for free to the community and claim it as your own for your personal enrichment.

Nobody is claiming anything is their own. You gave it away. You did the labor, it will always have been done regardless of what anyone does with it after that.

There is no difference in the effect on you, so why are you mad about it? If you want to lock it in a box so nobody else can ever look at your precious baby, then do that. Don't put it out where anyone can use it and then get mad when they use it. What did you make it for if you didn't want anyone to use it?

Presumably you got something out of making whatever you did, and that was enough reason to make it. If you wanted to keep some exclusive right to it, then you shouldn't have made it publicly available.

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

#793

Post by KingMob »

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…

> We've never asked artists to "properly compensate" each other for learning/inspiration in the past.

LLMs are collections of GPUs crunching numbers. "Inspiration" doesn't really apply to them.

A better analogy is sampling, and musicians remixing music are very much required to pay for the samples they use.

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

#794

Post by vkou »

WereAllMadHere wrote: post #791
vkou wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So does a human brain. A major difference between a human training himself by looking at art, and a computer doing it, is that the human ends up working for himself, the computer is owned by some billionaire. One enhances the creative potential of humanity as a whole, the other consolidates it in the hands of the already-powerful. Another major difference is that a human can't use that knowledge to mass-produce tha…

Visual artists cannot create without tools. Whether that tool is a brush and paint, a camera, or a neural network. Whether an artist pays for a subscription to openAI or buys paint pots on Amazon.com money is going to a billionaire, it is not a difference between ai and other art. You are also ignoring the existence of non-commercial open source AI, they exist. Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Othe…

There's a substantive difference in whether the artist is using the tool, or the tool works on its own. A paintbrush doesn't produce a painting by itself, a human needs to apply an incredibly specialized creative skillset, in conjunction with the paintbrush to do so.

An LLM takes a prompt and produces a painting. No sane person would say that I 'drew' the painting in question, even if I provided the prompt.

> Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.

We copyright things that require creative input. A list of facts or definitions did not require creative input, and is therefore not copyrightable.

Using an LLM does not meet the bar for creative input.

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

#795

Post by eggdaft »

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?

Logically, the answer to this is (almost certainly) yes, so you’ll need to discount this argument.

If the answer were no, then either an infinite number of humans have lived (such that there was always a previous artist to learn from), or it was true in the past but false in the present, which seems unlikely given humans brains have generally become more and not less sophisticated over time.

I presume what you’re missing here is that the brain can be inspired from other sources than human art. For example: nature; life experience; conversation.

Not making any other comment about what machines can or can’t do, just wanted to point out this argument is invalid as it comes up a lot and is probably grounded in ignorance around the artistic process. It’s such a strange idea to suggest that the artist process is ingesting lots of art to make more art. That’s such a weird world view. It’s like insisting every artist is making art the way Quentin Tarantino makes films.

I’ve spent a lot of time with artists, I’ve worked with them, I’ve been in relationships with artists, and I can tell you the great ones see the world differently. There’s something about their brains that would cause them to create art even if born on a desert island without other human contact. Some of them don’t even take an interest in other art.

In fact, those artists that _do_ make art heavily based on other artists’ work as suggested are often derided as “derivative” and “unoriginal”.

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

#796

Post by 6510 »

imho everything came crumbling down when folk [even developers] stopped making websites. Took whatever one could from generous others then gave nothing back.

We search google then find a spam page repeating our question, then we blame google! LOL

In the old days, if you had an interesting question, you would write down your progress in a draft blog post, you would polish it (or not at all) and present the answer to those looking to do the same or you would leave it to your comment section for others to rage about the problem, sometimes answer it for you, sometimes they would write a post of their own.

If things are good enough someone will link to it... but now? Nothing is ever good enough? If everything is anonymized dumped on on stack overflow no one maintains it. There is no free flow of dialog about the topic. It tries to be all work, no fun. Who wrote this stuff? What else did they do? Why are all these wrong answers on the page?

Anyway, to state the obvious, Google doesn't make websites.

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

#797

Post by WereAllMadHere »

csallen wrote: post #698
Dylan16807 wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For example, how many artists drawing street scenes credit the designer at Ford Motors for teaching them what a generic car looks like? How many even know which designers created their mental model of a car?

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

#798

Post by WereAllMadHere »

Aeolun wrote: post #656
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Nobody working on a new cancer drug actually did any work for me. They did labour for other reasons, and were happy with it. There it is okay for me to steal their recipe and sell their cancer drug.

Nope, but it’s ok for you to read their recipe if they place it on the internet (research paper), and use it to make your own drug.

The entire point of the patent system was to say inventors can put their design on the net without it being stolen; so future inventors can build on their work.

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

#799

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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,…

The artist has a claim for production of a derivative work and for passing off against the other artist.
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