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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

#801

Post by com2kid »

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…

One small nitpick: It is completely possible for an artist to make all of their own tools, and indeed for the majority of history that is exactly how things went.

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

#802

Post by golol »

There's a certain prevalent belief that I consider a fallacy, which is that if A profits from B, then that must be to the detriment of B and B is being exploited.

Irregarding of whether midjourney is exploiting the authors, the author draws a comparison to instagram. He claims him posting his art there is unlaid labour as instagram profits from it, and hence he is being expliited when he does so. That comparison weakens his case for me, as I do not agree with the above implication.

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

#803

Post by bugglebeetle »

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…

> This is why clothing doesn't qualify for copyright. No matter how original you think your clothing seems, someone in the last many thousands of years of fashion has done it before.

Most every fashion company has a legal team that reviews print and pattern, as well as certain other aspects of design, relative to any source of inspiration. My husband works in the industry and has to send everything he does for review in this way. I’m not sure where you got the idea that there are no IP protections for fashion, but this is untrue.

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

#804

Post by com2kid »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #652
csallen wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? 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…

> When a little child draws a tree for the first time, where do they draw inspiration? Do you think they were reviewing works of Picasso?

Are we going to discount the hundreds to thousands of artistic pictures children are exposed to? Or how about the teacher sitting up front demonstrating to the class how to draw a tree?

> Do you not have eyes, ears, do you not perceive and get inspiration from the natural world around you?

Learning to see as an artist is a distinct skill. Being able to take the super compressed simplified world view that mind sees and put something recognizable on paper is a specialized skill that has to be developed. That skill is developed by doing it over and over again, often by copying the style of an artist that someone enjoys.

Or to put it another way, go to any period in history prior to the mid 20th century and art in a given region starts to share the same style, dramatically so, because people were inspired by each other, almost to a comical extent. (Financial reasons also had something to do with it as well of course, Artists paint/carve/engrave/etc what sells!)

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

#805

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

golol wrote: post #802

There's a certain prevalent belief that I consider a fallacy, which is that if A profits from B, then that must be to the detriment of B and B is being exploited. Irregarding of whether midjourney is exploiting the authors, the author draws a comparison to instagram. He claims him posting his art there is unlaid labour as instagram profits from it, and hence he is being expliited when he does so. That comparison weak…

In my house my wife and I have a saying: "Trade benefits both parties by definition."

We say it often as a kind of ward against evil. The zero sum thinking that leads one to feel they're getting gypped in a given deal is almost never actually the case in a free market society. You always have the option to, if a deal provides no value to you, simply leave it on the table and move on with your life.

However, I always mentally add an important word to the beginning: Voluntary trade benefits both parties by definition. Who decides what is considered voluntary? If this market square is the only one in town I can sell in without being beaten up, is selling there voluntary? What if it's just the case that no one wants to go to my random grocery stall in the woods?

I've come to conclude that's ultimately an ethical question, not an economic one. Hence the eternal bickering. So from a certain point of view, I could see why my handy ward against evil could just be seen as another way the capitalistic regime imposes its will. One of the fun things about the internet is all the edge cases it creates along this very boundary.

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

#806

Post by golol »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #805
golol wrote: post #802

There's a certain prevalent belief that I consider a fallacy, which is that if A profits from B, then that must be to the detriment of B and B is being exploited. Irregarding of whether midjourney is exploiting the authors, the author draws a comparison to instagram. He claims him posting his art there is unlaid labour as instagram profits from it, and hence he is being expliited when he does so. That comparison weak…

In my house my wife and I have a saying: "Trade benefits both parties by definition." We say it often as a kind of ward against evil. The zero sum thinking that leads one to feel they're getting gypped in a given deal is almost never actually the case in a free market society. You always have the option to, if a deal provides no value to you, simply leave it on the table and move on with your life. However, I always…

Truth is, there are many platforms where you can distribute your works very effectively while ads are being shown, so there is at least competition, severalarket squares. There are also many ways to distribute your works lrss effectively where ads aren't being shown, so you have that option too. It just sucks because guess in comparison because hosting and distributing just costs some money.

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

#807

Post by CaptainFever »

edent wrote: post #780
CaptainFever wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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".

Sure. The requirement of consent is still not necessarily always ethical.

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

#808

Post by jazzyjackson »

williamcotton wrote: post #729
tedivm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

your argument is that it's not infringing because they copied everything at once?

I get that there's case law on copying in memory on the input side not being infringing but can't for the life of me understand how they get away with not paying for it. At least libraries buy the books before loaning them out, OpenAI and midjourney presumably pirated the works or otherwise ignored the license of published works and just say "if we found it on the internet it's fair game"

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

#809

Post by slowhadoken »

Kiro wrote: post #800
slowhadoken wrote: post #439

Midjourney is not art, it’s theft by proxy. LLMs aren’t A.I., they’re stochastic copy and paste chatbots.

Copying is not theft. Are we hackers or RIAA lobbyists?

That’s a naive and insidious line of reasoning. Free art and code should stay that way. Any company making a profit off of it through LLMs is unethical. It’s the opposite of open source.

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

#810

Post by bergen »

Aeolun wrote: post #211
tedivm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Did you read the books with the intent to incorporate their ideas into your head and profit of this?
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