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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

#811

Post by MrNeon »

chx wrote: post #538
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…

> 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…

I hope the idea of Intellectual Property as a whole is thrown out the window and copyright with it.

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

#812

Post by CaptainFever »

waffleiron wrote: post #774
CaptainFever wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The argument is that trying to make more restrictive IP laws only benefits large corporations. Therefore the question is "only corporations have AI" or "everybody has AI".

For the former, once the contributors have been paid, all of the capitalist-related issues that come with AI will still happen, just worse. More generally, the issues of artificial scarcity get worse as well, since now the models are no longer an abundant resource, but one controlled and restricted for profit.

Unless the answer is just "I don't care if future people get screwed over, I just want to be paid once/receive pennies in royalty".

Using your analogy, it's like minimum wage laws prevented open source software from existing because contributors need to be paid minimum wage.

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

#813

Post by eigenket »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #702
blibble wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the weights themselves are still a derivative work even if they post-filter legal discovery could almost certainly compel the LLM host to provide access to the output of the weights themselves without the "gatekeeper" present

I don't buy the argument that the models are not sufficiently transformative. Nobody would look at a weight table and confuse it for the original work, and it is different in basically every way. If there is a case to be made, I think it has to be around the original use of the works, the transcription process. Not the weights, or the output

No one would look at a veracrypt archive containing a copyrighted work and confuse it either. They look very different to the original files but both the encrypted file and the learning model's weights allow one to reproduce the copyrighted work.

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

#814

Post by bergen »

vorticalbox wrote: post #460
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…

One could argue that you're paying for the resources required to run the model rather than paying for the using the model.

Depends, some models are not freely available and in that case you pay very much for access to the model

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

#815

Post by waffleiron »

CaptainFever wrote: post #812
waffleiron wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The argument is that trying to make more restrictive IP laws only benefits large corporations. Therefore the question is "only corporations have AI" or "everybody has AI". For the former, once the contributors have been paid, all of the capitalist-related issues that come with AI will still happen, just worse. More generally, the issues of artificial scarcity get worse as well, since now the models are no longer an a…

>Using your analogy, it's like minimum wage laws prevented open source software from existing because contributors need to be paid minimum wage.

I'd say it's different, either you work directly on an open source project and you know the license your work is under, or you license your own work to be/not be allowed to be used by for-profit companies.

>More generally, the issues of artificial scarcity get worse as well, since now the models are no longer an abundant resource, but one controlled and restricted for profit.

Sure but that should be done on a higher level, that takes on copyright largely instead of just letting artists and writers be screwed over. We are currently in a situation that only benefits one party anyway.

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

#816

Post by jazzyjackson »

c0pium wrote: post #670
bluefirebrand wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For transparency, I am an advocate for human made art, If you believe AI tooling is an artform then you categorically are advocating against human made art as far as I am concerned.

This is just gatekeeping. Art is not better because it was made by hand as opposed to with technology. If I use a generative model to make art then I’m an artist.

I would argue art is better when it's the result of the effort and vision of an individual

prompting a search engine to stitch images together on your behalf might result in an image you can call art, but imo all the art generated wholecloth like this sucks. necessarily derivative. put into the world without thought.

My favorite critique of LLM work: "why would I bother to read a story that no one bothered to write"

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

#817

Post by Kiro »

slowhadoken wrote: post #809
Kiro wrote: post #800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imagine if someone told me during the Pirate Bay showtrial that in the future I would see fellow hackers turn into copyright and intellectual property zealots.

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

#818

Post by [deleted] »

PeterStuer wrote: post #777
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…

What about ML models that only publish 1 or 2 books a year? Is it realy about volume?

[deleted]

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

#819

Post by [deleted] »

soulofmischief wrote: post #703
sandworm101 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> the authors did not benefit from my secondary market transaction. But they did. The presence of a secondary market for used books increased the value of some new books. People buy them knowing that they might one day recoup some costs by selling them. Would people pay more, or less, for a new car if they were told they could never sell or trade it away as a used car?

Gee I don't know, but I'm glad that digital goods do not incur the same material costs as a car. "You wouldn't download a car", we've come full circle.

[deleted]

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

#820

Post by flir »

vkou wrote: post #794
WereAllMadHere wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. > Regardi…

> 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.

That sounds like a kinder restatement of the opinion at the top of the thread: "Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too."

Artists might not like the phrasing, but scratch the surface and there's a degree of truth there. It's an argument from self-interest, at core.

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