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

#821

Post by jazzyjackson » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 9:08 AM UTC

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…

information wants to be free in the same sense that hydrogen does: it tends to leak. it's a ~physical property of information, not an ethical stance.

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

#822

Post by SllX » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 9:13 AM UTC

Kye wrote: post #540

isoprophlex wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is all fun and game until you want to get some actual shit done, or in this case, communicate...

They're into their second half century doing this. Would they have made it this far without being a little weird? Maybe, but it's hard to A/B something like that. I understand it well enough after following the comic that long. It's not for you. (this is a reference to an ancient Penny Arcade bit: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24/the-adventures... )

> It's not for you.

> (this is a reference to an ancient Penny Arcade bit: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24/the-adventures...)

Thank you for posting this. I remember it, had forgotten it, and re-reading it after completely forgetting about it is almost as good as reading it for the first time. It still holds up 20 years later!

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

#823

Post by nathias » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 9:14 AM UTC

'profit as unethical' is a toxic idea that has ruined many good people

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

#824

Post by dorkwood » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 9:17 AM UTC

I was arguing with an artist the other day about this. I said that Midjourney copies the work of artists the same way that all human artists "copy" each other (checkmate, in my opinion). They pointed out that Midjourney wasn't a person and that I shouldn't treat it like one. They went on to say that it was a bit like enlisting a cheetah in a sprinting event, and that the game was still fair because the rule book didn't specifically outlaw the participation of cheetahs, and because the cheetah had to obey all the same rules that humans were bound by, such as gravity and requiring food for energy. I pointed out that this was obviously not the same, since the entire game falls apart if you let a cheetah play by the same rules as a human. They didn't seem to understand that, though.

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

#825

Post by robertlagrant » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 9:19 AM UTC

notpachet wrote: post #145

robertlagrant wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be good to see how much it changes if you only include work that is public domain.

Any prompt response longer than 30 characters inevitably devolves into verbatim passages from The Iliad.

I could get on board with this.

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

#826

Post by edent » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 9:22 AM UTC

CaptainFever wrote: post #807

edent wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. Yes it is.

There is a very narrow window where you can argue about the proportionality of state's monopoly on violence to coerce someone. There you can argue about the competing ethical needs to keep society safe vs a criminal's lack of consent to be imprisoned.

But that's not what we're discussing. Should a large company be able to ignore consent in order to create a product for profit?

No.

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

#827

Post by boxed » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 9:26 AM UTC

dorkwood wrote: post #824

I was arguing with an artist the other day about this. I said that Midjourney copies the work of artists the same way that all human artists "copy" each other (checkmate, in my opinion). They pointed out that Midjourney wasn't a person and that I shouldn't treat it like one. They went on to say that it was a bit like enlisting a cheetah in a sprinting event, and that the game was still fair because the rule book didn…

> I pointed out that this was obviously not the same, since the entire game falls apart if you let a cheetah play by the same rules as a human.

I think that was exactly their point. And a better one than your.

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

#828

Post by boxed » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 9:28 AM UTC

pmcp wrote: post #128

ineptech wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm always reticent to fully engage in "The Dialogue," regardless of its momentary configuration. It's a smoothie made from shibboleths; you have to be able to detect them at only a few parts per million because once these things metastasize, they stop being about whatever they were about and instead become increasingly loud recitations of various catechisms and loyalty oaths. Boy does that ring true.

Side comment: I respect the author’s right to choose words that ring well to them, but jeez, as a non native english speaker, reading this, i am happy my device has a dictionary function.

I'm not a native speaker and I enjoy his writing and have no problems understanding it. In this specific case it helps to be a bit of a nerd about religions/mythology though :P

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

#829

Post by bayindirh » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 9:28 AM UTC

Wissenschafter wrote: post #637

bayindirh wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that'll be boring. I don't want to be a star of a movie, that's not what pulls me in. I want to see what the person has imagined, what the story carries from the author, what the humans in it added to it and what they got out of it. When I read a book, I look from another human's eyes, with their thoughts and imagination. That's interesting and life-changing actually. Also, the author's life and inner world…

"This is what makes human creation special.", that's a load of garbage. There is nothing inherently special about human creation. Some AI artwork I've seen is incredible, the fact it was AI generated didn't change its being an incredible piece of art. Thinking our creation has some kind of 'specialness' to it is like believing in a soul, or some other stupid thing. It's pure hubris.

Actually, I'm coming from a gentler point of view: "Nature and living things are much more complex than we anticipate".

There are many breakthroughs and realizations in science which excite me more than "this thing called AI": Bacteria have generational memory. Bees have a sense of time. Mitochondria (and cells) inside a human body communicate and try to regulate aging and call for repairs. Ants have evolved antibiotics, and expel the ones with incurable and spreadable diseases. Bees and ants have social norms, they have languages. Plants show more complex behavior than we anticipated. I'm not entering the primates' & birds' region because only the titles will be a short chapter.

While some of them might be very simple mechanisms on chemical level, they make a much more complex system, and the nature we live in is much sophisticated than we know, or want to acknowledge.

I'm not looking from "Humans are superior" perspective. Instead, I'm looking from "our understanding of everything is too shallow" perspective. Instead of trying to understand or acknowledge that we're living in a much more complex system on a speck of dust in vast emptiness, we connect a bunch of silicon chips, dump everything we babbled to a "simulated neural network", and it gives us semi-nonsensical, grammatically correct half-truths.

That thing can do it because it randomly puts a word after word after a very complex and weighted randomization learned from how we do it, but imitating it blindly, and we think that we understood and unlocked what intelligence is. Then we applaud ourselves because we're one step closer to strip a living thing from its authenticity and making Ghost in the Shell a reality.

Living things form themselves over a long life with sight, hearing, communication, interaction and emotions, at least, and we assume that a couple of millions lines of code can do much better because we poured a quadruple distilled, three times diluted version of what we have gone through.

This is pure hubris if you ask me, if there's one.

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

#830

Post by pointlessone » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 9:33 AM UTC

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…

If training a model is fair use than model output should also fallow fair use criteria. The very first thing you can find on the internet about fair use is Wikipedia article on the topic. It lists a bunch of factors to decide whether something is fair use. The very first one has a quote from an old copyright case:

> [A] reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism. On the other hand, it is as clear, that if he thus cites the most important parts of the work, with a view, not to criticise, but to supersede the use of the original work, and substitute the review for it, such a use will be deemed in law a piracy.

Most use of LLMs and image generation models do not produce criticism of their training data. The most common use is to produce similar works. You can find this very common “trick” to get a specific style of output to add “in style of ”. Is this a direct way "to supersede the use of the original work”?

You can certainly see how other factors more or less put gen ai output into the grey zone.

The fact that clothing doesn’t qualify for copyright doesn’t mean text and images don’t. Or if you advocate that they don’t then you pretty much advocate for abolishment of copyright because those are the major areas of copyright applicability at the moment. Which is a stance to have but you’d probably be better to actually say that because saying that copyright applies to some images and text but not others is a much harder position to defend.