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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

#841

Post by mftrhu »

ta8645 wrote: post #748
romwell wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an AI views it, and is inspired by it, again, no harm done. There's such thing as consent , I hope you've heard of it. No artist whose work was used to train the AIs consented to such use. Particularly if they released their work online before generative AI was a possibility. >it's really there for everyone to view and be inspired by Generative AI model is not "everyone". It's a model , a combination of data tha…

> There's such thing as consent. When you release something into the world, you have to accept that things beyond your control will engage with it. When you walk outside, down the street, you consent to being in public, and being recorded by video cameras, whether you like it or not. Even if a new 3D camera you don't know about exists and is recording you in ways you don't understand. And in the same way, when you re…

> We should start protecting their rights in law today.

Yes, and those laws will be very useful as soon as any actual artificial intelligence will crop up. Blindly applying them to DALL-E or ChatGPT because they are marketed as AI would be... short-sighted.

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

#842

Post by lokjhfvvv »

romwell wrote: post #747
whamlastxmas wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems lazy to differentiate between types of intelligence without providing any substance as to why you believe one type is more worthy of learning than another and criticizing others for the same laziness

>Seems lazy to differentiate between types of intelligence without providing any substance as to why you believe one type is more worthy of learning than another and criticizing others for the same laziness Seems lazy to call a genAI model "intelligence" without providing any substance as to why one should believe that, but OK. The model isn't an "intelligence" because it's not making a choice about which data you tr…

> The model isn't an "intelligence" because it's not making a choice […]

There’s no evidence any of us are making choices either. I don’t think LLMs are intelligences in the way most people mean the word (I think that would be vastly overestimating their abilities) but appealing to choice when it’s so poorly understood — as poorly understood as intelligence, even — is not useful.

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

#843

Post by ben_w »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #447
ben_w wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why you're confused, but I think it's linguistics. If you write a book by yourself and post parts on your website and they ingest it, you are the copyright holder of that specific IP , and when I post this specific comment to Hacker News I am the copyright holder of this specific IP. In aggregate you and I together are the copyright holders of that book sample and this post, and I don't know any ot…

I don't think you're trying to claim ownership. It sounded like you were suggesting that the only recourse for OpenAI would be to fund a UBI program as a form of payment instead of directly paying the people who own the IP it ingested?

Yes, I'm saying that because there's (currently) no way to even tell how much the model was improved by my comments on HN vs. an equal number of tokens that came from e.g. nytimes.com; furthermore, to the extent that it is even capable of causing economic losses to IP holders, I think this necessarily requires the model to be actually good and not just a bad mimic[0] or prone to whimsy[1] and that this economic damage will occur equally to all IP holders regardless of whether or not their IP was used in training. For both of these reasons independently, I currently think UBI is the only possible fair outcome.

[0] I find the phrase "stochastic parrot" to be ironic, as people repeat it mindlessly and with a distribution that could easily be described by a Markov model.

[1] if the model is asked to produce something in the style of NYT, but everyone knows it may randomly insert a nonsense statement about President Trump's first visit to the Moon, that's not detracting from the value of buying a copy of the newspaper.

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

#844

Post by mftrhu »

Animats wrote: post #718
eslaught wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... as it didn't kill off the fashion industry. Clothes are inherently consumable goods. If you use them, they will wear out. If you do not use them, they still age over time. You cannot "copy" a piece of clothing without a truly astonishing amount of effort. Both the processes, and the materials, may be difficult or impossible to imitate without a very large investment of effort. Compare this to digital art: You c…

> You cannot "copy" a piece of clothing without a truly astonishing amount of effort. Sure you can. There's a whole industry making knockoffs.

GP compared copying a piece of clothing to copying digital art. I'd say that setting up a factory to make knockoffs - or even "just" buying a sewing machine, finding and buying the right fabric, laying out the piece you want to copy, tracing it, cutting the fabric, sewing it, and iterating until it comes out right - would qualify as "a truly astonishing amount of effort" for a person.

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

#845

Post by ben_w »

nrabulinski wrote: post #759
ben_w wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they make a model that's good enough to actually take away jobs rather than merely making everyone more productive — is it a tool or a human level AI, I'm not sure either way though I lean toward the latter — the only possible compensation is UBI… which they're funding research into. > plus, there was no consent. I agree with you about this. That's a different problem, but I do agree.

It’s not a matter of “is it good enough to replace humans”, as despite all of us here knowing it’s not, we could list many companies (and even industries) where it’s already happening

That comment is self-contradicting. If it's already replacing humans, then economically speaking (which is what matters for economic harm), it's good enough to replace those specific humans.

The reason I'm not sure how much this tech really is at the level of replacing humans in the workplace, is that there's always a lot of loud excitement about new tech changing the world, and a lot of noise and confounding variables in employment levels.

But if it is actually replacing them, then it must be at the level of those employees in the ways that matter.

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

#846

Post by mftrhu »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #635
ParetoOptimal wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then people will see how empty and inferior it is and want movies with actual people and writers again.

Then the market will decide, won't it? Why the fuss about generative AI then? If you're so confident about its inferiority, you shouldn't have to worry about it, right? The better product will win, right?

The market does not choose the superior product. It might choose the least common denominator, the cheapest product, the product that got on the market the earliest, or the one with the richest backers, but not "the superior product".

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

#847

Post by williamcotton »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #808
williamcotton wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

Libraries loan out specific books!

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

#848

Post by amon22 »

kansface wrote: post #455
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…

> The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. Ah, just like humans who train against the output of other humans. AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard, only scope, and even that isn't perfectly obvious to me a priori.

As other already pointed out, that's not how human artists learn or produce art. Everyone who uses this brain-dead argument outs themselves as someone who knows nothing about the subject.

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

#849

Post by [deleted] »

kelnos wrote: post #601
kansface wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. Ah, just like humans who train against the output of other humans. AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard, only scope, and even that isn't perfectly obvious to me a priori.

I really don't get why so many people seem to think that an AI model training on copyrighted work and outputting work in that same style is exactly the same thing (morally, ethically, legally, whatever dimension you want) as a human looking at copyrighted work and then being influenced by that work when they create their own work. The first thing is the output of a mathematical function as computed by a computer, whi…

[deleted]

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

#850

Post by nrabulinski »

ben_w wrote: post #845
nrabulinski wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a matter of “is it good enough to replace humans”, as despite all of us here knowing it’s not, we could list many companies (and even industries) where it’s already happening

That comment is self-contradicting. If it's already replacing humans, then economically speaking (which is what matters for economic harm ), it's good enough to replace those specific humans . The reason I'm not sure how much this tech really is at the level of replacing humans in the workplace, is that there's always a lot of loud excitement about new tech changing the world, and a lot of noise and confounding varia…

„In the ways that matter” and the only way that matters for a lot of employers is what is cheaper.

This maybe isn’t strictly related to the topic of this post or conversation but a lot of companies have been replacing most, or even all, support channels with AI assistants. No, it isn’t good enough to replace those humans in a sense most would consider essential - helping customers which reach for the support line, but businesses find it „good enough” in a sense that it’s cheaper than human workers and the additional cost of unhappy customers is small enough to still have it be worth it.

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