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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

#851

Post by bluefirebrand »

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…

> That's just it, nobody looking to get paid by OpenAI actually did any labor for OpenAI.

To me this is a strong point in favor of the idea that OpenAI has no business using their work. How can you even think it's ok for OpenAI to use work that was not done for them without paying some kind of license? They aren't entitled to the free labor of everyone on the internet!

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

#852

Post by bluefirebrand »

mlyle wrote: post #744
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What % is his independent inspiration? 30%? 90%? There are certainly people for whom it was 90%. For most we don’t know. We do know one thing for sure - that for AI it’s 0%

We don't know what percentage is independent inspiration for a person using the AI to create art. Once upon a time it was a contentious idea that humans had significant authorship in photographs, which merely mechanically captured the world. What % is the camera's independent inspiration? Here, we have humans guiding what's often a quite involved process of synthesis of past human (and machine) creation.

> We don't know what percentage is independent inspiration for a person using the AI to create art

The person using the AI doesn't matter in the equation. They aren't an artist, they're a monkey with a typewriter.

We're talking about the AI here, because it can generate the same images no matter which monkey with a typewriter is typing the prompts.

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

#853

Post by mlrtime »

KingMob wrote: post #793
csallen wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Only if the "use" where use means distribute.

If I sample a track and play it in my home I don't properly compensate anyone.

If I ask GPT to create a cool new comic based on the article and then delete or use it privately it, same applies.

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

#854

Post by edent »

CaptainFever wrote: post #833
edent wrote: post #826

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since you brought up coercion as a reason for consent, do note that when your works are used, no action is being done upon you. So what coercion is being done here? On the other hand, copyright proponents are the ones trying to coerce other people, restricting them from using what they already have access to via the use of copyright laws, backed by state violence. We do not consent to copyright laws. Of course, the c…

Ah yes. Property is theft. So I'm allowed to take your car because you're trying to restrict me from using something I have easy access to once I break your window. No harm has come to you, has it?

Unfortunately, we live in a world governed by laws and society. For 300 years copyright has been the law of the land (in varying degrees). It was bought about, in part, because people feel that someone mis-using their property is undesirable.

You cannot tell people that their feels are invalid. Lots of these artists feel aggrieved that their art is being misused. They think the law has been broken and a social contract has been violated. What argument do you have against that other than "you're wrong to feel that way"?

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

#855

Post by deely3 »

CaptainFever wrote: post #776
deely3 wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We should all own it. Maybe, just maybe better to ask artist, who should own it?

Which artist? There are billions.

I think all of them?

We can fix it. Lets create "for-ai-training" tag. With default value "false", so, when tag is absent you can't use text and images for ai training.

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

#856

Post by mlrtime »

mftrhu wrote: post #846
Wissenschafter wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The "superior" product is subjective.

The objectively superior product is the one that people pay for. They are exchanging labor/capital for the item/content.

I could make the best movie ever conceived, the movie to end all movies. If nobody watches it, it has 0 value.

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

#857

Post by wrsh07 »

freejazz wrote: post #629
wrsh07 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is! It being illegal doesn't mean Instagram is incentivized to crack down on it And if you're a tiny independent artist you also aren't well-resourced to do anything about it. (Afaict the best thing we can do is maintain a culture that demands attribution)

I represent tiny independent artists and the best thing you can do is hope that some moneyed media company infringes your work. They never have an excuse and they always pay up.

But that's not what happens on Instagram

This isn't like some TV ad using a song they forgot to license

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

#858

Post by elicksaur »

amenhotep wrote: post #329
mirekrusin wrote: post #67

There is simple way to fix this. Ban private large models trained on public data, require them to be public weights. If a company wants to train large private model, they can do it with their own data.

I don't see many people suggesting this, but I also quite like this way of thinking about it. The idea that it should be illegal for models to learn from artists, or that artists have a right to extract payment from the model, doesn't make much sense to me, it's too much of a radical departure from the way we treat human learning. But it seems unfair that a company can own such a model. It's not their work, it's a co…

Machine learning is a radical departure from human learning, so it seems like different rules make sense.

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

#859

Post by tekknik »

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…

This goes for your knowledge as well, as AI fundamentally doesn’t learn any different than humans do.

If you remove all knowledge gained from learning from or copying others works, what value do you provide?

Nothing on this planet can learn without copying something else. So if we open the can of worms for AI, we should do the same for humans and require paying royalties to those who taught you.

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

#860

Post by tekknik »

romwell wrote: post #732
c0pium wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generative models are just a tool. Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too. The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings, it just enabled more people to have control over what was on their walls.

>Generative models are just a tool. Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work . If it's "just a tool" in and of itself , then there's no problem keeping it away from other people's art. >The camera and 1-hour film developing didn’t destroy oil paintings Because the copyright laws were extended to include photographic reproduction of art as something you need to obtain a permission (and a license) f…

If you graduated from school and only used work that was public domain, would you have all the knowledge you currently have? Have you learned anything from anybody since graduating?

Where is the line? It’s ok for humans to learn from others work but not a machine?

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