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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

#861

Post by tekknik »

vkou wrote: post #783
candiodari wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure. It's just a tool. That need other people's art to work. So does a human brain. Which brings us to the other side of the reasoning is that tools like Midjourney and OpenAI enable idiots (when it comes to drawing/animating ... that includes me) to create engaging artwork. Recently generating artwork like that went from almost impossible to "great, but easily recognizeable as AI artwork". Frankly, I expect the d…

> 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…

> I see no reason for why a neural network's output should be protected by copyright. Only humans can produce copyrightable works, and a prompt is not a sufficient creative input.

Your brain is a neural network, just FYI.

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

#862

Post by tekknik »

com2kid wrote: post #801
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…

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.

But today the artist that can also create a robust version of photoshop on their own doesn’t really exist. Maybe some can write code to that level but certainly not a majority and it’s certainly not the same as sanding wood to make a paintbrush.

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

#863

Post by tekknik »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #570
bawolff wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the issue here, is you are giving AIs agency. AIs are not magic. They are tools. They are not alive, they do not have agency. They do not do things by themselves. Humans do things, some humans use AI to do those things. Agency always rests with a combination of the tool's creator and operator, never the tool itself. Is there really a difference between a human flooding the market using AI and a human floo…

>Is there really a difference between a human flooding the market using AI and a human flooding the market using a printing press? A magnitude of difference, yes. Even a printing press will be limited by natural resources, which require humans to procure. A computer server can do a lot more with a lot less. And is much easier to scale than a printing press. >Even if human's can't compete (An obviously untrue premise…

> A magnitude of difference, yes. Even a printing press will be limited by natural resources, which require humans to procure. A computer server can do a lot more with a lot less. And is much easier to scale than a printing press.

AI runs on some of the most power hungry and expensive silicon on the planet. Comparing a GPU cluster and a printing press then staring the GPU cluster not limited by natural resources is just silly. Where does the materials come from to make the processors?

> When the AI can be argued to be stealing human's work, yes. A printing press didn't need to copy Shakespeare to be useful. And it'd benefit Shakespeare anyways because more people get to read about his works.

The same can be true for AI as well. I could see a picture and then ask AI whose style it is. Then I could go look up more work by that artist, increasing their visibility.

- they can make commissions faster? To begin with commissions aren't a sustainable business. Even if they 5x the labor and somehow kept the same prices they aren't living well. But in reality, they will get less business as people will AI their "good enough" art and probably won't pay as much for something not fully hand drawn

Is this a complaint that something got cheaper to make? This one affects more than just artists. For instance, code quality output from LLM is quite high. So, wages across the board will decrease yet capabilities will increase. This is a problem external to AI.

> Until someone conceptualizes a proper UBI scheme, pointlessly toiling is how most of the non-elite live. I have yet to hear of a real alternative for these misplaced artists to move towards.

Again, not just artists and the path forward is the same as it’s always been with technological advancements, increase your skill level to above the median created by the new technology.

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

#865

Post by tstrimple »

dylan604 wrote: post #295
px43 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is using Midjourney to replace artists. Artists are using Midjourney to speed up the most tedious parts of their work.

That's just BS. If people weren't replacing artists, there would be no need to prompt with "in the style of ___". are you honestly saying that only artistX is using the prompt "in the style of artistX"?

You're right. Instead of asking for art in the style of Van Gogh, I totally should have commissioned him to do it instead. I've replaced Van Gogh!

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

#866

Post by ben_w »

nrabulinski wrote: post #850
ben_w wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bu…

This is very cheap: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/yes.1.html

I would agree with you that what counts as "good enough" is kinda hard to quantify (which itself leads into the whole free market vs state owned business discourse from 1848 to 1991), but I do mean specifically from the PoV of "does it make your jobs go away?"

Although now I realise I should be even more precise, as I mean "you singular and jobs plural for now and into the future" while my previous words may reasonably be understood as "you plural and each job is just your current one".

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

#867

Post by whamlastxmas »

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 about which data you train on and be "inspired by", as people here say.

This is a very poor definition of intelligence and is not convincing of deserving training data

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

#868

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

edent wrote: post #786
ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) means that taxes, the legal and justice systems, much of the public education system, criticism, begging on the street, and protest are all unethical, among I'm sure many others. Not to suggest you believe they are- I'm sure that you can present very strong arguments for some or all of these- but that makes it much less simple and leaves room for debate about whether this situation is also an exception.

People are free to leave a place which taxes them, or to homeschool their children, etc. This situation is not an exception. There is no compelling reason to force people to have their work ingested by an AI. Unless you believe that large companies have the inherent right to disregard the rights of individuals?

Adding opt-out conceivably covers all of these examples except for criticism and the justice system. It does also rope in DALL-E and Stable Diffusion.

Do I have the right to not let {MINORITY} ingest my work? The right to not allow my words to be quoted? To say you cannot rip my mp3s from CD and must buy it twice if you want to listen on your ipod? To prevent it from entering public domain or to ban fair use transformations like parody?

Was it unethical of Emily Dickinson's family to publish her work posthumously and without consent, and, separately, is it unethical for me to read it today? Was it wrong to translate The Art of War, given that Sun Tzu wanted it to give the Chinese an advantage over their enemies?

I (obviously) don't believe that large companies can disregard human rights. I do believe that ASI is a necessary precondition to a post-scarcity utopia and that every day it is delayed is a day that a billion people will suffer unnecessarily, and I admit that probably biases me against people in the first world who are doing their damnedest to delay it anyway because they want money. I do recognize that the possibility that OpenAI et al don't get us any closer to ASI or the possibility that ASI destroys rather than enriches humanity are valid critiques of that.

Ultimately, I'm strongly confident that people don't have unlimited rights to what is done with their works, weakly confident that one such limit is on the right to prevent their use as training data, and very strongly confident that this is a complicated ethical question.

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

#869

Post by mftrhu »

mlrtime wrote: post #856
mftrhu wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first part is debatable, unless you qualify it as "superior at making their creator money".

The market selects for that, and only that. Other qualities of the product are secondary, making any statements to the effect of "the best product [outside the context of simply making the most money] will win" misguided at best.

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

#870

Post by shadowgovt »

skydhash wrote: post #761
shadowgovt wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine someone came up with a way to print houses for nearly-free. Anyone needs shelter? Bam, instant house. Landlords would lose income left and right. The relevant question is: would society stop the building of these free houses to protect the interest of the landlords? (Now, take that analogy and throw it in the trash. ;) Housing is essential; art is fundamentally a luxury good. If we want to, we can have a soci…

> Imagine someone came up with a way to print houses for nearly-free. Anyone needs shelter? Bam, instant house. Money is just paper. And now with cashless systems, it's now only bits on some computers. But no one sane wants to maximize everyone accounts or print cash to hand out. Art takes hours, days, even years or human labor to produce. Copyright laws set an artificial scarcity, because if it can be replicated at…

> Art takes hours, days, even years or human labor to produce

Well, depending on whether one considers the output of one of the AI image diffusion algorithms "art"... Not anymore, right? That's rather the point of the debate? That we've gone over a few decades from a world of "This wall is blank. Maybe I'll go to the art show and find a piece someone made, or commission a piece based on an idea in my head" to "This wall is blank. Maybe I'll spend two hours futzing with DALL-E and send the result off to a local print-shop, then pop it over to Michael's and frame it?"

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