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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

#871

Post by Piskvorrr »

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.

Ok, here's a pile of sand, the goal is 1. a computer and 2. an AI to run on it. Go!

(spoiler: bootstrapping yourself up the tech tree gets progressively harder)

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

#872

Post by Piskvorrr »

freejazz wrote: post #723
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…

It'd be a good point if it wasn't for the fact that search engines didn't exist until google, because of technology, and that courts didn't need to consider the issue until then. So where does your point get us? We are here now.

"search engines didn't exist until google" - you might want to, uh, google that

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

#873

Post by csallen »

tga_d wrote: post #758
csallen wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never argued that AI doesn't need to worry about citing influences. If I am a person using a tool to create a work, and the final product clearly resembles some copyrighted work that I need to reference and give credit to, what does it matter if my tool is a pencil, a graphics editing program, a GPT, or my own mind? I can cite the work.

Like I said, this is exactly what the comment you first replied to was explaining. It is very clearly not the same as a pencil or a graphics editing program, because those things do not have a notion of Cat & Girl by Willem de Kooning embedded in them that they can utilize without credit. It is clearly not the same as your mind, because your mind can and, assuming you want to stay in good standing, will provide credi…

I'd say that a tool itself can't be guilty of copyright infringement, only the person using the tool can. So it doesn't matter if the GPT has some sort of "notion" of a copyrighted work in it or not. GPTs aren't sentient beings. They don't go around creating things on their own. Humans have to sit down and command them, and that point, whoever issued the command is responsible for the output. Copyright violation happens at the point of creation or distribution, not at the much earlier point of inspiration or learning.

So yeah, of course imo it should be permissible to share a model that can reproduce copyrighted works. Being "capable of being used" to violate a law is not the same thing as violating a law.

A ton of software on my computer can copy-paste others' work, both images and words. It can trivially break copyright. Hell, there are even programs out there than can auto-generate code for me, code that various companies have patent claims for. Do I think distributing any of this software should be illegal? No. But I think using that software to infringe on someone's copyright should be.

(Note: This is different than if the program distributed came with a folder that included bunch of copyrighted works. To me, sharing something like that would be a copyright violation.)

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

#874

Post by a_vanderbilt »

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…

I feel the emotionally charged nature of the topic prevents a lot of rational discussion from taking place. That's totally understandable too, it's the livelihood for some of those involved. Unless we start making specific regulations for Generative AI, current copyright law is pretty clear: you can't call your art a Picasso, but you can certainly say it was inspired by Picasso. The difference is that GAI can do it much faster and cheaper. The best middle ground in my opinion is to allow GAI to train on copyrighted data, but the output cannot be copyrighted, and the model weights creating it can't be copyrighted either. Any works modified by a human attempting to gain copyright protection should have to fulfill the requirements to be substantiative and transformative just as fair use requires now.

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

#875

Post by KaiserPro »

encomiast wrote: post #319
KaiserPro wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its fair use. https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-... There are complications, but google can use thumbnails because essentailly they are used to "review" the website. Has google sampled and hosted the whole image on their own website and made more iamges in the style of say mickey mouse, they would have been taken to town by the owners. This is why there are no commercial movies…

There's really no reason for anyone to be confident that this is or is not fair use. The law around fair use is a quagmire of conflicting ideas, cases, and opinions and most of the law is in the form of precedents since the letter of the law is so vague. One only needs to read the Supreme Court decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith. In this case, it was found to not be fair use, bu…

in that case, the source image was actually licensed:

"Years later, Goldsmith granted a limited license to Vanity Fair for use of one of her Prince photos as an “artist reference for an illustration.” The terms of the license included that the use would be for “one time” only. Vanity Fair hired Warhol to create the illustration, and Warhol used Goldsmith’s photo to create a purple silkscreen portrait of Prince, which appeared with an article about Prince in Vanity Fair’s November 1984 issue. "

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

#876

Post by johnnyanmac »

tekknik wrote: post #863
johnnyanmac wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 j…

>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?

Probably mined from 3rd world country slaves (in the literal "owning people" sense). But still, these servers already exist and scale up way more than a tree.

>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.

Sure, and you can use p2p to download perfectly legal software. We know how the story ends.

>Is this a complaint that something got cheaper to make... 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.

It's a complaint that people even woth more efficiency still can't make a living. While the millionaires become billionaires. I'm not even concerned about software wages. Some Principal SWE going from 400k to 200k will still live fine.

Artists going from 40k to 40k (but now working more efficiently) is exactly how we ended up with wages stagnating for 30 years. And yes, it is affecting everyone even pre-AI. The median is barely a living wage anymore, which is what "minimum wage" used to be.

If we lived in a work optional world I don't think many would care. But we don't and recklessly taking jobs to feed the billionaires is just going to cause societal collapse if left unchecked.

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

#877

Post by tga_d »

csallen wrote: post #873
tga_d wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, this is exactly what the comment you first replied to was explaining. It is very clearly not the same as a pencil or a graphics editing program, because those things do not have a notion of Cat & Girl by Willem de Kooning embedded in them that they can utilize without credit. It is clearly not the same as your mind, because your mind can and, assuming you want to stay in good standing, will provide credi…

I'd say that a tool itself can't be guilty of copyright infringement, only the person using the tool can. So it doesn't matter if the GPT has some sort of "notion" of a copyrighted work in it or not. GPTs aren't sentient beings. They don't go around creating things on their own. Humans have to sit down and command them, and that point, whoever issued the command is responsible for the output. Copyright violation happ…

I'm not sure how to explain this any clearer. I am talking about neural net compression algorithms. As in, it is literally just a neural net encoding some copyrighted work, and nothing else. It is ultimately no more intelligent than a zip file, other than the file and program are the same. You can't seriously believe that these programs allow you to avoid copyright claims, can you? Movie studios, music producers, and book publishers should just pack it in, pirates just need to switch to compressing by training a NN, and seeding those instead, and there's no legal precedence to stop them? If you do think that, do you at least understand why nobody is going to take your position seriously?

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

#878

Post by polytely »

Aeolun wrote: post #666
bluefirebrand wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without giving bias to humanity No, we should absolutely be giving bias to humanity. Flesh and blood humans matter, their lives matter, their thoughts matter and their work matters. Machines are tools for them to use not entities given the same rights and same consideration. I reject your whole premise.

So you instead want to what? Ban the tools because they interfere with doing things the human way?

no force the people creating and profiting from the tools to get permission from the people they mine the data from or cease operating

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

#879

Post by cwkoss »

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…

It's like you are mad at gravity. That sucks you feel that way, but very unlikely to change anything.

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

#880

Post by rpdillon »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #851
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…

> 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!

> 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?

At the risk of answering a rhetorical question: because copyright covers four rights: copying, distribution, creation of derivative works, and public performance, and LLM training doesn't fit cleanly into any of these, which is why many think copying-for-the-purpose-of-training might be fair use (courts have yet to rule here).

I think the most sane outcome would be to find that:

- Training is fair use

- Direct, automated output of AI models cannot be copyrighted (I think this has already been ruled on[0] in the US).

- Use of an genAI to create works that would otherwise be considered a "derivative work" under copyright law can still be challenged under copyright.

The end result here would be that AI can continue to be a useful tool, but artists still have legal teeth to come after folks using the tool to create infringing works.

Of course, determining whether a work is similar enough to be considered infringing remains a horribly difficult challenge, but that's nothing new[1], and will continue to hinge on how courts assess the four factors that govern fair use[2].

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receiv...

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176881182/supreme-court-side...

[2]: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

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