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

#951

Post by data-ottawa » Fri, Jan 19, 2024, 5:39 PM UTC

bergen wrote: post #810

Aeolun wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I read a lot of stories in a certain genre that I like, and I later write my own story, it’s almost by definition going to be a mish-mash of everything I like. Should I pay the authors of the books I read when I sell mine?

Did you read the books with the intent to incorporate their ideas into your head and profit of this?

That’s basically the education system’s goal.

However, AI models require copying and reproducing copyrighted works, whereas when I read I book I’m not copying it and I’ve secured some sort of license to use it.

The collection, mass copying, and redistribution of work to create these models seems quite obviously to be a violation on IP laws.

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

#952

Post by kansface » Fri, Jan 19, 2024, 7:12 PM UTC

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…

> The first thing is the output of a mathematical function as computed by a computer, while the second is an expression of human creativity.

The mathematical function is the expression of human creativity. It consumes other expressions of human creativity, a creativity act in an off itself, to output a different expression of human creativity. Other humans consume the output of the system and the system alike to generate further creative works. An AI model is a higher order creative process, much like humans, and is fundamentally predicated on the creative involvement of humans.

Consider the seminal work _Designing Programmes_ by Karl Gerstner if you'd like further consideration of optimizing creative output via self imposed, systematized restrictions and permutations (design programs as meta art). Or alternatively, consider aleatoric music or Toshiko Takaezu for the incorporation of _chance_ into art.

There really isn't anything too new here in my book (AI) - just increased scope and fruition.

> They do not have emotion.

Art does not require an input or output of emotion nor an emotional affect.

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

#953

Post by m4x » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 11:01 AM UTC

Viliam1234 wrote: post #947

m4x wrote: post #914

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? Yes. A printing press only floods the market with copies. An AI floods the market with new derivative works. A human producing a single creative work and then flooding the market with copies leaves lots of room for other humans to produce their own novel work. An AI flooding the market w…

"AI flooding the market with new derivative works" sounds nice if you are the consumer. Now that we can finally have lots of amazing things almost for free, should we create artificial scarcity to protect the existing business models?

It’s potentially nice for the consumer. If I could get personalised audio and video content created on demand for me, that would be pretty amazing. But it does disincentivise people from creating content rather than just consuming it, and I think that could end up taking away a lot of the magic from life.

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

#954

Post by tonetegeatinst » Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 11:13 PM UTC

One thing that confuses me in this whole thing we are talking about is the following....

If you paid a bunch of people to just churn out material in the form of text....art....comics....and video and then used it to train you model then is that ethical?

Because plenty of jobs own the intellectual property or copyright if your doing this work on company time....so simply by hiring people to create data for your model bypasses this ethics problem. You could even run a side business publishing articles these employees write.

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

#955

Post by CaptainFever » Mon, Jan 22, 2024, 2:38 AM UTC

exabrial wrote: post #864

CaptainFever wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consent is not needed to copy and reuse public information.

^ wow

The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-culture_movement

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

#956

Post by caconym_ » Tue, Jan 23, 2024, 1:21 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #945

caconym_ wrote: post #916

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI is great! But taking away artists' livelihoods and justifying it with an uncertain promise of UBI years or (far more likely) decades in the future is (hypothetically) a particularly malignant example of putting the cart before the horse. My observation of the vast majority of people who think intellectual property law is moral anathema to some idealized notion of "freedom" is that they either know nothing about m…

> Or, if you think UBI fixes everything, go ahead and start sending out checks (with a robust guarantee that they will keep coming). I'm sure that will change the tenor of the conversation. So far as I can tell, the capacity to do that is called "communism". Specifically "fully automated luxury communism". Why? Because governments are the only entities capable of making such a robust guarantee, and they can only do i…

You are rationalizing an unsupported prior ("OpenAI and its ilk are right to keep doing what they're doing") with a science fiction premise in which what they're doing is a clear path to so-called "fully automated luxury gay space communism". I don't find this kind of thinking to be particularly well-founded in reality, especially when it's used as a justification for causing harm.

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

#957

Post by jeremyjh » Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 3:07 AM UTC

romwell wrote: post #887

jeremyjh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It applies - but how it applies is simply not settled. Clearly, there is no statistical model that can launder IP. If someone uses Midjourney to produce someone else's IP, that user (not Midjourney) would be in violation of copyright if they use it in a way that does not conform to the license, such as by creating their own website of cat and girl comics and running Adsense on it. However, if other artists are inspir…

>Clearly, there is no statistical model that can launder IP. Of course. The model isn't making a decision as to what may be used as training data. The humans training it do. >If someone uses Midjourney to produce someone else's IP, that user (not Midjourney) would be in violation of copyright That's like saying that if a user unpacks the dune _full_movie.zip I'm sharing online, it's them who have produced the copyrig…

Yeah, "influenced" would have been a better word choice.