Live data from Hacker News

Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

kapwing.com

71–80 of 176 posts

Re: Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

#71
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cumulative license fees required to properly compensate all artists is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entirety of global economy if paid. The only solution I can think of is to burn down just the AI to be revisited later to be rebuilt as a tool that won't require absurd amount of training data, that also leave a lot more to its human operator beyond merely accepting literal categorical de…

> The cumulative license fees required to properly compensate all artists is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entirety of global economy if paid. That's kind of an interesting concept: "since the scale of my transgression was so big , I should get away with it scot-free."

That’s how eminent domain and regulatory takings work in most countries.

Re: Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

#73

I evaluated Tess.design about a year ago for an app I was building. At first I was excited because I wanted a service that compensated artists. However the number of artists was very limited and the blog post said “more will be added soon” but it had already been a year and it seemed like none had been added, not a good sign. Then I tested out the image generation itself and I was unable to come up with prompts that…

Yeah this just shows that ergonomics matters. I use Nano Banana and Grok Imagine to generate silly images for my friends and siblings (instead of reaction gifs I do reaction slop). The workflow is quite easy. Just plop in a prompt and usually the first image is good enough to share. Not that my standards are high anyway. Would I pay extra to ensure that the artists that these models were trained on were compensated f…

Most people can't even imagine the complexity it would require to actually build a system that correctly tracks down the sources for image generation. Not to mention that each image is generated from literally every single training image in a very small percentage.

It's not hard when someone inputs "create in style of studio ghibli" to say that studio Ghibli should get a cut. It's very different when you don't specify the source for the origin style.

And if you tried to identify the source material owner, the percentage of the output image that their work contributed to would be extremely - if not infinitely - small. You'd get minuscule payouts.

Re: Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cite one legal case where an AI company trained on a particular work, and the judge ruled that they quote-stole it-unquote.

Courts pretty much always rule in favor of rich corps that steal from individuals, and increasingly so. AI companies have money. Artists don't. That makes AI thievery fine, doubly so since AI corps have financially contributed to the government.

You should realize that this is happening not only in the space of images(where conglomerates aren't a thing), but also in music.

Music conglomerates have money and their lawsuits will probably settle the issue.(unless they settle) That will be applied for all copyrighted works, regardless of the medium.

I believe going against the big guys is the reason why the big ones don't yet have music generation LLMs.

Re: Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of the artist responses were "hard no" in 2024 . There's no way the artist demographic such a service would appeal to would be on board with anything even tangent to AI in 2026 (even done ethically) where the professional liability far exceeds the potential revenue.

Most artists I have spoken to don't believe it's possible to do this AI stuff ethically Maybe they're wrong but I tend to agree. Or even if it is possible to do it ethically, it still never will be done that way because there's just too much money in behaving unethically

The only problem that people see in these models is the money flows.

If it all was non-profit - then no one would raise the ethical issue.

Re: Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

#77

> The timing wasn’t right. We depended on artists helping us to promote the platform, and they didn’t. There's a certain arrogance to believing the timing "simply wasn't right". It looks really bad if you try it with any recent controversy: * "The timing wasn't right to charge people for heated car seats" * "The timing wasn't right to make Photoshop a subscription service" * "The timing wasn't right to increase fees"…

It’s not arrogant to be firm in your beliefs. You’re not arrogant for believing the timing is never right. You may even be 100% right, but you don’t have to belittle or put down the other side. In this case, they already lost, what more do you want?

Re: Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

#78
post #16
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to protect a particular style is just unworkable for obvious reasons. The only solution I can think of is requiring AI companies to license all of the content they have in their training set so artists get paid for the training rather than trying to work out which source material links to which outputs which is impossible.

The cumulative license fees required to properly compensate all artists is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entirety of global economy if paid. The only solution I can think of is to burn down just the AI to be revisited later to be rebuilt as a tool that won't require absurd amount of training data, that also leave a lot more to its human operator beyond merely accepting literal categorical de…

"If it took all the fossil fuel on Earth" What do you mean? To TRAIN an LLM model it takes roughly the same amount of energy as to raise a person, so it's not even really expensive in energy costs.

Re: Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

#80
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I buy a book, I don't buy a license to read it, I don't sign an EULA that says I won't scan it, digitize it, or write a program to analyze the word frequencies it contains. Do you want buy a license to read a book, because this is how you get there.

In Spain books include a copyright notice explicitly prohibiting reproduction and digitalization and alluding to article 270 of the Spanish criminal code.

The book can say anything it wants, whenever it's true and/or applicable in court later on is a very different matter. Spain's SGAE is a very powerful lobby but still needs to follow the law.

Edit: haven't followed the law in a while, but you could definitely copy, digitalize and scan documents for yourself and your friends (copia privada).

Post reply on HN