Artists score major win in copyright case against AI art generators

There are no clean image models. Zero. Using today's model architectures, the problem of using non-expressly-permitted data for training is insurmountable. I welcome anyone more knowledgeable on the matter to go ahead and comment about a counterexample before downvoting.

So if the artists prevail, image generators are donezo. Open source, proprietary, whatever. People saying otherwise just don't know enough about how they work.

You have heard of Adobe's Firefly. It is not clean. Adobe uses CLIP, T5, or something for text conditioning. None of those things were trained on expressly permitted content. Go ahead and ask them.

Maybe you have heard of Open Model Initiative. They are going going to use CLIP or T5. They have no alternative.

There are not enough license bureau images to train a CLIP model, not enough expressly licensed text content to train T5. A CLIP model needs 2 billion images to perform well, not the 600m Adobe claims they have access to. It's right in the paper.

Good luck training a valuable language model on only expressly permissioned content. You'd become a billionaire if you could keep such an architecture secret. And then when it does exist, such as with some translation models, well they underperform, so who uses them?

What do people want? I don't really care about IP, I care about, who is allowed to make money? Is only Apple, who controls the devices and accounts, and therefore can really enforce anti-piracy, permitted to make money? Only parties with good legal representation? It's not so black and white, not so cut and dried, who the good guys and bad guys are. We already live with a huge glut of content and raised interest rates, which have been 100x more impactful to the bottom line - financial and creative - of working artists. Why aren't these artists demanding that the Fed drops rates, or that back catalog media be delisted to boost demand for new media? It's not that simple either! Presumably a lot of people using these image and video generators are narrative creators of a kind too, like video game developers, music video makers, etc. Are they also bad guys?

There's no broad solution here, the legal victory here is definitely pyrrhic, but one thing's for sure: Apple, NVIDIA, Meta and Google will still be printing cash. The artists are advocating for a position that boils down to, "The only moral creative-economic status quo is my status quo."

I'm very excited for discovery.

Asking why the artists are mad at the corporations that are trying to profit off their labor without permission and not the fed or other artists is definitely a take.

You are making a bad faith comment. There's no mystery why artists are mad at Stability and Midjourney. I agree that demanding lower interest rates would be ridiculous. That is my point. You could delete Midjourney, Stability, DALL-E3, etc. tomorrow, and it will still suck harder today to be a working artist than it did in 2021, when interest rates were lower and there were literally hundreds more TV series being produced, 2x more video games being made, than today.

Why limit ourselves to turning back the clock on AI, on interest rates and content productivity, if we're going to play time machine fantasies? You could also go back in time and buy bitcoin, and be rich. I am mocking the idea of turning back the clock, and you know it, and while anyone has a right to be angry about anything, and to engage in a time machine fantasy about anything, it ought to at least be a fantasy that makes sense and achieves some goals.

Because the goal right now, "The smallest, most memetic sentiment of I'll show those corporations!" is kind of well-trodden, kind of old and tired. Brother, there are millions of people trying to do that every day. And when they achieve their goals of showing the big corporations, I cannot think of a single instance where all but the already lucky few - like these famous plaintiffs! - gain anything financially.

Didn't the Enron dataset that's now part of the Pile become public during discovery too? Some great image datasets might drop.