Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

kapwing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 176 posts

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

#111

Post by abustamam »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #91
csallen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The company is profiting off of other people's work! That's not right. What's wrong with it? We live in an interconnected world. Every company or individual who profits off anything does so, in very large part, thanks to work left behind by others that they don't directly compensate each other for. Stated differently, if we look at the other side of the coin, it's one thing to create value, and another thing to cap…

I'd love to see copyright abolished. As long as it continues to exist, however, AI should not get an exemption; that would directly advantage a few large companies over everyone else, giving them a special privilege to violate licenses that nobody else gets.

Yeah, that is true. I'd be on-board with abolishing copyright then.

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

#112

Post by abustamam »

JAlexoid wrote: post #65
pastel8739 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we really want the entire world to be endlessly full of cookie-licking rent seekers who demand profit every time anyone does anything? No, far better that we have four rent-seekers who gobble up everything that anyone is naive enough to share with the world, then turn around to demand profit in order to keep up with the new pace of the world that they’ve created.

But original artists being rent-seekers is OK, right? PS: I categorically disagree that AI developers are rent-seekers, unless they require rent for the products their models generate

Uh, is there an AI developer that does not charge for their services that I don't know about? I'd love to use that one.

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

#113

Post by billyjobob »

rambambram wrote: post #87

I'm not a native English speaker, but since when became 'lessons' a 'learnings'?

Probably due to the movie "Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan".

People missed the joke that it was poor English on purpose.

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

#114

Post by [deleted] »

fennecfoxy wrote: post #105

I mean there's no point; everyone still gets super mad even in the cases where models where trained only on content that a company owns or has paid for. I wish artists would stop with the "it stole our work bullshit" and just be more honest about the "it can do what we do and we're terrified and scare for our future" part. Because that I can 100% understand, and contrary to previous jobs just disappearing, we do live…

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by JAlexoid »

abustamam wrote: post #110
JAlexoid wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specif…

Most people can't even imagine the complexity required to build an LLM. But here we are. We throw plenty of smart people at plenty of hard ideas. If a company really wanted to, they would find a way to make this feasible.

Funny thing is that building an LLM isn't as complex as you might think.

But the problem of attribution is easily understandable to any human with a modicum of intelligence.

Imagine that you have a trillion input images, with every single one having a source associated. When training they go through lots of processes and every single image contributes a varying degree to a subset of 8billion parameters. That alone would produce a dataset that is 1T * 8B to just say how much a particular image contributed to the output...

To mimic intelligence the output is also randomized - the association is not static and every single pixel in the output has it's own lineage.

So as you can probably imagine that to calculate the actual source weights on the output you'd require to do at least 8e+21 calculations per output pixel... and require double precision floating point while you do it.

We know how to do it. It's just ridiculously expensive.

(The above example is for demonstrative purposes only)

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

#116

Post by JAlexoid »

abustamam wrote: post #112
JAlexoid wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But original artists being rent-seekers is OK, right? PS: I categorically disagree that AI developers are rent-seekers, unless they require rent for the products their models generate

Uh, is there an AI developer that does not charge for their services that I don't know about? I'd love to use that one.

Charging for a service isn't rent-seeking.

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

#117

Post by JAlexoid »

maplethorpe wrote: post #89
JAlexoid wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an artist your license didn't ban learning from your work. Unless your content was acquired without a license at all - you absolutely gave them permission to use it in training sets. That is the gap in the legal landscape.

No I didn't. It's use in a software product without my permission. That's never been allowed. Just because you obfuscate what's happening by calling it "learning" and pretending your model is actually just looking at pictures the same as a human, doesn't make it true.

Unfortunately you did grant that permission. Once you granted the permission for someone to hold a copy, they have the permission to process it.

I can assure you, that you didn't grant a license with an exclusive list of operations that can be performed on your work of art. At best you may have had something like "no commercial use" clause and general broad terms.

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

#118

Post by croes »

JAlexoid wrote: post #62
croes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t the reading. The problem is the output based on somebody’s other work. There is a reason why we call it styles, because it’s a recognizable pattern someone came up with maybe after decades of work.

The "funny" thing is that we absolutely allow people to copy style... but somehow software isn't allowed to do that? You don't even need to have a legally acquired source material to produce work in a certain style. The new reality allows for original creators to actually track the chain, so we're in this situation.

If people would have the same mass output as software we wouldn’t allow that too.

If one or two people take an apple from your tree it’s not a big deal, if a machine takes 10,000 it is.

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

#119

Post by maplethorpe »

oreally wrote: post #60
abustamam wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair use by most standards? Which standards are those? I don't think a standard about training an AI on billions of images exists.

By the same 'transformative' standards that allow satire, reaction and commentary videos to exist. And those take 100% from the source and add context, whereas good generated AI images that aren't wholesale copying take like less than 10% from the original source. In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on *your observation* of someone else's work is absurd. No one pays Newton's descendants for making lifts o…

> good generated AI images that aren't wholesale copying take like less than 10% from the original source.

So would the model work if it only trained on the top 10% of pixels in every image? Or do they in fact need the entire image before they begin processing it, and therefore use the entire image?

> In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on your observation of someone else's work is absurd.

I agree that's absurd. But training a model is no more "observing images" than an F1 car is "walking" down a race track. Just because a race car uses kinetic energy, gravity, and friction to propel itself, the same way a human does, doesn't mean it's doing the same thing as a human. That comparison you're making is the real absurdity.

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

#120

Post by oreally »

tovej wrote: post #103
oreally wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the same 'transformative' standards that allow satire, reaction and commentary videos to exist. And those take 100% from the source and add context, whereas good generated AI images that aren't wholesale copying take like less than 10% from the original source. In addition, the idea that you need to pay rent on *your observation* of someone else's work is absurd. No one pays Newton's descendants for making lifts o…

Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word? Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.

These are my opinions ofc.

> Is it transformative if I take all the pages in Hanya Yanagiharas A Little Life and use a thesaurus to change every second word?

If you meant it literally.. I'd think that such a version would be a sort of parody. It'd be up to lawyers doing their cross-examinations to prove the work was intended for such a purpose though..

> Or a more realistic scenario: what if I translate it to Spanish without license from the author? That's not allowed, and yet I have "transformed" the work in the same way that an LLM does.

Probably a lawyer would answer this better than me, but the 'content' is the same and would violate copyright. There's also other factors, like if it was translated/distributed for free.

Besides that I regard that LLMs to hold mathematical observations in contrast to a translated work. So long as the user ensures the output isn't close to what's already available imo it fits the transformative criteria.

Post reply on HN