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Learnings from paying artists royalties for AI-generated art

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

#141

Post by rickydroll »

tartoran wrote: post #130
squidbeak wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is known is that the majority believe that if artists were to be copied, they should at least be compensated. I get the emotional side of this argument - artists going hungry while someone else cashes in on their ideas. But compensation is a dangerous premise, because derivative art is an established type of artistic freedom. Artists routinely mimic styles, or work within the bounds of styles established by ma…

You can’t derive works at scale manually. We’re talking about a machine here.

I suggest you look into the history of art, specifically how artists have operated studios or "factories" where apprentices produced replicas of the master's work. Modern artists have numbered prints, where they reproduce their work at scale to as a revenue source. Sol Lewitt produced instructions for his art, and people reproduce them as public murals all over the place. see: https://massmoca.org/event/sol-lewitt-a-wall-drawing-retrosp...

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

#142

Post by squidbeak »

tartoran wrote: post #130
squidbeak wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is known is that the majority believe that if artists were to be copied, they should at least be compensated. I get the emotional side of this argument - artists going hungry while someone else cashes in on their ideas. But compensation is a dangerous premise, because derivative art is an established type of artistic freedom. Artists routinely mimic styles, or work within the bounds of styles established by ma…

You can’t derive works at scale manually. We’re talking about a machine here.

The 'machine' existed long before the AI companies in university art studies, galleries and republication, and the scale came from the graduates or ordinary acolytes borrowing wholesale the ideas and techniques they admired. Scale shouldn't alter the principle. Once there's a right to compensation established for derivation, you have to explain why it doesn't apply to the millions of artists making a living from exactly that.

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

#143

Post by squidbeak »

spudlyo wrote: post #9
Gigachad wrote: 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.

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.

It's even worse than that. You then have to pay an additional fee to use its ideas as inspiration for your own book.

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

#144

Post by squidbeak »

Gigachad wrote: post #10
spudlyo wrote: 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.

The old rules were built on based on old capabilities and and old reality which no longer exists.

This is a deceptive line of dismissal. Sound principles needs to be figured out before imposing any kind of restriction on art - "things have changed" doesn't cut it.

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

#145

Post by numpad0 »

Retric wrote: post #25
numpad0 wrote: 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…

> is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entire global economy if paid. Where did you get that idea. Global economy is ~200T/year PPP. 0.1% of that split across every artist you want the training data from would be insanely difficult for the vast majority of them to turn down. Which makes sense as art isn’t that big a percentage of the global economy compared to say housing, food, medical care, in…

There are definitely >1m artists worldwide, some popular some less so, and $1M * 1m =1T, not 0.1% * 200T =200B.

Hard cap of 200B divided by 1M equals 200k, and that would be sure more reasonable, but we aren't hearing artists responding favorably to hypotheticals in that range, so I'm skeptical that "ain't nobody gonna turn that down".

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

#146

Post by numpad0 »

Retric wrote: post #138
bjterry wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the people represented in the training data to receive royalties would be an incredible wealth transfer to the Extremely Online. My forum posts, StackOverflow answers etc are also contributing to the model outputs. The training data, by volume, mostly belongs to blog authors, redditors, Wikipedia editors, to us!

I object to calling people chatting online artists. However, ultimately nobody is going to pay them more than the value of their posts to the AI company which puts a severe cap on what that’s actually worth. People who post a great deal of online content might be worth compensating a few thousand dollars, but it would be hard for them to then turn that down.

I think the lower bounds of someone signing away rights to their whole art portfolio is more towards $1m than few thousands. Few k is just a month's salary that they can "make" themselves. Offers that small would be almost off-putting.

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

#147

Post by Kim_Bruning »

kdheiwns wrote: post #39
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #22

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.

Look, you've made a closed argument. Now if I mention small labs or floss projects that got litigated against, first I'd need to 'stop beating my wife'.

No one is stealing anything. It's not theft. There has been no crime. None of this is anywhere near criminal law.

I could make a more nuanced argument on copyright infringement. But to make that steelman, I'd need to accept a too large overton window shift, so I'll decline to do so here.

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

#148

Post by Kim_Bruning »

JAlexoid wrote: post #74
kdheiwns wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://gemini.google/overview/music-generation/

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

#149

Post by Retric »

numpad0 wrote: post #146
Retric wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I object to calling people chatting online artists. However, ultimately nobody is going to pay them more than the value of their posts to the AI company which puts a severe cap on what that’s actually worth. People who post a great deal of online content might be worth compensating a few thousand dollars, but it would be hard for them to then turn that down.

I think the lower bounds of someone signing away rights to their whole art portfolio is more towards $1m than few thousands. Few k is just a month's salary that they can "make" themselves. Offers that small would be almost off-putting.

That would be true if they gained the exclusive ability to reproduce works etc.

AI companies want a license to train not ownership of a portfolio.

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

#150

Post by Retric »

numpad0 wrote: post #145
Retric wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is so absurd that it will probably genuinely burn down the entire global economy if paid. Where did you get that idea. Global economy is ~200T/year PPP. 0.1% of that split across every artist you want the training data from would be insanely difficult for the vast majority of them to turn down. Which makes sense as art isn’t that big a percentage of the global economy compared to say housing, food, medical care, in…

There are definitely >1m artists worldwide, some popular some less so, and $1M * 1m =1T, not 0.1% * 200T =200B. Hard cap of 200B divided by 1M equals 200k, and that would be sure more reasonable, but we aren't hearing artists responding favorably to hypotheticals in that range, so I'm skeptical that "ain't nobody gonna turn that down".

This isn’t ownership it’s a license.

I think the vast majority would agree to let AI companies train on their art for 10k let alone 200k. Don’t forget the average global salary is way below what you see in the US.

Put another way how many people would turn down 6+ months salary. Of course the vanishing tiny percentage people care about would want more, but that’s a separate question and not particularly valuable to AI companies.

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