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

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

#171

Post by artninja1988 »

hutzlibu wrote: post #136
surfingdino wrote: post #31

AI business model is that of a school bully who a) steals a cup of lemonade from your lemonade stand, b) drinks it, c) pees into the cup, d) sells it to others, e) convinces the cheerleaders to go around telling everyone that you are not going to be able to make or sell your own lemonade anymore.

All your points would imply that the original art was degraded somehow. How?

Because now any child can create art by typing a prompt, creating more competition for them, I guess. Very selfish thinking imo

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

#172

Post by encomiast »

tsimionescu wrote: post #89
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…

The point is that Midjourney itself, the model weights, is possibly a derivative work of all of the works that went into its training. The fact that it can produce almost identical copies of some of them, especially if not carefully prevented from doing so through secondary mechanisms, is obvious proof that it directly encodes copies of some of these works. That already clearly means that they couldn't publish the mo…

> possibly a derivative work of all of the works that went into its training.

or… it is possibly a transformative work of the all the works that went into it's training, which would lead to a strong fair use argument. Given how permissive the courts have been with transformative work, this seems like an easier argument to make.

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

#173

Post by jazzyjackson »

runnr_az wrote: post #137
minimaxir wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was in a court filing: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

Yeah... but I don't think it's an actual list of artists that were used? Here's a relevant comment from the last discussion of this on HN: "Looking at the source tweet[1], this isn't a list of artists specifically used to train Midjourney, but instead is a list of artists used to pre-render additives that can be added to an existing prompt much faster than an arbitrary addition." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=…

Agreed its a bit tertiary, but how would that list of artists have any meaning if their work was not included in training?

also the discovery of the list was a strong rebuttal to the (iirc) CEO of Midjourney complaining that finding the source of online images in order to ask permission / offer compensation was just too arduous a task and also that they didn't bother. Well here's a list of thousands of artist styles they bothered to identify.

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

#174

Post by surfingdino »

chankstein38 wrote: post #85

[flagged]

Arguments similar to yours were made by people publishing other owners' IP on the early Internet. What AI companies are doing is the same thing, except they don't care for the quality of the results and keep telling everybody that a system that cannot repeatedly produce the same answer to the same question but keeps trying to come up with something that looks like an answer instead is better and should be paid for and used more. I do hope AI cheerleaders have their prostates worked on by AI-assisted hallucinating robots whose models contain equally weighted text on surgery, anatomical dissection, and meccano assembly instructions.

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

#175

Post by wrsh07 »

make3 wrote: post #104
pushedx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a reference to Instagram, et. al., where distributing your illustrations there implicitly allows thier Ad machine to profit from your work

you decide to put your stuff on Instagram, you don't decide to put your work in midjourney

But sometimes your work is put on Instagram without your knowledge or consent (eg by an Instagram aggregator account)

And this whole ecosystem of credit (or not sharing credit) is undoubtedly encouraged by Instagram (because it's valuable to me to have an Instagram account with many followers)

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

#176

Post by unnamed76ri »

Imnimo wrote: post #105

I'm a little skeptical that this artist's work was "used to train Midjourney" just because their name appears on that list. My understanding is that the list in question is just a scraped list of artist names from Wikipedia, and was used as a list of possible styles to try in prompts, to see if CLIP happened to know them. I don't think that being on the list necessarily means that an artist's work was used to train M…

An easy way to tell is to instruct Midjourney to create something “in the style of ______ “

I don’t currently have a MJ subscription or I’d try it.

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

#177

Post by tedivm »

sandworm101 wrote: post #118
madeofpalk wrote: post #36

> But I can't even get cartoons to most people for free now, without doing unpaid work for the profit-making companies who own the most use channels of communication This is the sticking point for me. OpenAI isn't a profit-making company, but it's certainly a valuable company. A valuable company that is built from the work of content others created without transferring any value back to them. Regardless of legalities…

>> If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content. But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's…

I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward.

I also firmly believe that commercializing models built on top of copyrighted works (which all works start off as) does not qualify as fair use (or at least shouldn't) and that commercializing models build on copyrighted material is nothing more than license laundering. Companies that commercialize copyrighted work in this manner should be paying for a license to train with the data, or should stick to using the licenses that the content was released under.

I don't think your example is valid either. The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. That is literally what they are and how they work. That is very different than people having similar styles.

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

#178

Post by unfamiliar »

Osmose wrote: post #139
sandworm101 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content. But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's…

Because we are humans and our capability of abusing those rights is limited. The scale and speed at which LLMs can abuse copyrighted work to threaten the livelihoods of the authors of those works is reason enough to consider it unethical.

I don’t think it is. What you describe is similar to any other industry disruption, and I don’t think those are unethical. I’d actually argue that preventing disruption is often (not always) unethical, because you artificially prolong an inefficient or inferior alternative.

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

#180

Post by munchler »

madeofpalk wrote: post #8
muststopmyths wrote: post #4

If the artist's license was for non-commercial use, isn't using it for training an AI for commercial use a clear violation ? I would love to know why not.

Fair use is an argument to explain why you violated the license/copyright. It relies on the fact that you did make a copy without permission.

Fair use is not a copyright violation! It’s a limitation placed on copyright to balance the interests of copyright holders with the public interest.
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