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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

#21

Post by ocdtrekkie »

kennywinker wrote: post #7

They took a base model, so something trained on stolen work - and then added a vaneer of non-stolen work. I too would be skeptical of their legal position.

If anything the legal position is probably the opposite: The law is leaning towards AI training being transformative/fair use and AI generated content not getting any copyright protection at all. So something paying artists for style-rips probably was a net positive for artists, because it's very possible it will end up outright legal to have gen AI rip off artists' styles wholesale.

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

#22

Post by Kim_Bruning »

kennywinker wrote: post #7

They took a base model, so something trained on stolen work - and then added a vaneer of non-stolen work. I too would be skeptical of their legal position.

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

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

#23

Post by ptmkenny »

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 achieved the kind of images I wanted. My only prior experience at the time was OpenAI API. With OpenAI I usually got what I wanted on the first or second try, but with Tess, I couldn’t get a usable result even after 20 tries.

So in addition to the limited number of artists, I think the quality of outputs vs. competing models was a huge factor. I needed to generate thousands of images, so I couldn’t afford to do dozens of attempts for each one.

Hopefully one day there will be a service that can match the quality of OpenAI Image API and Flux but with compensation for artists.

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

#24

Post by maplethorpe »

spudlyo wrote: post #6

> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style. It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DR…

It's interesting you interpret the consumer's response as a desire for the expansion of IP laws. As an artist whose work exists in many of these training sets, I'm of a different opinion: IP laws can stay the same, but they should have purchased a license to use my art before including it in their training data.

Since the didn't, they should go to jail. The same way I would have gone to jail if I built Sora in my basement and sold it to the public.

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

#25

Post by Retric »

numpad0 wrote: post #16
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.

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, infrastructure, military spending etc.

Obviously the incentive to take without compensation is far more appealing, but that doesn’t mean it was impossible to make a reasonable offer.

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

#27

Post by visarga »

maplethorpe wrote: post #24
spudlyo wrote: post #6

> Surveys consistently showed that consumers believed artists deserved payment when AI generated content in their style. It's interesting that "consumers" are generally for the expansion of IP laws. At at the moment, I'm fairly certain that "style" is not something protected by Copyright. I personally do not want this, and I'm sure there are likely many like me. Poorly thought out IP laws lead to chilling-effects, DR…

It's interesting you interpret the consumer's response as a desire for the expansion of IP laws. As an artist whose work exists in many of these training sets, I'm of a different opinion: IP laws can stay the same, but they should have purchased a license to use my art before including it in their training data. Since the didn't, they should go to jail. The same way I would have gone to jail if I built Sora in my bas…

I thought it was at most a monetary fine, do people go to jail for copyright infringement? But you seem to want to own all the air around your work, the ground beneath it too. Nothing can exist around it, so a creative person would do better to avert their eyes rather than loading useless ideas. Why should I install in my brain your "furniture" when I am not allowed to sit on it? In these cases I think authors provide a net negative to society by creating more works that further forbid others from creating in the same space.

Here, for example, any comment is open to read and respond to. On ArXiv any paper can be downloaded, read and cited. Wikipedia contains text from many thousands of editors, building on each other. We like collaboration more than asserting our exclusivity rights. That is why these places provide better quality than work for direct profit or, God forbid, ad revenue, that is where the slop starts flowing.

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

#28

Post by tdb7893 »

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.

You don't sign an EULA saying you can't do those things because scanning then distributing is already prohibited by copyright. The way to start a license war is to keep the status quo of these companies being able to ingest and essentially reproduce human work for free. One of my big worries about AI is that it will accelerate companies locking everything down and hoarding their own data.

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

#29

Post by esafak »

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 is not an individual buying the book but a corporation, with the purpose of being able to create imitations of it, and all other books.

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

#30

Post by throwaway314155 »

This article is bullshit. You can't get a full model from training on just one artist's work. A pretrained model is required. The pretrained model was likely one which was indeed trained on the works of others without consent.

What's more, their reasoning for abandoning the company was to build out another company with a suspiciously similar idea...

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