Microsoft Designer • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Designer

#201

Post by Dwolb » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 6:37 PM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #159

Dwolb wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter example: Cameras often do rely on other professions to have existed to do their thing. e.g. Architects who built city buildings, fashion designers who designed clothes, and engineers who built cars. They don’t get paid every time their work gets put on Instagram, etc.

I don't know how it is in other countries but in general in France you cannot just take a picture of a building and put it on Instagram without asking the architect for rights : > the image of a building cannot be reproduced without the authorization of the architect who holds the copyright or of his successors in title. Otherwise, the reproduction of a protected work without the authorization of its author constitut…

Interesting I hadn’t heard of that!

Is this law often enforced?

Re: Microsoft Designer

#202

Post by nuancebydefault » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 6:54 PM UTC

prometheus76 wrote: post #182

another2another wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that that's due to an improvement in Teams, it's probably more the formation of scar tissue that's offering a bit of respite. But something else might suddenly happen to rip the scab off and you'll be right back where you started.

One time I decided that I wanted to edit the dictionary used by Teams because I was tired of getting a spelling underline when I use contractions. Apparently, the dictionary didn't include contractions. Anyway, many rabbit holes later, I found out that Teams uses an undocumented hard-coded call to the dictionary used by Google Chrome. You cannot edit the dictionary, you cannot supplement it with a custom dictionary,…

The company i work for uses the Microsoft eco system, including Teams. I love how the tools work together. No complaints here.

Re: Microsoft Designer

#203

Post by nuancebydefault » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 6:58 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #197

ModernMech wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the way of capitalism, and it's how the entire economy works. I mean, you're so concerned with the artists work being stolen, but what of the scientists? Yes, the art produced by Stable Diffusion isn't possible without the artists, but it's also not possible without the countless scientists who have worked over decades to get this technology to where it is. I didn't hear artists complaining when they wer…

Why are you conflating scientific research (something that is paid), with art that was freely uploaded to social media sites and message boards? Microsoft Designer is not spitting out composites of stolen research, it is creating composites of art that can't be matched back to the original. > If artists are being robbed by corporations, then they can get in line if they want a payout, because the rest of us are being…

If you think of it, every work of art is a combination and/or transformation of pre-existing work. Only Adam and Eve never plagiarized.

Re: Microsoft Designer

#204

Post by nuancebydefault » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 7:07 PM UTC

Riverheart wrote: post #146

pas wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the infringement? You can't copyright style, no? If artists can look at each others copyright-in-full-force works and then imitate it, why can't AI? Corporations having too much power is different from technology encroaching on previously uniquely human faculties. Of course both are phenomena that ought to be addressed by society. At which point we see that it's a political problem, and of course politics is b…

Are we equating the capabilities of humans and AI now? AI isn't "imitimating" it's synthesizing an output, in seconds, based on a giant database of art scraped from the internet by human researchers, without permission from those artists, to be crystallized in a form that will outlive every artist born and yet born till the heat death of the universe. If copyright doesn't distinguish between that then copyright needs…

Any copyright currently is about the not-for-free right to _copy_, imitate-right on the other end, still has to be invented. I don't see how that would work in practice.

Re: Microsoft Designer

#205

Post by satvikpendem » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

callmetom wrote: post #62

hiisukun wrote: post #48

I feel a deep sadness, a sympathy, or sense of loss for the countless artists who have toiled to produce beautiful works over the decades (centuries?), just for them to be approximated by a single click as a vector mashup in an AI generative search space. And without so much as a by your leave. I'm not saying it's logical to be against AI image generation, but definitely have a feeling that something has gone wrong h…

Every time I hear this sentiment expressed I wonder about the speaker's familiarity with history and economics. The labor theory of value is almost a thousand years old and has been pretty thoroughly discredited for nearly the same amount of time. History is full of artisans who discovered just how much they overestimated the value of their skill only after someone came along and found a way to do the same thing more…

Indeed, this is the nature of progress.

Re: Microsoft Designer

#206

Post by Riverheart » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 7:37 PM UTC

nuancebydefault wrote: post #204

Riverheart wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we equating the capabilities of humans and AI now? AI isn't "imitimating" it's synthesizing an output, in seconds, based on a giant database of art scraped from the internet by human researchers, without permission from those artists, to be crystallized in a form that will outlive every artist born and yet born till the heat death of the universe. If copyright doesn't distinguish between that then copyright needs…

Any copyright currently is about the not-for-free right to _copy_, imitate-right on the other end, still has to be invented. I don't see how that would work in practice.

AI isn't "imitating" anything. Imitation is a conscious effort a human makes. Any artist could try copying someone's style by looking at a piece of art.

AI can't look at an image and say "I'll imitate that". A human "trains" an AI on images to create a model of how X looks with different examples and piecemeals together something that looks new but is in fact a million tiny data copies from all the images it was trained on so the original source cant be detected. The AI can't do anything it hasn't been trained on.

As I understand it, while it may not copy the exact image it has copied data associated with the image in a way that copyright law could never have anticipated.

So the solution is simple, train your models on your own stuff if you want to claim copyright to the work commercially or pay artists for your training data.

Re: Microsoft Designer

#207

Post by CatWChainsaw » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 7:50 PM UTC

des1nderlase wrote: post #179

hiisukun wrote: post #48

I feel a deep sadness, a sympathy, or sense of loss for the countless artists who have toiled to produce beautiful works over the decades (centuries?), just for them to be approximated by a single click as a vector mashup in an AI generative search space. And without so much as a by your leave. I'm not saying it's logical to be against AI image generation, but definitely have a feeling that something has gone wrong h…

To offer counter perspective, how is this different than any craftmanship being replaced for centuries by mass scale factories and automation. Is this is just the last wave of workforce displacement by automation?

Steven Zapata has a really good video on Youtube about "the end of art". He offers this analogy:

If a factory worker at a car manufacturing plant was handed a screwdriver, and he claimed it was "replacing" him, we would know that he is incorrect; it is a tool designed to make him more productive. But the day they rolled out the robotic assembly lines, however, he was correct: those were designed to replace him. And they did. And now he lives in the Rust Belt with a degraded quality of life and few job prospects because he didn't just lern 2 code.

Re: Microsoft Designer

#208

Post by true_religion » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:23 PM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #159

Dwolb wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter example: Cameras often do rely on other professions to have existed to do their thing. e.g. Architects who built city buildings, fashion designers who designed clothes, and engineers who built cars. They don’t get paid every time their work gets put on Instagram, etc.

I don't know how it is in other countries but in general in France you cannot just take a picture of a building and put it on Instagram without asking the architect for rights : > the image of a building cannot be reproduced without the authorization of the architect who holds the copyright or of his successors in title. Otherwise, the reproduction of a protected work without the authorization of its author constitut…

I wonder how they deal with real estate pictures. Do most people get a license to reproduce the images of their house when they buy it?

Re: Microsoft Designer

#209

Post by toss1 » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:37 PM UTC

nuancebydefault wrote: post #203

rchaud wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you conflating scientific research (something that is paid), with art that was freely uploaded to social media sites and message boards? Microsoft Designer is not spitting out composites of stolen research, it is creating composites of art that can't be matched back to the original. > If artists are being robbed by corporations, then they can get in line if they want a payout, because the rest of us are being…

If you think of it, every work of art is a combination and/or transformation of pre-existing work. Only Adam and Eve never plagiarized.

While most works of are re-combinations (up in the how many 9s after 99% region?), it is pretty hard to say that there has never been a new idea. Humanity has come from apes without art, up to modern digital art painted with lasers in the sky with drones.... From cave painting through Greek & Roman art, through Renaissance through modern art, and it's not merely new mediums for the same painting (and even so, "the medium is the message", so there's new stuff there). Same for music, text, etc...

Re: Microsoft Designer

#210

Post by nuancebydefault » Wed, Mar 08, 2023, 8:40 PM UTC

Riverheart wrote: post #206

nuancebydefault wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any copyright currently is about the not-for-free right to _copy_, imitate-right on the other end, still has to be invented. I don't see how that would work in practice.

AI isn't "imitating" anything. Imitation is a conscious effort a human makes. Any artist could try copying someone's style by looking at a piece of art. AI can't look at an image and say "I'll imitate that". A human "trains" an AI on images to create a model of how X looks with different examples and piecemeals together something that looks new but is in fact a million tiny data copies from all the images it was trai…

It always boils down to the same question when discussing a.i. Is there a difference between people's imagination (producing art that is considered new, but is unmistakably influenced by existing pieces of art) and copying/transforming and stitching together pieces of existing art? In a few years from now, probably nobody can tell the difference anymore. Same question holds for the reasoning and intelligence capabilities of a.i. Soon we can't tell the difference in at least several knowledge/skill domains. Is there any difference, will become a hypothetical question.