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No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

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Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#301

Post by fc417fc802 »

esafak wrote: post #290
fc417fc802 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that not self evident? When people engage in labor for the task itself (as opposed to a heavily abstracted version of not wanting to starve) we generally refer to that as a hobby. So stating that people shouldn't need to worry about starving (metaphorically or otherwise) would be roughly equivalent.

What do you mean? For example, are vets or artists working to pay their bills laboring or practicing a hobby?

Aside from artists that make it big it seems like the majority of them are forced to make compromises in order to continue practicing their desired craft full time. Much of their behavior is dictated by "not starving" rather than their personal preferences.

And many fold more than that are forced to drop out to "get a real job".

Of course all of the above is a good thing from the perspective of maximizing the quality of life across society as a whole. But wouldn't it be nicer if we didn't have to do (as much of) that?

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#302

Post by swframe2 »

I'm hoping this alternative image prompt preprocessing technique gets more attention:

https://art-msra.github.io/

Basically, the user's image prompt is converted to a several prompts to generate parts of the final image in layers which are combined. The layers are still available so that edits can cleanly update one section without affecting the others.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#303

Post by SirMaster »

Ray20 wrote: post #285
SirMaster wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see a massive difference in the shear number of images that the AI can look at and the speed at which it can imitate it as a fundamental difference between AI and a human copying works or styles? For a human it took a lot of practice and a lot of time and effort. But now it takes practically no time or effort at all.

>For a human it took a lot of practice and a lot of time and effort. But now it takes practically no time or effort at all. And why is this not a good thing?

Because now it’s too easy to rip off another artist’s work and style with no effort. And the current rules in place are not enough to protect the original artist.

The original artist used to be protected by the fact that it took so much effort to copy or reproduce their original work and style at a high quality, so it rarely happened at a scale to directly impact them.

But now it’s so easy and effortless that anyone can do it in mass and that now impacts the original artist greatly.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#304

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

eadmund wrote: post #124
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right the difference is that it’s a large company looking at it then copying it and reselling it without credit, which basically everyone would understand as bad without the indirection of a model. Edit: the key words here are “company” and “reselling”

But it’s not copying and reselling — it’s imitation. Copying is controlled by copyrights. And imitation isn’t controlled by anything. As for a company: a company is just a group of people acting together.

Imitation has been controlled by patent rights, where an object did not need to be an exact copy but merely use the essence of an idea to count as a violation. Of course so far this protection has only been applied to inventions, because they took a lot of time to develop but once done could be trivially copied at a glance. Now, in this new landscape, we may find it appropriate to apply a similar regime to art.

Or maybe we won't. It's a choice for society to make, to balance how much we need to protect the incentives to create something new vs protect the ease of copying.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#305

Post by SirMaster »

pixl97 wrote: post #238
SirMaster wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see a difference between a person spending years learning techniques to create art by hand, and spending months or years studying and practicing some famous artists style, and then spending days manually crafting drawing a single piece of artwork in the style and quality of the originals. The difference between that, and a person just entering a prompt to create some drawing in some style. The model looked…

Therefore we should give up all heavy equipment and all ditches should be dug with a spoon. Sometimes technology changes and what was nearly impossible in the past becomes trivial.

Nobody is arguing that…

Nobody is saying let’s not have these new efficient tools. All people are saying is let’s make protections and considerations etc for the original artists and their work that’s being used for training and for when the model draws from it to replicate the style that they developed.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#306

Post by fc417fc802 »

__loam wrote: post #291
singingboyo wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are legitimate criticisms that AI is harming creative endeavours. AI output is sort of by definition not particularly innovative. By flooding spaces with repetitive AI work, it may be drowning out the basis for truly innovative creation. And maybe it does suppress development of skills it tries to replace. The appropriation argument is somewhat unsound. Creative endeavors, by definition, build on what's come be…

The people who built this technology needed to use hundreds of millions of images without permission. They regularly speak explicitly about all the jobs they plan to destroy. If you think I'm being hyperbolic then you don't understand the scale of the issue, frankly.

> The people who built this technology needed to use hundreds of millions of images without permission.

It remains unclear if they needed permission in the first place. Aside from Meta's stunt with torrents I'm not aware of any legal precedent forbidding me to (internally) do as I please with public content that I scrape.

> They regularly speak explicitly about all the jobs they plan to destroy.

A fully legal endeavor that is very strongly rewarded by the market.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#307

Post by fc417fc802 »

__loam wrote: post #278
Vvector wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* You cannot ethically use a tool that was produced by appropriating the labor of millions of people without consent. You are a bad person if you use it. * I disagree. When you publish your work, I can't copy it, but I can do nearly anything else I want to with it. I don't need your consent to learn from your work. I can study hundreds of paintings, learn from them, teaching myself to paint in a similar style. Copyri…

Training an AI on something requires you to produce a copy of the work that is held locally for the training algorithm to read. Whether that is fair use has not been determined. It's certainly not ethical.

Viewing it in a web browser requires a local copy. Saving it to my downloads folder requires a local copy. That is very obviously legal. Why should training be any different?

You've yet to present a convincing argument regarding the ethics. (I do believe that such arguments exist; I just don't think you've made any of them.)

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#308

Post by kelseyfrog »

jayd16 wrote: post #300
kelseyfrog wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd take it farther to say that copyright and intellectual property is a legal fiction that ultimately benefits the wealthy[those who can pay to legally enforce it] over small artists. Small artists get paid to create the art; corporations benefit from exclusivity.

The alternative being small artists don't get paid and corporations benefit from non-exclusivity.

Small artists operate in a service-based economy, not a mass-production one. The value lies in their unique perspective, process, and personal connection, not just in the final product. You hire them, not just pay for 'art'. What they're selling lies outside of the fiction of intellectual property.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#309

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

bko wrote: post #73
amazingamazing wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think copyright should last maybe five years: in this modern era, monetizing your work doesn't (usually) have to take more than a short time. I funny how people who say this kind of stuff are never content creators (in the monetization sense).

There are a lot of programmers on this platform (myself included), and I love that my work has an impact on others. I have a number of public repos and I have benefitted greatly from other public repos. I hope LLMs made some use of my code. I wrote blogs for years without any monetization. I hope my ideas influenced someone and would be happy if they made some impact on the reasoning of LLMs. I'm aware of patent trol…

Programming, at least, is much easier to shield in a loose IP regime than art. You can ship only binaries, or even keep your code running on a server and disclose only the API. And likely, the company that pays your salary would opt to do just that.

I can't imagine a similar way for an artist to distribute their work while protecting their interests.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#310

Post by fc417fc802 »

__loam wrote: post #279
fc417fc802 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The straw man is yours. No claim of entitlement was made. A scenario was provided that appears to refute your unconditional assertion that using this technology actively harms creative labor. You've presented all sorts of wild assumptions and generalizations about the people who don't share your vehement opposition to the use of this technology. I don't think it's the person you're responding to with the implicit bia…

> Do you really expect people to blindly adopt your ideological views if you just state them forcefully enough? This is the view of most people outside the industry.

I can't say that the things you're saying match what I've encountered from nontechnical folks lately. Most of them are entirely apathetic about the whole affair while a few are clearly dazzled by the results. The entire thing seems to be a black box that they hold various superstitions about but generally view as something of a parlor trick.

The ones that pay attention to the markets appear to believe some very questionable things and are primarily concerned with if they can figure out how to get rich off of the associated tech stocks.

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