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No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

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Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#351

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #118
gcanyon wrote: post #34

It's interesting to hear people side with the artists when in previous discussions on this forum I've gotten significant approval/agreement arguing that copyright is far too long. As I've argued in the past, 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'd happily concede to some sort of renewal process to extend that p…

As you grow older and run through more cycles of general opinions, you realize that pretty much everyone is in it for themselves, what serves them best, and support what narrative aligns with that. 2007: Copyright is garbage and must be abolished (so I can get music/movies free) 2025: Copyright needs to be strengthened (so my artistic abilities retain value)

Either abolish it, or make it stronger so it applies to everyone. (OpenAI included.)

"Copyright for thee but not for me" is the worst of all worlds.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#352

Post by Vvector »

xmprt wrote: post #313
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…

My main concern with AI is that in a capitalist society, wealth is being transferred to companies training these models rather than the artists who have defined an iconic style. There's no doubt that AI is useful and can make many people's lives better, easier, more efficient, however without properly compensating artists who made the training data we're simply widening the wealth gap further.

Whats your definition of "properly compensate" when dealing with hundreds of millions of artists/authors and billions/trillions of individual training items?

Just a quick example, what's my proper compensation for this specific post? Can I set a FIVE CENTS price for every AI that learned from my post? How can I OPT-IN today?

I'm coming from the position that current law doesn't require compensation, nor opt-in. I'm not happy with it, but I dont see any easy alternative

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#353

Post by Vvector »

ConspiracyFact wrote: post #269
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…

AIs aren’t people. What we have is people using an algorithm to rip off artists and defending it by claiming that the algorithm is like a person learning from its experiences. If I wrote a program that chose an image at random from 1000 base images, you’d agree that the program doesn’t create anything new. If I added some random color changes, it would still be derivative. Every incremental change I make to the progr…

SCOTUS recently defined corporations as people, so why not AI?

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#354

Post by mrdependable »

Taek wrote: post #341
mrdependable wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point entirely. If you can make a movie with just a prompt, who is going to invest the money creating something like a Ghibli movie just to have it ripped off? Instead people will just rip off what has already been done and everything just stagnates.

How is "movies and other great works of art that used to cost tens of millions of dollars to make now cost tens of dollars to make" a bad thing? It means art can get more ambitious. Ghibli made their mark, and made their money. Now it's time for the next generation to have a turn.

The lower cost is not the bad thing. Allowing an AI to learn from it and regurgitate is the bad thing. If we can put anything into an AI and then say whatever it spits out is "clean", even though it is obviously imitating what it learned from, whoever puts the investment into trying something new becomes the sucker.

Also, I don't get this weird sense of entitlement people have over someone else's work. Just because it can be copied means it should belong to everyone?

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#355

Post by TheGrognardling »

haswell wrote: post #345
TheGrognardling wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm pretty encouraged by all of the projects and efforts within legislation and organizations regarding clear lines being drawn - i.e., through watermarking to clearly label whether something is AI-generated or not - as well as the efforts by industries for livelihoods to be protected, specifically in the creative space, where human intentionality and feeling are still of the utmost essentiality. We've seen…

While I know there have been plenty of scathing essays, backlash among various communities, etc. do you have some concrete examples of the clear lines being drawn and legislation that gives you this optimism? Maybe the progress you’re describing has escaped me because of the sheer speed this is all unfolding, but it feels like all I’ve heard is lots of noise, while AI companies continue to hammer hosted resources acr…

The EU AI Act, while I personally find it to be overreach, has certain points that I certainly agree with, and are encouraging given that every major platform has huge userbases in the EU. The first Executive Order on AI in the US following announcement of the AI Action Plan is surprisingly rigid whilst still encouraging innovation, especially given all of the drama regarding federal agencies as-of late. Creative industries are increasingly drawing clear lines on where AI use is and isn't acceptable, especially among individual studios and unions following the SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023-2024. And ultimately, this is all not even considering the profound advancements in education, biotech, and healthcare.

This is very easy to lose sight of, especially given rapid advancements, but it's important. I think certain companies like Anthropic definitely have safety approaches that I agree with more, being more thoughtful and having clearly-outlined scaling policies (such as the latest Responsible Scaling Policy effective March 31 of this year) versus more vague safety promises such as from companies such as OpenAI and Google. Websites such as https://www.freethink.com have wonderful essays espousing techno-humanism that ultimately gives compelling arguments on how AI will be a progressively beneficial force on humanity, rather than detract from it.

Yes, there WILL be growing pains - as is what happened with the internet and the World Wide Web. But, I am confident that we will adapt. There is no better time in history to be living in than right now.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#356

Post by globnomulous »

nitwit005 wrote: post #215
Gasp0de wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love using LLMs to generate pictures. I'd call myself rather creative, but absolutely useless in any artistic craft. Now, I can just describe any image I can imagine and get 90% accurate results, which is good enough for the presentations I hold, online pet projects (created a squirrel-themed online math-learning game for which I previously would have needed a designer to create squirrel highschool themed imagery)…

> For many, many websites this is going to be good enough. It was largely a solved problem though. Companies did not seem to have an issue with using stock photos. My current company's website is full of them. For business use cases, those galleries were already so extensive before AI image generation, that what you wanted was almost always there. They seemingly looked at people's search queries, and added images to…

> Companies did not seem to have an issue with using stock photos.

And now these image-generating models are giving us the equivalent of stock photos without the pesky issue of attribution or royalties. What a wonderful time to be alive.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#357

Post by globnomulous »

wincy wrote: post #158
munksbeer wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I love using LLMs to generate pictures. I'd call myself rather creative, but absolutely useless in any artistic craft. Now, I can just describe any image I can imagine and get 90% accurate results May I ask what you use? I'm not yet even a paid subscriber to any of the models, because my company offer a corporate internal subscription chatbot and code integration that works well enough for what I've been doing so fa…

I was generating pictures to use for a little game I made with my six and ten year old kids. They were so excited to see us go from idea to execution so quickly, they were laughing and we had a ton of fun. The only thing that disappointed me was I got throttled. We’d need to pay for API image gen to get it even faster. I made a logo for an internal product that wouldn’t have had a logo otherwise at our company. I als…

> They were so excited to see us go from idea to execution so quickly

They're learning to expect to skip the most important part of creating something.

> they were laughing and we had a ton of fun

I'm a parent so I think I get the appeal, but this to be is like saying "they were laughing and having fun while reading and composing legal briefs." I don't see the advantage, and any momentary benefit comes at the cost of a longer-term loss.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#358

Post by globnomulous »

genewitch wrote: post #179
__loam wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use this technology, you're actively harming creative labor.

Whatever. I wrote and co-wrote ten albums and my total take was $3. The market is saturated and the way it works means ten get rich for every million artists. I feel as though this has been pretty constant throughout history. Of course there's a lot of talent out there, "wasted", but I think that's always been the case. How many William Shakesmans did we lose with all the war, famine, disease? I actually decided I'd…

> I feel as though this has been pretty constant throughout history.

It hasn't. Look up the collapse of the viability of music as a career. Jaron Lanier has written on this.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#359

Post by globnomulous »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #307
__loam wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

> Why should training be any different?

If you really can't think of a reason, I don't think anybody here is going to be able to offer you one you are willing to accept. This isn't a difficult or complex idea, so if you don't see it, why would anybody bother trying to convince you?

> (I do believe that such arguments exist; I just don't think you've made any of them.)

This is lazy and obnoxious.

Re: No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

#360

Post by globnomulous »

eadmund wrote: post #125
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.

It took a truly colossal amount of human time and effort to build AI systems. It takes significant amount of energy to run those AI systems. I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images. Emphasis on the new — copying is still cop…

> I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images.

The word "meaningful" here is a cheap hedging maneuver, and if you don't see a meaningful difference (whatever that means), that's on you.

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