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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

#41

Post by heavyset_go »

protocolture wrote: post #33
maplethorpe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>IP laws can stay the same, but they should have purchased a license to use my art before including it in their training data. But including your art in the training data is fair use (or otherwise exempt) by most standards, as no reproduction occurs. You are advocating for a change to IP law to make it more restrictive.

No precedent has been set when it comes to training and fair use

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

#42

Post by abustamam »

protocolture wrote: post #33
maplethorpe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>IP laws can stay the same, but they should have purchased a license to use my art before including it in their training data. But including your art in the training data is fair use (or otherwise exempt) by most standards, as no reproduction occurs. You are advocating for a change to IP law to make it more restrictive.

Fair use by most standards? Which standards are those? I don't think a standard about training an AI on billions of images exists.

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

#43

Post by abustamam »

bjterry wrote: post #34
Retric wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, in…

For all the people represented in the training data to receive royalties would be an incredible wealth transfer to the Extremely Online. My forum posts, StackOverflow answers etc are also contributing to the model outputs. The training data, by volume, mostly belongs to blog authors, redditors, Wikipedia editors, to us!

Hey finally my reddit and hn habit can be lucrative!

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

#44

Post by bluefirebrand »

minimaxir wrote: post #19
Papazsazsa wrote: post #15

The individual who figures out how to do this will be both wealthy and beloved.

The majority of the artist responses were "hard no" in 2024 . There's no way the artist demographic such a service would appeal to would be on board with anything even tangent to AI in 2026 (even done ethically) where the professional liability far exceeds the potential revenue.

Most artists I have spoken to don't believe it's possible to do this AI stuff ethically

Maybe they're wrong but I tend to agree. Or even if it is possible to do it ethically, it still never will be done that way because there's just too much money in behaving unethically

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

#45

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

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.

When I buy a patented product I don't sign an EULA that says I can't manufacture and sell a copy, but I still can't manufacture and sell a copy.

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

#46

Post by abustamam »

ptmkenny wrote: post #23

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…

Yeah this just shows that ergonomics matters. I use Nano Banana and Grok Imagine to generate silly images for my friends and siblings (instead of reaction gifs I do reaction slop). The workflow is quite easy. Just plop in a prompt and usually the first image is good enough to share. Not that my standards are high anyway.

Would I pay extra to ensure that the artists that these models were trained on were compensated fairly? Absolutely! Would I pay extra for that but with degraded ergonomics? Given that this is just a silly hobby, probably not, if I'm being honest.

I think if that problem can be solved, and it's marketed to the correct group, a player in this space could certainly do well.

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

#47

Post by abustamam »

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…

Just out of curiosity, do you believe artists deserve to be compensated when their art is used to generate stuff in their style?

I'm staunchly against expansion of IP laws. But I personally think that when a corporate machine gobbles up an artist's works so that people like me who can't draw can generate silly memes for a few bucks a month, the artist should be compensated. The company is profiting off of other people's work! That's not right.

The mechanism by which compensation is calculated appears to be an unsolved problem currently though.

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

#48

Post by jowsie »

ipaddr wrote: post #31

They failed because they gave advances that were never going to be paid back and expected artists to bring in customers. The demand to produce something in an artists style is low. The volume required to make it interesting to artist isn't present. AI adoption and pushed back is greatest with artists you would be better off asking for money to shutdown AI. The tech itself sounds interesting and would love that writeu…

The tech doesn't sound that interesting at all. Every AI Degen thread on 4chan and similar has included model fine tuning instructions for a few years now, for the express purpose of cloning an existing artists style. I also find it interesting that they included a quote from an artist pointing out the hypocrisy of using an existing model, trained on unlicensed material, but never actually discussed that particular issue in the article.

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

#49

Post by croes »

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.

The problem isn’t the reading. The problem is the output based on somebody’s other work.

There is a reason why we call it styles, because it’s a recognizable pattern someone came up with maybe after decades of work.

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