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Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu

51–60 of 710 posts

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#51
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe is training off of images stored in their cloud systems, per their Terms of Service. OpenAI has provided no such documentation or legal guarantees, and it is still quite possible they scraped all sorts of copyright materials.

Google scrapes copyrighted material every day and then presents that material to users in the form of excerpts, images, and entire book pages. This has been ruled OK by the courts. Scraping copyrighted information is not illegal or we couldn't have search engines.

Google is not presently selling "we trained an AI on people's art without permission, and you can type their name in along with a prompt to generate a knockoff of their art, and we charge you money for this". So it's not really a 1:1 comparison, since there are companies selling the thing I described right now.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#52

[flagged]

My issue with this line of argument is that it’s anthropomorphizing machines. It’s fine to compare how humans do a task with how a machine does a task, but in the end they are very different from each other, organic vs hardware and software logic.

First, you need to prove that generative AI works fundamentally the same way as humans at the task of learning. Next you have to prove that it recalls information in the same way as humans. I don’t think anyone would say these are things that we can prove, let alone believe they do. So what we get is comments like they are similar.

What this means, is these systems will fall into different categories of law around copyright and free-use. What’s clear is that there are people who believe that they are harmed by the use of their work in training these systems and it reproducing that work in some manner later on (the degree to which that single work or the corpus of their work influences that final product is an interesting question). If your terms of use/copyright/license says “you may not train on this data”, then should that be protected in law? If a system like nightshade can effectively influence a training model enough to make it clear that something protected was used in its training, is that enough proof that the legal protections were broken?

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not say they were exclusively that; I said they were that. Once we as a society have implemented a good way for the artists whose work powers these machines to survive, you can feel good about using them. Until then, frankly, you're doing something immoral by paying to use them.

Who pays to use generators? The open ones are way more capable and interesting, generally.

Isn't high-quality open image generation almost entirely dependent on Stability releasing their foundational models for free, at great expense to them?

That's not something you'll be able to rely on long-term, there won't always be a firehose of venture capital money to subsidise that kind of charity.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#54
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

great comment! imagine being a photographer that takes decades to perfect their craft. sure another student can study and mimic your style. but it's still different than some computer model "ingesting" vast amount of photos and vomiting something similar for $5.99 in aws cpu cost so that some prompt jockey can call themselves an AI artist and make money off of other peoples talent. i get that this is cynical and does…

Like 99.9% of the art the common people care about is Darth Vader and Taylor Swift and other pop culture stuff like that. These people literally don’t care what your definition of what is and isn’t art is, or how it’s made, they just want a lock screen wallpaper of themselves fighting against Thanos on top of a volcano. The argument of “what is art” has been an academic conversation largely ignored by the people actu…

not entirely sure what your point is, but i think you are saying that art is just a commodity we use for cheap entertainment so it's ok for computers to do the same?

in the context of what i was saying the definition of what is art can be summed up as anything made by humans. i have no problem when its used in memes and being open sourced etc.. the issue i have is when a human invests real time into it and then its taken and regurgitated without their permission. do you see that distinction?

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#55

Remember when the music industry tried to use technology to stop music pirating? This will work about as well... Oh, I forget, fighting music pirating was considered an evil thing to do on HN. "pirating is not stealing, is copyright infringement", right? Unlike training neural nets on internet content which of course is "stealing".

FWIW, you're the only use of the word "steal" in this comment thread.

Many people would in fact argue that training AI on people's art without permission is copyright infringement, since the thing it (according to detractors) does is infringe copyright by generating knockoffs of people's work.

You will see some people use the term "stealing" but they're usually referring to how these AIs are sold/operated by for-profit companies that want to make money off artists' work without compensating them. I think it's not unreasonable to call that "stealing" even if the legal definition doesn't necessarily fit 100%.

The music industry is also not really a very good comparison point for independent artists... there is no Big Art equivalent that has a stranglehold on the legislature and judiciary like the RIAA/MPAA do.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#56
post #24
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously AIs can just train on images that aren't poisoned.

Is it possible to reliably detect whether an image is poisoned? If not then it achieves the goal of punishing entities which indiscriminately harvest data.

AI's have learned much tougher things. You just need a small data set of poisoned images to learn it's features.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tired argument; whether or not the diffusion models are "learning", they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists, and should be resisted for that reason alone.

As a human artist I don't feel the same as you, and I somehow doubt that you care all that much about what we think anyways. You already made up your mind about the tech, so don't feel the need to protect us from "a tool of capital [sic]" to fortify your argument.

[deleted]

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#58

[flagged]

And? Even if neural networks learn the same way humans do, this is not an argument against taking measures against one's art being used as training data, since there are different implications if a human learns to paint the same way as another human vs. if an AI learns to paint the same way as a human. If the two were exactly indistinguishable in their effects no one would care about AIs, not even researchers.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#59

[flagged]

And? Even if neural networks learn the same way humans do, this is not an argument against taking measures against one's art being used as training data, since there are different implications if a human learns to paint the same way as another human vs. if an AI learns to paint the same way as a human. If the two were exactly indistinguishable in their effects no one would care about AIs, not even researchers.

But the 'different implications' only exist in the heads of said artists?

EDIT: removed a part.

Re: Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

#60

[flagged]

Is it strange to you that cars and pedestrians are both subject to different rules? They both utilise friction and gravity to travel along the ground. I'm curious if you see a difference between them, and if you could describe what it is.
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