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On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

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Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#601

Post by kelnos »

kansface wrote: post #455
tedivm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward. I also firmly believe that commercializing models built on top of copyrighted works (which all works start off as) does not qualify as fair use (or at least shouldn't) and that commercializing models build on copyrighted material is nothing more than license laundering. C…

> The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. Ah, just like humans who train against the output of other humans. AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard, only scope, and even that isn't perfectly obvious to me a priori.

I really don't get why so many people seem to think that an AI model training on copyrighted work and outputting work in that same style is exactly the same thing (morally, ethically, legally, whatever dimension you want) as a human looking at copyrighted work and then being influenced by that work when they create their own work.

The first thing is the output of a mathematical function as computed by a computer, while the second is an expression of numan creativity. AI models are not alive. They are not creative. They do not have emotion. These things are not even in the same ballpark, let alone similar or the same.

Maybe someday AI will be sophisticated enough to be considered alive, to have emotion, and to be deserving of the same rights and protections that humans have. And I hope if and when that day comes, humanity recognizes that and doesn't try to turn AI into an enslaved underclass. But we are far, far from that point now, and the current computer programs generating text and images and video are not exhibiting creativity, and do not deserve these kinds of protections. The people creating the art that is used to feed the inputs and outputs of these computer programs... those are the people that should have their rights protected.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#602

Post by causal »

kibbi wrote: post #414

I'd find it hard to argue against this, or the Penny Arcade's statements, since I'm having trouble understanding their concrete arguments in between the rhetoric. I'd be hesitant to even discuss this in their comment sections or social media channels. One might ask: Under what circumstances would AI art be acceptable then? For example, does it really matter if these models are created by large corporations? I don't s…

That question - "Under what circumstances would AI art be acceptable then?" - is definitely not asked enough. And I think taking time to make it acceptable is a worthwhile goal, part of the path, not an obstacle.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#603

Post by kelnos »

KuriousCat wrote: post #475
kansface wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason that AI models are generating content similar to other people's work is because those models were explicitly trained to do that. Ah, just like humans who train against the output of other humans. AI models are not fundamentally different in kind in this regard, only scope, and even that isn't perfectly obvious to me a priori.

Going by this logic, why is OpenAI forbidding use of the content it generates for training other models?

Because any company, hypocrisy be damned, will use every legal lever at their disposal to protect their business model.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#604

Post by kelnos »

Aeolun wrote: post #211
tedivm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I firmly believe that training models qualifies as fair use. I think it falls under research, and is used to push the scientific community forward. I also firmly believe that commercializing models built on top of copyrighted works (which all works start off as) does not qualify as fair use (or at least shouldn't) and that commercializing models build on copyrighted material is nothing more than license laundering. C…

If I read a lot of stories in a certain genre that I like, and I later write my own story, it’s almost by definition going to be a mish-mash of everything I like. Should I pay the authors of the books I read when I sell mine?

You are not an AI model, and AI models are not human authors, so your comparison is invalid and question irrelevant.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#605

Post by smt88 »

derangedHorse wrote: post #435
smt88 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing a copy of the content isn't the relevant part. It's what that copy is used for. In a search engine, it's used to direct traffic to the original author. In Midjourney, it's used to create an alternative to the original author.

I certainly use the blurb in search results at times to get an alternative to the original author (especially if the blurbed content is paywalled).

In the US, that blurb is covered by fair use. Google doesn't regurgitate the entire published work.

These many AI lawsuits will likely settle whether training LLMs falls under fair use.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#606

Post by eigenket »

jdiff wrote: post #590
eigenket wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely not true. Here is an article where ars technica tried it https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/ny-times-sues-op... And this is a screenshot of their session whith copilot https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Scree...

This does not match what GP claimed, that when prompted with the start of an article, GPT 3 (mostly) faithfully completes it. The original article also claimed that it seemed to have been patched shortly after publication.

It does match exactly what I claimed and it also states that even though the behavior was patched in GPT the ars people were able to easily reproduce it in copilot.

Its funny that the behavior was patched if OpenAI believes it isn't copyright infringement.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#607

Post by kelnos »

derangedHorse wrote: post #406
mondrian wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does copyright law say you can ingest copyrighted work at very large scale and sell derivates of those works to gain massive profit / massive market capitalizations? Honestly wondering. This seems to be the crux issue here.

Like how Google has parsed webpages of content to develop their page rank algorithm for searching on the web? I'm assuming it does.

No, because crawling the web, ingesting copyrighted content, and ranking them is not a derivative work of that content.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#608

Post by BizarreByte »

Wissenschafter wrote: post #424
BizarreByte wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The horse is out of the barn already, deal with it. Like leaded gas, the government can make regulations to deal with anything should they choose to. Why do you think it's okay for massive companies to freely profit off the work of others?

Leaded gas isn't open source software. Try again.

Most of the big AI models aren't open source and even if they were? You can absolutely regulate them.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#609

Post by johnnyanmac »

csallen wrote: post #574
johnnyanmac wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not? Because in this case the art is still necessary for the machine to work. You don't need horse buggies to make a car, nor existing books to make a printing press. You DO need artist's art to make these generative AI tools work. If these worked purely off of open source art or from true scratch, I wouldn't personally have an is…

> We don't need to kill it. Just pay your dang labor. > But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it. That's just it, nobody looking to get paid by OpenAI actually did any labor for OpenAI. They did labor for other reasons, and were happy with it. OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet bene…

>They did labor for other reasons, and were happy with it.

True, sadly most of those copyright are probably owned by other megacorp. So they either collude to surppess the entire industry or eat each other alive in legal clashes. The latter is happening as we speak (the writers for NYT are probably long retired, but NYT still owns the words) so I guess we'll see how that goes.

>OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet benefits by learning from the images of their fellow artists.

If we treat AI like humans, art historically has an equally thin line between inspiration and plagiarism. There are simply more objective metrics to measure now because we can indeed go inside an AI's proverbial brain. So the metaphor is pretty apt, except with more scrutiny able to be applied.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#610

Post by kelnos »

ls612 wrote: post #366
scythe wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But we are allowed to use copyrighted content. We are not allowed to copy copyrighted content. We are allowed to view and consume it, to be influenced by it, and under many circumstances even outright copy it. It's important to consider in any legalistic argument over copyright that, unlike conventional property rights which are to some degree prehistoric, copyright is a recent legal construct that was developed for…

Copyright only makes any sense for goods with a high fixed cost of production and low to zero marginal cost. Any further use beyond solving that problem is pure rent seeking behavior Also, with computers being functional copyright has become a tool of social control; any function in a physical object can be taken away from you at a whim with no recourse so long as a computer can be inserted into the object. Absent a…

> Copyright only makes any sense for goods with a high fixed cost of production and low to zero marginal cost.

If that's the case, then novels, news articles, digital images, etc. are things that copyright absolutely makes sense for. If you think that they have a "low cost of production", you are sadly misinformed about the artistic process.

Some of these have vanishingly low marginal costs when it comes to reproduction, but in light of their high fixed cost of production, I don't see how that matters.

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