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Nightshade: An offensive tool for artists against AI art generators

nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu

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

#601

Post by withinboredom »

Thiez wrote: post #589
withinboredom wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. That is NOT what humans do unless you somehow learn grammar without going to school. Most of a human's childhood is spent learning from their parents so that they can move about and communicate at least a little effectively. Then, they go to school and learn rules, social, grammar, math, and so forth. There's some learning via copyrighted works (such as textbooks, entertainment, etc.), but literally, none of this…

Clearly going to school did not help you learn the meaning of theft. If you keep repeating the same incorrect point there is no point to a discussion. First: in your opinion, which specific type of law or right is being broken or violated by generative AI? Copyright? Trademark? Can we at least agree it does not meet the definition of theft?

I was taught as a kid that using something that doesn't belong to me, without their permission is theft... and it appears courts would agree with that.

> which specific type of law or right is being broken or violated by generative AI?

Namely, copyright. Here's some quick points:

- Generative AI cannot exist without copyrighted works. It cannot be "taught" any other way, unlike a human.

- Any copyrighted works fed to it change its database ("weights" in technical speech).

- It then transforms these copyrighted works into new works that the "original author would have never considered without attribution" (not a legal defense)

I liken Generative AI to a mosaic of copyrighted works in which a new image is shown through the composition, as the originals can be extracted through close observation (prompting) but are otherwise indistinguishable from the whole.

Mosaics of copyrighted works are not fair use, so why would AI be any different? I'd be interested if you could point to a closer physical approximation, but I haven't found one yet.

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

#603

Post by dahart »

redwall_hp wrote: post #359
witherk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cameras are a tool of captial to fuck over human portrait artists" It's funny that these people use the langauge of communism, but apparently see artwork as purley an economic activity.

> It's funny that these people use the langauge of communism, but apparently see artwork as purley an economic activity. You hit the nail on the head. Copyright is, by its very nature, a "tool of capital." It's a means of creating new artificial property fiefdoms for a select few capital holders to lord over, while taking rights from anyone else who wants to engage in the practice of making art. Everyone has their ri…

> fiefdoms for a select few

What do you mean? Copyright protects all creative works, and all authors of those creative works. That some have greater means to enforce was always true, and copyright doesn’t cause that, it (imperfectly) helps mitigate it. What copyright does is actually prevent them from stealing work from independent artists en masse, and force them to at least hire and pay some artists.

> I’d rather live in a world where anyone is free to make whatever art they want, even if everyone has to have a day job.

You’re suggesting abolish Copyright and/or the Berne Convention? Yeah the problem with this thinking is that then the big publishers are completely free to steal everyone’s work without paying for it. The very thing you’re complaining about would only get way way worse if we allowed anyone to “freely” make whatever art they want by taking it from others. “Anyone” means Disney too, and Disney is more motivated than you.

> You, as an indie hip hop or house musician supported by a day job, can’t sample and chop some vocals or use a slice of a chord played in a song… for a completely new work

Hehe, if you sample, you are by definition not making a completely new work. But this is a terrible argument since sampling in music is widespread and has sometimes been successfully defended in court. DJs are the best example of independent artists who need protection you can think of?

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

#604

Post by hn_acker »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #310
thfuran wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. No, you don't need to prove any of those things. They're irrelevant. You'd need to prove that the AI is itself morally (or, depending on the nature of the dispute, legally) equivalent to a human and therefore deserving of (or ent…

Few people are claiming that the AI itself has the same rights as a human. They are arguing that a human with an AI has the same rights as a human who doesn't have an AI.

> They are arguing that a human with an AI has the same rights as a human who doesn't have an AI.

This is the analogy I want people against AI use to understand and never forget, even if they reject the underlying premise - that should laws treat a human who uses AI for a certain purpose identically to a human who uses nothing or a non-AI tool for the same purpose.

> Few people are claiming that the AI itself has the same rights as a human.

I think that's the case as well. However, a lot of commenters on this post are claiming that an AI is similar in behavior to a human, and trying to use the behavior analogy as the basis for justifying AI training (on legally-obtained copies of copyrighted works), with the assumption that justifying training justifies use. My personal flow of logic is the reverse: human who uses AI should be legally the same as human who uses a non-AI tool, so AI use is justified, so training on legally-obtained copies of copyrighted works is justified.

I want people in favor of AI use particularly to understand your human-with-AI-to-human-without-AI analogy (for short, the tool analogy) and to avoid machine-learning-to-human-learning analogies (for short, behavior analogies). The tool analogy is based on a belief about how people should treat each other, and contends with opposing beliefs about how people should treat each other. An behavior analogy must contend with both 1. opposing beliefs about how people should treat each other and 2. contradictions from reality about how similar machine learning is to brain learning. (Admittedly, both the tool analogy and the behavior analogy must contend with the net harm AI use is having and will have on the cultural and economic significance of human-made creative works.)

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

#605

Post by CatWChainsaw »

educaysean wrote: post #40
NoraCodes wrote: post #8

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.

You've done the same thing in this comment so what makes you think you're the superior specimen?

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

#606

Post by CatWChainsaw »

NoraCodes wrote: post #393
MacsHeadroom wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And horse wages (some oats) were low when the car was invented. Yet they were still inflated. There used to be more horses than humans in this country. Couldn't even earn their keep when the Ford Model T came along.

You're comparing human artists to horses? Seriously?

It's not surprising, they prefer machines to people and call humans "stochastic parrots". The more humans are compared to animals, the more justified they feel writing them off as an expense and doing away with them.

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

#607

Post by stale2002 »

withinboredom wrote: post #573
stale2002 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you steal a pen from a store Fortunately I am not talking about someone illegally taking property from someone else. Instead I am talking about people taking completely legal actions that are protected by law. > in the theft of copyrighted works Actually, it wouldn't be theft if it was done in fair use. Instead it would be completely legal. If nobody sues you and proves that it was illegal then you are completel…

Did you read anything I wrote? If you are going to argue, it would be worth at least researching your opinion before writing. Caps used for emphasis, not yelling. Firstly: Copyrighted work IS THE AUTHOR'S PROPERTY. They can control it however they wish via LICENSING. Secondly: You don't have any "fair use rights" ... there is literally NO SUCH THING. "fair use" is simply a valid legal defense WHEN YOU STEAL SOMEONE'S…

> They can control it however they wish via LICENSING.

This isn't true though. There are lots of circumstances where someone can completely ignore the licensing and it is both completely legal, and the author isn't going to take anyone to court over it.

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

#608

Post by jMyles »

gfodor wrote: post #175

Huge market for snake oil here. There is no way that such tools will ever win, given the requirements the art remain viewable to human perception, so even if you made something that worked (which this sounds like it doesn’t) from first principles it will be worked around immediately. The only real way for artists or anyone really to try to hold back models from training on human outputs is through the law, ie, levera…

> leveraging state backed violence to deter the things they don’t want

I just want to say: I really appreciate the stark terms in which you've put this.

The thing that has come to be called "intellectual property" is actually just a threat of violence against people who arrange bytes in a way that challenges power structures.

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

#609

Post by jMyles »

eigenvalue wrote: post #331

This seems like a pretty pointless "arms race" or "cat and mouse game". People who want to train generative image models and who don't care about what artists think about it at all can just do some basic post-processing on the images that is just enough to destroy the very carefully tuned changes this Nightshade algorithm makes. Something like resampling it to slightly lower resolution and then using another super-re…

> musicians make most of their money nowadays from touring and selling merchandise at shows

Be reminded that this is - and has always been - the mainstream model of the lineages of what have come to be called "traditional" and "Americana" and "Appalachian" music.

The Grateful Dead implemented this model with great finesse, sometimes going out of their way to eschew intellectual property claims over their work, in the belief that such claims only hindered their success (and of course, they eventually formalized this advocacy and named it "The Electronic Frontier Foundation" - it's no coincidence that EFF sprung from deadhead culture).

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

#610

Post by shkkmo »

Almondsetat wrote: post #311
xigoi wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but I’m pretty sure copying an image by hand is copyright violation.

So you cannot train your drawing skills by copying other people's artworks?

The answer is "it depends". Distribution is not a hard requirement for copyright violation. It can significantly impact monetary judgements.

That said, there is also an inherent right to copy material that is published online in certain circumstances. Indeed, the physical act of displaying an image in a browser involves making copies of that image in cache, memory, etc.

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