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

catandgirl.com

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

#621

Post by hermitdev »

munificent wrote: post #534
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.

AI models are fundamentally different because a computer is a lump of silicon which is neither a moral subject nor object. A human author is a living sentient being that needs to earn a living and is deserving of dignity and regard.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to fundamentally disagree with you. One does not get a morality pass because "the computer did it". People are creating these AI models, selecting data and feeding the models data on which to be trained. The outcome of that rests upon _both_ the creators of the models and the users prompting the models to achieve a result.

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

#622

Post by qingcharles »

ShamelessC wrote: post #598
qingcharles wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I tried it, and MJ gets thrown off by the name of the style being two generic words "cat and girl." It basically thinks you want a cat and a girl. I tried lots of variations and prompt options and I was giving too many hints. Lesson being: give yourself a name as an artist that cannot be used easily in an AI prompt. I think some musicians did this with artist names and track names that meant they couldn't easil…

Is the artist anonymous or something? Use their real name…

Well if you call your band just a string of characters that search engines don't like, such as punctuation, math symbols etc. I think Aphex Twin did some of this. Maybe Royksopp? And I think there is band called Various Artists.

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

#623

Post by Wissenschafter »

halostatue wrote: post #422
Wissenschafter wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we are humans and our capability of abusing those rights is limited. The scale and speed at which looms can abuse copyrighted work to threaten the livelihoods of the seamstresses of those works is reason enough to consider it unethical. Replace loom for printing press etc, you realize you're a luddite?

Ned Ludd was onto something. He wasn't anti-progress. He was anti-labour theft. The problem was not that people were losing their jobs, but that they were being punished by society for losing their jobs and not being given the ability to adapt, all to satisfy the greed of the ownership class. I am hearing a strong rhyme. Commercialized LLMs are absolutely labour theft even if they are useful .

Capatalism has really done a number on the human psyche, WE WANT OUR LABOR STOLEN. That's the whole point, so we don't have to labor anymore.

Boggles my mind how warped peoples thinking is.

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

#624

Post by egypturnash »

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…

There are many ways an artist can compensate their influences. Some of them are monetary.

When discussing our work, we can name them.

When one of our influences comes out with a new body of work, we can gush about it to our own fans.

When we find ourselves in a position of authority, we can offer work to our influences. No animation studio is really complete without someone old enough to be a grandfather hanging out helping to teach the new kids the ropes in between doing an amazing job on their own scenes, and maybe putting together a few pitches, for instance.

We can draw fan art and send it to them.

None of these are mandatory, but artists tend to do this, because we are humans, and we recognize that we exist in a community of other artists, and these all just feel like normal human things to do for your community.

And if an artist suddenly starts wholesale swiping another artist's style without crediting them, their peers get angry. [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy

OpenAI isn't gonna tell you that it was going for a Cat & Girl kind of feel in this drawing. OpenAI isn't gonna offer Dorothy Gambrell a job. OpenAI isn't going to tell you that she just came out with a new collection and she's still at the top of her game, and that you should buy it. OpenAI's not going to send her a painting of Cat & Girl that it did for fun. OpenAI isn't going to do anything for her unless the courts force it to, because OpenAI is a corporation who has found a way to make money by strip-mining the stuff people post publicly on the Internet because they want other humans to be able to see it.

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

#625

Post by jMyles »

spamizbad wrote: post #148
jMyles wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that boundary something that the internet is likely to be able to recognize or enforce though? In 100 years? In 500? What are we building for here?

If the boundary isn't enforced you'll likely see art move increasingly to a patronage system, whereby a select elite will get to choose what art is suitable for your consumption. Maybe you'll like that, maybe you won't.

I think it depends in large part on how the moving parts interact.

If the emergence of automata and internet creatures also means that people can spend more of their time doing what makes them happy, and if people doing that results in amazing art and music emerging, then I don't think that the purvey of selection will be so dangerously cornered by an elite.

But it's up to us to do the work to build that future.

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

#626

Post by Wissenschafter »

BizarreByte wrote: post #608
Wissenschafter wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#627

Post by rafaelero »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #349
rafaelero wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we even have a choice here. It's unstopable.

Human laws are not natural products of the universe. It was a mistake to accept the validity of Aquinas and Hobbes arguments because we end up with conclusions like this. The concept of intellectual property is a legal fiction, a fabrication invented from whole cloth and somehow we've ended up here where it's assumed part of the natural universe. When we reverse the direction of laws from being products of human crea…

You have a three line sentence. Come on. Write clearer.

The reason I said it is unstopable is not because of a philosophical/deterministic argument. It was a figure to speech to verbalize the fact that the incentives are so strong for allowing AI to use copyright data that going against it would be a societal backwards decision. Similar to what avoiding agriculture was for previous societies that don't exist anymore.

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

#628

Post by shadowgovt »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #448
sandworm101 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If you think OpenAI is less valuable because it can't use copyrighted content, then it should give some of that value back to the content. 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. If one doesn't want anyone to see/consume or be influenced by one's…

Let's say I'm an artist. I have, thus far, distributed my art for consumption without cost, because I want people to engage with and enjoy it. But, for whatever reason, I have a deep, irrational philosophical objection to corporate profit. I want to preclude any corporation from ever using my art to turn a profit, when at all possible. I have accepted that in some sense, electrical and internet corporations will be t…

When you put it that way, I think you just laid out the case for creating a Copyleft for art.

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

#629

Post by freejazz »

wrsh07 wrote: post #539
freejazz wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But sometimes your work is put on Instagram without your knowledge or consent (eg by an Instagram aggregator account) That's copyright infringement. You can't claim to own other people's work and then give license to others to use when you don't own the work.

Of course it is! It being illegal doesn't mean Instagram is incentivized to crack down on it And if you're a tiny independent artist you also aren't well-resourced to do anything about it. (Afaict the best thing we can do is maintain a culture that demands attribution)

I represent tiny independent artists and the best thing you can do is hope that some moneyed media company infringes your work. They never have an excuse and they always pay up.

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

#630

Post by freejazz »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #498
freejazz wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sue people for copyright infringement frequently. It's rare that I have a defendant whose defense is "the internet is full of other infringers, why should I be held responsible?" Never have they won. This debate would go better if people didn't base it on assumptions they gleam from the world around them, but with regard to the actual law and not specious reasoning like "well, they did it too!! "

I'd love to be the lawyer of the first anime artist then.

Why engage with nearly 200 years of copyright jurisprudence when you can just insist you are right because anime?
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