Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

artnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 144 posts

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#81

Post by freedomben »

thurn wrote: post #3

One positive aspect of the status quo in the United States is that AI-generated images are not currently eligible for copyright. I think this is a great direction to go in, I highly doubt Wizards of the Coast or whoever is going to want their premium products to lose copyright protections, so they'll need to keep paying artists. I'd love for us to lean into this -- you can make all the AI art you want, but it automat…

Wow, this is incredibly insightful! I'm completely on board, for whatever that's worth (which is pretty much nothing).

That would really be a great way to structure things.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#82

Post by PixyMisa »

tavavex wrote: post #16
kmeisthax wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about AI art is that, absent lots of prompt engineering, seed grinding, and touchups, you're likely to have a bunch of images that are obvious tells if your entire project is AI. Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. There's also another advantage to having a "no obvious AI art" policy; and that's to cut down on spam. AI is extremely useful to people w…

> Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing - we don't know if it'll ever reach the threshold, but the amount of effort required to stamp out all the wonkiness from an AI generation has been going down ever since the first viable algorithms appeared. I don't think that this was an anti-spam…

In just the past two years it's gone from obvious horrors like hands attached directly at the elbow to much more subtle errors like chair legs that cross over each other like an Escher drawing or doorknobs adjacent to the hinges.

Human artists might have to become used to tracking provenance. If you work with traditional media, that's easy: Here's the painting. For digital artists, software can publish encrypted, timestamped brushstroke-level histories of the work if we need that level of proof.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#83

Post by colordrops »

srackey wrote: post #6
thurn wrote: post #3

One positive aspect of the status quo in the United States is that AI-generated images are not currently eligible for copyright. I think this is a great direction to go in, I highly doubt Wizards of the Coast or whoever is going to want their premium products to lose copyright protections, so they'll need to keep paying artists. I'd love for us to lean into this -- you can make all the AI art you want, but it automat…

Completely unenforceable. How can you even tell if an image was made by AI? What if AI created an outline that was worked on by a human artist (or vice versa)? Who would the burden of proof be on? Steam has a “no AI art” policy, and it’s rapidly turning into a “no obvious AI art policy”. How could they tell?

Furthermore, what is the threshold for something to still legally be considered AI art once an artist's hand has modified it? What if they change the brightness? Fix a hand? completely replace a character in a scene? Illustrate most of the scene themselves but add an AI figure or background? Use AI to sharpen a hand drawn image?

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#84

Post by Imnimo »

>The 24-page list of artists’ names used by Midjourney as the training foundation for its AI image generator

I don't see how they reached the conclusion that this list is "the training foundation" of Midjourney. I feel like this headline is misleading, perhaps even outright false.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#85

Post by dorkwood »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #71

I do find it entertaining to watch the creative world struggle against this unstoppable force. It's the Luddites and the mechanical knitting machines of the early 19th century all over again. The human race never changes. It will undoubtedly end the same way.

I don't think it's the same this time. A mechanical knitting machine can be invented in isolation. Midjourney could not have existed without an extensive database of stolen art. Isn't that something worth fighting against, for artists?

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#86

Post by tavavex »

omeid2 wrote: post #51
tavavex wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really struggling to conceptualize a world where every picture that's drawn must have a full notary log of how exactly it was produced, all for the sake of removing generative AI. Besides, it's not that easy of a problem - a lot of corporate artists are salaried workers, they don't get specified commissions with an attached bill per work, but are paid a salary so the company can ask them to draw whatever they nee…

It is for the sake of copyright, if you want society to protect your work, provide evidence for your creative work. It seems rather simple to me. Keep in mind that in the not so far future, producing art will be as cheap as consuming it, this means that the original benefits society got in return for copyright no longer applies, so why should they protect it?

> It is for the sake of copyright, if you want society to protect your work, provide evidence for your creative work.

I'm not sure if it's that simple - for one, this requirement is a complete departure from how copyright systems work now. Providing complete history logs isn't normal practice, and expanding law to necessitate it isn't common sense.

> Keep in mind that in the not so far future, producing art will be as cheap as consuming it, this means that the original benefits society got in return for copyright no longer applies, so why should they protect it?

I'll make a prediction that this future is further from now than you may think it is. Sure, things like static imagery may become completely indistinguishable from human-made art in the near(ish?) future, but the production of all art is still an unsolved problem. How long will it take until some advanced multimodal algorithm can make a full game that can measure up to ones that are released today? I'm guessing that it'll take a while.

And yeah - once we do reach this scenario of hypothetical "art post-scarcity", we may as well just delete the whole copyright system from existence - it'd be a logical thing to do. But how does any of it contradict what I said in my other comments?

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#87

Post by PixyMisa »

jwells89 wrote: post #15
kmeisthax wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about AI art is that, absent lots of prompt engineering, seed grinding, and touchups, you're likely to have a bunch of images that are obvious tells if your entire project is AI. Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. There's also another advantage to having a "no obvious AI art" policy; and that's to cut down on spam. AI is extremely useful to people w…

And this will continue to be an issue until ML models have achieved something resembling sentience, because many of these tells are the result of the model not truly comprehending the subject matter and thus struggling to maintain internal consistency in everything from geometry and kinetics of human bodies to lighting and physics. Less obviously, ML models also lack the ability to bake in intent. In human made piece…

Absolutely correct. This is a far more obvious problem in text models, because you end up with internally flawless arguments as to why your next scuba diving vacation should be in Ulan Bator.

With art, it's more subtle, because there there's no single reference point that lets us determine if an artwork is "true". There are the glaring errors that everyone can agree on - notoriously, human hands - but those cases are improving rapidly.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#88

Post by krainboltgreene »

tavavex wrote: post #16
kmeisthax wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about AI art is that, absent lots of prompt engineering, seed grinding, and touchups, you're likely to have a bunch of images that are obvious tells if your entire project is AI. Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. There's also another advantage to having a "no obvious AI art" policy; and that's to cut down on spam. AI is extremely useful to people w…

> Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves. The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing - we don't know if it'll ever reach the threshold, but the amount of effort required to stamp out all the wonkiness from an AI generation has been going down ever since the first viable algorithms appeared. I don't think that this was an anti-spam…

> The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing

People have been trumpeting this since day one of Stable Diffusion releasing, but I'm seeing the same output quality as that day and I've been keeping up.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#89

Post by scheeseman486 »

bsder wrote: post #17
srackey wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely unenforceable. How can you even tell if an image was made by AI? What if AI created an outline that was worked on by a human artist (or vice versa)? Who would the burden of proof be on? Steam has a “no AI art” policy, and it’s rapidly turning into a “no obvious AI art policy”. How could they tell?

> Completely unenforceable. Complete wrong. You just flip the defaults--something is AI unless you can prove otherwise. This is done already and has precedent. Producing porn requires that you keep artifacts demonstrating that who the performers were, that they were of age, etc. If you claim a work is not AI generated, you should have to produce some artifacts to back up that claim. In the case of a corporation, that…

The end result of this will be end to end cryptographically authenticated pipelines. I'm sure Adobe will be very happy about having yet another way to extract money from artists.

Re: Database of artists used to train Midjourney AI garners criticism

#90

Post by Brybry »

nwallin wrote: post #50
thurn wrote: post #3

One positive aspect of the status quo in the United States is that AI-generated images are not currently eligible for copyright. I think this is a great direction to go in, I highly doubt Wizards of the Coast or whoever is going to want their premium products to lose copyright protections, so they'll need to keep paying artists. I'd love for us to lean into this -- you can make all the AI art you want, but it automat…

> I highly doubt Wizards of the Coast or whoever is going to want their premium products to lose copyright protections, so they'll need to keep paying artists. WotC's latest round of layoffs (within the past month or so) hit the art staff especially hard.

The main source I've found for the December WotC layoffs is Christian Hoffer's Twitter[1] and only 3 of the ~20 people listed seem to be art staff.

Some of the lists, such as on Reddit, appear to (erroneously?) list a few artists who advertise themselves as still employed by WotC. [2]

[1] https://twitter.com/CHofferCBus/status/1734947730491932929

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/18ij198/list_of_kn...

Post reply on HN