[HN Gopher] An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into a...
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An unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model
Author : ghuntley
Score : 239 points
Date : 2022-11-01 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (waxy.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (waxy.org)
| qull wrote:
| So she is claiming the flat corprate style, but with more
| saturation, as her own? Thats ballsy. It's a style for sure, but
| one based on looking oversimplified and generic imo. No suprise
| its easy to emulate, and a common averaging result. Its not as
| likely an actually distinct style, unless massively popular,
| would have this issue. That said, the greater question is no less
| valid; what elemens of style do we own, and how will ownership
| manifest moving forward when many new works use ai images as a
| starting poit, which are then based on other artists work, some
| of them being ai generated. Will it become a feedback loop
| sooner, or later, and what will that look like?
| burkaman wrote:
| DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are very good at replicating the
| distinctive styles of famous artists like Van Gogh or Seurat or
| anyone else you can think of, as well as other living artists:
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/16/1059598/this-art...
|
| This is not just about styles that you personally don't like.
| It will work for any style with a lot of available existing
| work, popularity is irrelevant.
| [deleted]
| jalk wrote:
| That's was not my takeaway:
|
| >... the rendering, brushstrokes, and colors are the most
| surface-level area of art. I think what people will ultimately
| connect to in art is a lovable, relatable character. And I'm
| seeing AI struggling with that."
|
| So she doesn't want her name associated with, in her eyes,
| bland illustration that copy the the style she has used for
| some big well known clients.
| simonw wrote:
| Go take a look at her portfolio: https://holliemengert.com/
|
| It's clear to me that she has a very distinctive style of her
| own. It's not "flat corporate style" at all.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Homeboy in the article specifically trains AI on her work to
| get specific results that return when her name is used because
| he wants to be able to recreate her style.
|
| Fans of her work alarmed by the closeness point out to her
| what's happened.
|
| Qull as appointed gatekeeper of style for the internet: 'she
| has no discernable style'.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Reading all of that, the biggest issue was just the art style
| naming.
|
| One of the key features of Stable Diffusion is adding "in the
| style of <artist name>" to the prompt. This just has a
| contemporary/living artist and actually lets an individual train
| Stable Diffusion for anyone to add that style to their own Stable
| Diffusion instance, instead of waiting for Stability.ai to
| release another dataset.
|
| He has since renamed the style, but he should just say "inspired
| by <artist name>"
|
| It is so similar to what someone inspired by a particular artist
| would do that I can't make a separate standard.
|
| Basically the pushback comes from the level of discipline that
| was once required in the past (2 months ago) compared to now.
| That level of discipline is no longer required.
| cmovq wrote:
| I know this website is not a hivemind, but it's interesting every
| time an article like this gets posted the majority opinion seems
| to be that training diffusion models on copyrighted work is
| totally fine. In contrast when talking about training code
| generation models there are multiple comments mentioning this is
| not ok if licenses weren't respected.
|
| For anyone who holds both of these opinions, why do you think
| it's ok to train diffusion models on copyrighted work, but not
| co-pilot on GPL code?
| bombcar wrote:
| If I were to steel man both sides it'd be something like this:
|
| 1. Training an AI model on code (so far) makes it regurgitate
| code line-for-line (with comments!). This is like "learning to
| code" by just cut and pasting working code from other
| codebases, you have to follow the license. The AI doesn't
| "understand the algorithm" at all (or it hasn't been told
| "don't export the input you fool"). Obviously a bog-simple AI
| could make all licenses moot by dumping out what it input, and
| the courts wouldn't permit that.
|
| 2. Training an AI model on illustrations so far produces "style
| parodies" which may look similar to an untrained eye (the
| artist here is annoyed because she'd not art like that, even
| though to us it looks similar enough). Drawing a picture that
| _looks_ like Mickey Mouse is a _trademark_ violation, but
| _tracing_ a picture of the Mouse is _both_ a trademark and a
| copyright violation.
|
| The first violates some pretty clear _legal_ concepts; the
| second is closer to violating _moral_ concepts but those are
| more flexible - if an artist spends years learning to paint in
| the style of Michelangelo is that immoral?
| yenwodyah wrote:
| AI image generators also often churn out near-exact replicas
| of their inputs. For example:
|
| Original: https://static-cdn.jtvnw.net/ttv-
| boxart/460636_IGDB-272x380....
|
| Copies: https://lexica.art/?q=bloodborne
| Abroszka wrote:
| Exact replicas are an issue. If you are using AI image
| generation to replicate the near exact image, then that's
| illegal. But nobody cares if you copy a nice code pattern
| from a GPL code and apply it to your own code base. In the
| same fashion nobody should care if you make an image in the
| same art style.
| lolinder wrote:
| The problem with this argument is that it's founded in how
| the AI is used, not how it is made. It's not a compelling
| reason to ban the tool, it's a compelling reason to regulate
| its use.
|
| Copilot _can_ produce code verbatim, but it doesn 't unless
| you specifically set up a situation to test it. It requires
| things like "include the exact text of a comment that exists
| in training data" or "prefix your C functions the same way as
| the training data does".
|
| In everyday use, my experience has been that Copilot draws
| extensively from files that I've opened in my codebase. If I
| give Copilot a function body to fill in in a class I've
| already written, it will use my internal APIs (which aren't
| even hosted on GitHub) correctly as long as there are 1-2
| examples in the file and I'm using a consistent naming
| convention. This isn't copypasta, it really does have a clear
| understanding of the semantics of my code.
|
| This is why I'm not in favor of penalizing Microsoft and
| GitHub for creating Copilot. I think there needs to be some
| regulation on how it is used to make sure that people aren't
| treating it as a repository of copypasta, but the AI itself
| is pretty clearly capable of producing non-infringing work,
| and indeed that seems to be the norm.
| ceres wrote:
| Please let's not start dictating how people should use a
| piece of software. It would be like "regulating" Microsoft
| Word just because people might use it to duplicate
| copyrighted works.
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm not saying we should regulate the software, I'm
| saying we need some rigorous method of ensuring that
| using the AI tools doesn't put you in jeopardy of
| accidental copyright infringement.
|
| We most likely don't need new laws, because infringement
| is infringement and how you made the infringing work is
| irrelevant. Accidental infringement is already illegal in
| the US.
| irrational wrote:
| How would you regulate this?
| lairv wrote:
| There is a part of Deep Learning research (Differential
| Privacy) which focuses on making sure an algorithm cannot
| leak information about the training set, and this is a
| rigorous concept, you can quantify how much privacy-
| preserving a model is, and there are methods to make a
| model "private" (at the cost of performance I think for
| now)
| f_devd wrote:
| Differential Privacy only proves that it cannot leak a
| certain amount of information about individual samples of
| the training set. This only guarantees the input is not
| leaked exactly back, any composition of the training set
| is valid, although in image generation this usually means
| a very distorted image.
|
| An example of DP in image generation (using GANs):
| https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10283631
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| > Copilot can produce code verbatim, but it doesn't unless
| you specifically set up a situation to test it.
|
| It does not matter what a service can or cannot do. We do
| not regulate based on ability, but on action.
|
| The service has an obligation to the license holders of the
| training data to not violate the license. The mechanism for
| which the license is violated is irrelevant. The only thing
| that matters is the code ended up somewhere it shouldn't,
| and the service is the actor in the chain of responsibility
| that dropped the ball.
|
| The prompting of the service is irrelevant. If I ask you to
| reproduce a block of GPL code in my codebase and you do it,
| you violated the license. It does not matter that I primed
| you or lead you to that outcome. What matters is the
| legally protected code is somewhere it shouldn't be.
| lolinder wrote:
| > If I ask you to reproduce a block of GPL code in my
| codebase and you do it, you violated the license. It does
| not matter that I primed you or lead you to that outcome.
| What matters is the legally protected code is somewhere
| it shouldn't be.
|
| This isn't accurate. If I reproduce GPL code in your
| codebase, that's perfectly acceptable as long as _you_
| obey the terms of the GPL when you go to _distribute_
| your code. In this hypothetical, my act of copying isn 't
| restricted under the GPL license, it's _your_ subsequent
| act of distribution that triggers the viral terms of the
| GPL.
|
| The big question that is still untested in court is
| whether Copilot _itself_ constitutes a derivative work of
| its training data. If Copilot is derivative then
| Microsoft is infringing already. If Copilot is
| transformative then it is the responsibility of
| downstream consumers to ensure that they comply with the
| license of any code that may get reproduced verbatim.
| This question has not been ruled on, and it 's not clear
| which direction a court will go.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that there's a considerable amount of art
| hanging in museums, that was done by students of great
| artists. I think there are several Mona Lisas, done by da
| Vinci's students, and they are almost identical to the
| original.
| PuddleCheese wrote:
| Re. Point 2:
|
| Artists are granted copyright for their work by default per
| the Berne Convention. These copyrighted works are then used
| without consent of the original author for these models.
|
| Additionally, the argument that you can't copyright a style
| is playing fast and loose with most things that are
| proprietary, semantically.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > Additionally, the argument that you can't copyright a
| style is playing fast and loose with most things that are
| proprietary, semantically.
|
| This has been true since copyright existed, Braque couldn't
| copyright cubism -- Picasso saw what he was doing and
| basically copied the style with nothing to be done aside
| from not letting him into the studio.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| But if I train my own neural network inside my skull using
| some artist's style, that's ok?
|
| Either a style is copyrightable or it's not. If it's not,
| then I can't see any argument that you can't use it
| yourself or by proxy.
| PuddleCheese wrote:
| The brain-computer metaphor is not a very good one, it's
| a pretty baseless appeal. Additionally, it's an argument
| that anthropomorphizes something which has no moral,
| legal, or ethical discretion.
|
| You do not actively train your brain in remotely similar
| methods, and you, as an individual, are accountable to
| social pressures. An issue these companies are trying to
| avoid with ethically questionable scraping/training
| methods and research loop holes.
|
| Additionally, many artists aren't purely learning from
| others to perfectly emulate them, and it's quickly
| spotted if they are, generally. Lessons learned do not
| implicitly mean you perfectly emulate that lesson. At
| each stage of learning, you bias things through your own
| filter.
|
| Overall, the idea that these two things are comparable
| feels grotesque and reductionist, and feel quite similar
| to the "Well I wasn't going to buy it anyway" arguments
| we've been throwing around for decades to try to justify
| piracy of other materials.
|
| At the end of the day, an argument that "style can't be
| copyrighted" is ignoring a lot of aspects of it's
| definition, including the means, and can be extrapolated
| into an argument that nothing proprietary should be
| allowed to exist...
| akiselev wrote:
| _> Overall, the idea that these two things are comparable
| feels grotesque and reductionist_
|
| I agree with you there but the alternative - that they're
| not comparable - I find equally grotesque and full of
| convenient suppositions rooted in romanticism of "the
| artist". We're in uncharted territory with AI finally
| lapping at the heels of creative professionals and any
| analogy is going to fall apart.
|
| This feels like something that we should leave to the
| courts on a case by case basis until there's enough
| precedent for a legal test. The question at the end of
| the day should be about harm and whether an AI algorithm
| was used as run-around of a specific person's copyright
| PuddleCheese wrote:
| Good points.
|
| I was actually just sitting in a AI Town Hall hosted by
| the Concept Art Association which had 2 US Copyright
| Lawyers who work at the USCO present, and their along
| similar lines, currently.
|
| Basically, like you specified, legal precedent needs to
| be built up on a case by case basis, and harm can pretty
| readily be demonstrated, at least anecdotally, especially
| as copies are made during training of copyrighted work.
|
| Unfortunately, historically, artists do not generally
| enjoy the same legal representation or resources that
| unionized industries with deeper pockets enjoy. It's
| probably one of the reasons Stability.Ai are being so
| considerate with their musical variant.
|
| It would have been great if artists were asked before any
| of this. I could see this going in such a different
| direction if people were merely asked...
| aqsalose wrote:
| > But if I train my own neural network inside my skull
| using some artist's style, that's ok?
|
| How well the network inside your skull can manipulate
| your limbs to reproduce good-quality work in some
| artist's style?
|
| Our current framework for thinking about "fair use",
| "copyright", "trademark" and similar were thought about
| into existence during an era when the options for
| "network inside the skull" were to laboriously learn a
| skill to draw or learn how to use a machine like printing
| press/photocopier that produces exact copies.
|
| Availability of a machine that automates previously hand-
| made things much more cheaply or is much more powerful
| often requires rethinking those concepts.
|
| If I copy a book putting ink on paper letter by letter
| manually, that's ok, think of those monks in monasteries
| who do that all the time. And Mr Gutenberg's machine just
| makes that ink-on-paper process more efficient...
| odessacubbage wrote:
| unless you are in fact a living and breathing cyborg [in
| which case, congratulations] , the wet work inside your
| head is not analogous to the neural networks that are
| producing these images in any but the most loosely poetic
| sense.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You are romanticizing brains. Please stick to logical
| arguments that can be empirically tested.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| No? The mechanisms are different but the underlying idea
| is the same - identify important features and replicate
| those features in new context. If an AI identifies those
| features quickly or if I identify them over a lifetime
| what's the difference? If I so that you might say my work
| is derivative but you won't due me. Why is it different
| if an AI does it?
| DenisM wrote:
| This comment answers your questions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33425414
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Not particularly. Parent post is not concerned with or
| making any claims to special knowledge of the internal
| details of the modelling in the mind or in the machine,
| only the output.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > The mechanisms are different but the underlying idea is
| the same
|
| no.
|
| they are the same as asking a person to say a number
| between 1 and 6, then asking the same question to a dice
| and concluding that men and dice work the same.
|
| > identify important features and replicate those
| features in new context
|
| untrue
|
| if you think that that's what people do, obviously you
| can conclude that AI and humans are similar.
|
| But people don't identify features, people first of all
| learn how to replicate - _mechanically_ - the strokes,
| using the same tools as the original artists until they
| are able to do it, most of the time people fail and
| reiterate the process until they find something they are
| actually very good at and _only after that_ the good ones
| develop their own style.
|
| based either on some artistic style or some artistic
| meaning.
|
| But the first difference we learn here is that humans can
| fail to replicate something and still become renown
| artists.
|
| An AI cannot do that.
|
| Not on its own.
|
| For example, many probably already know, but Michelangelo
| was a sculptor.
|
| He was proficient as a painter too, but painting wasn't
| his strongest skill.
|
| So artists, first of all, are creators, not mere
| replicators, in many different forms, they are not good
| at everything in the same way, but their knowledge
| percolates in other fields related to theirs: if you need
| to make preparatory drawings for a sculpture, you need to
| be good at drawing and probably painting (lights,
| shadows, mood, expressions, are all fundamental for a
| good sculpture)
|
| Secondly, the features artists derive from other art
| pieces are not the technical ones, those needed to make
| an exact replica of the original, but those that make it
| special.
|
| For example, in the case of Michelangelo, the Pieta has
| some features that an AI would surely miss.
|
| First of all the way he shaped the marble that was
| unheard of, it doesn't mean much if you don't
| contextualize the opera and immerse it in the historical
| period it was created.
|
| An AI could think that Michelangelo and Canova were
| contemporary, while they were separated by 3 centuries,
| which make a lot of difference in practice and in spirit.
|
| But more importantly, Michelangelo's Pieta is out of
| proportion, he could not make the two figures in the
| correct scale, proving that even a genius like he was
| could not easily create a faithful reproduction of two
| adults one in the lap of the other, with the tools of the
| 16th century.
|
| The Virgin Mary is very, very young, which was at odds
| with her role as a grieving mother and, the most
| important of them all, the Christ figure is not
| suffering, because Michelangelo did not want to depict
| death.
|
| An AI would assume that those are all features of
| Michelangelo's way of sculpting, but in reality it's the
| result of a mix of complexity of the opera, time when it
| was created, quality and technology of the tools used and
| the artist intentions, which makes the opera unique and,
| ultimately, irreproducible.
|
| If you use an AI to reproduce Michelangelo, everybody
| would notice, because it's literally something a complete
| noob or someone with a very bad taste would do.
|
| So to not say the difference, you should copy the works
| of lesser known artists, making it even more unethical.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| respectfully, you're raising a whole lot of arguments
| here that had nothing to do with any point I was raising
| and doesn't seem to be moving this discussion forward in
| any significant way. The point of this subthread thread
| was a user saying the following:
|
| >But if I train my own neural network inside my skull
| using some artist's style, that's ok?
|
| This post and others uses a lot of flowery language to
| point out that we train artificial neural networks and
| real neural networks in different ways. OK, great. I
| don't think anyone is saying that's not true. What I _am_
| saying is that it 's irrelevant.
|
| If I am an exceptional imitator of the style of Jackson
| Pollock and i make a bunch of paintings that are very
| much in that style but clearly not his work I'm not going
| to be sued. My work will be labeled, rightfully so, as
| derivative but I have the right to sell it because it's
| not the same thing. Is that somehow more acceptable
| because I can only do it slowly and at a low volume? What
| if I start an institute whose sole purpose is training
| others to make Jackson Pollock-like paintings? What if I
| skip the people and make a machine that makes a similar
| quality of paintings with a similarly derivative style?
| Is that somehow immoral / illegal? Why?
|
| There's a whole lot of hand-wavey logic going on in this
| thread about context and opera and special human magic
| that only humans can possibly do and that somehow makes
| it immoral for an AI to do it. I am yet to see a simple,
| succinct argument of why that is the case.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > This post and others uses a lot of flowery language to
| point out that we train artificial neural networks and
| real neural networks in different ways. OK, great. I
| don't think anyone is saying that's not true. What I am
| saying is that it's irrelevant
|
| Maybe I was too aulic.
|
| The point is: you don't train "your artificial
| intelligence", because you're not an artificial
| intelligence, you train your whole self, that is a
| system, a very complex system.
|
| So you can think in terms of "I don't like death, I don't
| want to display death"
|
| You can learn how to paint using your feet, if you have
| no hands.
|
| You can be blind and still paint and enjoy it!
|
| An AI cannot think of "not displaying death" in someone's
| face, not even if you command it to do it, because it
| doesn't mean anything, out of context.
|
| > Jackson Pollock
|
| Jackson Pollock is the classic example to explain the
| concept: of course you can make the same paintings
| Jackson Pollock made.
|
| But you'll never be Jackson Pollock, because that trick
| works only the first time, if you are a pioneer.
|
| If you create something that look like Pollock, everybody
| will tell you "oh... it reminds of Jackson Pollock..."
| and no one will say "HOW ORIGINAL!"
|
| Like no one can ever be Armstrong again, land on the Moon
| and say "A small step for man (etc etc)"
|
| Pollock happened, you can of course copy Pollock, but
| nobody copies Pollock not because it's hard, but because
| it's cheap AF
|
| So it's the premise that is wrong: you are not training,
| you are learning.
|
| They are very different concepts.
|
| AIs (if we wanna define the "intelligent") are currently
| just very complex copy machines trained on copyrighted
| material.
|
| Remove the copyrighted material and their output would be
| much less than unimpressive (probably a mix of very
| boring and very ugly).
|
| Remove the ability to watch copyrighted material from
| people and some of them will come up with an original
| piece of art.
|
| It happened many times throughout history.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| You're typing a lot in these posts but literally every
| point you're making here is orthogonal to the actual
| discussion, which is why utilizing the end product of
| exposing an AI to copyrighted material and exposing a
| human to copyrighted material are morally distinct.
| comfysocks wrote:
| But haven't we seen examples of generative art that are
| substantially similar to original artwork and examples where
| AI regurgitates blocks of art (with watermarks!?)
| quickcheque wrote:
| If you are willing to throw out the moral reason, then the
| legal reason is just an empty rule.
| bombcar wrote:
| There are many legal reasons without moral force behind
| them beyond "we need to agree on one way or the other" -
| such as which side of the road to drive on.
| quickcheque wrote:
| In your example, both sides are equally acceptable and we
| just pick one. How does this apply to the present case?
| bombcar wrote:
| We made a decision years ago around copyright (we've
| modified it since but the general concept is "promote the
| arts by letting artists have reproduction rights for a
| time"). We could change that in various ways, if we
| wanted to, even removing copyright entirely for "machine-
| readable computer code" and leave protections to trade
| secrets. Even if you argue "no copyright at all is
| immoral" or "infinite copyright is immoral" it's hard to
| argue that "exactly author's life + 50 years is the only
| moral option".
|
| Switching the rules on people _during the game_ is what
| annoys /angers people, and is basically what these AIs
| have done (because they've introduced a new player at low
| effort).
| dwringer wrote:
| > if an artist spends years learning to paint in the style of
| Michelangelo is that immoral?
|
| I'd say that artist has gained a lot by studying
| Michaelangelo, including an appreciation for what
| Michaelangelo himself accomplished and insights into how to
| paint as well or better, and maybe even how to teach that to
| other people. I don't think we get those benefits from AI
| models doing that (at least not yet!)
| _manifold wrote:
| I think we're kidding ourselves to think that some nebulous
| concept of "the artist's journey" somehow informs the end
| result in a way that is self-evident in human-produced
| digital art. Just as with electric signals in the "brain in
| a vat" thought experiment, with digital art it's pixels. If
| an algorithm can produce a set of pixels that is just as
| subjectively good as a human artist, then nobody will be
| able to tell - and most likely the average person just
| won't care.
|
| On the other hand, I would say that traditional mediums
| (especially large format paintings) are relatively safe
| from AI generation/automation - for now.
| [deleted]
| akiselev wrote:
| _> On the other hand, I would say that traditional
| mediums (especially large format paintings) are
| relatively safe from AI generation /automation - for
| now._
|
| Why do you think that? I think large format paintings
| might be in just as much danger.
|
| There's a large industry of talented artists in China,
| Vietnam, etc who copy famous artworks by hand for very
| low prices. They're easily accessible online: you upload
| an image and provide some stylistic details and the
| artist does the hard work of turning the image into brush
| strokes. It's not "automated" but I've already ordered
| one 4'x2' AI generated painting in acrylic relief for
| less than the cost of a 1'x1' from a local community
| gallery. I put in quite a bit of work inpainting the
| image to get what I want but it would have been
| completely impossible to get what I want even six months
| ago.
|
| I've only ever purchased half a dozen artworks in my life
| and they were all under a few hundred bucks but with this
| new tech, it just doesn't make sense to buy an artists'
| original work unless it's for charity. The AI can do the
| creative work the way I want and there are plenty of
| artists who are excellent at the mechanical translation
| (which still requires a lot of creativity, mind)
| dwringer wrote:
| I don't think the artist's journey necessarily informs
| the end result in some way - but I believe it can be an
| important experience for the artist. Then again, artists
| can still do this in the era of generative art - there's
| just not much as much chance of being rewarded for it. If
| this leads to fewer people wanting to explore art, then I
| think we've lost something. But it's not clear to me
| where things are headed I guess. This could be a huge
| boon in letting people explore ways of expressing
| themselves who otherwise lacked the artistic ability to
| want to try.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| And perhaps more importantly regarding (1) than simple
| regurgitation: code _does_ things. There 's a real risk that
| if you just let Copilot emit output without understanding
| what that output does, it'll do the wrong thing.
|
| Art is in the eye of the beholder. If the output looks
| correct as per what you're looking for, it _is_ correct.
| There 's no additional layer of "Is it saying what I meant it
| to say" that is relevant to anyone who isn't an art critic.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| People often hold conflicting views, they done like to think
| about it though, because it can lead to cognitive dissonance.
|
| That's one reason why it is probably better to have a derived
| world view than a contrived world view.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > the majority opinion seems to be that training diffusion
| models on copyrighted work is totally fine
|
| Well, maybe they were all just downvoted into invisibility. But
| up to your post, I have seen none.
| an1sotropy wrote:
| I think this is a great question, but I think answers should
| rest on a slightly more detailed understanding of how actually
| copyright works.
|
| IANAL, but to a first-order approximation: _everything_ is
| "copyrighted" [1]. The copyright is owned by someone/something.
| The owner gets to set the terms of the licensing. The rare
| things not under copyright may have been put explicitly into
| the public domain (which actually takes some effort), or have
| had their copyright expire (which takes quite a while; thanks
| Disney).
|
| So: this is really a question about fair use [2], and about
| when the terms of licensing kick in, and it should be
| understood and discussed as such. I don't think anyone who has
| really thought about this is claiming that the models can't be
| trained on (copyrighted) material; the consumption of the
| material is not the problem, is it? The problem is that the
| models: (1) sometimes recreate particular inputs or
| identifiable parts of them (like the Getty watermark), or
| recreate some essential characteristics of their inputs (like
| possibly trademark-able stylistic elements), AND ALSO, (2) have
| no way of attributing the output to the input.
|
| Without being able to identify anything specific about the
| input, it is impossible know with certainty that the output
| falls within fair use (e.g. because it was sufficiently
| transformative), and it is impossible to know how to implement
| the terms of licensing for things that don't fall within fair
| use. There's just no getting around that with the current crop
| of models.
|
| The legal minefield is not from (1) or (2), but from (1)+(2),
| at the moment of redistribution, monetized or not. Even if
| Copilot was only trained on non-reciprocal licenses (BSD, MIT),
| _there are very likely still licensing terms of use_ , which
| may include identifying the original copyright owner.
| Reciprocal licenses like GPL have more involved licensing
| terms, _but that is not the problem_ : the problem is failure
| to identify the original licensing terms. We should not use
| these models as an opportunity to make an issue about GPL or
| its authors, or about the business model of companies like
| Getty; both rest on copyright, and come to our attention
| because of licensing.
|
| Sorry about the rant. As for your question: I think it may be
| as simple as: to what extent are readers here the producers of
| inputs to the ML models, versus consumers of outputs. It gets
| personal for coders when models violate licensing terms of FOSS
| code, but it feels fun/empowering to wield the models to make
| images that we'd otherwise be unable to access. From my rant
| above you can tell that whether its for code or images, I think
| the whole thing is an IP disaster.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
| aliqot wrote:
| Your argument is tantamount to expecting Michael Bay to have
| never seen a Scorcese or deriving influence from it.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Is Michael Bay cloning and copyrighting entire scenes of the
| Scorsese films as entirely yours?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Pretending it's not clearly more complicated than that will
| not convince anyone, it will make them feel condescended to.
| While Scorcese is Scorcese, a deep learning model is not
| Michael Bay.
| aliqot wrote:
| I used that comparison on purpose. Michael Bay leans on a
| lot of computer driven technology to shoot movies inspired
| by other more traditional directors. The comparison is
| direct, if you feel condescended to, I did not intend that.
| com2kid wrote:
| > In contrast when talking about training code generation
| models there are multiple comments mentioning this is not ok if
| licenses weren't respected.
|
| I think one of the differences is that people are seeing non-
| trivial amounts of copyrighted code being output by AI models.
|
| If a 262,144 pixel image has a few 2x2 squares copied directly,
| you can't tell.
|
| If a 300 line source file has 20 lines copied directly from a
| copyrighted source, well, that is more blatant.
| andybak wrote:
| I personally feel the bar for copyrighting code should be
| considerably higher than 20 lines.
| com2kid wrote:
| > I personally feel the bar for copyrighting code should be
| considerably higher than 20 lines.
|
| That highly depends on the lines of code.
|
| One of my (now abandoned) open source react components
| essentially does some smarter-than-it-probably-should state
| management in just a handful of LOCs. At least a few
| hundred people found the clever solution I came up with
| useful enough to integrate into their own projects.
|
| I've seen talented a graphics programmer hand optimize
| routines to gain significant speed boosts, speed boosts
| that helped save non-trivial amounts of system resources.
|
| And where do you draw the line? That same gfx programmer
| optimized maybe a dozen functions, each less than 20 lines,
| but all quite independent of each other. The sum total of
| his work gave us a huge performance boost over everyone
| else in the field at the time.
|
| And of course you also have super terse languages like APL,
| where non-trivial algorithms can easily be implemented in
| 20 LOC.
|
| But let's move to another medium, the written word, also
| one of the less controversial aspects of copyright
| (ignoring the USA's penchant for indefinite extension of
| copyright)
|
| Start with poems, plenty of artistically significant poems
| that come in under 20 lines, deserving of copyright for
| sure.
|
| https://tinhouse.com/miracles-by-lucy-corin/
|
| There is a short story, around 22 lines.
|
| The problem is, it is complicated, which is why these are
| the types of things that get litigated all the time.
|
| Heck as a profession we cannot even agree on what a line of
| code is. A LOC in Java is, IMHO, worse less than a LOC in
| JavaScript, and if you jump to embedded C, wow that is
| super terse, unless you count the thousands of lines of
| #defines describing pinouts and such, but domain knowledge
| is needed to know that those aren't "real" lines of code.
| nico wrote:
| Yup. There's also this, FTA:
|
| > the original images themselves aren't stored in the Stable
| Diffusion model, with over 100 terabytes of images used to
| create a tiny 4 GB model
|
| Is jpeg compression transformative then? Should a compressed
| image of something not be copyrightable because "it doesn't
| store" the "real image"? How about compressed video? Where do
| we draw the line?
| esperent wrote:
| > Where do we draw the line?
|
| This is what we have courts and legislation for. I expect
| there's existing legislation here about what constitutes a
| different work versus an exact copy but it may need some
| updates for AI.
| marmada wrote:
| By that case all art should be copyrighted since our brain
| stores a highly compressed version of everything we've seen.
|
| I wager 100 TB => 4GB is different from JPEG compression and
| more similar to what happens in our brains. "Neural
| compression" so to speak
| notamy wrote:
| > By that case all art should be copyrighted since our
| brain stores a highly compressed version of everything
| we've seen.
|
| Good thing this is already the case!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
|
| > The Berne Convention formally mandated several aspects of
| modern copyright law; it introduced the concept that a
| copyright exists the moment a work is "fixed", rather than
| requiring registration. It also enforces a requirement that
| countries recognize copyrights held by the citizens of all
| other parties to the convention.
| pulvinar wrote:
| The difference is that JPEG _does_ store the real image, at
| least close enough to within the given tolerance (determined
| by the compression factor). That image is as real as say an
| image on film (also not exact, nor in "original" form).
|
| With Stable Diffusion it's storing the style, but can't
| reproduce any single input image-- there aren't enough bits
| [0]. (except by luck, but that's really true for any
| storage).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon-Hartley_theorem
| mjburgess wrote:
| The weights of a NN are just a compressed representation of
| the training data, think lossy zip.
|
| Rank all generated images by similarity to the training
| data (etc.) and you can see what's stored.
|
| The Shannon-Hartley theorem isnt relevant. A 4GB zip of
| 100TB text data can exactly reproduce the initial 100TB for
| some distributions of that initial dataset.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > there aren't enough bits
|
| you can create compressed copy of a file containing 100TB
| of the letter "A" in much less than 4GB
|
| there could be enough bits in there to reproduce some of
| the inputs.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| What this analogy is saying is that if an image is
| generic and derivative enough (or massively
| overrepresented in the training data) it may be possible
| to reconstruct a very close approximation from the model.
| If the training data is unbiased, I question the validity
| of copyright claims on an image that is sufficiently
| derivative that it can be reproduced in this manner.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| If you can't reproduce a quantitatively (not qualitatively)
| similar likeness of an image then it is not just a compressed
| image.
| narcraft wrote:
| It's actually fine in both cases
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Can humans learn from copyrighted work?
|
| ps. I'm surprised music has not yet been yet leveled by AI,
| can't wait for "dimmu borgir christmas carols" prompts.
| itronitron wrote:
| I don't think the law will get hammered down until the AI
| models generate 'major recording artist' inspired songs.
| Anyone claiming that artists can't claim 'style' as a defense
| of AI generated works is in for a rude awakening.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Music is somewhat more challenging because you have a few
| other problems that have to be solved in the pipeline, and
| source separation is still not a 100% solved problem. Beyond
| that, audio tagging beyond track level artist/genre is a lot
| harder than image tagging.
|
| Once you have separated sources for a training data set, it's
| like text generation, except that instead of a single
| function of sequence position, you have multiple correlated
| functions of time. Text generation models can barely maintain
| self consistency from paragraph to paragraph, which is a
| sequence difference of maybe 200 tokens, now consider moving
| from token position to a time variable, and adding the
| requirement that multiple sequences retain coherency both
| with each other, and with themselves over much larger
| distances.
|
| There are generative music models, but it's mostly stuff
| that's been trained on midi files for a specific genre or
| artist, and the output isn't that impressive.
|
| I am also eagerly awaiting "hark the bloodied angel screams"
| with blastbeats, shrieks and blistering tremolo guitar,
| though.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Code generation models tend to much more often regurgitate code
| from the training data compared to one of these image based
| models regurgitating images from the training data.
|
| Code generation models need to have special handling for
| checking if the generated code falls under copyright.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| It's not the training of the models that's the problem, it's
| when the AI spits out "substantial portions of code", an
| important term in the GPL and with regard to fair use law, that
| are exact, sometimes even including exact comments from
| specific codebases. This does violate the licenses.
|
| There's something quantitative in code that you don't get in
| drawings, drawings the unique quality is purely qualitative, so
| it is hard to demonstrate what exactly it was that was ripped
| off. When you find your exact words being returned by a code
| helper AI it's hard to pretend that it's not directly and
| plainly just copy pasting code snippets.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| It's a dumb hill to die on. Doomed to fall to a layer of
| minor refactoring. If you say that's the problem, you'll have
| nothing to stand on later.
| andybak wrote:
| On the contrary - the part that is problemmatic is the
| verbatim reproduction of copyrighted code. If that's fixed
| by a "minor refactoring" then there's no hill to die on.
| It's not AI code generation per se that's problemmatic -
| it's when it does things that are break current IP law.
|
| If you want to debate expanding IP law - that's a different
| discussion and one I would be rather sceptical about. I'd
| prefer the that IP law in general was rolled back - not
| forward.
| robocat wrote:
| > Doomed to fall to a layer of minor refactoring
|
| Not quite - there is a reason why
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design exists as a
| concept to workaround copyright, and the same concept could
| hold for ML models.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The vast majority of HN's patronage is tech aligned. Try asking
| a community of artists the same question and see what their
| responses are. The results might surprise you.
| dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote:
| What's funny is HN was majority OK with AirBNB "disrupting"
| hotels and Uber/Lyft "disrupting" taxi services by bending
| the rules and exploiting legal loopholes, but when AI starts
| "disrupting" their artwork and code by bending the rules
| suddenly disruption becomes a personal problem.
|
| Disrupt onward I say. Humans learn and remix from prior
| copyrighted work all the time using their brains (consciously
| chosen or not). So long as the new work is distinguishable
| enough to be unique there's nothing wrong with these new AI
| creations.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Because when I go to a live performance, watch a movie, browse
| an art gallery, etc., I am training my brain on copyrighted
| work. Every artist has done the same. No artist has developed
| their style in a vaccuum.
|
| (See my other comment though, I am not sold on any of this
| being right).
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Because when I go to a live performance, watch a movie,
| browse an art gallery, etc., I am training my brain on
| copyrighted work
|
| you paid for it and enjoyed it in the way the artist
| intended.
|
| > I am training my brain on copyrighted work.
|
| too bad your brain alone is useless.
|
| You need good hands to replicate much of the copyrighted
| works you "trained" your brain on.
|
| > No artist has developed their style in a vacuum.
|
| some absolutely did, indeed.
|
| Just look at the school of film and animation that artists in
| USSR developed while separated from the rest of the World.
|
| They are unique and completely different from what the west
| was used to (Disney)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qWBZattl8s
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qrWnS3ULPk
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > Just look at the school of film and animation that
| artists in USSR developed while separated from the rest of
| the World.
|
| So they were developed in a complete vacuum including
| traditional things like theater, poetry and story telling?
| [deleted]
| melagonster wrote:
| maybe we can have a GPL code generator model, all generated
| code are under GPL license?
| joshcryer wrote:
| I always held the opinion that GPL etc was a copy-left license
| that was intended to make sure the code was free (free as in
| freedom not as in beer). That in an ideal world you wouldn't
| need the GPL or any licenses at all. At this point I really
| don't care what co-pilot or any of its derivatives result in
| and I think in the not too distant future we will have machine
| code to readable code translation which will enable more
| freedom. That is, it really won't matter if the code is
| compiled or not, when you can "AI decompile" it into human
| readable code, do your modifications, and then do with it what
| you will.
|
| From that view let the data be free.
| pessimizer wrote:
| As long as this copyright violation laundering isn't reserved
| for the big guys, I'm happy for anything that confuses and
| delegitimizes the concept of copyright. But it is reserved
| for the big guys, you're going to get sued to death if you
| copy any of their work.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Some languages need to compile but others don't
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I think both are inevitable and I'm ok with both. I think a
| sticking point is that its considered normal to make your own
| art in the style of another but abnormal to copy code verbatim.
| Art seems to be clearly the former while there are instances
| that probably stick in people's minds where copilot has
| produced verbatim examples.
|
| Indeed it seems like code will be vastly more prone to this
| problem compared to art because changing a single pixel is
| merely a question of aesthetics whereas code is constrained
| tightly by the syntax of the language. With a much smaller
| space of correct results duplication is likely inevitable.
| lolinder wrote:
| Possibly controversial opinion: I think the biggest reason why
| so many people hold conflicting views on this is because of who
| the victim is in each case.
|
| The loudest voices complaining they were directly hurt by
| Copilot's training are open source maintainers. These are
| exactly the kind of people who we love to root for on here.
| They're the little guy involved in a labor of love, giving away
| their work for free (with terms).
|
| On the other hand, the highest-profile victims of Stable
| Diffusion and DALL-E are Getty Images and company. They're in
| most respects the opposite of open source maintainers: big
| companies worth millions of dollars for doing comparatively
| little work (primarily distributing photos other people took).
|
| Because in the case of images the victim is most prominently
| faceless corporations, I think our collective bias towards
| "information wants to be free" shows through more clearly when
| regarding DALL-E than it does with Copilot.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Humans used to learn to code from copyrighted works (textbooks)
| without much reference to OSS or Free Software. Similarly,
| teaching ML models to code from copyrighted works isn't going
| to violate copyright more frequently than a human might; and
| detecting exact copies should be pretty easy by comparing with
| the corpus used to train it. Software houses already have to
| worry about infringement of snippets, and things like Codex are
| just one more potential source.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Those books were purchased and a license granted for such
| use.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Because there's more programmers than artists in this hive
| mind.
| firefoxkekw wrote:
| Cognitive dissonance, different persons, hypocrisy.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| With the caveat of "Strong opinions, weakly held", my personal
| take is that creating artificial scarcity is inherently immoral
| and thus copyright itself is immoral. Training AI on someone's
| non-private work is then completely fine IMO.
|
| Copyleft is a license that weakens copyright (and thus
| inherently good :)), so using machine learning to weaken
| copyleft by allowing you to copyright "clones" of copyleft code
| is bad.
|
| If I try to generalize here, the problem in both cases is only
| if you produce copyrighted works, especially if you trained on
| copyleft works. If instead both models would stipulate that all
| produced works are copyleft I would be much more fine with it
| (and I feel it would respect the license of the copyleft works
| it was trained on, even if that may be legally shaky).
| egypturnash wrote:
| How do you propose to keep artists able to pay their bills
| and live a decent life if you're completely cool with
| training AIs on them?
|
| Bonus points if you have any actionable scheme beyond waving
| your hands and talking vaguely about "basic income".
|
| Keep in mind that the life of a professional artist is
| currently very perilous, anyone working freelance is
| constantly battling against the social media giants' desire
| to keep everyone scrolling their site forever. Words like
| "patreon" and "commission" and links off-site to places an
| artist can exchange their works for money are poison to The
| Algorithm and _will_ be hidden.
|
| And also if I am reading this right, you have absolutely _no_
| problem with an image generator that 's been trained on
| copyrighted work producing work that's either copyrighted
| _or_ copylefted? You are utterly fine with disregarding the
| copyrights of the original artist and /or whoever they may
| have assigned the copyright to as part of their contract?
| pjonesdotca wrote:
| Because the models are not creating a 1:1 replacement of the
| original work.
|
| As mentioned before "style" is not something subject to
| copyright and the model creates a model of that style. The
| process of finetuning a model generally means that one would
| not want to recreate the original images as that would overfit
| it and render it, essentially useless.
|
| When it comes to code, there is a higher chance of getting a
| one-to-one clone of the input as the options used in creating
| an algorithm, or even a simple function are dramatically
| reduced imo.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Code is hundreds to many thousands of lines. A line of code
| is analogous to one color pixel in digital art.
| melagonster wrote:
| but one line similar code is easier to find. this is
| because copilot work in one line/small function level.
| com2kid wrote:
| Depends on which lines of code.
|
| I have written projects where I'd consider a handful of
| lines of code to be the core central tenant of the entire
| project that everything else is built up around. Copy those
| lines and everything else is scaffolding that falls out
| naturally from the development process.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Because the models are not creating a 1:1 replacement of
| the original work.
|
| Since when did that become a requirement? If those are the
| rules now, then cutting the final credits is good enough to
| start torrenting movies.
|
| > When it comes to code, there is a higher chance of getting
| a one-to-one clone of the input as the options used in
| creating an algorithm, or even a simple function are
| dramatically reduced imo.
|
| If you're going to consider each function within a larger
| work as an individual work, that makes the 1:1 replacement
| claim more dubious. In order to recognizably imitate a style,
| one or more features of that style have to be recognizably
| copied, although no single area of the illustration would
| have to be. A function is a facet of a complete program just
| like recognizable features of a style are facets of each work
| an artist produces. If it helps, consider an artist's style
| as their own personal utility library.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If I made a scene for scene remake of a Disney movie, with
| an ugly woman for a princess and social
| commentary/satirical injections, it would be defensible as
| fair use in court.
| leereeves wrote:
| > when it comes to code, there is a higher chance of getting
| a one-to-one clone of the input.
|
| I'm not so sure. There's a generated image in the article
| that I think looks enough like Wonder Woman to cause a
| lawsuit.
|
| That's just one of a handful of images in the article, and
| doesn't seem to have been chosen for its similarity to Wonder
| Woman.
| dwringer wrote:
| I think when it comes to art, less than one-to-one clones are
| often still functionally equivalent in the mind of many
| viewers. Stylistic and thematic content is often just as, if
| not more, important than the exact composition. But currently
| the law does agree that this is not copyrightable. And
| sometimes independent artists profit and make a name for
| themselves copping other styles, and I think that's great.
|
| But could it be considered an intellectual and sociological
| denial-of-service attack when it's scaled to the point where
| a machine can crank out dozens of derivative works per
| minute? I'm not sure this is a situation at all comparable to
| human artists making derivative works. Those involve long
| periods of concentration, focus, and reflection by a
| conscious human agent to pull off, thus in some sense
| furthering to the intellectual development of humanity and
| fostering a deeper appreciation for the source work. The
| machine does none of that; it's sort of just a photocopier
| one step removed in hyperspace, copying some of the artists'
| abstractions instead of their brush strokes.
| yuzuquat wrote:
| There's already a lot of discussion on the legal/moral arguments
| here so I'd like to comment on something more concrete.
|
| As I understand it, an illustration for a magazine like the New
| York Times might net anywhere from $100 to $1000 and require 8
| hours of work. An illustrator working for someone like the new
| york times or magic the gathering would likely consider this the
| pinnacle of a stable job. Many, including my comic books teacher,
| spent years moonlighting a service job before making it and
| publishing (Kikuo Johnson). With the advent of generative AI art,
| it seems immoral from a fiduciary responsibility point of a view
| that an art director _doesn 't_ train an AI model on their
| illustrator's art before laying them off.
|
| I have no doubt that generative AI will continue to push forward
| irrespective of the legal arguments being made. I'm fearful for
| the frictional unemployment that comes. Having come from art
| school (and luckily working in tech), my illustration peers are
| creative but such creativity doesn't necessarily translate into
| creative use of tooling, business-savyness or marketing. All I
| can say is that I empathize with a lot of the fear and hope for
| the best.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Where do you get $100-1000 in cost for a major publication? The
| artists I know easily charge in that range, and that's for
| private commissions that they retain the rights over.
|
| I could not imagine the custom work done that helps sell
| publications, *especially MTG or similar* only net $1000 per
| piece. Certainly they have some sort of royalties contract, at
| the very least.
| baq wrote:
| It's a quite dystopian technology for sure, but maybe it isn't
| all that bad. the artists _just_ (cough) have to pivot from
| delivering images to delivering style sheets for generative
| models...
| blueblimp wrote:
| > With the advent of generative AI art, it seems immoral from a
| fiduciary responsibility point of a view that an art director
| doesn't train an AI model on their illustrator's art before
| laying them off.
|
| If they do that, the quality of illustrations they'll get will
| be vastly worse (as can be seen from the comparisons in the
| article). If they were willing to spend $1000 on an
| illustration in the first place, I doubt they'd accept that
| quality drop.
| detritus wrote:
| It managed that from just 32 example illustrations?
|
| Irrespective of everything else here, I find that alone hugely
| impressive.
|
| ed - for 'hugely impressive' also insert 'slightly terrifying'.
| mring33621 wrote:
| this whole argument is bullshit
|
| artists are no more a protected class than programmers
|
| learn to use the automation to further your own goals/career
|
| or move out of the way
|
| At some point, some non-artist, non-director, non-screenwriter
| will make a brilliant movie using these ML-assisted technologies.
| After few iterations of this success, most people will shut up
| and learn to harness the benefits.
| djoldman wrote:
| It's interesting to think about all the controversy surrounding
| machine-generated images in contrast with a scenario where the
| same images were generated/drawn/created directly by a human.
|
| In this specific scenario, what would the artist think if 1000
| people started drawing in her style and released those images?
| michaelt wrote:
| Sometimes society established norms when doing a thing was very
| rare and expensive, and honestly barely needed any control
| because it was so unusual.
|
| If that thing becomes a lot cheaper and easier, and it starts
| being done a lot more - perhaps we realise we actually need
| different rules _even though the difference is purely
| quantitative_.
|
| One guy juggling chainsaws on main street - how entertaining!
| No need to ban that. Dozens of chainsaw jugglers on every
| street, 24/7, the issues are easy to imagine.
|
| To say that "Oh, you were OK with one chainsaw-juggler
| therefore you would be OK with 100,000" is IMHO a line of
| argument that obscures more than it clarifies.
| mdaEyebot wrote:
| burkaman wrote:
| It's ok to have different standards for humans and computers.
| Even if you think that a machine learning model is conceptually
| doing the same thing as a human artist, just a trillion times
| faster and infinitely replicable, there's no reason we can't
| say that it's ok for humans to do this, but not for computers.
| Computers are not people. It's not unfair or unethical to put
| an artificial limitation on an artificial object.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >It's ok to have different standards for humans and
| computers.
|
| Is it? The computer is a tool doing it on behalf of a human,
| so different rules for computers ends up being different
| rules for using different tools. Should the efficiency of a
| tool be a factor in the limits we put on a human? Given that
| humans can use the same tool with different levels of
| efficiency, this also seems to open up to the question if
| different levels of skill using a tool have different rules.
| cezart wrote:
| I can move on the street om my feet, or I can move on the
| street with 240km/h with the use of a tool called a sports
| car. I think limits on the capacity of our tools are often
| the whole difference between what is legal and what is
| illegal.
| burkaman wrote:
| > Should the efficiency of a tool be a factor in the limits
| we put on a human?
|
| Yes, for example hitting someone with a real sword is
| punished more harshly than hitting them with a plastic one.
| Tweeting out blatant lies to your 100 million followers is
| worse than tweeting out blatant lies to 2 followers.
| Shining a laser pointer at a plane is only illegal if it's
| strong enough to blind the pilot.
| LastTrain wrote:
| The question is should we have different standards for
| computers and human doing the exact same thing - not
| different things. Your examples all have different
| outcomes based on the tool.
| burkaman wrote:
| Do you think training a human artist on a body of work
| has the same outcome as training Stable Diffusion on that
| same body of work?
| dymk wrote:
| Seems like putting a limitation on what someone can do with
| their own computer on their own time with their own money.
| burkaman wrote:
| Yes, sort of like disallowing someone to DDoS a server
| using their own computer on their own time with their own
| money.
|
| This is not about one person playing around in private,
| it's about thousands of people (potentially millions)
| instantaneously generating art expressly intended to copy
| someone's specific style and publicly releasing the
| results.
| googlryas wrote:
| If you're ddosing someone's server you necessarily aren't
| playing around in private.
| asddubs wrote:
| if you release the artwork you generate, you aren't
| playing around in private either.
| burkaman wrote:
| If people were only playing around with Stable Diffusion
| in private then this article wouldn't exist and we
| wouldn't be having this conversation.
| googlryas wrote:
| Saying "here's an image I generated" is exactly the use
| case of reddit. DDoSing reddit is not the use case of
| reddit.
|
| And "private" has more meanings than "secret/only
| personally known". Posting something you generated on
| Reddit for fun is private use.
| burkaman wrote:
| Tough to argue with that, all I can say is that your
| usage of the word "private" does not agree with either
| the dictionary definition or common usage.
| googlryas wrote:
| Look up the term with relation to copyright law. See
| also: personal use, fair use.
|
| e.g. (pdf) https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/cgi/vie
| wcontent.cgi?r...
| burkaman wrote:
| That link does not define the term, and I haven't been
| able to find a legal definition of "private use". The
| paper seems to be using the normal definition, though.
|
| > It sounds controversial that a defense of private use
| exists at all; after all, one usually buys a book for her
| private use. This use may mean that one can make
| photocopies of a legally possessed book, in order to read
| it, for example, not only in the office, but also at
| home. One may also loan the book to a friend.
|
| I would be pretty surprised to find a legal definition
| that says if you put something online just for fun it
| doesn't count as copyright infringement.
|
| I don't know why we're talking about this though, I'm not
| a big fan of copyright but that's not what this is about.
| It's not "you put my drawing on Reddit without my
| permission", it's "you publicly released a tool on Reddit
| that allows anyone to effortlessly create infinite
| variations of my work in my name, please don't do that".
| I don't care whether or not it's legal, I think it's
| immoral to create a tool that could not exist without
| ingesting someone's life's work and then ignore them when
| they ask you not to do that.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| There are plenty of those limitations already, some even
| having to do with things like IP and copyright.
| cthalupa wrote:
| I don't see any evidence that things being generated with
| SD or similar somehow remove those same limitations
| around IP and copyright. I am just as much hoping Disney
| looks the other way when I make fanart of their IP
| regardless of how it is made.
| dagmx wrote:
| You're missing the big qualifier: what if those other artists
| started drawing in her style AND marketed it as her style?
| randyrand wrote:
| There's nothing atypical about that in the graphic design
| world.
|
| An artist does not own "their" style, and can even be one of
| thousands of people drawing in that same style.
|
| Art styles are not something people can own.
|
| Imagine trying to own a genre of music...
| godelski wrote:
| I'm an AI researcher working on generative modeling, so I want to
| note my bias upfront.
|
| But I'm also a musician/artist and so I find some of these
| conversations odd. The problem with them I see is that they are
| oversimplified. To get better at drawing I often copy other
| works. Or I'll play a piece exactly as intended. Then I get more
| advanced and learn a style of someone I admire and appreciate.
| Then after that comes my own flair.
|
| So I ask, what is different between me doing it and a machine?
| The specific images being shown in this article shows that Hollie
| is doing the same process as me and the machine. Their work is in
| fact derivative. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that
| either. They say a good artist copies but a great artist steals.
| I don't think these generators are great artists, but they sure
| are good ones.
|
| I learn by looking at a lot of art and styles. I learn by
| copying. I am able to be more efficient than the machine because
| I can understand nuance and theory, but the machine is able to do
| the former much better than I can. It can practice its drawings a
| hundred or thousand times an hour.
|
| Now there are highly unethical stuff that is actually going on
| and I don't want the conversation getting distracted from. Just
| today a twitter account posted a demo of their work and actively
| demonstrated that one can remove watermarks with their tool[0].
| This is bold and borderline illegal (promoting theft). There are
| also people presenting AI generated work as human digital
| paintings (we need to be honest about the tools we use). People
| presenting work in ways that it was not actually created is
| unethical. But there are other generative ethical concerns.
|
| Now there are concerns about photographer's/artist's rights. If I
| take someone else's work and post it as my own, that is straight
| up theft. Even celebrities can't post photos of themselves that
| were taken by others[1]. This gets muddled if I make minor
| changes but it's been held up in court that the intention matters
| and it needs to be clear that the changes were new in an artistic
| manner and not a means of circumventing ownership rights. These
| are some of the bigger issues we're running into.
|
| A problem with these generative models is interpretation. How do
| you know if the image you produced actually exists in the wild or
| if it is new and unique? There's been papers that show that there
| are privacy concerns[2] and that you can pull ground truth images
| out of the generator. I'd argue that this question is easier to
| answer the more explicit the density your model calculates.
| Meaning that this is very hard for implicit density models (such
| as GANs), moderately difficult for approximate density models
| (such as diffusion and VAEs), but not too bad when pulling from
| explicit density models (such as Autoregressive or Flow based
| models).
|
| This is a concern that is implicit by articles such as this, but
| fail to actually quantify the problem here: "How do we
| meaningfully differentiate generated images from those made by
| real people?" I'm a strong advocate for the study and research
| for explicit density models, but a good chunk of the community is
| against be (they aren't currently anywhere near as powerful, but
| there's nothing theoretically in the way. I'd argue it is that
| few people are researching and understanding these models. There
| is a higher barrier to entry). So I'd argue that the training
| methods aren't the major concern, but what is actually produced.
| While the generators learn in a similar fashion to me it is clear
| that I'd get in trouble if I was passing off a fake Picasso as a
| legitimate one. But it is also fine for me to paint something in
| that same style as long as I'm honest about it.
|
| The nuance here really matters and I think we need to not lose
| sight of that. This is a complex topic and I would like to hear
| other views. But I'm not interested in mic drops or unmovable
| positions. I don't think anyone has the right answer here and to
| solve it we must get a lot of different view points. So do you
| agree or disagree with me? I especially want to hear from the
| latter.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/ai_fast_track/status/1587475575479959559
|
| [1] https://collenip.com/taylor-swift-entitled-say-
| photographers...
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06018
| aqsalose wrote:
| >But I'm also a musician/artist and so I find some of these
| conversations odd. The problem with them I see is that they are
| oversimplified. To get better at drawing I often copy other
| works. Or I'll play a piece exactly as intended. Then I get
| more advanced and learn a style of someone I admire and
| appreciate. Then after that comes my own flair.
|
| >So I ask, what is different between me doing it and a machine?
|
| You are a human. If you practice art as a hobby you can feel
| pleasure doing it, or you can get informal value out of the
| practice (there is social value in showing and sharing hobbies
| and works with friends). One could try to formalize that value
| and make a profession out of it, get livelihood selling it.
|
| When all that "machinery" to (learn to) produce artistic works
| was sitting inside human skulls and difficult to train, the
| benefits befell on the humans.
|
| When it is a machine that can easily and cheaply automate ...
| the benefits are due to the owner of machine.
|
| Now, I don't personally know if the genie can be put back
| _into_ bottle with any legal framework that wouldn 't be
| monstrous in some other way. However, ethically it is quite
| clear to me there is a possibility the artists / illustrators
| are going to get a very bad deal out of this, which could be
| ... a moral wrong. This would be a reason to think up the legal
| and conceptual framework that tries to make it not ... as wrong
| as it could be?
|
| It could be that we end up with human art as a prestige good
| (which it already is). That wouldn't be nice, because of power
| law dynamics of popularity benefit very few prestige artists,
| which could get worse. But could we end up with a Wall-E world
| where there are no reason for anyone to learn to draw any well?
| When a kid asks "draw me a rabbit", they won't ask any of the
| humans around when the machine can produce a much more prettier
| rabbit, immediately and tailored...?
| vanadium1st wrote:
| I am a graphic artist. In the recent months I've read dozens of
| articles and threads like this. I still can't see what the big
| deal is.
|
| Graphic artists don't have trade secrets or unique impossible
| techniques. If someone can see your picture, he can copy its
| style. It becomes publicly available as soon as you publish it.
| For the vast majority of graphic styles, if one author can do it,
| then hundreds of his colleagues can do it too, often just as
| well. If one author becomes popular and expensive - then his less
| popular colleagues can copy his style for cheaper. The market for
| this is enormous and this was the case for probably hundreds of
| years.
|
| I personally am a non-brand artist like that. More often then not
| clients come to me with a reference not from my portfolio and ask
| me to produce something similar. I will do it, probably five
| times cheaper than the artist or studio who did the original. It
| may not be exactly as good, but it won't be five times worse.
|
| Some clients are happy to pay extra for the name brand, and will
| pay. Some want to spend less, and will settle for a non-brand
| copy.
|
| The clients that are willing to pay for the name brand will still
| be there for the same reason they are now, and the existence of
| Stable Diffusion changes nothing to them. And the ones that just
| want the cheap copy would never contact the big name artist in
| the first place. The copy market will shift, but the big name
| artist doesn't even have to be aware of it.
| [deleted]
| xena wrote:
| The main thing people are worried about is the fact that food
| costs money and you need to eat in order to live. People are
| afraid that their illustration jobs are at risk because of AI
| illustrations being _good enough_.
| Matumio wrote:
| I dislike the drift this "need to work for food" phrase that
| I'm hearing so often. Job automation never reduced our
| ability to produce food. The harvest is not in any danger,
| not even if we suddenly produce twice the art with the same
| amount of work.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| It's not about food production, it's about capitalism.
|
| If artists could simply ask for food and be given it from
| the overflowing cornucopia, then yes, this wouldn't matter
| and in fact would be a net benefit.
|
| Unfortunately though, artists must sell their art to get
| money, then exchange that money for food. Now, if a robot
| produces free art that's almost as good, most of those
| buyers won't pay those artists anymore, and the artists
| will starve (or stop being artists).
|
| I do believe that job automation will quickly eliminate
| scarcity for basic life necessities, while also displacing
| more and more jobs in our economy, and that therefore UBI
| or some equivalent will be imminently necessary - but
| that's a much larger topic
| egypturnash wrote:
| Hi. I'm a professional artist. I have a lot of friends who
| are also professional artists.
|
| Most of us live in cities, and go to the store to buy food.
| We have specialized in being good at making images, which
| we trade for money, which we can trade for other goods and
| services such as "food" or "entertainment" or "rent".
| _Some_ of us are doing well enough to have room for a
| garden, and the time to tend it. This is by no means the
| majority.
|
| How many of your peers would know one end of a modern
| combine harvester from the other? Probably very few, if you
| live in the city.
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder how many illustrators already lost their jobs once
| clipart took off starting in the 90s.
|
| Many newsletters/newspapers of bygone era had an
| artist/doodler to do little sketches which got replaced by
| clipart in many cases.
| passion__desire wrote:
| If that is the main issue, why are artists hiding behind the
| pique that "when I create art, it is full of soul,
| experience, blood and sweat" Just say that you need a way to
| make money and these models are replacing us.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Because that argument is as old as the written word, and it
| works exactly as well now as every time in the past (not at
| all).
|
| Every job being automated requires its own "we're unique"
| pitch to get any pity points.
| vanadium1st wrote:
| This is a hundredth time in history when technology
| progressed and artists had to learn new ways to make money.
| I've learned art in art school - none of the jobs that my art
| teachers had in their youth are relevant right now. The
| tools, the pricing, the workflow, the clients requests and
| expectations are all different. You can keep some of the
| skill, but you still need to learn and adapt to the new
| reality. Sometimes it takes 5, sometimes 15 years, but the
| job of the artist is always transforming.
|
| The illustrator from the article is probably drawing in
| Procreate with an Ipad. Probably doing her promotion on
| social media and doing business with her clients remotely.
| All of those are recent technological advancements that
| appeared in her lifetime and completely outperformed the
| previous way to do commercial illustration. Illustrators that
| worked before that had to learn those new ways, or lose their
| jobs. This happened dozens of time in history. Now is the
| turn for current illustrators to adapt.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| But none of that addresses fundamental changes to the
| market structure. How can a beginner artist possibly get
| traction in a marketplace where people only pay for premium
| names or pay dirt for beautiful art that's 90% of what they
| want. You said yourself most clients are willing to settle
| if the price is right, and you can't really beat free.
| geoelectric wrote:
| I see a pretty clear analogy to the various industries that
| felt threatened by home video and audio recording improving to
| the point of being able to make copies quickly and without
| significant degradation--particularly when disc ripping at 20x+
| became a thing and time wasn't even a barrier.
|
| A person who can clone a style and crank out illustrations at
| human speed is a very different thing than an automated process
| that can do it immediately on request, in minutes or seconds.
| If nothing else, the latter is a huge efficiency gain for being
| able to self-serve, as it would allow an editor to trial
| different illustrative approaches without all the back and
| forth contracting out to a human would require.
|
| Personally, I think what this will do most is convince artists
| not to put galleries of their work suitable for training
| online.
|
| The Redditor identified in the article posted a new comic art
| model based on James Daly III (this is mentioned at the end of
| an article with a link). The Redditor's comment in that post
| implies Daly was chosen specifically because they had a gallery
| of easily consumable training images all in one place.
|
| I have no idea what the minimum effort would be to make the
| images less useful for training, but I foresee a lot of
| obnoxious watermarks in our future as people try to do so.
| mwlp wrote:
| In sophomore year of college, I came across a Japanese
| illustrator who sold sticker packs for messenger apps. I liked
| their art style a lot, to the point where I themed my entire
| computer setup (wallpaper/terminal/editor) around their work.
| Some friends and I worked on a project for an information
| retrieval class and their art continued to be a centerpiece for
| the website's theme, and we even jokingly snuck an image into our
| final paper.
|
| As much as I loved their style, it seemed they rarely put out new
| content. A few weeks ago I trained a SD embedding on their work--
| it was the coolest thing ever. I thought back to the class
| project, how I "stole" one of their artworks to use as the
| favicon. "Nobody outside this class will see this", I thought.
| But a pixel art anime girl wearing headphones was perfect
| branding for the app. "If I ever decide to publish this project,
| maybe I'll commission the artist for an official logo", I thought
| at the time. Now I wonder if I'd just use the SD embedding...
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Curious who the illustrator is?
| mwlp wrote:
| https://twitter.com/mhug_ https://mhug.tumblr.com/
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| And after all those words you still haven't credited the
| illustrator.
| mwlp wrote:
| I'm sure with a bit of scrolling you can find it. Just a few
| more words.
| throwaway12245 wrote:
| Thing I don't get is people post on public internet and then
| somehow expect that that information is somehow protected from
| uses that they don't want. If you don't want your data mis-used,
| don't post it on the internet.
| ketzo wrote:
| Well, this is a weird argument. There are lots of things that
| are posted on the internet that are illegal to re-post
| elsewhere without attribution/payment. That's, like... all of
| internet copyright law.
| ljf wrote:
| Where did she post the images she created?
| gdubs wrote:
| Feels like there's a difference between artists as drops in a
| vast ocean of training data, vs explicitly creating a model on
| one person's work. And I think the conversation would benefit
| from not conflating the two.
|
| I'm sort of a copyright 'moderate' I suppose. I think people
| should get paid for their work, and trying to just rip-off a
| single person's style (and I'm not at all saying this particular
| example was nefarious in intent) just feels gross. But I also
| think too much baggage and we stifle new ideas an innovations.
|
| However, I also think that most of the conversation around large
| models like StableDiffusion lack an understanding of how these
| models actually work. There's this misconception that they're a
| kind of 'collage machine'. The contribution of individual artists
| in these base models are like drops in a vast vast ocean. [edit:
| I repeat myself; recovering from Covid, forgive me.] They take
| this incredibly large set of digitized human creativity, and in
| turn we all get this amazing tool: a synthesizer for imagination.
|
| Anyway, just my personal opinion. It's become a very 'us vs
| them', lines-in-the-sand argument these days, and it'd be great
| if the conversation could be less heated and more philosophical.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Hey, we want to use machines to steal people's creative work,
| take away their jobs in the future, and create more algorithm
| generated garbage since it worked so well for news sites and
| promoting videos/posts/social media. We also want to pretend
| that computer generated graphics are created by an 'artist' for
| the sole purpose of being able to assign copyright to our
| machine works, but be able to ignore artists and copyright in
| every other way.
|
| Why do people seem to have a strong opinion against this? It's
| just stealing the most intimate thing humans create (art) so
| that we can create soulless algorithmic versions of it for our
| own uses because evil artists won't let us just do what we want
| with their works and won't let us profit on their work. Artists
| are jerks.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I can't quite follow what you're saying due to your choice of
| subjects. "It's just stealing the most important thing humans
| create so we can create soulless algorithmic versions of it
| for our own uses..." Who is the 'we' there if not 'humans?' I
| can tell you the machines do not care one way or the other
| about art.
|
| What we're looking at is the ability for humans _who have not
| trained to be artists_ being able to create something similar
| to trained output. That 's what technology does: augment
| human capacity to do something. It's what it always does.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > We also want to pretend that computer generated graphics
| are created by an 'artist' for the sole purpose of being able
| to assign copyright to our machine works
|
| The current IP rights system allows for work for hire,
| assignments. Reframing it to "I commissioned an AI"
| obliterates any debate about who owns what. When you
| commission the rights of what is created is assigned to you,
| for this machine model, just add that clarity in the TOS and
| its a done deal.
| leereeves wrote:
| Creating art similar to another artist's work isn't stealing
| when humans do it, why would it be stealing when machines do
| it?
|
| (Unless the result is too similar, like the Wonder Woman
| image generated by Stable Diffusion shown in the article, in
| which case it's "stealing" whether created by human or
| machine.)
| manholio wrote:
| Because machines are not humans, and shouldn't enjoy the
| benefits of fair use.
|
| Copyright law exists to balance the interests of the people
| that make up the society, not some abstract caricatural
| embodiment in algorithmic form.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Should humans using machines enjoy the benefit of fair
| use?
| manholio wrote:
| Sure, if you build your own model, train it on
| copyrighted works, then use it to create art; or if you
| use someone else's model which properly license its
| copyrighted sources, and use that to create art. In both
| cases your output is a new creative work sufficiently
| different from its parents to not constitute infringement
| and enjoy its own copyright protection.
|
| However, the model creator/distributor will never be able
| to claim fair use on the model itself, which is choke
| full of unlicensed material and can only exist if trained
| on such material. It's not really a subtle or
| particularly difficult legal distinction, in traditional
| terms it's like an artistic collage (model output) vs a
| database of copyrighted works (trained model).
|
| The trained model _is not_ a sufficiently different work
| that stands on its own, in fact it is just a compressed
| algorithmic representation of the works used to train it,
| legally speaking _it is_ those works.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| In what way is the model chock full of unlicensed
| material? It was trained on unlicensed material, but I
| don't think you're ever going to be able to find a
| forensic auditor who can tease individual works out of
| the weights in a model.
|
| You can't reasonably assert that a model encodes
| individual works of copyrighted material in any way
| meaningful for copyright. Not without a change to the
| law.
| manholio wrote:
| Obfuscation is not a valid defense against copyright
| infringement. If my database contains full encrypted
| copies of unlicensed works and I distribute keys to my
| customers for parts of those works, no forensic auditor
| will ever prove the full extent of my infringement
| without learning the full keyset. But I would argue that
| reproduction of even a single instance of an unlicensed
| non trivial fragment of a copyrighted work would taint
| that entire database.
|
| In the same way in AI a crafted prompt that creates
| striking similarities to a well known work, like this
| example here, is suficient proof that the model embeds
| unlicensed works; using a copyrighted work for training
| models is just another form of commercial exploitation
| that the original author should be compensated for.
| fragmede wrote:
| Misconception? I mean, if it talks like one and quacks like a
| collage machine, that's kinda what it is. It's just using an
| infinite (well, 4 GiB) magazine reel to cut out from.
| soraki_soladead wrote:
| > Anyway, just my personal opinion. It's become a very 'us vs
| them', lines-in-the-sand argument these days, and it'd be great
| if the conversation could be less heated and more
| philosophical.
|
| It's heated and less philosophical because many artists are
| worried about their livelihood while a multi-billion dollar
| company is working towards making them obsolete often using
| their own work.
|
| I don't understand the confusion people have towards this
| issue.
| lbotos wrote:
| > many artists are worried about their livelihood while a
| multi-billion dollar company is working towards making them
| obsolete often using their own work.
|
| You do realize that most commercial art is "art for hire" and
| in this very story some of the examples trained were not
| owned by the artist.
|
| Multi-billion dollar companies _already do this_. Hire artist
| to draw Corporate IP. Corp owns and can do whatever they want
| with it. Maybe they hire that artist again. Maybe they hire
| someone else and they share the work in a reference folder.
| allturtles wrote:
| But now they (maybe) get to skip the "hire arist" step.
| Which, from the point-of-view of the artists, is the most
| important part.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| The distinction I think is that the multi-billion dollar
| company working towards making artists obsolete by using
| their own work didn't pay any of these artists for that IP.
| At least with hiring an artist to draw corporate IP, an
| artist has to relinquish their rights to that work
| explicitly and are paid for those rights.
| fragmede wrote:
| Are we talking about Stable Diffusion or GitHub Copilot here?
| soraki_soladead wrote:
| I'm not convinced there's a difference.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > Feels like there's a difference between artists as drops in a
| vast ocean of training data, vs explicitly creating a model on
| one person's work.
|
| I don't.
|
| Stability.ai did the big training sets and it is coincidence
| that it remembers the names and categories accurately.
|
| If you want to leverage this tool more fine tuned then you add
| these modules with more accurate naming.
|
| I would be for some way to compensate artists, like if the use
| of a module gave them a royalty, but I don't think it is an
| ethical, legal, or social norm to enforce. If it happens in a
| uncircumventable way, I would be for it. If it doesn't, I'm for
| that too.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Screw one person? A great offense. Screw _lots of people at
| once_? A great innovation.
| leereeves wrote:
| Great innovations do tend to "screw lots of people". Cars put
| most buggy makers out of business. Light bulbs, candlemakers.
| The computer, human computers. The internet, journalists.
|
| AI promises to be a particularly disruptive innovation, but I
| don't think anyone can or will stop it. Instead, we should
| think about improving society so that the promise of AI
| benefits everyone and not simply a select few.
| meowface wrote:
| You have a point, but it's also how art works in general.
| Most artists draw inspiration from a conglomeration of
| hundreds/thousands of other artists. If an artist draws
| inspiration from one and only one artist, they're just a
| plagiarist.
|
| (Not necessarily saying that clears up any potential legal or
| ethical issue with generative image models training on
| artists' work.)
| itronitron wrote:
| Why do you think artists draw inspiration from other
| artists?
| axus wrote:
| An artist who's never seen art is like an AI with no
| training data
| lancesells wrote:
| But these aren't artists and this isn't art. This is fast
| food. This is content for articles and technology for
| startups to become the middelman for yet another thing.
|
| There will be art coming from these tools at some point but
| right now it's creatively bankrupt illustrations driven by
| curiousity and lots of creatively bankrupt people.
| shafoshaf wrote:
| Yet. As "real" artists start using these generations to
| leapfrog their projects, at some point, how is this
| different from someone studying a style and producing
| something in that style with that addition of actual
| "art?"
| itronitron wrote:
| That's like expecting a chef to take inspiration from a
| fast food menu. It might happen but it's more likely that
| the chef already knows what makes fast food taste good
| and can develop a new menu based on their fundamental
| knowledge.
| t-writescode wrote:
| The fundamental knowledge they gained by looking at
| thousands upon thousands of previous bits of information;
| and, after today, that collection of insights is going to
| include auto-generated artwork, as well.
| mordae wrote:
| In the end, you are not going to be paid for drawing everything
| all over again. You are going to get paid for devising a unique
| style to match the creative vision of the movie, series, book
| or whatever and for tweaking the machine outputs.
|
| There is a chance that style will become copyright-able. Well,
| eventually common style banks will appear.
| manholio wrote:
| It doesn't really matter: the AI model is a compressed
| representation of copyrighted works processed by a generic,
| non-artistic algorithm specifically engineered to extract the
| artistic features of such works.
|
| Conceptually, it's very similar to running lossy JPEG over a
| single copyrighted work versus a giant folder of works from
| different artists, then shipping that compressed collection to
| you customers so they cut and paste sections of those works in
| their collages. The output your customers create with this tool
| might be sufficiently original to warant copyright protection
| and fair use, but your algorithmic distribution of the original
| works (the model) is a clear copyright violation, it doesn't
| matter if it affects a single artist or thousands.
| johnthewise wrote:
| How do you copyright a style though?
| lbotos wrote:
| > your algorithmic distribution of the original works (the
| model) is a clear copyright violation
|
| Depends on if it's considered "transformative" enough. If
| Google can cache thumbnails for search, how is an AI model
| not a "search database+algorithm?"
|
| That said, I do expect that SD will be shut down for
| copyright infringement at some point because you are right,
| the model does have a bunch of copyrighted material in it and
| Disney's lawyers will probably come swifter and more prepared
| than the defense.
| manholio wrote:
| As a general rule, the fair use thumbnails enjoy is very
| limited, only in certain jurisdictions, and only for very
| specific use-cases.
|
| An universal art-production machine that can compete in the
| market place with the original artist - and indeed crush
| them on productivity and price - certainly does not qualify
| as fair use.
| treis wrote:
| >AI model is a compressed representation of copyrighted works
|
| But it's not because you can't get a copy of the copyrighted
| works back out.
| simion314 wrote:
| I think painters also copy each other styles , or make copy of
| popular works, artists don't like this but I did not seen
| people demanding "do not use this art style because XYZ created
| it",
|
| For me, just a regular person, the art is not something an
| soulless machine can generate or a monkey with a camera, the
| intent and mind is important. So a guy can ask an AI to create
| a malformed portrait of some subject with some artist style ,
| the value of the art is in the subject,theme and not the style
| IMO. Like if you ask for a portrait of X steping on Y dead
| body, dressed in Z and with M,N,P the artistic value is in your
| idea behind this and not in the pixels.
|
| I remember similar complaints when digital art started to get
| popular, that is not real art , that you just move pixels
| around
| i_like_apis wrote:
| This Hollie Mengert's style is (nice, but) not at all original.
| There are thousands of cartoons that look exactly like this. You
| could never even tell that anything like this is similar to "her"
| style.
|
| But, even if she did have a distinctive style, there is nothing
| illegal or unethical about learning that style and producing your
| own similar artwork, whether you call it "in the style of", or
| not.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >This Hollie Mengert's style is (nice, but) not at all
| original. There are thousands of cartoons that look exactly
| like this. You could never even tell that anything like this is
| similar to "her" style.
|
| Good point. As the article itself says, her style is explicitly
| based on Disney. This isn't like, say, Cubism, a style
| (intentionally) very different from the contemporary norm, and
| nothing like anything that had come before.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| > not at all original.
|
| > But, even if she did have a distinctive style
|
| This is some rough criticism of an artist who's dedicated their
| profession and life to art.
|
| > is (nice, but)
|
| This made it all OK!
| stavros wrote:
| I don't know this specific artist, but the fact that someone
| dedicated their profession and life to art doesn't mean
| they're necessarily good.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| I didn't make this claim that someone would be good just
| because of the amount of time spent, the claim I made that
| is harsh criticism to make when they have.
|
| For example if you just started strength training, have
| been at it for just a few weeks and someone said "you're
| not very strong" that's not harsh criticism because you
| just started, but if you've been strength training for
| 10-20 years and someone said "you're not very strong" that
| criticism hits different right?
|
| Does it make sense what I am saying now?
|
| This artist will probably read these HN comments, and I'm
| struck by how cruel the comments are to someone who's just
| out there creating wonderful content, didn't ask for any of
| this, so many of you here do not care about how she feels.
|
| I also call into question the ability of these HN
| commenter's competence at critiquing art.
| stavros wrote:
| Ah, yes, that clarifies it, thank you. I agree.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| It's not an art critique.
|
| If she reads it, hopefully she understands the lens of
| the language. Her style is good, and evidently assiduous.
|
| Everything said remains relevant.
| bombcar wrote:
| Or they could dedicate years and be good (or great!) and
| still not unique.
|
| In fact, the better they get the less likely they are to be
| unique as more people will imitate their style.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Does whether they're good or not actually have any bearing
| on the legality or morality of copying their work?
| i_like_apis wrote:
| It's not rough. Her art is nice. And I've also seen a lot of
| other work that looks like it. Years dedicated to the
| profession or not.
|
| Maybe she's closer to the origin of the style than most?
|
| Anyway I spent all my life writing code and I'm not upset
| when someone uses patterns I came up with, especially if they
| credit me.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| My dad once told me about when he was a kid, some Christmas
| specials would only be played a few times on CBC right before
| Christmas. If you missed them, you had to wait a year. He said
| that became a tradition.
|
| When he went to share his tradition with us, he was a bit
| bothered by the idea of "get it on VHS!" He actually protested
| the idea. "I didn't want you watching it at any time. It should
| be a tradition." And indeed it became a tradition for my brothers
| and I.
|
| My kids are 3 and 5 and "Nightmare Before Christmas" was a huge
| hit last Halloween. My kids wanted to watch it 3 or 4 times that
| Halloween week. It's available for streaming so that was easy.
| But then they watched it in November. And January. And a bunch in
| the spring and summer. ...And they never asked for it this year.
|
| There's a quality bestowed through scarcity. When you have it all
| the time, on-demand, there is no scarcity. When you can generate
| art instantly, in any style, of anything, I think it stops being
| exciting. For example, I don't think the concept of "ahahaha
| look, it's the Avengers but as Muppets!" or "It's me, but as a
| Simpson's character!" will have any amusement value by next year.
|
| Maybe I should be asking Gene Roddenberry but I'll ask all of
| you: do you think there's something lost by eliminating scarcity?
| gopalv wrote:
| > If you missed them, you had to wait a year.
|
| This is literally the intro section to Chuck Klosterman's
| Nineties - about the number of people who watched Seinfeld and
| those that missed it, just missed it.
|
| > There's a quality bestowed through scarcity.
|
| There's a depth to scarcity, but your kids are going to watch
| way more things growing up than you did and you have no idea
| what that means for them.
|
| I get that you aren't able to pass on that "value the thing you
| hold, not the two you can get later" sort of commitment to a
| single thing.
|
| But that's valuing the only true scarce thing left in my life
| at least - my time and attention.
|
| I remember feeling the "post-scarcity" thing going to a library
| for the first time in the US.
|
| I used to buy books and read them, before I came to the US.
| Each book was a hard choice on whether to spend money on it or
| buy something else.
|
| I now decide to read through a book based on whether I want to
| spend the time, not the money.
|
| Unless I'm going to be immortal, there's no fixing that
| scarcity (and I get how young people/kids don't get that part
| at all - their life is endless from where they are).
|
| Maybe do a little better so that my 70s aren't spent in a bed,
| but in a park outdoors reading.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I really appreciate your response because it argues with my
| point and yet resonates with me. I think there's truth to
| what you're saying. Perhaps that "tradition" I'm seeking is,
| in a way, obsolete, and my kids are faced with an entirely
| different (and maybe better) problem: what to spend their
| time on?
|
| I'll add one thing this made me think of: when I was a kid,
| my family computer and Game Boy had a fixed number of games.
| Getting a new game was a big deal. I took it seriously and I
| scraped the fun out of every game thoroughly. Once I got to
| college and got some money, I ended up with the "I have ten
| thousand Steam games and I don't feel motivated to stick with
| any of them" problem.
|
| Not totally sure it's related, but I thought of that.
| blooalien wrote:
| > ... "I ended up with the "I have ten thousand Steam games
| and I don't feel motivated to stick with any of them"
| problem."
|
| For my own personal instance of that _exact_ problem, I 've
| chosen to install a limited number of games at a time which
| fit into my current set of interests in gaming, and choose
| from among those when I feel like playing a game, until
| each has been thoroughly explored and enjoyed to it's
| fullest before uninstalling that one or two specific fully-
| explored game(s) to replace with another. Works for me ...
| YMMV.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| My younger sibling and I are quite far apart age wise and
| we grew up on other sides of this divide. When I grew up,
| families would buy VHS tapes for kids or record shows and
| kids were known to watch the same shows over and over
| again. Everyone in my cohort has memories of watching that
| one movie or that one show so many times that their parents
| were utterly sick of it (and of messing up a recording of
| the last episode of their favorite show.) My sibling grew
| up in the age of rental DVDs and Youtube and the idea of
| running out of content to them was laughable.
|
| But as children we were both limited by our mental
| development, time, and attention spans. My sibling just
| watched the same Youtube video over and over just like I
| watched the same VHS tape over and over again. As much as
| material conditions change, humans tend to stay the same.
| jobigoud wrote:
| Your story reminds me of a newspaper we have in France "La
| bougie du sapeur", it's only published on February 29th.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Bougie_du_Sapeur
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I'm sure there was something nice about hunting down big animal
| once a year and having nice feast by the fire next to the cave.
| fragmede wrote:
| Absolutely. But where scarcity has been abused for domination
| and power over others, as in food or oil or money scarcity,
| it's not a good thing and whatever we can do to bring those
| systems down is, in my book, good.
| allturtles wrote:
| In addition to oversaturation, on-demand access to things can
| also lead to a sort of paralysis: the fact that I have access
| to shows on demand all the time means I _almost never actually
| watch them_. After all I can always do something else (read a
| book, browse HN) and watch that thing some other time. Whereas
| I will watch live TV (Jeopardy, sports), because I have to turn
| on the TV at a particular time to see it.
|
| Your line of thought "rhymes" in an interesting way with Matt
| Levine's column today about how illiquidity sometimes has value
| [0]:
|
| > Another, funnier sort of financial innovation is about
| subtracting liquidity. If you can buy and sell something
| whenever you want at a clearly observable market price, that is
| efficient, sure, but it can also be annoying. Consider the
| following financial product:
|
| > 1. You give me the password to your brokerage account. > 2. I
| change it. > 3. You can't look at your brokerage account for
| one year, because you don't have the password. > 4. At the end
| of the year, I give you back your password and you pay me $5.
|
| > Is this a good product? For me, sure, I got $5 for like one
| minute of work.[1] For you, I would argue, it's also pretty
| good. For one thing, you avoid the stress of looking at your
| brokerage account all the time and worrying when it goes down.
| For another thing, you avoid the popular temptation of bad
| market timing: You can't panic and sell stocks after they fall,
| or get greedy and buy more after they rise, because I have your
| password.
|
| [0]: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/matt-levines-
| money...
| bsenftner wrote:
| Perhaps, finally, the persistent over emphasis on the expensive
| yet empty production value will give way to _content composed
| of moral catch-22 's and the richly described personalities
| enduring such situations_, what is traditionally considered
| _story first_ film making. No gloss is necessary when the story
| is strong.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Others answered you in many interesting ways, so I'll just try
| to address this:
|
| > _Maybe I should be asking Gene Roddenberry but I 'll ask all
| of you: do you think there's something lost by eliminating
| scarcity?_
|
| I'd like to think Gene would tell you, there's always going to
| be a scarcity of _something_ - the adventure is in chasing it,
| but it 's much more enjoyable when you aren't _coerced into it_
| by the need to feed and shelter yourself and your close ones.
| Basically, scarcity of food, healthcare, housing and
| opportunities is bad. Scarcity of unique experiences and
| relationships is enjoyable, and it 's always going to be there.
|
| I emphasize with how you feel about your kids, but I think this
| is less about scarcity per se, and more about your kids not
| wanting to participate in _your_ tradition. It 's possible they
| still might - after all, these kinds of traditions aren't
| really about a movie, but about the time spent together.
| Perhaps when they grow up, they'll voluntarily abstain from
| rewatching that movie on their own, outside Halloween.
|
| Personal and much more childish example: in my more naive
| years, I've established a tradition, and roped a few friends
| into it, of watching "V for Vendetta" on the 5th of November.
| That was way back when the "oh fuck, the Internet is here" meme
| was funny, and not a stuff of nightmares. It was a completely
| random and voluntarily tradition, that lasted a couple years
| before naturally dissolving. My point being, the availability
| of the movie had little to do with it - it was all about
| voluntary choice of a group of people to do something together.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| Certainly something is lost by removing scarcity... at the same
| time, once that scarcity is gone, it can't be restored short of
| civilizational collapse. There's no way to put the streaming
| genie back in the bottle, nor the Stable Diffusion genie.
| PuddleCheese wrote:
| Let's not conflate ethical inputs for full-out "undo" panic.
|
| I don't see many people saying that we need to "un-release"
| anything.
|
| What I do see is a want for ethical considerations for
| vulnerable parties be part of the discussion. I don't think
| consent is too large a barrier, especially since the music-
| focused variant of these tools currently has the developers
| walking on egg shells to avoid aggravating people with deeper
| pockets.
|
| Instead what I see is the borderline criminalization of the
| people who were forced into the role of gatekeeping to be
| able to support themselves in the span of a few months
| because someone said "We can!" and apparently didn't watch
| Jurassic Park.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Yeah, I think you're 100% right. There is no "should we do
| this?" question here. Like every technology ever invented,
| it's now here.
| bugfix-66 wrote:
| It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that
| Napster exists.
|
| _Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It
| originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on
| digital audio file distribution. Audio songs shared on the
| service were typically encoded in the MP3 format. It was
| founded by Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker, and Hugo Saez
| Contreras. As the software became popular, the company ran
| into legal difficulties over copyright infringement. It
| ceased operations in 2001 after losing a wave of lawsuits
| and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002._
|
| Use of the output of systems like Copilot or Stable
| Diffusion becomes a violation of copyright. The weight
| tensors are illegal to possess, just like it's illegal to
| possess leaked Intel source code.
|
| If you use the art in your product, on your website, etc.,
| you risk legal action.
|
| The companies that train these systems can't distribute
| them without risking legal action. So they won't do it.
| It's expensive to train these models.
|
| It will always exist in the black-market underground, but
| the civilized world makes it illegal.
|
| That's where this is going, I hope. Best case scenario.
| PuddleCheese wrote:
| Just because it's here doesn't mean it can't be modified
| going forward, and that we have to surrender to any and all
| ability to regulate anything. Fatalism can be attractive if
| you don't want to think about regulation, though, I
| suppose.
| operator-name wrote:
| Regulation can't trump individual morals, and is driven
| by collective ethics. Deepfakes still exist and are
| actively being made and developed, even though many
| platforms have regulated it. Ignoring the difficulty of
| passing a hotly debated premise, regulating would only
| limit the actions of those who align with the regulation
| - as the article demonstrates even if Google are cautious
| to release their DreamBooth model and specifics it
| doesn't take much for someone to replicate it, ignoring
| (or ignorant) of such concerns.
|
| This is obviously something that we're going to have to
| collectively figure out - the technology is here and the
| technology is still being developed. Either we adapt our
| thinking or consider it taboo. Anything else (such as
| restricting usage to a "trusted subset") is just delaying
| the inevitable.
| lelandfe wrote:
| I have some friends whose young children are addicted to
| watching videos of _other_ kids opening presents on YouTube.
|
| I've been trying to articulate why I reacted negatively to that
| concept, and I think you nailed it.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I have that exact problem here. I want my kids to have
| latitude and freedom with what they watch and do. But their
| child brains need adult moderation. They literally want every
| day to be Christmas, and they do not understand how that
| might "burn out" their synapses on things like the act of
| waiting, being excited, and eventually getting new gifts.
| kixiQu wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
|
| Valuable material in the disciplines of aesthetics and
| philosophy of technology on this.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| > do you think there's something lost by eliminating scarcity?
|
| What a silly question. How does an extension of an already
| bottomless internet of content that you couldn't consume over
| the course of hundreds of lifetimes come anywhere remotely
| close to ending food insecurity?
| furyofantares wrote:
| > do you think there's something lost by eliminating scarcity?
|
| Certainly whatever these models can output just from text plus
| a bit of work/skill on the prompt plus a bit of selection will
| not be very valuable.
|
| But it will see applications that don't need something very
| valuable, and where otherwise a piece of art would be not be
| affordable. I run a daily word puzzle game, and every daily
| puzzle comes with an image that helps tie the theme together.
| This is a low value piece of art that's nearly free for me to
| make, which wouldn't exist otherwise.
|
| But the other thing is that people will make scarce and
| valuable things using generated art. Right now we're seeing
| tons of art where the direct output of a model is posted after
| less than an hour of work on prompts and selection by a person.
|
| But when more people start combining all of these tools,
| spending dozens of hours on an image that's made out of
| components that are generated using AI tools, and other
| components that are manually edited or created, I think we're
| going to see a lot of brand new art and brand new skills.
|
| There's always going to be people who pour their creativity,
| skills, and time into something. I can't wait to see what
| people can make when they do that while incorporating all these
| new tools that are being created into their process.
| melagonster wrote:
| I hope we can distinguish it from other normal AI artworks, I
| very I don't have this ability:(
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| How completely unsurprising - a person who grew up in a country
| most famous for chop yo dolla gives two fucks about the context
| of achieving his personal desires at the expense of those
| actually willing to do the work. It's his own goddamn narrative.
| I hope Disney bankrupts him as a consequence to his ignorant and
| selfish actions.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Does anyone else feel painfully unsure of their opinion on all of
| this? I honestly don't recall the last major thing I've felt this
| completely uncertain about. All my opinions generally lean in one
| direction at least a little bit.
|
| On one hand, I think it might be ridiculous for an artist to get
| to "own" a "style" of art. In the first example on this page,
| none of the art looks plagiarized. It looks like what every
| artist has done: been inspired by or borrowed ideas from other
| sources.
|
| But on the other hand, if left unchecked, this will further harm
| our creative industries. We're going to be starving out our
| artists because robots can generate art _far_ more easily than
| they can. If this continues, it disincentivizes anyone from
| trying the already very uphill battle of making a living by
| creating art. One might say, "capitalism, baby! we don't need
| those artists, because we have AI and look at what it can do in
| seconds!" But I think that even if AI can "discover" new art
| styles and trends, there's something lost by humans not doing it.
|
| I don't think AI will be able to replace human creativity for
| discovering new paradigms as fast as it will replace human
| application of existing paradigms. And by doing the latter really
| well with AI, we're killing our ability to do the former. We'll
| end up with a sterile art trajectory.
|
| I guess my uncertainty is: something about this _feels wrong_ and
| yet I cannot point to any one moral/ethical thing that feels
| wrong about it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Oh, agreed. This is Brave New World territory.
|
| My suggestion is to accept it as a thing that will be here and
| tune our expectations appropriately. Because if it is made
| illegal, it will be one of those things that's illegal-but-
| omnipresent, like sharing music on BitTorrent... The Western
| copyright regime doesn't blanket the world, and the advantages
| of these tools are so big that places it doesn't reach will
| just use them. The fact that this story is about a Nigerian
| engineer in Canada using software developed in San Francisco
| running on some computers in Northern Virginia to ape the
| artistic style of an artist from LA, none of these parties
| having ever met each other, indicates how empty the bottle is
| the genie used to live in.
| PuddleCheese wrote:
| Artists don't generally try to OWN styles or prevent others
| from using them. They are the result of years of training,
| adapting, etc. They put their own spin on it. It's effectively
| a brand of that artist, and it's generally beholden to a sort
| of "honor" code that you'll likely get called out for breaching
| if you're flagrantly trying to pass it off as your own.
|
| The core issue illustrating this is when people use an artist
| name in a prompt. If these models did not exist, if you wanted
| something in that style, you would likely be reaching out to
| that individual, or asking someone else to try to emulate
| someone. In that instance, the emulation is generally
| accountable. In these instances, there is no accountability
| towards the algorithm, as it's not making creative choices, to
| say nothing of moral or ethical ones. That was done by the
| individuals with venture-capital backing, using research
| loopholes to fund the legally questionable scraping of this
| data in the first place, which in some instances, violates the
| EULAs of the sites they were scraped from.
|
| At the end of the day, these artists, styles, etc. would not
| exist without the artists who had no say in their
| "democratizing art".
| MathYouF wrote:
| > I don't think AI will be able to replace human creativity for
| discovering new paradigms as fast as it will replace human
| application of existing paradigms. And by doing the latter
| really well with AI, we're killing our ability to do the
| former. We'll end up with a sterile art trajectory.
|
| This may actually end up making the few artists creative enough
| to create bold new art styles even more valuable, if they can
| basically not release their art and hide it behind a model.
|
| Though I guess anyone with access to that model's output could
| then just generate a few samples and train on those, so maybe
| not.
| mdaEyebot wrote:
| Invictus0 wrote:
| It will change the landscape of the art market, but it won't
| destroy it. Digital art will be less valuable, canvases and
| sculptures will become more valuable.
| MathYouF wrote:
| The cost of materials and transportation and time using the
| expensive CNC machine will be the major costs of sculpture.
| Generating the same quality 3D models is at the very furthest
| 18 months away. And animating and rigging the models and
| giving them auto-generated RL policies will surely come very
| quickly next.
| fleddr wrote:
| I'm thinking a little bit of empathy doesn't hurt. Reason from
| Hollie's point of view. She didn't ask for this and was working
| on cool stuff:
|
| https://holliemengert.com/
|
| Next, somebody grabs her work (copyrighted by the clients she
| works for), without permission. Then goes on to try and create an
| AI version of her style. When confronted, the guy's like: "meh,
| ah well".
|
| Doesn't matter if it's legal or not, it's careless and plain
| rude. Meanwhile, Hollie is quite cool-headed and reasonable about
| it. Not aggressive, not threatening to sue, just expressing
| civilized dislike, which is as reasonable as it gets.
|
| Next, she gets to see her name on the orange site, reading things
| like "style is bad and too generic", a wide series of cold-
| hearted legal arguments and "get out of the way of progress".
|
| How wonderful. Maybe consider that there's a human being on the
| other end? Here she is:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWiwZLJVwi4
|
| A kind and creative soul, which apparently is now worth 2 hours
| of GPU time.
|
| I too believe AI art is inevitable and cannot be stopped at this
| point. Doesn't mean we have to be so ruthless about it.
| makz wrote:
| Call me Luddite but this has gone too far, please stop it
| already.
| irrational wrote:
| How can it be stopped? Seriously, is there any way to put the
| open source genie back into the bottle?
| swordsmith wrote:
| So with these generative models running rampant, what's to even
| motivate aspiring artists to develop and hone their craft, if
| their years of work can be copied so easily?
|
| Maybe it doesn't practically matter, because some art style
| generative model can be developed and feed into the diffusion
| model so it can generate art of new styles.
| lurquer wrote:
| One way to consider copyright: when the concept gained traction
| 16th and 17th centuries, the doctrine existed to protect the
| author's ability to get someone to finance the printing of his
| work. That is reproduction was costly and required an investment
| by a printer. The printer faced more economic harm than the
| author if he spent $20,000 typesetting and printing a thousand
| copies of something only to find a competitor beat him to the
| market. To be clear, the copyright attaches to the author, but it
| is only valuable because it enables the author to induce a
| printer to publish his work.
|
| Now, as the costs of publishing have dropped to zero, the concept
| is beginning to make less sense.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The Supreme Court of the US is currently deciding if Andy
| Warhol's orange prince[1] violates copyright.
|
| It is essentially a cropped photo, defeatured, plus the color
| orange.
|
| This could be done easily without the help of AI at all, just
| cropping and filtering.
|
| The case is very interesting and grapples with the same
| questions.I highly recommended listening to the oral
| arguments.[2]
|
| I doubt the Andy Warhol Foundation will prevail, but it raises
| all these same questions, without the AI: What constitutes a
| transformative use of prior work?
|
| Can you imbue existing art with new ideas and make it your own?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Prince_(1984)
|
| https://www.oyez.org/cases/2022/21-869
| [deleted]
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I don't really have a stance on the moral or ethical points but
| some of the results in the illustrations included here are
| amazing. If you mixed them up and asked me to identify those
| which were originals and those which where AI generated I would
| fail miserably. That in amazing in my book.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I feel like there are three issues at play here:
|
| -Using her name to describe/advertise the fine-tuned model.
|
| -Using her illustrations to fine-tune the model.
|
| -Using a larger body of potentially unlicensed images to train
| the base model.
|
| For the first, if we had decided that the other steps were fair
| use or whatever, would it be better or worse if the fine-tuned
| model had been made available with no mention of the identity of
| the author of the training images? I'm not sure.
|
| For the second, there is surely a limit after which this sort of
| thing becomes unambiguously unacceptable. Suppose you fine-tune
| so aggressively on a small dataset that eventually the model
| simply reproduces exactly the training images. Now you're
| obviously violating copyright. But where exactly is line before
| that? If I have a base model that was trained on fully licensed
| images, and I make one single gradient descent step using a
| copyrighted image, making imperceptible changes to the model's
| output, surely the resulting images not suddenly in violation. It
| seems to me that the standard should be that if a human were to
| draw the output by hand after looking at the training images,
| would we consider it a violation of copyright? As a thought
| experiment, imagine someone who lacks the ability to draw but can
| instead hand-write the weights of a neural network to produce the
| desired output - it shouldn't matter which process they use.
|
| For the third, what if I spent a long time prompt engineering on
| a model trained entirely on properly licensed data and was able
| to generate a prompt format that produced the outputs we see from
| this fine-tuned model? In other words, for any generative model,
| there is a space of reachable outputs, and it's not so clear that
| these images did not already lie in that space before fine-
| tuning.
| krinchan wrote:
| I mean, they're literally out here training models on Disney's
| copyrighted works. People seem to miss the point that the
| copyright ambiguity can work both ways and the courts are
| almost always on the side of corporate copyright holders.
|
| I posit with a few good NSFW scandals so the legislation can be
| dressed up as protecting the children, Disney will get the
| legislative intervention it wants re: copyright and stable
| diffusion.
|
| I realize that seems pretty US-centric but it's surprising the
| ways Disney can reach internationally to protect it's IP. It'll
| be interesting to see if Stable Diffusion ends up relegated to
| the parts of the Internet outside of the big three
| "jurisdictions" so to speak: US, EU, and China.
| lbotos wrote:
| > But where exactly is line before that?
|
| Unfortunately the line of "fair use" is very blurry and only
| gets clarified in specific instances, with lawyers and humans
| debating if there was damage done.
|
| It's extremely frustrating and these advances are going to
| pressure fair use for sure.
|
| People will generate infringing work with AI and people will
| generate newly copyrightable work with AI. The danger is, as an
| artist, it's hard to trust if the model has given you something
| that is copyrighted as _you_ have not necessarily seen it
| before. (You the human can cite your references, and it 's
| possible you were subliminally influenced, but with SD, generic
| prompts may give you "copyrighted details" that you don't
| know.)
| Imnimo wrote:
| Yeah, definitely. It's more starkly clear with Copilot, where
| you can point to verbatim reproduction of code. And it
| probably helps Stable Diffusion that images are fuzzier, so
| you're less likely to generate something that's close enough
| to be a copyright violation, but there's really no way to be
| certain that your output is not a memorized training example,
| even if it's statistically very unlikely.
| theptip wrote:
| I think this is the right way of chopping the problem space. In
| this case, the artist expressed a preference to not have her
| name used, which seems reasonable, and the author renamed the
| repo to accommodate that.
|
| One could easily imagine the opposite scenario, where the
| artist objects to not being credited.
|
| We are in a weird stage where the indexes into this style space
| are quite weird and ad-hoc; look at all the prompt engineering
| black magic. It's worth noting though that this problem only
| showed up because there weren't many examples of this style in
| the data set; when every frame of every Disney animation is in
| there, it won't need you to refer to one artist's name.
|
| I do wonder if a PR and UI improvement would be to layer a
| language model on top to build the prompt, or perhaps even bake
| this into the model itself, so you can use more generic (and
| possibly iterative) style descriptions instead of having to
| refer to an artist by name. Basically use AI to solve the
| prompt engineering problem too.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| > In other words, for any generative model, there is a space of
| reachable outputs, and it's not so clear that these images did
| not already lie in that space before fine-tuning.
|
| I'm trying to understand what you are saying here. It sounds
| like you are saying that something that doesn't yet exist must
| already exist simply because a model has been created which can
| yield this non-existent thing as an output?
|
| Your example uses properly licensed data as an input but seems
| to imply that creating a model that is capable of producing a
| particular output means that the output in effect already
| exists as a prior work before it has ever been created by
| virtue of the model's ability to create it on command.
|
| I'm probably over-thinking all this.
| Imnimo wrote:
| Well, at some point it's like the monkeys writing
| shakespeare. Instead of a complicated neural network, we
| could have written a program that just outputs random pixel
| values. We'd definitely be able to find all of the outputs of
| Stable Diffusion, as well as all of the works of the original
| artists coming out of that program. It'd just take us a lot
| of waiting and watching.
|
| I don't know that that's enough to constitute "prior art" in
| any meaningful sense, though.
|
| The way I look at it is that the function of Stable Diffusion
| or any other diffusion model is to pare down the output space
| of the "random pixel machine". It learns which regions of
| image space are likely and which are unlikely, and so when
| you sample an image, you tend to get ones that people like
| rather than random noise.
|
| You could imagine an idealized diffusion process whose output
| space is truly continuous and which assigns non-zero
| probability to the entire image space (all possible pixel
| arrangements), with higher probability assigned to "good"
| regions, and lower probability assigned to "bad" regions. If
| I sample from such a model repeatedly, I will eventually (in
| the mathematical sense of probability 1 in the limit) get out
| an image that looks exactly like a Hollie Mengert
| illustration, even if the model has never seen one during
| training. I'll even eventually get out an image that looks
| exactly like an illustration that an unborn artist will
| create in the year 2047.
|
| Now, in practice, it's a little less clear. Are there regions
| of the image space that Stable Diffusion assigns exactly zero
| probability, such that no amount of sampling will ever
| generate that image? Are there real, "good" images that
| Stable Diffusion assigns very low probability such that
| generating them is no better than sampling from the "random
| pixel machine"?
| doodlebugging wrote:
| >you tend to get ones that people like rather than random
| noise.
|
| And you have to consider that your idea of and tastes in
| "art" may be quite different from mine. People actually buy
| and display canvas with random bullshit colors or simple
| shapes or even lines on them that to me, is not art in the
| pure sense but is instead just the output of a lazy person
| marketed to dweebs who need something different for their
| living rooms.
|
| Back to the original discussion - if your earlier point is
| valid, I don't agree myself, then the only one who owns any
| art, product, process, etc is the one who designed that
| model that can be used to create it even if the model was
| created years after the thing they created. None of the
| people who actually created the product or process, etc own
| anything as a result of their efforts. That is wrong.
|
| It is a bit hand-wavey and bullshit mystic like the dumbass
| marketing used by some sculptors who claim they didn't
| really do anything except remove all the wood, stone, clay,
| etc that was hiding the sculpture they created. It was
| always right there carefully concealed in the tree trunk
| and anyone who dinked around with that trunk would've ended
| up creating the same sculpture under that logic. LOL. Jesus
| put it there, I'm only the guy picked to uncover it.
|
| >Are there real, "good" images that Stable Diffusion
| assigns very low probability such that generating them is
| no better than sampling from the "random pixel machine"?
|
| That depends on your definition of "good". Do you mean
| "good enough" that an observer will see a resemblance or is
| it something else? I would think that the output from any
| model will always have an upper limit to what it can
| reproduce that is related to the properties of the combined
| inputs to the model. With more inputs one should see higher
| precision outputs. Like you say though, Stable Diffusion
| probably designates some outputs as near zero probability
| because the input set supports that conclusion for the
| requested output.
| Imnimo wrote:
| >I would think that the output from any model will always
| have an upper limit to what it can reproduce that is
| related to the properties of the combined inputs to the
| model.
|
| I look at it from the other direction. A diffusion model,
| at its heart, is a function that takes an image
| (initially random noise), and produce a slightly "better"
| image, according to its learned concept of "better". You
| turn this crank over and over and out comes a good image.
| But the simplest diffusion model of all is the identity
| function. You feed it random pixels and it outputs them
| unchanged. That model - the "random pixel machine" - can
| trivially output any possible image. The training process
| is paring down its output space to produce more outputs
| that are like the training images, and fewer outputs that
| are unlike them.
|
| So it's not the "upper limit" that training is
| addressing. Creating a model with an upper limit that
| includes all the great works of art humanity will ever
| create is trivial. It's the "lower limit" that's the
| problem - if those outputs are lost in a sea of
| uninteresting noise, you'll never find them. Training is
| the process of raising that lower limit.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| >according to its learned concept of "better".
|
| I'm gonna assume that all the input images fed to the
| process form it's "learned concept of better" (LCoB) so
| that in effect there is nothing random about the outputs.
| Indeed, each successive output becomes an optimization of
| the model fit to the "LCoB". Following that, it may start
| with an initial output that strongly resembles random
| noise but inside that first output will be a non-random
| component that initially fits some part of the LCoB model
| that it is trying to achieve.
|
| Also following that, the lower limit of the process is
| the output of the first step in the process since each
| successive iteration is an optimization towards a model.
| You already have the model noise floor when you run the
| first step. Struggling to take that lower is not smart
| and could be accomplished simply by excluding some part
| of the collection of images used to form it's LCoB.
|
| Does that make sense?
|
| There is nothing random about any of the outputs of this
| if it is model-driven. Stable Diffusion output is model
| driven therefore it is not random at any stage.
|
| In geophysical processing we have to carefully monitor
| outputs from each process to make sure that processing
| artifacts from mathematical operations can not create
| remnant waveforms that can be mistaken for geological
| data that could be used as a basis for drilling an
| expensive well. Data-creata is a real thing. Models are
| used.
|
| Thanks for the discussion.
| Imnimo wrote:
| So the simplified view of a diffusion model is like the
| following (this leaves out the role of the prompt):
|
| -Sample random noise.
|
| -Ask the neural network "Here is a noisy image. What do
| you think it looked like before I added all this noise?"
| (note that you did not form this image by adding random
| noise to an initial image)
|
| -Adjust the pixels of your random noise towards what the
| network said.
|
| -Repeat until there is no noise left.
|
| During training, we take a training image and add noise
| to it. This way we know the "correct" (in scare quotes
| because there are many possible clean images that lead to
| the same noisy image given different realizations of the
| noise) answer to the question in step 2. This is used to
| update the weights of the neural network.
|
| Ultimately, a diffusion model is just a denoiser. A
| denoiser implicitly represents an underlying distribution
| of clean data. The diffusion process used to sample from
| the diffusion model is a clever way of drawing samples
| from that underlying distribution given access only to
| the denoiser.
|
| At sampling time, we have no training image that we add
| noise to. We just sample random noise out of thin air.
| This works because in the limit of large amounts of
| noise, the distribution of "initial image plus lots of
| noise" and "just lots of noise" are the same. You can
| certainly draw an analogy between this initial random
| noise and the uncarved block of marble that the sculptor
| says "contains" a sculpture waiting to be uncovered.
| Given the same noise, the neural network is deterministic
| - it will always produce the same output.
|
| You could even imagine an oracle who can unwind the
| process of the neural network being cranked and tell us
| exactly what initial noise sample would produce any
| desired output. Just like an artist might just draw the
| image that they want rather than waiting for the random
| pixel machine to output it, the oracle could simply set
| the precise values of Stable Diffusion's noise input to
| produce a Hollie Mengert work, rather than sampling
| repeatedly until it found one.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I think that we just described the same process.
|
| >-Sample random noise.
|
| >-Ask ... ...what the network said.
|
| >-Repeat until there is no noise left.
|
| Initially we have noise (random or not doesn't matter)
| and we are trying to find inside that noise a matching
| function to an image that we already have, our model or
| training image. That image may or may not also contain
| some residual noise and as you describe in your iterative
| steps, noise is added to it thus decreasing the signal to
| noise ratio, and the neural network compares the output
| of it's initial or updated image to the "correct answer"
| image and weights the next iteration accordingly so that
| a better match can be obtained. The function itself
| consists of an optimization process designed to minimize
| the residual noise (a de-noiser like you say) between the
| most recent image and our target image.
|
| When you say that you begin with a sample of random noise
| created by your array populating function which is
| assumed to be random but that you have no training image
| to which you are adding noise, that fits the whole
| process but it ignores that you are using the random
| noise image to iteratively produce an output that fits a
| model image created by compiling statistics from multiple
| images to create a target output that is assumed to be
| near noiseless or to have very high signal to noise
| ratio.
|
| If you are trying to use this to "find" Alfred E. Neuman
| in your output the process needs to know what Alfred E.
| Neuman looks like so it can effectively optimize to that
| result. Each iteration denoises based on the known output
| in the model created from the images that it must ingest
| in order to build the model. If you only have a few
| images of Alfred E. Neuman but you have thousands of
| Homer Simpson in your model input dataset, then you will
| have to fight through the tendency of the process to
| converge on Homer Simpson. No matter, you always have a
| priori information that is used to verify the integrity
| of the output. The input is irrelevant whether it is
| random or not since you are looking at an optimization
| process that matches, denoises, and weights iteratively
| until it minimizes an error function in the match and can
| be said to be an optimum, or good match.
|
| This is not particularly new or novel or anything else.
| It is a typical iterative modeling exercise like those
| that have been used for decades but now you have the
| compute power to build a near noise-free target model
| that fits the known data from every source at your
| disposal.
|
| The user who created the Hollie Mengert styled outputs
| could not have hit that target without using a model that
| was designed to create or mimic that type of output. That
| is why he chose to use her work in his process. He liked
| it. Then when he found out that she was not pleased about
| not being consulted and that she didn't have the rights
| to use some of those images then I think he had a come-
| to-Jesus moment that ultimately led him to rename it so
| he could feel better about it. Guilt-tripped him.
|
| Anyway, ethics should be a required part of every
| computer science curriculum especially when private
| personal information is involved.
|
| I'm in the oil and gas industry. It sucks sometimes.
| Fortunately there has been a push to include or require
| ethics training. Maybe one day it will clean up that
| industry. I'm only holding my breath though when I pass a
| refinery.
| Imnimo wrote:
| >The user who created the Hollie Mengert styled outputs
| could not have hit that target without using a model that
| was designed to create or mimic that type of output.
|
| This is the part that I'm not so sure about. The value of
| fine-tuning on Hollie Mengert's work is not so much that
| it enables the model to create that type of output, it's
| that it makes it far less likely to create other types of
| outputs. It narrows down the haystack, but it doesn't
| create the needle.
|
| Similarly, if I set out to find Alfred E. Neuman, but my
| training data has no images from MAD magazine due to
| licensing concerns, will it be possible? It may not be
| possible to use the prompt "Alfred E. Neuman", but maybe
| it's possible to use the prompt "A cartoon drawing of a
| grinning red-headed boy with a gap in his front teeth".
| Images recognizable as Alfred are likely still in the
| model's output space, even if they are not so easily
| found. They are certainly in the output space of the
| "random pixel machine". It's just a question of how hard
| they are to find.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Relevant to #2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33424817
| randyrand wrote:
| A great artist can take these same prompts, look at the same
| input images, and produce the same or even better results.
|
| No one would call that stealing. Copying, yes. Stealing, No. A
| great artist can copy other artist's style's expertly. A large
| part of being an art student is learning how to do exactly this.
|
| Stable Diffusion is just a truly great artist.
| r_murphey wrote:
| I have been a member of a local musicians union for more decades
| than I care to admit. If someone was offering to replace me with
| an AI after a career of dedication to the art, I would worry
| there is a real risk of incidents of devastating loss of income
| if there is no financial cushion. Even if I had not lost any gigs
| yet, I would call a couple of the local union board members to
| discuss it, and I believe this is a concrete situation which the
| local board would take up for discussion.
|
| I'm sure there are good things to come out of AI in the arts,
| especially if it becomes a tool for the artist. But offering to
| put a financially struggling artist out of work with low effort,
| even temporarily, is a nightmare for the artist. Guilds and
| unions [0] [1] have talented artists on boards of directors and
| lawyers on staff who can help them codify some of the issues into
| their standard contract used by member artists. I have seen bands
| fired with no notice when they had used a standard union
| contract. The contract and access to the Union's attorney is the
| only thing that protected them from loss work and not making rent
| that month.
|
| [0] https://graphicartistsguild.org/ [1]
| https://www.usa829.org/About-Our-Union/Categories-Crafts#Sce...
| irrational wrote:
| Why would I want to spend years developing my own art style if I
| know that it can be copied and used by one of these AI engines in
| a few hours? Are we going to end up with less human created
| artwork?
| [deleted]
| bergenty wrote:
| So? It's not a copy of her work, just her style. I see no
| problems here.
| PuddleCheese wrote:
| 1. I like this style of work. I cannot make this style of work.
| I will pay this artist to produce this style of work.
|
| 2. I like this style of work. I cannot make this style of work.
| I will not pay the artist. I will instead take copyrighted
| material, and process it into a result using a machine that is
| not able to ethically refuse.
|
| 2.1. I like this style of work. I cannot make this style of
| work. I will not pay the artist. I will use this model someone
| else made to produce this style of work.
| randyrand wrote:
| Calling it "her" style is part of the problem. "The style she
| uses" would be more appropriate.
|
| ofc that takes longer to say so it will never happen.
| Yizahi wrote:
| I foresee super quick closure of almost all graphic artists in a
| closed and heavily moderated pay per view/use communities. Or
| they will simply starve. This so called A"I" producing a ton a
| derivative art will mess up a lot of industries.
| ronsor wrote:
| If they stay in a closed pay-per-view environment, I have a
| feeling most of them will definitely starve then.
|
| Technology has messed up industries before. Everyone's not
| going to die.
| TMWNN wrote:
| I believe Yizahi is talking about pornographic furries art,
| which is (from what I understand) a _very_ lucrative market
| for artists (regardless of their personal disgust of the
| subject).
| Yizahi wrote:
| We are observing a live example in the OP right now. If you
| are an artist working in some specific style, then even a
| small dataset (just 30 images in the OP) will render future
| works much less desired. Of course big companies have
| compliance rules, reputation and so on, so they won't use
| "gray" art in the production. But the is definitely not
| enough bigcorp contracts for every artist, so smaller less
| known ones would compete basically with themselves. Imagine
| someone choosing between paying for original art X thousands
| of dollars, or generating 80% similar in quality art for
| "free".
|
| PS: after posting my comment above I've realised that by idea
| won't work. Art will become public sooner or later, just scan
| physical medium, or rip drm off the digital one and you will
| get the dataset for NN generator. Well, it will be a huge
| mess. We will see how it will turn out.
| PuddleCheese wrote:
| I mean, the alternative is arguably that artists become
| indentured servants to scraping/training models that benefit
| the people who are doing the scraping/training, at the arguable
| expense of the artist.
| jarrell_mark wrote:
| Artist using Disney trademarks without their permission has style
| taken without their permission
| spicyusername wrote:
| It really does feel like the headline for 1970 - 2070 is going to
| be "Technology desperately tries, but fails, to make the world a
| better place".
|
| What technology has _really_ improved what it is like to be a
| human being, around other human beings, and to lead a fulfilling
| life?
|
| Every "disrupted" industry feels like it just has been replaced
| by a less-human, more unequal, and more dystopian version of
| itself over the past 50 years.
|
| Those who can survive tech jobs seem to have turned out to be the
| least equipped people to properly navigate us towards utopia.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| My Roomba is one of the few pieces of technology I own with no
| downsides to my life. I often think of it as an example of
| technology done right.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| There's been lots of great technological advancements in
| household stuff. Cordless tools come to mind as another.
|
| I think it's when you put a screen on anything that it starts
| the downhill slide.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3pp8y/amazon-buys-roomba-
| co...
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Lol, well I've got the old dumb one that you just push a
| button on to clean. His boundaries are set by my little
| fence pod things that run on D batteries which I have to
| push the button on too.
| Kiro wrote:
| What is a fulfilling life? I would say most technology I'm
| using has given me a more fulfilling life.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Group video chat. Allowed my family, spread across the world,
| to all say goodbye to my ailing grandfather before he passed.
|
| And, on a happier note, allows me to stay in touch with dear
| friends on the other side of the globe. Emails and co. just are
| not the same.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| This is just negativity bias. All the good stuff is forgotten
| because you don't have to think about it. Go to 1969 and you'll
| miss a ton of stuff.
|
| I'd say the fact that I can get any book I want and be reading
| it within 5 minutes without even having to get out of bed is
| amazing. That tops it for me.
| btilly wrote:
| It is worth asking, what legal rights of the author's may have
| been violated here?
|
| Glancing at
| https://cyber.harvard.edu/property/library/moralprimer.html the
| following ending sentence seems particularly applicable:
|
| _If a person uses the identity of an author, or the works of the
| author, for her own benefit without the author 's permission,
| then she may have violated the author's right of publicity or may
| be guilty of misappropriation of the author's work._
|
| And the previous line is nearly applicable:
|
| _If authorship of a work is attributed to an author against her
| will, or misattributed, the author may have a state action for
| defamation against the person responsible for the attribution._
|
| Of course "moral rights" are particularly weak in the USA. I'm
| sure that there would be a much better case in the EU.
|
| Of course this gets directly to the question of what happens when
| laws conflict with technology. People in technology generally
| think that technology should win. People who benefit from the
| laws think that the laws should win. Both popular opinion and
| real world results generally wind up somewhere between.
| polotics wrote:
| The legal right that's been violated is copyright: copies of
| her work were taken and fed into the ML model. This was done
| without the picture owner's approval. Moral right may be weak
| in the USA, but copyright ain't. Most likely making the owners
| whole is going to be an expensive proposition at some point.
| btilly wrote:
| Copyright law is the right to control a set of specific kinds
| of actions. A complete list of which ones is at
| https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/. "Inputing the
| work to a computer program" is not in the list of actions.
| Whether or not the result of running that program may violate
| copyright is a question of fact based on what the program
| does.
|
| As for what it does, my non-lawyerly opinion is that it is no
| different than a human artist looking at paintings then
| imitating the style. Which is very much legal.
|
| That said, a case can be made for derivative works. I don't
| think it is a very good case, but a case can be made for it.
| [deleted]
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Training on copyrighted material is legal, and rightly so.
| polotics wrote:
| Are you sure? Has this been tested in court? As you write:
| "rightly so", may I ask if you are a judge, lawyer? Has
| this decision of yours been appealed, gone to a higher
| court? Does the word "training" as applied to a computing
| system not simply mean "copying"? Who decides this?
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Copyright is still about outputs instead of inputs, just
| like it is with human learners.
|
| Training isn't copying. Its an input. It's akin to
| "seeing" or "reading".
|
| Any judge needs to think in terms of outputs. If a system
| outputs something that violates copyright, there's a
| problem.
|
| But attempting to regulate inputs can't work. For
| instance, it will be impractical/impossible when we have
| agents moving around in the real or virtual world, how
| are they supposed to know when they should turn their
| sensors off so they don't see copyrighted material.
| praptak wrote:
| Things algorithmically generated from a copyrighted work
| constitute derived work.
|
| Obviously if the thing is as complex as an AI model it might be
| hard to prove that a copyrighted work was among the inputs.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| This is certainly the legal question of the hour, and it may
| allow courts to sidestep the equivalence problem to apply
| different rules to humans than to AIs. History is replete
| with courts deciding that the rights of some minority don't
| count because they are deemed different (or less) in some
| way. Might as well get started with AIs right away. Might as
| well make sure that when AI is eventually demonstrably
| sentient there are already tons of established laws and
| billions of dollars that says they are not.
|
| It seems to me that you cannot take someone's art and plug it
| into an empty model: we have to start with a model that has
| been trained on a huge corpus of art, and only then can you
| show it some pictures and ask it to imitate. This is no
| different than a human. But my opinion does not matter at
| all. All it requires is that a jury says "This is an
| algorithm, therefore it is derivative."
| cthalupa wrote:
| >Things algorithmically generated from a copyrighted work
| constitute derived work.
|
| This is a very strong statement that is not, at least to me,
| obviously true. I am curious what your argument is - learning
| from a copyrighted work does not automatically make a work
| derivative.
|
| These models do not store copies of images they learned from,
| or attempt to replicate these images. They learn about
| constituent parts and assemble them based on the prompt,
| which is not conceptually all that different from how humans
| do the same thing.
|
| There are obviously moral questions and legal questions
| around AI art, and I expect that we will see more, but I'm
| not sure that this statement is accurate.
| benlivengood wrote:
| It's a derived work but also transformative and thus almost
| certainly fair use.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| So, if we remove her name and call this style #27b-6, there's
| no issue.
|
| She does not own the style. She owns her name and can get fussy
| about how it's used, but you can't stop someone from learning
| your style.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| The relevant part is probably
|
| > ...works of the author, for her own benefit without the
| author's permission
|
| which did happen, in the training and fine-tuning process.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Training on copyrighted material is legal. As it should be,
| IMO.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Is that established law (in what jurisdiction?), or just
| your opinion?
| i_like_apis wrote:
| I'm the EU it's established law. In the US it's basically
| true but it will be playing out in the courts a little in
| the future.
| btilly wrote:
| I am pretty sure that it is not established law, but I am
| pretty sure that that is how it will work out. US
| provisions for fair use make training models likely OK,
| and the EU is carving out exemptions for it. See
| https://valohai.com/blog/copyright-laws-and-machine-
| learning... for more.
|
| The question of whether the output of the model itself
| counts as a derivative work, though, is rather more
| complex. In the case of Github Copilot it has proven very
| adept at spitting out large chunks of clearly copyrighted
| code with no warning that it has done so. And lawsuits
| are being filed over this.
|
| But in the case of the visual artwork, I'm pretty sure
| that it is going to be ruled not derivative. Because
| while it is imitative, you cannot produce anything that
| anyone can say is a copy of X.
|
| But as ML continues to operate, we'll get cases that are
| ever closer to the arbitrary line we are trying to
| maintain about what is and is not a copyright violation.
| And I'm sure that any criteria that the courts try to put
| down is not going to age well.
| zuminator wrote:
| In the music industry, even the tiniest sound sample used
| in a work entitles the original creator to compensation.
| It might come to pass that using any portion of an
| author's work in your training data will confer certain
| rights to the author over the AI generated product.
| You'll have to perpetually keep records of your training
| data for commercially available work, lest you be sued. A
| whole bureaucracy will evolve, a Getty Curated Training
| Data, public domain training data sets. Basically the
| same sorts of issues that we've had over the past 30
| years, except replacing "internet" with "AI."
|
| And if the past is any guide, the forces of capital will
| prevail commercially, but after aborted attempts to rein
| them in with lawsuits, hobbyists and kids on social media
| will be mostly ignored by rights holders.
| LastTrain wrote:
| We don't know that yet.
| simonw wrote:
| As always with generative AI, the legalality is far less
| interesting than the morality.
| btilly wrote:
| The problem with discussing morality is that we each bring
| our own moral systems to bear, then use emotionally charged
| words like "right" and "wrong". This leads to people at first
| disagreeing, and then arguing past each other. Doubly so
| because you feel like you have made a real point when you
| agree with yourself, while the other person feels like you
| haven't. And vice versa.
|
| As a result I only want to discuss morality with people who
| either largely agree with me, or who are able to take a step
| back from their own moral system to discuss what someone else
| from their moral system might think.
|
| By contrast laws and human behavior are external and hence
| easier for people to agree on. Yes, they are dissatisfying
| because none of us entirely agree with the law, and laws are
| deliberately vague in certain things. But I find that
| discussions of them tend to actually work out better.
| bugfix-66 wrote:
| Systems like Copilot and Dall-E and so on turn their training
| data into anonymous common property. Your work becomes my work.
|
| This may appeal to naive people (students, hippies, etc.), for
| whom socialist/communist ideas are attractive, but it's poison in
| the real world because it eliminates the reward system that
| motivates most creative work. People work hard for credit or
| respect, if they're not working for money.
|
| Ask yourself, why does the MIT License
| (https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) contain the following text?
| Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER> The above
| copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
| all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
|
| These systems are a mechanism that can regurgitate (digest,
| remix, emit) without attribution all of the world's open code and
| all of the world's art.
|
| With these systems, you're giving everyone the ability to
| plagiarize everything, effortlessly and unknowingly. No skill, no
| effort, no time required. No awareness of the sources of the
| derivative work.
|
| My work is now your work. Everyone and his 10-year old brother
| can "write" my code (and derivatives), without ever knowing I
| wrote it, without ever knowing I existed. Everyone can use my
| hard work, regurgitated anonymously, stripped of all credit,
| stripped of all attribution, stripped of all identity and
| ancestry and citation.
|
| It's a new kind of use not known (or imagined?) when the
| copyright laws were written.
|
| Training must be opt in, not opt out.
|
| Every artist, every creative individual, must EXPLICITLY OPT IN
| to having their hard work regurgitated anonymously by Copilot or
| Dall-E or whatever.
|
| If you want to donate your code or your painting or your music so
| it can easily be "written" or "painted", in whole or in part, by
| everyone else, without attribution, then go ahead and opt in.
| Most people aren't so totally selfless.
|
| But if an author or artist does not EXPLICITLY OPT IN, you can't
| use their creative work to train these systems.
|
| All these code/art washing systems, that absorb and mix and
| regurgitate the hard work of creative people must be strictly opt
| in.
|
| I say this as a person who writes deep-learning parallel linear
| algebra kernels professionally.
|
| We've crossed a line here.
| polotics wrote:
| I disagree that creative individuals have to do anything
| explicit here: copyright law is pretty clear that the burden of
| proof of right is with the copier, not the copied. I expect
| most artists won't be sending invoices for licensing fees just
| yet, but corps surely will bleed dry anyone that produce
| unlicensed derivative works that generates any income.
| [deleted]
| gpderetta wrote:
| Exactly, any coder and artist should learn from scratch without
| absolutely any exposure to existing code, work of art or even
| idea. Anything else is outright STEALING!
|
| Excuse me when I make an apple pie from scratch.
| qull wrote:
| Thats a reducto ad absrudium at best. While you have a point,
| schools and even museums are generally compensated for
| providing these training models to the public, to look at it
| in a ml way.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Sure, I also had to pay for the books I studied from, but
| Dr. Tanenbaum is yet to knock at my door to assert
| copyright on all the code I have written.
| CharlesW wrote:
| This is a perfect example because, depending on the apples
| you're using, growing them may have required a license and
| adherence to licensing requirements.
|
| https://mnhardy.umn.edu/apples/licensing
| https://provarmanagement.com/cosmic-crisp/
| polotics wrote:
| Have you maybe possibly previously been exposed to the
| concept of an argumentation straw man? Feeding actual works
| of art into an approximation machine, and no expecting the
| output of said machine to not be owned by the author of the
| art is making a big assumption I think. There is the word
| copy in "copyright" and the model did definitely got a copy
| of the original at source. No matter the dilution, copyright
| is being breached, as I understand it.
| ysavir wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how would you feel if someone fed your HN
| comment history into a ML model, then used that to respond on
| every HN topic and conversation under the username
| "othergpderetta"?
| kleer001 wrote:
| Interesting argument, but it'd be outputting fully sounding
| word salad garbage.
| gpderetta wrote:
| So exactly like my comments!!
| gpderetta wrote:
| My HN history is public, so I wouldn't have a problem with
| training a model with it. I would have a problem with the
| model attempting to pass as my self of course.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| >Excuse me when I make an apple pie from scratch.
|
| You'll have to invent the universe first.
| gpderetta wrote:
| I expect a big bang anytime now!
| kerblang wrote:
| As the artist in the article points out, the artwork in the
| model doesn't belong to her and by current legal standards she
| has no authority to give permission; of course the corporate
| owners do have authority, and I'm not even sure you need new
| laws to enforce the copyright complaint.
|
| I was complaining about all of this when the derivation was
| based on "the internet" and everyone was being ripped off at
| once. All the AI-generated art out there is doing the same
| thing.
|
| Of course most of this is being used to create derivations of
| trendy pop art, so are we really losing anything? Was there
| ever any hope for artistic capitalism as something that
| communicates in meaningful ways beyond the most local of scale?
| vikingerik wrote:
| Serious question: What is the difference between a human
| intelligence looking at a work and using concepts from it in
| their own, compared to an artificial intelligence doing it?
|
| If the copyright violation occured by the AI's inputs looking
| at the work... how is that different than an image of the work
| landing on a human's retinas?
| p0pcult wrote:
| NFTs to the rescue.
| dzink wrote:
| For generative art, trademarking your name might help prevent
| people from using it in prompts, but for general copyright,
| where does the line stand between someone casually publishing
| every color in the rainbow, every note combination, every
| letter in the alphabet, and claiming anyone else is infringing
| on their copyright?
|
| If someone copies your thesis, abstract, poem word for word,
| that is clear violation of your IP, but we are all remixing
| words that everyone uses, colors, brush strokes, API terms,
| programming language keywords, and notes. Copyright law has the
| fair use doctrine and transformative use is explicitly allowed
| to allow iteration. There is some level of granularity that is
| essential to creativity - otherwise one entity can copyright
| all possible combinations and prevent any creativity from
| happening legally. If AI goes below that threshold, all of
| humanity has a chance to iterate far faster and find new spaces
| and fill new needs for everyone. Humans have been able to draw
| in the style of Picasso or Monet for centuries. A program doing
| it is not infringement, just much faster iteration.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| That is a fake argument. It has been proven wrong on every
| one of these articles, yet pro-stealing people like yourself
| keep posting it. You can't copyright such works, only an
| 'installation' of those works. If you want to talk about
| copyright, maybe educate yourself on copyright. It's Title
| 17. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/
| dzink wrote:
| Which argument, which articles - be specific. AI content is
| not copyrightable at this stage. Drawing styles are not
| copyrightable. Name calling and labeling are ad-hominem
| attacks however and that has no place on HN.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| People claiming you can copyright a canvas that is just a
| color (when you can't, you can only copyright the art
| installation/display). People claiming that you can
| copyright the alphabet (when you can't). It's just
| frustrating that HN wants to keep having this discussion
| but with ZERO basis in actual copyright law, and people
| making factually inaccurate claims as if they understand
| it. I had the same issue on a criminal law post. Someone
| posted completely factually inaccurate information
| regarding title 18 statutes, and HN blocking me from
| responding in a timely manner while people were reading
| the post. This just isn't a forum for informed discussion
| I guess, but peoples gut feelings and what they THINK
| copyright law is. Opinions are great, and needed, but
| established law is a real thing and should be part of a
| discussion that at it's core is about copyright.
|
| Sorry you feel attacked that I suggested you get educated
| on the topic at hand when you present theoreticals
| ALREADY addressed in TITLE 17.
|
| Is your position not that it is OK to steal peoples
| intellectual property as currently defined by law as long
| as you run it through a couple algorithms? I apologize if
| I misunderstood the position you publically staked out.
| burkaman wrote:
| > A program doing it is not infringement, just much faster
| iteration.
|
| "Much faster" is absolutely relevant, morally and legally.
| Visiting a website a bunch of times is not illegal,
| programmatically DDoSing it is. Having a private conversation
| with someone and writing down what they said afterwards is
| not illegal, but recording the conversation and perfectly
| reproducing it without their permission often is. Shouting at
| someone in public is generally ok, having a drone follow them
| around anytime they're in public playing a recording of
| whatever you shouted is probably not ok.
|
| Computers are not people. Just because it's ok for a person
| to do something, doesn't mean it's ok to have a computer do
| the same thing a billion times per second.
| dzink wrote:
| DDoSing is bad not because of the speed but because it
| overwhelms the infrastructure a product is designed for.
| Doing it to your own computer by making it crunch AI models
| until it runs out of memory is perfectly legal and
| iterative. Printing pages of a book in seconds vs
| dedicating lives of people to hand draw each letter in the
| monastery is iteration.
|
| Computers are not people. Computers are iteration tools
| people use to free up precious lifetime they have and bring
| more value to the world. If you are a human who trains
| 10000 hrs to invest like Paul Graham, or draw like Thomas
| Kincade, or play the piano, or operate as a top brain
| surgeon, you have spent a fraction of your life to do this
| fast and reap the rewards. But that fraction of your life
| has tremendous cost on society. Many people paid with their
| time and money to feed you, teach you, house you, during
| that time and during your upbringing which allowed you to
| have those 10k hrs to dedicate to this task. Now all of
| that work can be used by you to do exponentially more with
| your precious life. Instead of spending days or years
| making a portrait, you'd spend seconds. Now you can find
| higher purpose and solve much bigger problems - instead of
| asking for 100 to hand draw a portrait for a few hundred
| people in your lifetime, you could create one for every
| teen who needs a boost in their self esteem and raise their
| confidence and ability to cope with challenges in their
| life at massive scale.
|
| More importantly, since there is a huge scarcity of people
| trained to fulfill each niche need that forms a bottleneck
| on society's capacity to use that. Imagine if instead of
| airplane we counted on a few trained supermen to fly people
| who needed to cross places fast by hand. How many people
| would die before they see the world or are taken to a
| doctor, etc. The world can't survive on superheroes or
| super trained people. The world can do more with the time
| and lives of people in it.
| burkaman wrote:
| I disagree but this is a reasonable perspective. One
| specific point:
|
| > instead of asking for 100 to hand draw a portrait for a
| few hundred people in your lifetime, you could create one
| for every teen who needs a boost in their self esteem and
| raise their confidence and ability to cope with
| challenges in their life at massive scale.
|
| This is a misunderstanding that reminds of those startups
| that were like "we realized people love getting hand-
| written cards, so we built a product to learn your
| handwriting and generate them for you!" No, the effort is
| the point. For people who like those cards it's not about
| the aesthetics of handwritten text, it's about knowing
| somebody dedicated some of their limited time to you
| personally. A depressed person is not going to be cheered
| up by an auto-generated portrait, even if it's
| indistinguishable from one a human artist spent 12 hours
| on. You can't "scale" human connection like this, unless
| you hide the fact that robots are involved.
|
| I'm not saying all technology is bad. I think robo-
| surgeons would be great if they can save more lives, even
| if they put human surgeons out of work. In this
| particular domain, right now it seems like these tools
| have the potential to discourage future generations of
| artists, which would be self-defeating because the models
| are not AI and will stagnate without additional training
| data. I don't think they should be banned, but I think we
| should take human artists' concerns seriously, not co-opt
| someone's artistic identity if they ask us not to, and
| try to make sure we think about the unintended
| consequences of a powerful new tool.
| dzink wrote:
| People who love to walk will continue to walk even when
| there are bikes, cars, airplanes, self driving tech, and
| teleportation etc, available to them. AI art does not
| discourage artists any more than restaurants discourage
| home cooks who enjoy cooking. In all of those scenarios
| the tech caters to people who are in need of a task done
| and not in desire to spend their life on the craft.
|
| There will always be unintended consequences and some
| will be severe. But what is happening now is pent up
| demand that finally found an outlet - like a bunch of
| high pressure mountain water that found a hole through a
| cave wall and into the ocean - it is gushing.
|
| Instead of blind fear of change, I try to see the value
| previously unseen and it is tremendous. As the creator in
| the article said she does not see her true art in the
| stable diffusion creations: the eyes that speak to
| character in each character, the poses that show
| confidence or query, or passion. Instead she sees images
| that mimic her style of drawing.
|
| I do see how someone may choose to not become an artist
| for a living because AI art becomes so ubiquitous that
| they could never make a living with a paintbrush. BUT,
| with so much 80-90% of desired art generated by AI, there
| will now be huge demand for skilled artists who can take
| a generated image the rest of the way to desired results.
| I trust that human ambition and taste always expands past
| superhuman capabilities. The artists if tomorrow will
| have much different brushes than those of yesterday and
| be far better and more productive than those of
| yesterday. There will likely be 3D art in the real world
| and universes to explore in the virtual one. I'm more
| concerned we will and are running out of space to store
| our contraptions. Data storage manufacturers will be
| thriving.
| avereveard wrote:
| you can get copilot to regurgitate copyrighted code verbatim,
| but I haven't seen stable diffusion recreating copyright works
| yet, which is quite an important difference.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Wasn't it regularly spitting out whole watermarks?
| avereveard wrote:
| was the image underneath watermarked, or it just reproduced
| the watermark style over an unrelated image?
| kleer001 wrote:
| At the moment there's no legal protection for style in an of
| its self. Additionally there maybe (and should be) if this
| style-capture actually displaces the artists they're apeing.
| But I don't see that happening. IMHO its a tempest in a teacup.
|
| Why? Because Ai generated "art" is a soupy mess and real life
| human artists can speak and understand colloquial language,
| work quickly, and develop new styles based on new direction.
|
| But then again maybe we're looking at the death of a widespread
| industry like when gigantic industrial looms came on the scene,
| but I highly doubt it.
|
| Then again, last of all, I do see a future where AIs generate
| full feature length photo-real movies in minutes based on
| prompts and cheaply.
| asciimov wrote:
| I think it's interesting that for the past 50+ years we have been
| having an ongoing philosophical debate about the ethics of
| genetic manipulation. The warning stories are abound in sci-fi,
| and though we have the tools to do so, we use extreme restraint
| in their research.
|
| Yet we haven't had such discussions in computer science about the
| use of AI. While other fields wrestle with the ethics of doing
| things, we have had no such discussions. (Due to the nature of
| our education we are blind to the demands of ethics.) We have
| made the tools so easy to use, and so accessible, that even if we
| should discuss the implications of said tools the cat is already
| out of the bag.
|
| Lately, I've been thinking about that poem "First they came..."
| by Martin Niemoller and wondering if now is the time to heed it's
| warning. First they came for the socialists,
| and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a
| socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists,
| and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a trade
| unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not
| speak out-- Because I was not a Jew.
| Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.
| izzydata wrote:
| There are a lot of science fiction stories warning about AI.
| Although, they are about actual AI and not machine learning.
| Personally I think it is actually literally impossible to make
| AI built from conventional computer hardware. Anything you
| could ever do as a computer scientist can only ever result in
| more sophisticated, but not sentient algorithms.
| asciimov wrote:
| True, we do have warnings about human level AI... but we
| never really cover the Machine Learning is gonna take all
| y'all's jobs.
| m3047 wrote:
| I've been musing for several years that there doesn't seem to
| be an organized "philosophy of computer science".
| asciimov wrote:
| I agree, we need some kind of organized thoughts on
| computing. Heck just a straight up ethics course would be a
| huge improvement. I didn't realize until after I graduated
| that most of the hard sciences require undergrad ethics, and
| if you do any graduate work you will take more ethics
| courses.
| savant_penguin wrote:
| Maybe I'm oversimplifying but the question is: "does an artist
| _own_ a style?"
|
| To me the answer is no.
| theptip wrote:
| I agree with your answer, but not that your question is the
| question. Some that I think are closer:
|
| Does an artist own their name? Yes. I can't publish a work of
| art and say "authored by savant_penguin".
|
| Can I sell art with product name "in the style of
| savant_penguin"? I think this varies by jurisdiction; it's not
| going to be legal in the EU I think. It might well be in the
| US.
|
| Edit: fleshed out more thoroughly by someone else already:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33423857
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