The same artists who have been pitching a fit about how the robots are coming for their jobs?

Pretty sure they are trying to figure out a way their art can’t be used to train an AI and won’t be willingly participating in making it easier.

You might be surprised. We have almost as many opt-in requests as opt-outs since we announced this today.

We don't see this as binary in the long term. Maybe artists want to release art from a prior period, for example, but withhold their current series until they move to the next.

I think we'll see people who want to post images of themselves in there as well. Like, being a 'playable character' you could prompt for to be in the artwork could be pretty fun.

Why is opt out a thing?

Who told you you could use the data in the first place?

It's copyrighted. Reproducing any of it is a crime.

Reading through your comments, it appears you're under the impression that we (Spawning) trained models using this data. That is not the case. We're building tools to help people to remove themselves from, or add themselves to, datasets used (by others) to train these models. We're hoping to make that as close to 0 effort as possible for all parties. We agree that artists should control how their works are used, and we're working hard to make that the norm.

> It's copyrighted. Reproducing any of it is a crime.

In which case it should be fairly simple to challenge it in court, no?

I’m skeptical that Al will replace artists. The existence of computer chess and go, though superior in every way, has not killed interest in human competition. I see no reason we couldn’t have the same thing happen with art: people see AI art as a novelty and something worth studying but otherwise preferring human art for its relevance to the human condition.

The problem is that competition in chess, in games, has always been for the sake of the game itself and the fun in playing it. 'game playing' is its own reward, there is no other entity interested in paying for results of chess games, even 'interesting' chess games. If there was, you could setup instances of Stockfish to play against each other and dominate that market.

This is not true of the artist market. While yes, many artists get into it for the fun/satisfaction of producing their own artworks, the reason that they can remain in it long term is that there are other entities in paying for the results of their work. See: game studios, film studios, etc. Before AI, the only way to get the assets for these various projects produced was by paying artists/experts for their work. Now, the production of those building blocks can be automated.

I agree. It was telling that in what I perceived to the non story of the midjourney created image winning the county art fair, many of the other prizes were for activities that machines have been better at than humans for decades. Fruit canning. Furniture construction. The replacement narrative is overblown, but these tools are going to augment human artists considerably.