I'm not saying that's good or right - I really don't know how I even feel about the AI networks morally... I just think money is going to win out.
The arguments suggesting that people shouldn't benefit from their work on an individual level, and pointing to music piracy as an example of why we shouldn't try, strike me as arguments for general inaction and fatalism. Not sure what the goal is, there...
The goal is to make them stop trying to control it. Because their attempts to control it are ruining computers for all of us. We already have harmful stuff like DRM on every chip because of these people. Platforms are getting more locked down, our freedom as users and programmers is decreasing. They will destroy free computing as we know it if this keeps going unchecked.
Regarding the concept of control, artists were first put in a defensive position by the individuals who started using their work without their consent, and who are trying exercise their own control over the artwork produced by others through monetizing outputs. Are only companies like Stability.AI, OpenAI, and Midjourney exclusively permitted to use and control the artwork of others, and allowed to charge for access to models which use this artwork without compensation or accreditation to the original authors? Are those artists computers not also being ruined? Do they not deserve representation?
We need to stop demonizing the idea that someone can benefit from their work because there are some companies that have fought to extend copyright for their own benefit.
Copyright REFORM is generally a much more supportable issue than the idea that everything should be free in perpetuity...
It is the reality of computing. Anyone trying to deny that is going to discover that bits are bits and there is no control unless you end computer freedom. It takes tyranny such as mandating that computers only run government signed software to change this reality. This is the sort of thing that will happen if this copyright insanity continues and it will also pave the way to absurdities like regulation of cryptography.
> We need to stop demonizing the idea that someone can benefit from their work
Nobody is doing that. They can benefit from their work as much as they want. Plenty of creators are benefiting right now from patronage via platforms like Patreon. They're getting paid for the act of creating, not for sales of an artiticially scarce product. Copyright is not necessary.
Having larger models and adapting the weights is one thing but the innovation is mostly on the side of large entities.
It's ideas (memes) copying themselves, making variations, evolving. Until now ideas could only jump from human to human, intermediated by various media. Now they can be unified and distilled into a model, a more efficient medium of replication for ideas, and more helpful in general because it can be adapted to new situations on the fly.
The biggest reason the laws can't possibly hope to stop the practice is:
> [MysteryInc152] told me the training process took about 2.5 hours on a GPU at Vast.ai, and cost less than $2.
As those costs are driven down and the software is accessible to more people, distribution of the weights will not be needed.
Amen.
I think one thing we're going to have to look at is having the expectation of a separate agreement for having ones work go into a training set. Maybe equity should even be the standard here.
And informed consent associated with it. People need to know they're training something else to do their job as well as doing the job, selling the cow instead of the milk.
It's already out there. On people's local computers and soon their mobile devices. People are tinkering with it at warp speed. This point addresses that it technically cannot be stopped.
I don't expect it to be possible to detect that the art is AI-generated. This becomes further impossible when using a personal input image as well as many follow-up edits or composite works. It blends into normal image creation. The only way to prove that it's not AI-generated is to record in-progress "human art" as is sometimes done in art contests, but this isn't reasonable to legally require of every single piece of art to be created.
You can't enforce what you can't detect.
The analogue here is AI art week be legitimized, and the artists who profit will be the ones who let their work be used as input for a cut of the profits. And nobody will be able to compete with them, and the owners of the machine will be able to set the profit rate as they choose.
... That does sound like a new stable equilibrium, actually.
Microsoft won't legally be able to continue its abuse of GitHub. Copilot will be dead. OpenAI and Stability will not legally be able to profit from large-scale intellectual property theft. All these violations will end.
These are the most significant digits. The residual amateur piracy doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if random guy gets some leet neural net warez and uses it to make his desktop wallpaper.
I already have Stability running on my PC. I generate an image with it. How do you know the output comes from Stability? Answer that, please.
Second, a worldwide draconian ban on AI image training and generation just isn't going to happen. Very few legal things are coordinated worldwide, and copyright law is incredibly low on the list.
Even training without consent can be addressed. Google trained some of their AI from Google Photos. Which they made free for unlimited use so that us fools would produce billions of images, accept the terms we don't even read and voila: AI legally trained.
Of course "killing someone" and "copying someone's artwork" are at different levels, however, I'm sure artists would beg to differ.
And your point is invalid in long term.
Reddit luddite brigade?
Now you seek to deny others such protection while taking advantage of it yourself.
This is also the same reason due to which open source projects often struggle with funding, and why many databases (among other OSS software) are moving towards stricter licenses such as the AGPL.
(There are infrastructure challenges as well, but this thread is about intellectual property.)
If copyright did not exist, you could take it as a google employee and start your own google without going to jail.
Your ability to sue him will be limured, he cant go to jail, he can deckare bancrupsy, and you have to be spesific about what is protected, 'idea' is a vague term that cant be protectedm
Whether they are 3 years or 300 is a finer point, and is only worth discussing after nessesity and legitimacy of sich protections is established
Visual arts as a career will be dead soon. Visual arts as a hobby will live on.
Put a fine of 10% of annual turnover if a company cannot prove that images used in its product/ads are human generated. Make payment to visual artists part of the process of proving it. Boom, visual arts as a career saved.
It's one thing to say we shouldn't do it, it's quite another to say we cannot.
Plenty of music is procedurally generated so we gotta make sure we ban those as well.
Why do humans play chess after 1997? Why do they play checkers after the 70s?
AI capability is destroying human enjoyment of activities because it also destroys the economic rationale for engaging in them and/or allows other humans to cheat.
The obvious conclusion of this position is that we should just all kill ourselves if strong AI ever starts to exists. No, thank you, I'd rather do everything possible to prevent it from being created.
Indeed that is the logical conclusion. I expect some people advocating this line of logic to follow through
Even if we assume the above rule is made, there is no way to prove it because even if a human does it, he might still use the help of photoshop etc which are planning to integrate such tools currently. Most favorable outcome I see out of this is for famous/competent artists to license out their style of art to these generation companies which then train their models on them (which sounds win-win but won't be as profitable as it is today)
It's unclear to what extend tool producers will support AI in this context at all. Also, this is a problem for safeguarding the integrity of the product of artists, not for safeguarding their income.
We got applications like unity for game generation, low code solutions that let you generate a crud dashboard for a database in a few clicks, etc.
As a developer with an actual degree in comp sci, I can guarantee I'd be a helluva lot better paid if everyone had to do their software development in low level C.
Software developers aren't protected at all, we are simply just in demand for the time being. There will probably be a time in the far flung future where our jobs are phased out, too.
Nobody is paying $10 per CD anymore.
They're not paying $10, they're paying more.
So, about $3 less.
[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
(Who knows if that site is reliable though, the point is inflation.)
Stable Diffusion is math and cannot be stopped now the toothpaste is out. You can attempt to regulate, assign draconian requirements by force of law, but ultimately these are as unenforceable as regulating that pi=3.
Ironically, what could help is NFT type tech. Signed with a private artist key, your copy is "original". Even if knockoff generative copies are produced, the digitally signed produced-bys are still authentic.
That solves a completely different problem, though. I don't think anyone is saying that the problem is one of false attribution, where people are claiming generated images are the work of a particular person. What's being discussed is artists having less work because people generate art computationally rather than commission artists to do it.
We can evolve the market (in my view, into luxury goods with NFT type tech) or we can wait for artists to truly starve. I'm a proponent for solving the problem that can be solved to help folks move forward.
While it's possible that these AI tools will leave some (certainly not all) artists without work, what I think is really going to happen is that artists will harness them to do new things that were simply impossible before, or to make their work easier. Technology rarely destroys jobs; it more frequently changes their nature. Just like how at some points animators needed to know how to use 3D tools when in previous decades they didn't, in the near future graphical artists will need to know how to use AI. It's possible that where there were previously two artists working there will then be only one, but such is life. Demand for art is finite.
Your comparison to computer animation is apt. Rewatching animated classics recently, I can see what we've lost now that every film is plastic.
So, yes, what you say may definitely happen, but it's a trend some graphical industries have been on for decades. It's why there are so many fewer professional animators anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if some techniques of traditional animation have been lost by now.
In two years people will be generating novel music of any style with any vocals and vocalists they want. That'll be even more of a fit to consumers' wants. They'll never run out of music that will appeal to them.
I'm currently working in this space and it's wild the things that are possible.
Napster, P2P sharing of music, was not.
Piracy is held at bay only by the ease & affordability of legally obtaining media and difficulty accessing the technical means to accomplish it.
... and well-packaged piracy solutions and modern broadband bandwidth likely sink the maximum price (the only remaining term) below the cost of production.
It took me 20 minutes to go from nothing to an entire season saved locally and playing on a Roku. That's finding the software, installing, configuring, finding torrents, downloading, and then playing. And that's not having pirated in a decade or so.
perfect example, as piracy has _never_ been effectively stopped and _never_ will be effectively stopped by legislative means
I'm a big pirate myself, with multiple TB harddrives full of pirated music accrued over the years, but even I choose to use Spotify and Tidal a lot of the time, out of pure convenience.
They are not stopping the piracy.
They are providing better service than piracy. As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem.
Offer something convenient and worth the price and a lot of people will pay it just fine.
Is this like the stagecoach makers when automobiles where invented? Or is this like Napster stealing copyrighted material? This is new territory.
(1) Ubiquitous new technology
(2) New domains the technology opens
It's even more fundamental than stagecoach --> automobile. It is more like cipher --> RSA -- fundamental change based on basic math and ubiquitous, readily available technology.
The toothpaste is out of the tube!
First, I'd like to correct a fact you omitted: Napster, Limewire and the like didn't come out of nowhere. They were created because artists and their recording companies forced consumers to buy entire CDs at inflated prices that kept rising. Now, what they got in return from their consumers after that wasn't fair either.
I don't think making AI generation illegal for everyone makes sense. That's how you get the Metallica's of the world bank-rolling professional grifters to hold people's grandmother's financially hostage.
I do think it makes sense to bar AI generated products from making money if the works used to train it did not belong to that company or individual. If you create a program using CoPilot, you should not earn money. If you make a comic using Stable Diffusion, you don't deserve money. This keeps the power players in check while allowing artists paths to use these AIs if they own their own work outright. Imagine if you could train CoPilot on your own code and then use it to help you. That to me sounds like the framing for a new and responsible form of innovation.
it feels too unfair leading a new art style and simply be copied with machine precision and speed… opting to not contribute to the neural network database should be a thing but i do not know how reverse engineering of output can be done
If an artist wants her works to have the fate of BBC archives, that removed millions of hours of radio and tv shows from the internet, then go ahead. The historic BBC content was never shared, liked, commented or had any influence since the internet became a thing. A cultural suicide to protect ancient copyrights.
That really should depend upon the output.
Many, if not most, people learn an art by imitating the style of established artists. Some will carry on with that style. Others will develop their own, though it will probably always carry elements from those they imitated. Should injecting a machine into the process automatically make it illegal?
There are going to be clear cut cases where it should be, cases where so much is imitated that it goes beyond style and into substance. Yet that means we should have a human looking at the output to determine if it is too close to a copy, rather than banning AI generated art altogether. To do so would put the creative process in peril. This is not because machine learning reflects our definition of creativity. Rather it is because it is difficult to define what human creativity itself is.
(That said, I do believe that using the artist's name as a way of promoting their own work is stepping over a line.)
Except, in copyright law it depends on the _input_.
These models would not exist if they were not first fed the source material.
Until we have systems that are not trained on a pre-existing corpus this will remain true. No matter how clever the algorithm, without the source material you have no output. Zilch. Nada.
Now, when the source material is someone else's property this means that without - someone else's property - you would have had no output.
So, when you want to use someone else's property, which you do not own, the general rule is that you a) first ask them if you may and b) pay them for the right to use their property.
In this sense it is no different than using a photocopier.
It's the copyright ownership of the material you put into the machine that will interest the judge not the quality of the copy.
I'm really looking forward to the first court cases and predict that much hilarity will ensue!
And the other way around - are we allowed to train and use neural nets on anyone's work, assuming no near duplicates are generated?
Technically the neural net does not have a copy of the originals inside, it has their summed up gradients. The original model shrunk 4B images to a mere 4GB file, so 1 byte/image worth of information learned from each example, a measly pixel.
The model has learned un-copyrightable things like the shapes of various objects and animals, how they relate, their colours and textures. That should be protected. Let them finally learn how many fingers we have.
Doesn't matter. JPEG of the work is just a bit of numbers to feed equation, doesn't change the fact it's copyright infringement
Exactly the same happens with artists. The only artists who can claim not to have been influenced by seeing the work of other artists lived tens of thousands of years ago. So what makes it okay to process artwork via some processes but not others, when the ultimate output may in some way copy the input anyway?
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding of copyright law is that this is explicitly the opposite.
https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo_pub_909_2016.pdf
>• reproduction of the work in various forms, such as printed publications or sound recordings; >• distribution of copies of the work; >• public performance of the work; >• broadcasting or other communication of the work to the public; >• translation of the work into other languages; and >• adaptation of the work, such as turning a novel into a screenplay
None of these rights, to me, indicate that copyright protects the input. The AI model is not reproducing any specific works, distributing copies of it, performing it in public, broadcasting it, translating it to another language, or adapting the work from one format to another.
AI art is unknown territory. Comparing this to media piracy (e.g. copying music) leads to a fallacy.
Specifically: where does fair use stop? And consider: Good artists copy; great artists steal. Any art historian will be able to show you how true this is accross all epochs and styles (and types of art no less, i.e. including e.g. music)[1].
Anything that follows is OT for the debate at hand. It is merely to point out that while not only not applying here (AI art is derivatives/remixed works not simple copies), the notion that the P2P crackdown and its legal repercussions of the early 2000's had anything to do with how much someone creating the music in the very first place got paid is a myth perpetuated by the music industry. Specifically that part of the music industry that is not the artists.
> Remember the naive rallying cry among those who thought everyone should have the right to all music, without any compensation for the artist?
The only naivity is that compensation of artists played a role in this. Piracy was never noticable for musicians who weren't already stinking rich. And for those, while noticable, it wasn't an issue. One may argue it was/is for people high up in the food chain of the music industry. But even that stands on feet of clay. From [2]:
> The main finding of the present study is that in 2014, the recorded music industry lost approximately €170 million of sales revenue in the EU as a consequence of the consumption of recorded music from illegal sources. This total corresponds to 5.2% of the sector’s revenues from physical and digital sales. These lost sales are estimated to result in direct employment losses of 829 jobs.
There are approx. two million people being employed by this industry in the EU[3]. Go figure.
For further reading on the funny idea that artists got compensated before P2P and didn't after there is Courtney Love's classic debunking piece on musician's revenue around the time Napster was a thing[4].
And some comparable numbers from what this means for artists trying to make a living of digital music today [5][6].
[1] My father was an art historian. My opinion is mainly based on spending every holiday of my youth looking at art from all epochs across Europe, first hand. Nolens volens I may add. I.e. I'm saying: take my word for it. :]
[2] https://euipo.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/docum...
[3] https://www.ifpi.org/music-supports-two-million-jobs-contrib...
[4] https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
[5] https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/12/how-many-spotify-str...
[6] https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/spotify-million-ar...
Edit: typos
I'm not saying I support the argument or that it will stand up in court, but definitely some merit to making it.
If the entire Western copyright sorted of influence unifies on it being an illegal system, Russia and China are under no disincentive to ban the techs. Especially if it makes their entertainment industries more competitive with the Hollywood machine.
The harms to artists are obvious and immediate, but limited and small. The benefits of letting an ML model train in the same way as a human are vague and in the future, but might be capable of massive transformative changes in the way we work. I think it's right to be careful about "protecting" a limited number of people at the cost of enormous future potential.
Why would anyone in their right mind choose to put effort into creating original art if there is "one easy trick" to get around copyright by simply turning their art into a model that can be used to churn out things they could have produced?
Why do some artists still paint on canvas instead of using photoshop or krita, where you can easily ctrl+z any mistake, never need to mix any paint, can move layers up and down, etc. etc. etc.?
Why do some photographers still shoot anything smaller than large format with film when medium format and full frame digital cameras exist?
Why do some people still use analog synths when Native Instrument's Komplete exists?
Why do some guitarists still use amplifiers when they could use an AxeFx/Kemper/Neural DSP?
Most of those options are also more expensive, on top of being more inefficient/difficult/generally burdensome, yet people still do them.
People do a lot of things that are not necessarily the most efficient way to do something. They like the minor differences, or enjoy the process, or many other things.
I also don't see how SD and similar get around copyright. Even if training these models on copyrighted images is legal, that doesn't mean that the output they produce necessarily is. It doesn't matter how I create a depiction of Iron Man, be it SD or a paintbrush and canvas, I do not have the rights to reproduce him. And for things that can't be protected by copyright, such as style, I am not hindered by it no matter if it is created with SD or colored pencils on a sketchpad.
Plus, we humans all built our skills and works on the shoulder of giants. Artworks and cultural artifacts are never created in a vacuum. Maybe it's time to acknowledge that.
Yeah, but getting financial compensation can certainly help. The opportunity cost of putting bread on the table means that the output of most professional artists today would drop significantly, if they needed to pick up another profession (especially full time).
> Plus, we humans all built our skills and works on the shoulder of giants. Artworks and cultural artifacts are never created in a vacuum. Maybe it's time to acknowledge that.
You're acting as if artists don't already acknowledge and understand this. https://www.muddycolors.com/2017/12/some-thoughts-on-master-....
Where are the tears for horseback couriers? Or blacksmiths? Or thatchers?
How often are we seeing innovative advancements in the field of horseback couriers, blacksmithing and thatching nowadays?
The same thing will happen to human generated creative content whereby it becomes something that people are involved in because they want to be, not because it's a necessity/it's the only way to do it.
Yes the potential for future art work done by a human today will be erased in the future when it can be performed by a machine, but that has always happened & yet somehow it's surprising to people.
An artist being indignant towards machine generated art yet using mass produced tools, eating food farmed by mechanised equipment, wearing clothing woven by automatic looms, taking a digital photo themselves instead of hiring a portrait painter, owning a car instead of a horse that supports many sub-industries, sending emails instead of letters is just hypocrisy.
Technology has always brought us forward and these new AI powered tools will assist us as the tools we produce have always assisted our species. And as always those who refuse to change will eventually be left behind.
And yes, if this was happening to the industry I'm in I would currently be going through the 5 stages of grief about it, too. But then I'd just have to change up what I'm doing to reflect the changing times. As she herself said, it still doesn't capture what she puts into her art & so there is still that avenue to pursue.
In terms of creating original art, I think that in ten to twenty years artists will see models as another tool for creative expression; one that lets an individual artist be more productive but can produce a generic feel, like thin-line animation or sticking difference clouds everywhere or using a palette of pre-made drag and drop body parts.
It'll all be about time to market and brand building. I could even see a world where the originals of the input creator would sell quite well as classic modern artworks. Imagine for a second a world where 3D assets get created this way. I'm pretty sure fans of popular games would shell out good money for originals from "the artist behind the Witcher 7 asset engine" if the trajectory of human development goes as I see it going.
Also...artists are going to create art no matter if it makes financial sense or not. In fact I'd argue that's the difference between art and design :P
That's a reasonable way to go about things. The problem is that right now the status quo is that you just take artists' work without their consent and use it to train your model.
It wouldn't be similar at all. It takes years to get skills good enough to even copy stuff like that. With AI person who never did any art in their lives can get hundreds of copies in few hours.
Year after year entrenched media interests lobby the US government to make IP policy more corporate friendly and those policy changes are forced on the citizens of countries around the world through strong armed free trade agreements.
We don't get to discuss these thigs as citizens of soverign states, they just happen to us.
Maybe we want to live in a world with a substantially shorter copyright term, is that so wrong? Maybe that would be better for individuals and society as a whole but we'll never know because American companies wont risk the chance of losing money or power to find out.
How long do you think should copyright should be before it reverts back to the public domain?
5 years? 25? 50? 100? 500? 1000?
How much is too much copyright?
The thing is that you're distributing only the instructions for making other peoples' work. There are art books and articles explain the styles of certain artists and what techniques they use to achieve it; you could probably recreate "the Mona Lisa but in the style of Marc Chagall with cool glasses on" with real paint if you had previously stared at both the Mona Lisa and Marc's art for hours at a time. Are you infringing upon either of their copyrights by combining them? Probably not. But if you just recreated the Mona Lisa after having stared at it for hours, and it turned out nearly identical, then it would be. So where is the line?
It gets of course harrier because what happens to experts in the field who are able to do that and then just use this as a boosting tool. Still, I don’t think copyright law has clear bright lines so much, but more guidance that the courts just try to muddle through as best they can. Certainly one can make an argument that just stealing an artists style like this could be considered a copyright violation, just like sampling even a few seconds of someone else’s track can be in music.
Again, not saying these are net good for society, but clearly existing copyright laws do try to take this tack. I think the one thing working against her favor is that a) early days so laws haven’t caught up b) us laws generally favor corporate interests over individuals so she might never get any relief even if deeper pockets start to protect themselves as this becomes a bigger problem for them.
But if you took 100 paintings from 100 artists and clipped all into small jigsaw pieces then recombined them randomly to create a new picture, that would probably not be considered "derived art".
What matters is how much creativity you put into the process. Does the creative esthetics of the work derive from your efforts, or from those of the existing author's existing art.
But if I took 100 paintings from a single artist and combined them all into new works of art, that would probably be copyright infringement in my view, and is what seems to be happening here.
Consider the history of trademark lawsuits. You can be sued if you create something that somehow resembles an existing trademark, say use the exact same color as Coca-Cola for something similar.
So I think the guiding principle is or should be whether what you create can be confused with the work of some other highly original artist. It doesn't matter if you painted it all, if it looks similar enough that people could confuse it with the original artist's work, you are infringing.
What makes you say that? A work is considered derivative with regards to another work, not with an author. If we take your jigsaw example and accept that the final result would not be derivative of any of the works that contributed each individual piece, and then pretend as if in actuality all the sources were from the same artist, what would change that would suddenly make the result derivative from some or all of the original works?
As I understand it copyright infringement is not just a pure "crime" in itself. It is about the financial harm caused. I think the word they use is "tort". It is always about violating somebody else's right(s).
Oracle sues Google for Java copyright infringement. It is not just about "Hey here's a copyright infringement ... put Google in jail".
It is about "We lost a billion dollars, because of your infringement". So Oracle claims not just a single copyright infringement of a single work, but billion dollars worth of infringement. It is not black and white, it is quantitative. How much there is of it determines the seriousness of the violation.
I'm not a lawyer of course, don't take my advise.
As for the morality of it? I don't like the idea of copilot replacing me, but I don't think it was wrong to make it. I'll eventually have to retrain myself to retrain copilot models I suppose. Or we'll have to decide to care for each other as we all go unemployed.
The number of people who learned to draw by redrawing/imitating Disney stuff is countless.
The thing people aren't seeing with AI art is that it's the same as mass manufacturing, compare: buying a mass produced knife vs buying a handmade artisanal knife. I think exactly the same thing applies; generating machine made art in a given style vs buying/commissioning an artist.
I think taking someone's work to train an AI is fine, as long as you obtained legal access to the material in the first place. There is no copyright for art styles, if there was we would have no artists because even this artist in question would've started out by imitating other artist' styles.
As an update after taking a closer look at the article rather than the discussion: her art style is 100% inspired by Disney (and a few others) and there is nothing wrong with that.
The concept of copyright was created in response to the development of the printing press. It was a reaction to a disruptive technology. It was possible to laboriously copy written works before the printing press existed, but the new technology made it incomparably cheaper and faster to do so, and societies reacted by creating new protections for content creators.
We are now at the threshold of a new disruptive technology that is likely to bring about profound economic changes in the arts. It makes no sense to me to take the old rules and try to use them to justify this disruptive technology, when the old rules were initially created in response to a different disruptive technology.
It seems uncontroversial that this new generative technology is built on the backs of human artists. It only functions by drawing from their works. Is it so unconceivable that we might need a totally new set of protections for those human artists?
> The concept of copyright was created in response to the development of the printing press. It was a reaction to a disruptive technology.
Absolutely, one of the major factors was that it allowed individuals to benefit directly off someone elses work without having made substantial changes. The protection was intended for the original works it self and derivatives too close to the original content.
> We are now at the threshold of a new disruptive technology that is likely to bring about profound economic changes in the arts.
This already happened with photography taking over portraits and tracing, the response wasn't to outright ban it, or really prevent it either. When technology made photography more accessible, to the point it was going to be disruptive to professionals in the field, the response again wasn't to outright ban it, or really prevent it either. This is despite the fact that it has litterally destroyed a significant amount of jobs to achieve conviniences that we now all enjoy.
I feel like the AI issue is a parallel to above situation. People are now given better tools to generate/create art themselves and as long as it isn't blatant copies, derivatives too close to the original content, it probably should be have similar rules in my opinion.
> It only functions by drawing from their works.
You can train AI models by taking photos and then vectorizing/toonifying/paintify etc. depending on what you're aiming for with various wildly available non-AI filters. Stylistic ideas are possible to implement into these filters, I have some experience having done so with making plugins for processing my photos. So, that isn't even a strict requirement for generation. So, even in the case where you ban AI from learning from people made art (even in the situation where they would allow it), there are ways to still train the AI models regardless to achieve a similar result.
There is another problem that hasn't been discussed, enforcement is going to be a very interesting problem considering how international borders for information/data are virtually non-existent now and it's becoming relatively difficult to even distinguish if a piece was generated by an AI or by a person. The economic changes are likely coming in regardless from my point of view. It's going to be either people are using it illegally if banned regardless or people using it legally if it isn't -- I just do not see this changing either way.
I wonder if it is possible to get a machine to learn a style without input. Likely a room full of typewriter monkeys searching for Shakespeare scenario, but a human would still be involved in the loop to "confirm" the desired style - which is technically a creative decision in itself.
Which I guess shows the true nature: machines could generate stuff for machines without any external input. But we built them, so we've tasked machines to generate stuff for humans. And therein lies the answer I guess.
I 100% believe machines can be creative. Creativity isn't something unique to humans or to living things. For me it's a concept.
It's different in the same way that making a copy of a book by hand, where it might take weeks or months to make a single copy, is different than making a copy with a printing press in a few minutes. It was the technological development of the latter process which lead to the concept of copyright being created in the first place.
There is a fundamental difference between a human being taking years to acquire artistic skill, then using that artistic skill to create individual works inspired by other artists, vs. using a generative AI system to "learn" a particular artist's style in a minutes or hours, then create infinite iterations of that style nearly instantly.
There's a tendency for people in tech to search out broad, overarching, universal principles that can be applied to all behavior. But sometimes, simply being able to do something tens of thousands of times faster or tens of thousands of times more cheaply is enough of a difference to require new rules, new moral frameworks, new modes of thinking.
"The computer is just doing what a human could do" simply isn't a compelling enough argument, any more than "the printing press is just doing what a scribe could do" would be.
That is the big question here, what kind of legal access does Copilot etc. have to the training materials. When they use the training material they must copy it to their computer. According to most open source licenses they then also have to retain the copyright notice to wherever they copy it. But now it seems that Copilot skips that part. It copies everything else but not the copyright notice.
If I look at 100 paintings by Pablo Picasso and then paint a new one in his style, did I commit copyright infringement?
But consider you produced a comic-book about Mickey Mouse where the character Mickey Mouse looked exactly like the one in the several Disney books and movies. You would probably get sued. Right?
Trivially, you still can't. Lawbreaking when it comes to copyright is enabled at scale by computers (like everything else); so unless you manage to win the war on general-purpose computing there's nothing you can do.
Sure, streaming has taken the place of piracy (growing the pie is better than strict conservatism), and Patreon (and its offshoots) has made it possible to be paid for recurring content that's inevitably going to be pirated, but file-sharing (torrents) and alt.binaries (abusing free storage sites as a backend for streaming video) still work just as well as they ever did.
The only reason people pay for content is that they want to, provided the price isn't usurious or infinite ("not sold in your region"); those that continue to work with said want prosper, those that fight it fail, and that's just the way it is.
- Corporations / Contributers can buy images, or draw their own
- Getty Images already has the rights to 477 million images.
This is inevitable.
You can't. Soulseek is alive and well. It started with Napster and now others are carrying the torch.
Everything you can come up with as a "solution" is really just a stop gap measure. Instead of specifying the style by name, you could specify it by example image. Instead of training the AI on her images directly, you could train a second generation AI on images drawn in that style generated by another AI that was trained on her images. Thus your second generation AI would be free of any copyrighted work. And of course the whole copyright thing only comes into play when people redistribute the AI. If AI is easy to train yourself locally, even that doesn't matter anymore.
If you want to go all Butlerian Jihad on the world, you might be able to stop it. As long as AI is allowed, this ain't going away, it's only getting easier, cheaper and faster.
Your "indirection" hasn't ever been a valid argument.
Also, Herbert wasn't against AI I don't think. I suspect he simply recognized he couldn't comprehend the world that far in the future if AI was a part of it. Instead, he used space magic to explore his very present reality of resource wars, and went on to make a point I'm not sure I understand, about too much political order and resultant stagnation causing self annihilation.
So just because AI is inevitable doesn't mean that we should abandon all regulation. There would be good merit in slowing down some progress, so we can actually maintain a good transition to new industries.
Curious choice of example, because it was never stopped. It just went somewhat out of the mainstream because the industry offered pricing options, like Spotify, who were acceptable for most people so they no longer had an incentive to resort to piracy. Not wanting to pay at all was always a minority position, most people just found it ludicrous to pay full album price for one of two songs that they liked.
And still, if you do want song X for free you can still obtain it easily. The industry just no longer makes a fuss about it.
We effectively didn't, though, at least as far as artists are concerned. Streaming revenue is abysmal for artists. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-...
Piracy made music acquisition too convenient for the consumers, so an alternative had to be created - but this alternative really only helps the labels, and not the people actually making the music.
It's not clear to me that the streaming world is better for artists than the Napster one. At least anyone wanting to legally listen to music then would buy albums, rather than just having a spotify subscription. Not that royalties on physical CDs were great, but my understanding is they did work out better for most artists than we see with streaming royalties.
I don't know what a potential analogy would be here with stable diffusion or dall-e or whatever, but I don't know that people were able to immediately identify the potential downsides with "winning" against piracy, either.
But that's not Napster's fault. Spotify pays a lot of money for playing of a song, of that the artist only sees a tiny percentage due to music middlemen trying to relive the 90's.
And that's why I buy music off Bandcamp whenever I can, and thankfully most of the music I listen to is on smaller labels, so usually even more money goes to artists.
I'm just saying that the solutions that pop up once you "win" are not necessarily ones that provide a win for the people you are trying to protect.
If P2P was somehow impossible, we would still be buying DRMd tracks for $1 each on iTunes. Spotify would at best, cost $80/month.
Spotify take in €9.5 billion and pay out 70% of that as fees to record companies who take their slice before giving the artist nothing.
I would consider that a lot of money, even if you disagree.
Spotify is taking in a lot of money and paying 70% to labels, which adds up to a lot of money for artists depending on their agreement with their label/distributor. But the per stream rate is still very low because there are trillions of songs streamed annually.
Are you saying that CD Baby is a better distribution technique than standard labels because you get good margins? I didn't know CD Baby until I just looked them up but they appear to be a distributor, so your $3.65 metric is still being paid by Spotify/Amazon/Apple. Please correct me if I'm wrong but that is much higher than the normal published numbers by 10-100x.
Is this an RIAA moment where labels are trying to make other people look like jerks rather than accepting what they do, or are people using the "per 1000 streams" poorly because they will always look worse on successful platforms?
In fact Jefftk has stated the exact opposite to your position.
$3.65 per thousand is at the low end of what I see elsewhere. For example https://twostorymelody.com/spotify-pay-per-stream/ has $3-$5 per thousand.
> I'm not clear what your point is.
I think the distribution of streaming revenues is generally reasonably fair, and people who say things like "Spotify pays artists nothing" are confused about either (a) how much money there is to divide up or (b) where it is going.
I'm glad that there is someone creative on here that can educate and confirm.
I obviously don't know your listening habits, so for you that may be the case. But people will listen to a single song far more often than once. Or otherwise there'd had to be 77.946.027 new users on spotify[1] last month all playing Ed Sheeran once. Clearly nonsense.
If you play every $1 iTunes song eight times on spotify, the costs (and therefore fees) will be on par: $10/month.
>The actual recording artists? “They’re keeping anywhere between 5% and a quarter.”
That is a far cry from 70%
70% of Spotify's revenue is to be split that way compared to ~40% of revenue of CD sales.
You're also comparing apples to oranges on revenue. 40% of the revenue of a $10-$18 CD sale is a lot different than 70% of a $10/mo subscription being split out over however many artists someone might listen to on spotify.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/arts/music/streaming-musi...
Lots of artists talk about how they simply can't make a living off streaming royalties - artists that were able to do in the era of album sales. Obviously any sort of comfortable living requires merch sales and touring.
I agree that Spotify's revenue split is not perfect (it is in fact worse than what you described), but it is still much more fair than record sales. I consider having tape/CD record sold in physical shops (i.e. not during concerts) would be a success on its own in the 90s.
Now every artist can publish their work on Spotify and start to earn money, possibly getting noticed through it. It is much feasible to not be a part of record label now.
You've hit the nail on the head there. The same record companies that got up to very dodgy copy protection schemes [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
(1999) 40% of 23.7 = 9.48
(2021) 70% of 14.9 = 10.43
So while gaming got much more popular during that time, music still brings a lot of revenue to the artists thanks to the streaming.
(1) https://www.statista.com/chart/17244/us-music-revenue-by-for...
That's pretty important difference. If it is going to recording company that pays pittance to artists no wonder "streaming revenue is bad"
If this is about big C copyright, where is the Mickey Mouse dreambooth concept? Disney property is seen as property but the labor of some random freelancer is just seen as nothing.
As it is, artists don't have massive teams of lawyers and billions in assets, which makes their concerns irrelevant to the people who would normally be bribed to advocate for them.
For copilot, I'd like to see more models trained on stolen and leaked proprietary code from hacks, or an organized movement to leak code from businesses and feed it into a freely-shared model. If transformation into the model is enough to launder copyright, it ceases to be stolen code. I'm sure it would be helpful in cloning proprietary products.
Naming a recognizable artist is the current "lazy" way of doing this instead of naming every possible visual style; and sure we could ban name and surname, but should an artist own "dreamy flat pastel colored illustrations of cities of characters with high contrast, no lines, children illustrations" for perpetuity? Definitely not, for the style itself there's likely hundreds of artists that have done something similar before and after.
It's a bit like saying we can't stop music piracy, now that Napster exists.
Remember the naive rallying cry among those who thought everyone should have the right to all music, without any compensation for the artist?
"Information wants to be free!" (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/24/napster-music-...)
Napster was a peer-to-peer file sharing application. It originally launched on June 1, 1999, with an emphasis on digital audio file distribution. ... 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. The weights are like distilled intellectual property. You're distributing an enormous body of other people's work, to enable derivative work without attribution? Huge harm to society, make it illegal.
If you use the art in your product, on your website, etc., you risk legal action. Just like if I publish your album on my website. Illegal.
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. When it's illegal, the criminals will have to pay for the GPU time.
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.