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.
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.