The Google bot has been consuming their art for many years, even copying it verbatim into Google's site and yet they didn't complain.

This seems much more about the fear of competitions, than about violation of copyright. And yes, that's scary, but unavoidable as tech progresses. I don't think anything good could come from trying to strickten copyright here. The AI is obviously not copying directly, at best it takes a bit of inspiration from other works, something artists themselves do plenty themselves.

Something like UBI might help with the monetary needs eventually. Though the fear part might start getting really interesting in the near future. What do you do with your life when AI is better at it than you? When everything you can create, can be created by the AI faster and better?

> This seems much more about the fear of competitions, than about violation of copyright

Yep, it's all about being compensated and yes copyrights are already very problematic and creativity limiting concept.

People in these industries happen to be the first to face AI revolution but it will come for as all, eventually. UBI might be something but I don't know, it seems like hard times are ahead of us.

> People in these industries happen to be the first to face AI revolution

as has many other industries that faced automation and become obsolete. The fact that it is AI derived doesn't make it different than Luddites before.

Artists shouldn’t have to compete against themselves. If these AI companies didn’t use the work of artists, the output would suck! I’m sure many artists would be happy to compete against the artistic talents of software developers. But they’re not, they’re having to compete against their own work.

I listened to an interview with an artist who referenced the “three C’s”:

Consent

Credit

Compensation

These seem reasonable to me. The request isn’t to eliminate the technology. It’s that artists should be able to consent to their work being used. Works derived from their work should include credit. And, they should be compensated.

Who do I credit when I use SD inpainting to remove power lines from the background of a personal vacation photo?

Everybody who ever made a photograph that shows blue sky and posted it online - easy.

The request is to eliminate the technology. The training data set for stable diffusion has 5 billion images. Even if it was a single dollar per image, the data set as a whole would cost $5 billion.

Getting consent of all the authors within that 5 billion images, managing the infrastructure of paying them, would be a Herculean task, and the cost of that task would far outrun the 5 billion spend if you gave a dollar for each image.

That would kill any and all possibility of an open source AI model. The future where this happens would be a very dystopian one.

This. I see and understand the FUD on behalf of the artists. It's real; this is going to change things in a way that makes their lives harder, and that sucks.

What I see in the discussion is a results first, truth second thing. This is understandable - in an existential fight, damn the consequences - I'm swinging for my own survival.

What's missing from that analysis though, is that by constricting open source models, you're not by any measure stopping the development or deployment of these models. Google will make one. Microsoft will make one. Apple will make one.

Adobe will make one. Then, in order to use these technologies, you will have to pay. A lot - and it won't be paying the artists. Sure, the initial training night send out a few cents for each work included, a small price for Google to pay to prevent competition. But you're smoking the wrong shit if you think for a second that won't change as soon as the lead is cemented.

So now you're still looking for another job, and you don't even get to play with this new tech and continue making art, because you don't work for Google.

It’s insane how much of a gift to artists Stable Diffusion is, this tech could have been wrapped up in extremely expensive subscriptions by any of the current creative tool rent barons but it was handed to us all for free.

Many are too angry and small minded to see how lucky we are. A tool beyond anything Adobe currently ships today, for free. Could have easily been a AutoCad level subscription (10k+ a year IIRC that would have left you behind if you hadn’t paid.

I think that some of the friction here is about mindset. I have a lot of friends who are artists, and many of them consider this stuff 'tech shit I'll never understand'; I think, because we've culturally set ourselves up in a strata of 'professionals' (who are assumed to be better / smarter / uniquely capable) and non-professionals (who are born without whatever it takes to grok x). This is along many lines - my artist friends in question both believe they understand something about the creative process that the art-uninitiated will never get, and that 'tech shit' is leagues beyond what they'll ever get, because they did bad in math.

But here's the thing; I have never 'done art' as a part of my identity, and yet I can listen to them talk about it and understand where they're coming from enough to contribute.

Also, I work in tech and I didn't even make it through basic trig. I have a GED and a set of scattered community college credits that are never going anywhere because of a GPA < 2.

The whole idea that there are 'this type of person' and 'that type of person' and that those are immutable is a horrific and dangerous lie.

But some people have bought it.

Future of creativity and artistry isn't just being expert in one thing anyway, already seeing in a lot of fields where top level creatives are managing to excel in several fields.

These sort of tools are only going to accelerate this trend in my eyes.

People and companies have complained an enormous amount about Google's usage of images, particularly their inclusion in Google's site, and legal action or the threat thereof has caused Google to change how Google Images works before.

I think what we are seeing here is a proxy argument.

Artists do not care about the copyright of people being able to learn from their art and reproduce it.

It is not been an issue for decades, because it is a long established standard of copyright. You can't copy a work directly, you can learn from it and reproduce your own sort of stuff.

What's different now is that this is a tool which artists can be replaced by. They not angry that their art has been learned from. Artists are angry that there is a tool which can replace them. And artists are looking for a way to make sure that tool is hampered as much as physically possible.

If it were not learning copyright it would be something else, and whatever that's something else is it would also probably be something with proxy for that core issue.

Imagine we had created an AI which was perfect, it could take your exact description of anything you asked it for and drew that thing.

And then I went and asked it for a picture of Mickey mouse in the style of Disney. Because it's a perfect AI perfectly reproduces it.

Who is in the wrong? I think it's absurd to think the creators of the AI would begin the wrong, because they did their job perfectly. It's a perfect app, it is a tool capable of literally anything.

At the end of the day, it's the person using the tool to violate copyright who is in the wrong, assuming they distribute those images.

And I don't believe the answer here is communism, I believe the answer is the same answer we've had for decades for the same situation. People need to find new jobs and learn new skills and do new things.

And as programmers, it's probably going to happen to us too, about as soon as it happens to artists. Time to consider to start to learn to weld or build homes or something like that.

I don't think we can look into this from copyright standpoint. It was already not working very well in the digital age, now it's completely useless.

I don't object that people should learn new skills and find new jobs, my concern is that people who actually put huge effort to produce that "training data" are now left dry. They should be compensated and move on, I'm completely against hampering the abilities of AI in order to preserve the current business structures.

The problem is, the net contribution of most artists to these systems is next to zero.

It's greater than zero, otherwise the AI wouldn't exist, but these AI are trained off of 5 billion plus examples.

Examples that required work to collect and sort through. Examples that required millions of dollars worth of compute time to make into something useful.

What is there to compensate them for? These machines are not actually going to make these companies that much money either. The tools are open source. Competition is going to reduce profit on these systems to a very slim margin.

You have to not only compensate for the fact that they aren't involved in actually creating the AI, so they're only getting a fraction of what this thing is worth in the first place. Then you have to consider that there are five billion images in the training set.

The compensation is going to be nothing.

I agree, the situation is not ideal. These machines should't been trained on their work in first place.

Currently compensating the artists would be like the Pirate Bay compensating the studios for their production costs through the gambling ads they run. No new move would have been ever made if that was the case.

Isn't this machine never being invented a net loss for society?

I want my computer to be able to summon images out of the ether if I ask it for a picture of anything I could imagine. I could not imagine a positive system that would value such a small group of individuals over the need of the whole in a situation like this.

The tech is out there. This whole discussion is a waste of energy, it will never, ever be undone. Focus on what's next, not what you've lost.

Capitalism isn't when you pay for things, it's when there's capital you can sell.

The capital of the artists is their intellectual property, that's the point.

So if I look at everything you created with an omniscient view how many violations will I find in your artwork?

These days it's both publishers and artists attempting to create RMS's world of a right to read.

Under capitalism artist would be unable to make a profit off of their art.

Under communism artists would be barred from making art entirely, ordered by the state to work in a place where it is deemed to be productive.

You must be joking? It's obvious if you actually care to look that leftist governments value the arts much more than liberal ones.

Is there a study on this? (Serious question.)

It would seem that it opens you up to the problem of other people deciding whether you're an artist or not and if so whether you're a good artist.

The same of course happens with capitalism, where it's your customers doing it. (Or in the case of books, which are almost never profitable, the VC-like publishers deciding to give you advances.)

So of course the reason modern mixed economies are good is there's more than one set of people that you may be able to convince to fund you.

> Under capitalism artist would be unable to make a profit off of their art.

Sure they would, it would just be "I got paid to do this art/music piece that then someone will use in their product they sell"

"Capitalism" is selling the right itself to someone else, not earning royalties from it. IP rights are government creations; it's not like you signed a contract with each royalty payer.

Actually, you are wrong. The capital of the artist is to physically create art. AI has to be fed physically created art and the told by humans what it is being fed. AI is not 'inspired', it is statistically driven by a human written progam, using mapping of human made work, labeled, tagged and defined by more humans to render a shopping list input by another human. Humans are using programming technology, written by humans to exploit other humans physical work.

> The capital of the artist is to physically create art.

Surely that's their labor? Capital is the factor of production that isn't labor (or land if Georgist.)