There was a certain 4 frame series with each frame about 5m long by 3m high. Each was an architectural study of Rome with each being from a different view direction. What struck me was the text written below the paintings which indicated that the artist, after *3 years of work*, had been quoted that he was sick of the job and wished that the process would be now over. 3 years to produce 4 images so that some aristocrat could hang it on his wall and be reminded of his holiday adventure.
The distance between this state of the world, where to make a representation of reality (unreality) at the highest levels of fidelity would take years to achieve, versus what is now possible with digital cameras and AI image generation is staggering. Now anybody can create a Mona Lisa and have it hung in their own toilet to admire. Is this a bad thing that ordinary people have access to the tools to create content vs the old way where only the very very rich could afford to pay a master for three years to produce a few images?
I can only assume that the same arguments and complaints were raised at every stage a new technology was introduced that lowered the cost and time to produce "content".
Cameras often do rely on other professions to have existed to do their thing.
e.g. Architects who built city buildings, fashion designers who designed clothes, and engineers who built cars.
They don’t get paid every time their work gets put on Instagram, etc.
> the image of a building cannot be reproduced without the authorization of the architect who holds the copyright or of his successors in title. Otherwise, the reproduction of a protected work without the authorization of its author constitutes, according to the provisions of the article L122-4 of the Code of the intellectual property an act of counterfeit.
I don't think anybody has ever been sued but the SETE (Société d'exploitation de la tour Eiffel) do make money with the image.
[1] https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/business/use-image-of-eiffel...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Illumination_copy...
Is this law often enforced?
Which of those technologies were based on billions of copyright violations? And of course this copyright still exists but is only enforced in one direction, just like on YouTube where random corporations can claim copyright on any video and hurt the income of actual creators without negative consequences. AI will likely not improve this situation.
I'll think differently about that comparison if it is possible for random people to legally train models & create images from Disney's intellectual property on affordable hardware. But I don't have any false hope that equivalent enforcement of copyright will be a reality in the foreseeable future.
Corporations having too much power is different from technology encroaching on previously uniquely human faculties.
Of course both are phenomena that ought to be addressed by society. At which point we see that it's a political problem, and of course politics is broken.
> I'll think differently about that comparison if it is possible for random people to legally train models & create images from Disney's intellectual property on affordable hardware.
... that's a very strange set of criteria. that said, last year one of my designer friends tried Midjourney, one of the pictures was so and so in Star Wars style.
Of course generating pictures is different from using them, let's say in ads.
AI can reconstruct many training images in surprising detail. Show me an artist who can draw you an image they practiced on 10 years ago including the rough shape of the watermark.
> Of course generating pictures is different from using them, let's say in ads.
Microsoft's Copilot is a paid service, same with OpenAI's upcoming ChatGPT Plus subscription. Nobody here claims that it's illegal to draw Mickey Mouse and hang it on your fridge, but those AI models aren't trained just for fun. If Microsoft is allowed to make money from ignoring countless license terms I should be allowed to make my own short film trained with Disney cartoons and sell it. But we all know how well that would turn out.
I can't but that doesn't mean there are none. For music we have a lot of examples of artists who can copy perfectly. For visual arts we have people who take a helicopter tour of a city and then draw it in amazing detail.
Yes, time discounts everything for humans. That doesn't mean human artists don't cargo-cult watermark-like things. (One example is putting text/symbols on clothes that the designer doesn't bother to understand.)
> Copilot and MickeyMouse
This thread started by someone commenting about paintings in the Alte Pinakotheke, then about Disney.
Now it's language models.
Obviously they are different, but what's more important is that copying is more clear-cut in code, less degrees of freedom compared to visuals.
That said, at this point it's important to discuss how copyright works. You can look at someone's code. You can copy the style. Let's say you never saw functional code, you see a lot of it, then you learn functional style. Neat. But you can't copy the Haskell standard library 1:1 without infringing.
If Copilot produces Haskell stdlib, the copyright holders can sue.
And of course that's again where politics comes in. Since this is a new phenomena that disadvantages many small copyright holders this is where society ought to step in and help them to enforce their copyrights.
(So it's important to note that copyright and the license terms don't kick in if it's not a derived work. And that's the discussion we should be having. Maybe as a quick hotfix society should tweak copyright law and make it more broad in terms of what it considers a derivative. We can also put in the specifier that "except for humans, if you swear you did not use an artificial neural net" or whatever. I don't think this makes much of a difference, unfortunately. AI - and other kinds of technological changes - makes a lot of existing inequality problems worse. The general solution is to fix the inequalities. Of course if politics were actually representative of people's needs the inequalities were also likely inconsequential.)
I think the point here is that now you can. Your "AI" can draw it for you with extreme accuracy and then... is it yours? That's the real question here. Pretty simple.
What if we had a copyright law that did give like a percent of detail that has to be different, so you make a new drawing that has the required amount of difference, and it's yours right? Now your "AI" can be trained to make differences in drawings that specifically meet the requirement of however much difference between the original and yours will negate the ability of the original author to make a copyright claim. Pretty straightforward. It's not the case now, but when we have enough content that has to be judged by humans on whether or not it falls under copyright... Anyhoo... I'm not selling content, so I shouldn't care, right?</snark>
If copyright doesn't distinguish between that then copyright needs updated. It's a tool, not a person, and one that people want to use commercially so they can create the billion pieces of art to train it on themselves.
A human that copies someone will die. An AI can live, multiply, and be improved forever. Humans will never compete against anything they wind up being capable of. Society is built for humans not AI.
One one hand I support authors' rights to place restrictions on their art for a limited time. (Not the current forever + 75 years.) So let them draw whatever lines they want in the sand.
Because otherwise there's no general good way to delineate generative AI from other tools. It's a very fast magic brush. (You might have seen timelapse videos of artists do a digital painting. It's already pretty magical. Especially to me, because I can't even draw to eggs to match.)
https://rpjlaw.com/blurred-lines-copying-songs-musical-style...
All of them, no one is reinventing the wheel every time something new is made, every invention is based on the inventions that proceeded it, it's how human society advances and learns.
There is something impressive and inspiring about the process those artists went through, embedded in the physical work itself. Like we are impressed watching someone running a marathon, even though they could cover the same distance much more quickly in a car.
HN only tells me that almost none of you have even visited a modern art museum.
Making content production and duplication cheaper enables more people to consume it, requiring more of it, and more people end up working on the new systems. I suspect these tools will be no different.
This was also true for past media like the TV and the criticism of the medium in many ways was correct. TV remains, despite uptick in quality, more generic, intentionally addictive, attention grabbing than say, film. We're now discovering the negative effect algorithmic social media has on the mental health of teens. Critics of automatically produced mass media tend to be right locking backwards.
It doesn't really matter what you, me or the public thinks. If you set up a system that constantly forces people to optimize for lowest cost and highest profits without concern for other things, you eventually will end up with a race to the bottom, where content does cost zero monies.
And that's the system most of us live in today. There is seemingly nothing else to do about than to join the rat race, otherwise you get left behind and on the streets. You can try to fight it, but eventually capitalism will overrun you, either by force and sneakily. It eats everything around you.
Capitalism and globalism was supposed to be the system that forced everyone to be friends via trade, because why would you hurt your trading partner? Instead we got what we have today, which might be less violent, but maybe the same amount of cruel.
>discovering the negative effect algorithmic social media has on the mental health of teens
Same was said for pants over dresses, for radio, for tv, for rock and roll, for video games, for dancing, for co-ed schools, for educating women, for cameras, for electricity, for catalog ordering, and on and on, with literally the same arguments, the same studies, the same downfall of society, and this has been repeated in cultures the world over as they evolve. With all these terrible decreases in teen life compounding for hundreds to thousands of years, it's amazing they do so well today compared to generations past.
It's also nice when people put their beliefs, created from their upbringing, on the next generation, ignoring that each has adapted and evolved with new changes and each does turn out ok, and for the most part with much better lives.
Instead of picking a negative consequence of some change and ignoring the net change, look at the pros and cons - over time society tends to mitigate the cons and adopt the pros, and today will likely be the same pattern.
I actually did, you didn't which is why you're engaging in whig history. Today roughly one in six youths is obese. 10% of all American teens are prescribed some psychiatric medication. Over the last five years about 20% of high school students have reported thoughts of suicide. Today people from all age groups report fewer social connections than in any prior decade. All of these stats are at all time highs/lows.
This pattern you're talking about doesn't exist. If you look at actual data there are huge losses in quality of life, some having continued for decades. The tech utopianism in the face of clear evidence is pathological and imaginary. Vague arguments about "thousands of years of history" (do you actually have data on happiness and well-being over 'all of history')? don't constitute an argument, that's just fantasy.
Mortality has decreased https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
>All of these stats are at all time highs/lows.
First, that statement is incorrect. I'll post historical data:
>Over the last five years about 20% of high school students have reported thoughts of suicide.
Suicide rates have been nearly flat for 70+ years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-s...
Thoughts of suicide match - not an all time high https://www.childtrends.org/publications/teen-suicide-databa...
>Today roughly one in six youths is obese.
Are you claiming this is the fault of tech too?
>10% of all American teens are prescribed some psychiatric medication.
Is the the fault of tech or that more people get diagnosed? Before glasses were invented, 0% of people had them.
>do you actually have data on happiness and well-being over 'all of history'
We certainly do on mortality - and that's improved vastly over the past 100 years, mostly due to tech increases.
>This pattern you're talking about doesn't exist.
I just gave evidence it does exist. A living teen is better than a dead child.
Teens also are happier in general than in the 1990s : https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/the-sad-state-of-happi...
And that report points out the correlation between general teen happiness and various internet uses is ~ -0.1, which is pretty weak, with plenty of citations of research backing it up.
>Today people from all age groups report fewer social connections than in any prior decade
"there is no evidence that self-reported loneliness is increasing over time" https://ourworldindata.org/social-connections-and-loneliness
So you can cherry pick all the ills you want, blame them on whatever current boogey man there is, but that same argument has been used for all the things I mentioned above. The correlations, and certainly the causes, are no where near as clear in the research data on these topics.
There is a massive difference between "a smaller piece of the pie" and "cut out entirely".
I mean it's amazing that image can be generated from text but honestly, you have to take what you can get, it has it's own "style" you need to just accept what it gives you, even if you prompt it for a long time. There seem to be certain cases where it really excels and others where it just fails really hard. It was interesting to see the way people were trying to use it and how far off the mark it was.
However, what really struck me though is how it's such a blatant rip off factory. I asked it to generate some images of musicians I like as sketches, and in some cases it was reproducing famous posters etc and in styles and with similar outlines to those I've seen before. Then the way it takes "styles" of say Ghibli studio and rips it off is just, trash.
Most artists just wouldn't do that, they might imitate a style for study, borrow ideas for inspiration (of course) but a professional / respectful artist would develop their own style not to rip someone off so hard.
It's quite ridiculous the thing is legal. IMO MS PR must be going into over time convincing us this is all ok.
I can't wait till people start ripping off MS product with it and see how they feel.
Those who make the argument not allowing this to continue because it's holding back "AI" have really drunk the cool aid. It's fine people research, but to charge money for using other peoples work like that, it's disgusting.
I'd say most artists would be ok to lend their art to AI to actually improve and push the boundaries of art itself, but this whole "draw me a scene from x movie, or copy blah's style so I can use it for anything, including commercial purposes", what a load of crap, ha.
While I agree the current state of affairs isn’t great, we have to look past today to where things are going.
As far as I can tell tools like Midjourney do enable an iterative creative process. It’s more like painting with a pinball machine than directly with brushes. You have control over the process but only very tenuously. Things can go very wrong with generation that are out of your control, but the control you do have is magical.
I used Midjourney to try and generate a character for a project. I started with a source image and a description, and through hours of refining and regeneration, I finally got a character I liked.
- Did I steal the character from someone else? No, the character as far as I can tell is a unique one that I arrived at after sifting through thousands of variations.
- Did I copy a style? Well no it really, I made a character. I can then apply any style I want to it. The style is orthogonal to my goals of character generation.
- Did I get the result through no work of my own? Well I certainly lack the skill to draw the image I landed on. The only technical skill I used was clicking a button and entering text. But that’s the best part! Anyone can do this!
The skill I was actually using was my mind’s eye in guiding the iterative prompts, choosing when to blend images, choosing the words and the seed images, etc. That’s a higher-level creative process than moving the brush in the canvas. And you know who will be best at this? Artists!
The way I see it, this is a case of the punch card writer being replaced by the compiler. The punch card writer has all the skills necessary to use the compiler to continue producing programs as they were before, but faster.
Yes, artists are threatened by this. But they shouldn’t be because they are the most qualified to leverage these tools and to wield them competently. The game used to be to start from a blank canvas and to use an iterative creative process to build a scene that you picture in your head. Nothing has changed about that except now the canvas starts filled. But it still needs to be molded and pushed toward what’s in the kind of the artist. That’s where the artistry comes in.
A service exists which allows people to rip off other artists work and pass it off as their own and hide that fact in the fact it's "generated".
Some artists styles are so prolific, so great that if you're just lazily having ChatGPT generate that for you then using it for commercial gain, or not crediting them, that's theft in my view.
I'm not talking about new technologies that enable new types of art, I'm talking about a platform that enables mass scale rips offs.
I'd feel completely different about it if artists were able to lend their art works to the training model voluntarily for training and even receive some royalties overtime. In fact, I think that's a pretty cool business idea.
So while the ripping off isn’t great, that’s something which can be fixed, and you’ve given a great suggestion on how to do so. But in the meantime, the tech is advancing, and digging in our heels isn’t an option. The upside is far too great to society imo. The legal and social environment will normalize around it, but it isn’t going away.
We should be embarrassing the weight of labor lifted from our shoulders and organize society so that it becomes desirable. Replaced professionals should be allowed to go into retirement directly and access some form of basic income. There should be incentives to automating your own work.
Now incentives are on the other way: everyone tries (understandably) to make it as hard as possible to be replaced but this just leads to a world of bullshit jobs pretending to be useful while the AIs do all the heavy lifting.
Completely disagree with this view, especially when it comes to art.
This is not advancing society, or art, or anything, it's a freaking knock off factory that's been developed and used for commercial gain. It's not the same as manual loom weavers being replaced, this is a way to steal peoples stuff with little trace or accountability. This is legal trash and MS has plenty of lawyers to make you feel otherwise.
I was playing with it today and I couldn't believe the crap I was seeing. Nearly every single known artist is known because they developed a unique style, and worked to develop that style. They didn't just copy other peoples stuff and sell it. To make a machine that just rips off peoples styles and then you charge money for it is freaking lame as and I really hope they get sued hard for it, actually they should be taxed to pay for all the fantasy retirement money you speak of.
Do you know that throughout history there has been many, many artists who made counterfeit art works for money? There has been many, many print shops ripping off work etc. This is absolutely no different to automating that same level of theft. In my opinion, what's going on there isn't even really that original.
This isn't just about research or advancing anything, because it's not. It takes much and gives back very little. If it was for research, do it in a university, generate some new cool things with it and leave it at that. Having a machine which can just "draw this and do a half ass job at ripping off someone who worked hard to create something cool", what a low blow.
Disclaimer: I'm not an artist, so it's not personal, I just now bullshit when I see it, and that thing is bullshit, regardless of the technology behind it.
Because when you drink Cherry Cola or eat Cherry Bakewell Tart, your first thought is to the chemist who worked hard to make the synthetic flavour, and then criticism to the company that just "copies other peoples stuff and sells it" hoping they get sued hard for it?
I also think it’s a matter of scale, I guess you’re staying a company has stolen another companies flavouring formulae, and used it for their own devices, which does seem like ripping something off, anyway…I shouldn’t and don’t care in that case so I shouldn’t care when artists work is is used to profit off without paying them royalties ? ..
Artworks since at least Duchamp have been more about some abstract concept rather than a nice painting.
Now if ChatGPT can churn out convincing BS about why taping a banana to a wall or something is a piece of revolutionary art, then artists will really be in trouble.
Or rather how you can sell some abstract concept to the paying public. The level of bullshittery in the arts is beyond the scale.
It's still kind of sad for the people who are affected though (when/if they are affected? kind of hasn't happened yet).
Very related, am I the only one who finds it funny corp lingo for human artists is "content creators", and what AI is spitting out is called "art"?
Progress isn't ruthless. People are ruthless. People make these decisions, weighing the profits against the ethical concerns and potential impact on society. It's not some platonic form pulling the trigger.
I could argue that cloning myself and forcing myselves into indentured servitude to build my space kingdom on Mars is "progress" but perhaps that is more technological progress than societal progress and therefore undesirable.
As far as being replaced, we'll all be replaced at some point so what's the end game look like? Is it "progress" for humanity or AI? Are we just manufacturing our own obsolescence?
I also don't think that much of what's available online is true "art".
The vast majority of the image generation crowd are (surprise surprise) adamantly against paying artists for training materials.
that's because it would be literally impossible to give them any amount of money that would make a difference for the artist. It would cost hundreds of billions to train a new model. At that point, it would be simpler to just make AI dev illegal because the effect would be the same.
Worst of all, the majority here seems to be hailing them for this.
That attribution would be a product of the floating point values (weights) of the model, right?
"Here's the list of artists contributing to your work not already in compensated libraries such as Getty. Your bill is $X.XX and 70% of your payment will go to these artists in this proportion [list]".
Instead MS is just pocketing it. It isn't like they lack the funds and hardware/software resources to also implement backtracing...
Perhaps what should be advocated is use this for idea generation then present it as part of the design brief to get local designers and artists to do a genuine creative work. And give them credit on the published result.
Where is their attribution? Should we expect Microsoft and OpenAI et al. to list the authors of the papers they used to work through the technical aspects of their product? Should all of the open source projects they leveraged be attributed and compensated? If we are going to ask Microsoft to share profits with artists, shouldn't we also ask them to share profits with scientists and open source devs?
Arguably, yes! But if so, then the focus on the poor artists being robbed is misplaced. If artists are being robbed by corporations, then they can get in line if they want a payout, because the rest of us are being robbed too. It's a much larger problem than just artists -- it's that corporations capture all of the downstream benefits of upstream content/science/technology developments, and then refuse to reinvest at a proportional rate back into the system that allowed them to profit so handsomely. This applies to the scientists and the artists.
So yes, be mad at what Microsoft is doing. But the solution isn't to get them to pay artists, that doesn't fix anything. If we want actual change, we need to fundamentally reimagine the relationship between corporations and the rest of us. If the only way to get there is for corporations to screw over more people until enough wake up, then so be it.
Microsoft Designer is not spitting out composites of stolen research, it is creating composites of art that can't be matched back to the original.
> If artists are being robbed by corporations, then they can get in line if they want a payout, because the rest of us are being robbed too.
Perhaps you should disclose what AI is stealing from you. For me, nothing, because my career is in an area where I don't have to publicly share my work.
So, if we're to establish (I won't say "prove") the idea of [everything is transformation], we'd need to sort out the list of primitives, which are being re-combined.
Conversely, for the [some things are really new], we'd have to find the new items. That said, the new items will almost popup in the context of other transformations, e.g., a new innovation in painting would still likely occur within some more normal transformations.
Take for example the Abstract Art movement, which was about painting not representations of real things, but exploring the elements of form, color, line, texture, but not painting people or landscapes (or only doing so in a very abstract way). So, painting a person on a digital medium vs oil & canvas or watercolor is a transformation. But my sense is that some of these abstract artists were actually digging down into the lower levels of subconscious visual processing, where the initial processing is to find edges, colors, movement, textures, and this was entirely new in the history of painting.
What about concepts, from the flat earth to the round earth, from geocentricism to heliocentrism, to no special location in the universe, or from earth-water-fire-air to alchemy, to structure-of-the-atom-based chemistry? Are there no new ideas here, or are they just out of scope?
To your example, is any number just a combination of other numbers? The concept of Zero didn't exist for a long time in recorded history (how long is debated). What about negative numbers, imaginary numbers? Do we consider these new or combinations?
Or, are we just discussing the Ship of Theseus, a fundamentally unsolvable question that depends on our concept of "new"? (still a fun rabbit hole!)
2. Human mind can recombine all it wants. It’s called a homage, a reproduction, or a cover. When a software tool does that automated and at scale, though, it is copyright violation.
Was it paid? How do you know? A lot of research is done by Ph.D. students, who are paid if you're lucky. Often though they are in fact paying for a degree.
Moreover, science and art are often held as two sides of the same coin, because they are both fields that don't generate profit, yet society has deemed socially necessary enough to fund them. So even though scientists and artists are held to be opposites personality wise, the roles they play in society are actually very similar. This means their works are also exploited in a similar way.
> Microsoft Designer is not spitting out composites of stolen research, it is creating composites of art that can't be matched back to the original.
We could accurately say that Microsoft is profiting off of research done by students who go uncompensated. If a starving artist should be paid because their drawing went into a diffusion model that Microsoft profits off of, why shouldn't a starving student who wrote a paper that MS read to create their diffusion model be compensated as well?
> Perhaps you should disclose what AI is stealing from you. For me, nothing, because my career is in an area where I don't have to publicly share my work.
Well, that's one of the problems isn't it? Microsoft doesn't have to disclose or attribute any of the works that went into the production of this technology. But in the general case, if you walk through the OpenAI offices, you'll find stacks of research papers, whose authors are listed readily on those papers. If the artists get in on a royalty cut, I don't see why every one of those authors shouldn't as well (and for that matter all the open source devs whose code is running on their systems).
Artists and writers generally earn their living by selling their works. If they are not paid for their works, they starve, which is why the stereotype of the "starving artist" exists.
This is like MS scanning all Open-Source code and generating PROPRIETARY results from that code.
Like the art, it was shared or published WITHOUT permission for commercial re-use.
Yet, here is Microsoft, hijacking and commercially re-using it. This is effectively stealing without permission or compensation. None of the artists consented for this type of re-use, especially packaged such that it would literally erase their ability to make a living.
MS has a very cool product here, except for this wholesale systematic theft.
> If they are not paid for their works, they starve, which is why the stereotype of the "starving artist" exists.
Sort of. Most people actively doing the hard labor in scientific fields are in fact Ph.D. students, who are paid meager stipends, if anything. They also frequently literally starve due to how little they are paid. And yet, it's their hard work that goes into published papers, which then are read by engineers (read: highly-compensated millionaires), who then implement those ideas into production code, which is sold for profit.
Further, much of the scientific process is actually volunteer work. I don't peer edit and review for free, in my spare time, just so Microsoft has an easier time reading the papers that pass through my inbox. I do it because the scientific process requires it, and this is the process we've decided on as a society. But maybe in the future, all scientific research will be for-profit, paid access only. That's the way it will be if the profit keeps getting captured by corporations without proportional taxes being paid back into the system.
> Scientists are generally paid, at least with public grant money
That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is the scientists who are paid with grant money are the lucky ones, because the pie is so small. So many other scientists are doing side jobs, hustling, and giving up their dream to be a scientist because the opportunities to make a living in this field are so few and far between. Being a scientist supported by a grant or corporation is a lot like being an artist with a patron, actually.
And why is it this way? The pie is so small to begin with because science is generally not profitable, and so research cannot fund itself. Nonetheless, we as a society feel that scientific research is a worthwhile endeavor, so we fund science, and tax corporations who use the fruits of science industrially. Those funds will then be reinvested into more science.
But now Microsoft and the rest of the big corps don't want to pay their taxes, yet they still want to freely incorporate public-funded research into their for-profit technology products. If that plays out, well who is going to fund the science? The scientists can't, the public won't, the corporations won't.
If a factory worker at a car manufacturing plant was handed a screwdriver, and he claimed it was "replacing" him, we would know that he is incorrect; it is a tool designed to make him more productive. But the day they rolled out the robotic assembly lines, however, he was correct: those were designed to replace him. And they did. And now he lives in the Rust Belt with a degraded quality of life and few job prospects because he didn't just lern 2 code.
I'm not saying it's logical to be against AI image generation, but definitely have a feeling that something has gone wrong here. When Microsoft, a billion dollar global software firm, can profit by generating these images I must ask if they are the ones that worked for such reward.