In 2 out of 3 of your examples the "victim" is a large corporation

Which employ real people to do jobs. What’s your point, that people working for large corporations don’t count for some reason? What reason is that?

> In 2 out of 3 of your examples the “victim” is a large corporation

No, in none of them are the victims mainly large corporations.

In two out of the three, the scumbags who are victimizing are acting through a large corporation, but I’m not sure how that is material.

Artists are literally already being affected by their art being scraped to train these models. According to my artist friends, commissions are down, and there's reports of professional positions being replaced as well.

Do you not think that the response is justified in the face of the livelihood of artists being actually stolen from them as we speak?

No. If a robot can do your job, it's time to find another.

Copyright maximalism makes the creative world worse for everyone in the long run.

The robot can't do the job. The Robot needs the artist to train. The robot can't train on its own output because it doesn't understand what it's supposed to be drawing.

Artists don't need to collaborate with the tool running their livelihoods either.

Ruining the lives of actual creatives is making the creative world a worse place right now, so spare me the thought for the long run.

And what did the artist do at art school/formation years? Just learned strokes with zero references to works of art nor culture?

Besides a diffuser trained just in public domain is going to be as dangerous to their job, they seem to generalize well enough, and if their style is anywhere close to anything existing pre 1920 they will have ai spitting out the exact same thing they do and no recourse.

And to get to the point, actual creations can use these tools to increase their output then fold or more. A reduction in commission price is to be expected, as is expected for them to use the tools to produce more.

They are not outcompeted by ai, they are outcompeted by a new crop of artists bracing ai tools to work at a greater volume and thus can sustain a lower price point. More art will be produced, not less, and those in true danger are the artisans that aren't embracing the ai industrial revolution.

Humans come and go but AI is forever and shouldn’t be treated as if they’re the same. Human society is for humans but we’re creating immortal models that can be forever improved and will outperform all current and future humans. So what, the current generation embraces it and the next gets replaced by it entirely?

Seems tech won’t be satisfied till its devalued the entire human experience of growth and effort and replaced it with quick answers and cheap results.

And these arguments are different from those employed by the OG Luddites, how...?

I’m sorry does it need to be? Does being a Luddite invalidate the argument I’m making or perhaps you can see that all automation is about trade offs and perhaps this moves the needle too far in one direction. By all means continue using Luddite as a slam dunk argument not to consider the impact of this technology on society vs previous forms of automation.

Edit: Then one day when the species goes extinct because we’ve got our robo-waifus we can exclaim in our final breathes that the luddites were wrong. All technology is great, no issues whatsoever.

(Shrug) There are two careers to avoid if you prefer things to stay the same over time: 1) technology; and 2) art.

A rising tide really does lift all boats, whether you believe it or not. History furnishes no exceptions to this rule.

I’d like that to be true but the argument that people who champion AI always make is that those who embrace the technology will out compete those who don’t. This technology isn’t free, certainly not globally. Sounds like power will concentrate in the hands of early adopters. If AI makes everyone productive then labor value goes down. I’m just having a hard time seeing this as a massive benefit to ordinary people.

In that regard you do have a valid point. Equitable access to models is going to be a huge, huge deal. Things aren't getting off to a great start in that regard.

To those looking at becoming politically active in this area, it will be much better to work to democratize AI than it will be to try to stop it. The former will be difficult, the latter impossible.

> The Robot needs the artist to train.

It doesn’t, though. The models that are transforming the markets now would continue to do so, in much the same way, if no additional art from working “traditional” artists was used to train either base models or fine tunes.

Sure, if this existed before the models – which it couldn’t, since it incorporates one of them directly – and had been applied to all existing (including public domain) art and it was completely effective and had no immediate countermeasure, it could have obstructed or delayed things, but now its trying to unring the bell, and it can’t, even if it worked flawlessly on a technical level.

> The robot can't train on its own output because it doesn't understand what it's supposed to be drawing.

Actually, a very significant source of training data for new training of models is…output of existing models curated by the trainer. The robot can be trained on its own output.

> Artists don’t need to collaborate with the tool running their livelihoods either.

Ironic statement, given that they do even to use Glaze, which incorporates exactly the tool they are blaming to do its work. In fact, the entire poisoning attack is done by injecting other artist’s styles into their work, in the hope of confusing style extraction. That is, the tool literally does exactly the thing it is intended to prevent, as its preventive measure.

> According to my artist friends, commissions are down, and there's reports of professional positions being replaced as well.

To be fair, the economy is in a dump. Reduced commissions and positions being cut might have more to do with that than AI. That said, the market for “generic” art is probably going to be taken over by AI.

It's hard to understand what's going on without witnessing it: kids are collecting ~50 files, throwing it into a packaged fine-tuning tool, or worse yet, just putting an image through i2i to wash off giveaway features and claiming to be an "artists". And those "arts" aren't that well received by audiences. There are some low-budget fringe use cases but those are low-effort low-return stuff. People say the AIs are getting better, but those to me are just trying to be optimistic.

Nothing is taken over by AI, but just young clinical psychopath types are being enabled to be burned later at the expense of all. That's kind of wrong.

I don't understand: is your argument you should bad laws are only bad when they are used to address a non-existent problem?

But are their works even included in any of the datasets?

Also - if I want to get, say, cover art for my book - why should I hire a human if Stable Diffusion works just as good? I'm also not interested in ripping off a particular artist's style. Do those artists really think that I'm going to hire them after they opt out of being included into ML datasets? Nope - I'll just experiment with SD a bit more to get the style that I want.

Well, you live by copyright law minutia and you die by copyright law minutia. If this was glaze's intended purpose, and it actually works, then hats off to them for the brilliant hack.

While i don't disagree, it also probably isn't even in the top 10 scummy anti-circumvention uses.