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A comment on On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney. Parent comment

Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by ls612 on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @02:39PM (#39017967)
Copyright only makes any sense for goods with a high fixed cost of production and low to zero marginal cost. Any further use beyond solving that problem is pure rent seeking behavior

Also, with computers being functional copyright has become a tool of social control; any function in a physical object can be taken away from you at a whim with no recourse so long as a computer can be inserted into the object. Absent a major change in how society sees copyright I envision a very bleak totalitarian future arising from this trend.

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Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by Ferret7446 on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @02:53PM (#39018185)
No, copyright only makes sense insofar that it provides a net positive value for society: that it promotes/protects more creativity leading to economic output than it prevents.

That is, does the amount of creative/economic output dissuaded by allowing AI (preventing people who would not be able to or not want to create art if they couldn't get paid) exceed the creative/economic output of letting people develop and use such AIs?

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Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by ls612 on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @02:56PM (#39018232)
GenAI reduces the fixed cost of creating images/text/whatever which all else equal will increase the amount created. Whether or not you think that is a good thing is probably mostly a function of do you make money creating these things or do you pay money to have these things created.
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Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by freejazz on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @02:58PM (#39018259)
Don't put the cart before the horse. What art will we have for AI to copy if there's no more artists next generation?
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Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by ls612 on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @04:21PM (#39019322)
The future of good AI art is Adobe Firefly; a tool in a picture editor which gives users great productivity for certain tasks. Artists won’t go extinct; they will be able to produce a lot more art.
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Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by freejazz on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @05:25PM (#39020006)
That's the future of AI art - but is AI art the future of art? if AI artists can't maintain any profit from their work, how are they going to afford the compute time?
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Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by kelnos on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @04:53PM (#39019661)
> Copyright only makes any sense for goods with a high fixed cost of production and low to zero marginal cost.

If that's the case, then novels, news articles, digital images, etc. are things that copyright absolutely makes sense for. If you think that they have a "low cost of production", you are sadly misinformed about the artistic process.

Some of these have vanishingly low marginal costs when it comes to reproduction, but in light of their high fixed cost of production, I don't see how that matters.

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Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by MacsHeadroom on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @11:04PM (#39023135)
Novels maybe. News articles, with rare exception, and digital images absolutely do not have high fixed costs of production.
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Re:On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train... by MacsHeadroom on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @11:02PM (#39023121)
> Copyright only makes any sense for goods with a high fixed cost of production and low to zero marginal cost. Any further use beyond solving that problem is pure rent seeking behavior

100% agree. But even then it's not very good. Abolish copyright, severely limit patents, and leave trademarks as they are. The IP paradigm needs an overhaul.

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