The level of claims accompanied by enthusiastic reception from a technically illiterate audience make it sound, smell, and sound like snake oil without much deep investigation.

There is another alternative to the law. Provide your art for private viewing only, and ensure your in person audience does not bring recording devices with them. That may sound absurd, but it's a common practice during activities like having sex.

True I can imagine that kind of thing becoming popular.

This would just create a new market for art paparazzis who would find any and all means to inflitrate such private viewings with futuristic miniature cameras and other sensors and selling it for a premium. Less than 24 hours later the files end up on hundreds or thousands of centralized and decentralized servers.

I'm not defending it. Just acknowledging the reality. The next TMZ for private art gatherings is percolating in someone's garage at the moment.

I find this difficult to believe; no matter how small your camera is, photography is about light. Art reproduction photography is surprisingly hard to do if you care about the quality of the end result. Unless you can surreptitiously smuggle in a studio lighting setup, tripod, and color checker card… sure you can take an image in secret, but not one that is a good representation of the real thing.

It’s about number of photons and aperture. In principle this could be very hard to detect, especially once people get good at multiple distributed apertures that are coherent with one another.

You could just build a stabilizer system and stand really still for 1 second. Then expose for a longer time. Photography is Apertrue, ISO, and exposure time. This will gather enough light to do a proper exposure even in a dimm lit venue. Anything darker and every viewer will have a hard time seeing the private art. ANother thing would be to crank up the ISO and denoise it later. Its much more lossy but with this you could get lower exposure times.

I hear what you’re saying, but I think maybe we just have different standards for what counts as acceptable quality.

For comparison, The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls did this and successfully remained hidden for half a century, only failing because it was published somewhere else.

That doesn't sound like a viable business model. There seems to be a non-trivial bootstrap problem involved -- how do you become well-known enough to attract audiences to private venues in sufficient volume to make a living? -- and would in no way diminish demand for AI-generated artwork which would still continue to draw attention away from you.

The thing is people want the benefits of having their stuff public but not bear the costs. Scraping has been mostly a solved problem especially when it comes to broad crawling. Put it under a login, there, no more AI "stealing" your work.

I don't think that's true at all. Images and text get reposted with or without consent, often without attribution. It wouldn't make it right for the AI companies to scrape when the original author doesn't want that but someone else has ignored their wishes and requirements. Basically, what good is putting your stuff behind login or some other restrictive viewing method if someone just saves the image/text? I think it's still a relatively serious problem for people creating things. And without some form of easy access to viewing, the people creating things don't get the visibility and exposure they need to get an audience/clients.

This is one the AI companies should offer the olive branch on IMO, there must be a way to use stenography to transparently embed a "don't process for AI" code into an image or text or music or any other creative work that won't be noticeable by humans, but the AI would see if it tried to process the content for training. I think it would be a very convenient answer and probably not be detrimental to the AI companies, but I also imagine that the AI companies would not be very eager to spend the resources implementing this. I do think they're the best source for such protections for artists though.

Ideally, without a previous written agreement for a dataset from the original creators, the AI companies probably shouldn't be using it for training at all, but I doubt that will happen -- the system I mention above should be _opt-in_, that is, you must tag such content that is free to be AI trained in order for AI to be trained on it, but I have 0 faith that the AI companies would agree to such a self-limitation.

edit: added mention to music and other creative works in second paragraph 1st sentence

edit 2: Added final paragraph as I do think this should be opt-in, but don't believe AI companies would ever accept this, even though they should by all means in my opinion.

Here are my 2 cents, I think we will need some laws specifying two types of AI models, ones trained with full consent (opt-in) for its training material and ones without. The first one would be like Adobe's firefly model where they allegedly own everything they trained it with, or something where you go around asking for consent for each thing in your training corpus (probably unfeasible for large models). Maybe things in the public domain would be ok to train with. In this case there are no restrictions and the output from such models can even be copyrighted.

Now for the second type, representing models such as Stable Difusion and Chat GPT, it would be required to have their trained model freely available to anyone and any resulting output would not be copyrightable. It may be a more fairer way of allowing anyone to harness the power of AI models that contain essentially the knowledge of all man kind, but without giving any party an unfair monopoly on it.

This should be easily enforceable for big corporations, else it would be too obvious if they are trying to pass one type model as another or even keep the truth about their model from leaking. It might not be as easy to keep small groups or individuals from breaking those rules, but hey, at least it evens the playing field.

Is that login statement strictly true? Unless the login is paid, there's no reason we can't get to (if not already there) the point where the AI scraper can just create a login first.

But then you can rate-limit to a point where scraping everything will take a considerable amount of time.

Of course the workaround would be to have multiple accounts, but that in turn can be made unscalable with a "prove you're human" box.

you are not incorrect that this would help mitigate, but it still misses a few key points I think regarding why artists are upset about AI generation

- This is still vulnerable to stuff like mturk or even just normal users who did get past the anti-bot things pulling and re-uploading the content elsewhere that is easier for the AI companies to use

- The artists' main contention is that the AI companies shouldn't be allowed to just use whatever they find without confirm they have a license to use the content in this way

- If someone's content _does_ get into an AI model and it's determined somehow (I think there is a case with a news paper and chatGPT over this very issue?), the legal system doesn't really have a good framework for this situation right now -- is it copyright infringement? (arguably not? it's not clear) is it plagiarism? (arguably yes, but plagiarism in US court system is very hard to proof/get action on) is it license violation? (for those who use licenses for their art, probably yes, but it's the same issue as plagiarism -- how to prove it effectively?)

Really what this comes down to is that the AI companies use the premise that they have a right to use someone else's works without consent for the AI training. While your suggestions are technically correct, it puts the impetus on the artists that they must do something different because the AI companies are allowed to train their models as they currently do without recourse for the original artist. Maybe that will be ruled true in the future I don't know, but I can absolutely get why artists are upset about this premise shaping the discussion on AI training, as such a premise negates their rights as an artist and many artists have 0 path for recourse. I'm pretty sure that OpenAI wouldn't think about scraping a Disney movie from a video upload site just because it's open access since Disney likely can fight in a more meaningful way. I would agree with artists who are complaining that they shouldn't need to wait for a big corporation to decide that this behavior is undesirable before real action is taken, but it seems that is going to be what is needed. It might be reality, but it's a very sad reality that people want changed.

No, eforcing click-wrap legal agreements is actually possible. With basic KYC the scraper would instantly open up itself for litigation and no internet art piece is frankly worth this sort of trouble.

>There is no way that such tools will ever win, given the requirements the art remain viewable to human perception

On the other hand, the adversarial environment might push models towards a representation more aligned with human perception, which is neat.

The ol' Analog Gap. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

> Huge market for snake oil here.

This tool is free, and as far as I can tell it runs locally. If you're not selling anything, and there's no profit motive, then I don't think you can reasonably call it "snake oil".

At worst, it's a waste of time. But nobody's being deceived into purchasing it.

If this is a danger from "snake oil" of this type, it'd be from the other side, where artists are intentionally tricked into believing that tools like this mean that AI isn't or won't be a threat to their copyrights in order to get them to stop opposing it so strongly, when in fact the tool does nothing to prevent their copyrights from being violated.

I don't think that's the intention of Nightshade, but I wouldn't put past someone to try it.

There's an academic paper being published.

Snake oil for the sake of getting published is a very real problem that does exist.

Religion is also deceptive and snake-oil even if it does not involve profit driven motivations.

It very often does involve such motivations, though I agree with your larger point.

I should've said even when it does not involve... English can be funny.

Everything old is new again. It's the same thing with any DRM that happens on the client side. As long as it's viewable by humans, someone will figure out a way to feed that into a machine.

My guess. Is that at some poi t of time You will not be able to use any generated image or video in commercial. Because of 100% copyright claim for using parts of copyrighted image. Like YouTube those days. When some random beeps matches with someone music...

It should be like that. I agree

This is the hard reality. There is no putting this genie back in the bottle.

The only way to be an artist now is to have a unique style of your own, and to never make it online.

"and to never make it online."

So then of course, you also cannot sell your work, as those might put it online. And you cannot show your art to big crowds, as some will make pictures and put it online. So ... you can become a literal underground artists, where only some may see your work. I think only some will like that.

But I actually disagree, there are plenty of ways to be an artist now - but most should probably think about including AI as a tool, if they still want to make money. But with the exception of some superstars, most artists are famously low on money - and AI did not introduce this. (all the professional artists I know, those who went to art school - do not make their income with their art)

Can you elaborate on how they supplement their income?

Every other source of income? So other, art-unrelated jobs.

GP almost certainly mean "make physical art." Pictures of that can get online, but it's not the real thing.

> leveraging state backed violence to deter the things they don’t want

I just want to say: I really appreciate the stark terms in which you've put this.

The thing that has come to be called "intellectual property" is actually just a threat of violence against people who arrange bytes in a way that challenges power structures.

I'm thinking — is it possible to create something on a global level similar to what they did in Snapchat: some sort of image flickering that would be difficult to parse, but still acceptable for humans?

Sorry i do not use Snapchat and with googeling "Snapchat image flickering" i did not find a good result. Could you elaborate this a bit more or provide me with a link where this is described? Thank you very much. :)

If humans can process it, you can train a model to do the same.

"A law, ie, leveraging state backed violence to deter the things they don’t want."

We all know what a law is you don't need to clarify. It makes your prose less readable.

Other people pointed out they appreciated this prose. It’s easy to forget what exactly people are asking for when they talk about regulating the training of machine learning models.

You don’t need it to visible. You only need it to be scrapped to poison the models. I think that’s the idea.

I heard that flooding the net with AI generated art would do much much more harm to generative AI than this whatever is this. Yes, this must be some snake oil salesman, those take it seriously turn AIs own weapon against AI.