If a classroom of 14 year olds are making a game in their computer science class, and they use AI to make placeholder images... Was a real artist harmed?
The teacher certainly cant afford to pay artists to provide content for all the students games, and most students can't afford to hire an artist either.. they perhaps can't even legally do it, if the artist requires a contract... they are underage in most countries to sign a contract.
This technology gives the kids a lot more freedom than a pre-packaged asset library, and can encourage more engagement with the course content, leading to more people interested in creative-employing pursuits.
So, I think this technology can create a new generation of creative individuals, and statements about the blanket harm need to be qualified.
This is a nice strawman you've put up, but students and teachers are not entitled to nice assets. As you mentioned, there's plenty of free and open source content on the internet, like open game art or kenney, that can be used ethically, or the 14 year olds can make their own assets and understand how much artistic labor is involved in making games. Having them use the theft engine would stifle their creativity, not enhance it.
I kind of think you're also showing an implicit bias in your comment that bothers me a lot in the tech industry. If using AI is okay for the creative labor, why shouldn't the students also use it for the programming too? Why do anything at all?
It feels too me like a lot of people in tech feel that their labor is implicitly more valuable than artistic labor. You think it's fine to use AI for the art because you think that isn't the important part. The importance for you is in the programming only.
Games are massively technical, multi disciplinary works of art that require a wider variety of skills than just programming, yet programmers always assume their contributions are the most valuable, and the most worthy of being taught and passed down to the next generation. The aesthetic value of the art is just an afterthought.
It's kind of why I'm always so disgusted by this conversation. These image generators wouldn't exist without artistic labor, and that labor is arguably the more important contribution compared to the technical labor that produced the training algorithm, but rather than revere that contribution, the members of this community seem almost annoyed that artists are upset with them. It's just so ungrateful. And then you invent these scenarios to justify that theft like this, telling us an artist wouldn't get paid anyway so why are you so mad?
I'm mad because you're telling me this is going to lead to a new generation of creatives while you smother the economies and information ecosystems that support the training of creative skills, and you're too ignorant, deluded, or malicious to stop.
I disagree. When you publish your work, I can't copy it, but I can do nearly anything else I want to with it. I don't need your consent to learn from your work. I can study hundreds of paintings, learn from them, teaching myself to paint in a similar style. Copyright law allows me to do this.
I don't think an AI, which can do it better and faster, changes the law.
Maybe because AI is ultimately nothing but a complicated compression algorithm, and people should really, really stop anthropomorphizing it.
If I wrote a program that chose an image at random from 1000 base images, you’d agree that the program doesn’t create anything new. If I added some random color changes, it would still be derivative. Every incremental change I make to the program to make it more sophisticated leaves its outputs just as derivative as before the change.
You've yet to present a convincing argument regarding the ethics. (I do believe that such arguments exist; I just don't think you've made any of them.)
If you really can't think of a reason, I don't think anybody here is going to be able to offer you one you are willing to accept. This isn't a difficult or complex idea, so if you don't see it, why would anybody bother trying to convince you?
> (I do believe that such arguments exist; I just don't think you've made any of them.)
This is lazy and obnoxious.
The idea I expressed is also quite straightforward. That the act of copying something around in RAM is a basic component of using a computer to do pretty much anything and thus cannot possibly be a legitimate argument against something in and of itself.
The audience on HN generally leans quite heavily into reasoned debate as opposed to emotionally charged ideological signalling. That is presumably sufficient reason for someone to try to convince me, at least if anyone truly believes that there's a sound argument to be made here.
> This is lazy and obnoxious.
How is a clarification that I'm not blind to the existence of arguments regarding ethical issues lazy? Objecting to a lazy and baseless claim does not obligate me to spend the time to articulate a substantial one on the other party's behalf.
That said, the only ethical arguments that immediately come to mind pertain to collective benefit similar to those made to justify the existence of IP law. I think there's a reasonable case to be made to levy fractional royalties against the paid usage of ML models on the basis that their existence upends the market. It's obviously protectionist in nature but that doesn't inherently invalidate it. IP law itself is justified on the basis that it incentivizes innovation; this isn't much different.
Just a quick example, what's my proper compensation for this specific post? Can I set a FIVE CENTS price for every AI that learned from my post? How can I OPT-IN today?
I'm coming from the position that current law doesn't require compensation, nor opt-in. I'm not happy with it, but I dont see any easy alternative
The appropriation argument is somewhat unsound. Creative endeavors, by definition, build on what's come before. This isn't any different between code, creative writing, drawing, painting, photography, fashion design, music, or anything else creative. Creation builds on what came before, that's how it works. No one accuses playwrights of appropriating Shakespeare just because they write a tragic romance set in Europe.
The hyperbolic way you've made whatever arguments you had, though, is actively working against you.
It remains unclear if they needed permission in the first place. Aside from Meta's stunt with torrents I'm not aware of any legal precedent forbidding me to (internally) do as I please with public content that I scrape.
> They regularly speak explicitly about all the jobs they plan to destroy.
A fully legal endeavor that is very strongly rewarded by the market.
Most of the larger commercial entities seem to be doing the work themselves and being quite upfront about the entire thing.
Because all the litigation is currently ongoing.
> A fully legal endeavor that is very strongly rewarded by the market.
Yes let's sacrifice all production of cultural artifacts for the market. This is honestly another thing that's being litigated. So far these companies have lost a lot of money on making a product that most consumers seem to actively hate.
Who said anything about sacrificing production? The entire point of the tooling is to reduce the production cost to as near zero as possible. If you didn't expect it to work then I doubt you would be so bent out of shape over it.
I find your stance quite perplexing. The tech can't be un-invented. It's very much Pandora's box. Whatever consequences that has for the market, all we can do is wait and see.
Worst case scenario (for the AI purveyors) is a clear legal determination that the current training data situation isn't legal. I seriously doubt that would set them back by more than a couple of years.
I'd like to suggest that you might be better received on HN if you were a bit more direct about making an argument of substance regarding the ethics.
You've presented all sorts of wild assumptions and generalizations about the people who don't share your vehement opposition to the use of this technology. I don't think it's the person you're responding to with the implicit bias.
You've conflated theft with piracy (all too common) and assumed a priori that training a model on publicly available data constitutes such. Do you really expect people to blindly adopt your ideological views if you just state them forcefully enough?
> If using AI is okay for the creative labor, why shouldn't the students also use it for the programming too?
They absolutely should! At least provided it does the job well enough.
Unless they are taking a class whose point is to learn to program yourself (ie the game is just a means to an end). Similar to how you might be forbidden to use certain advanced calculator features in a math class. If you enroll in an art class and then just prompt GPT that likely defeats the purpose.
This is the view of most people outside the industry.
The ones that pay attention to the markets appear to believe some very questionable things and are primarily concerned with if they can figure out how to get rich off of the associated tech stocks.
This is your opinion. I don't see how these statements connect to each other.
You might have heard this: it's helpful to strive to be someone only a few years ahead of you. Similar to this, we give calculators to high-schoolers and not 3rd graders. Wolfram-Alpha is similarly at too high a level for most undergraduate students.
Following this, giving an image generator to kids will kill their creativity in the same way that a tall tree blocks upcoming sprouts from the sun. It will lead to less engagement, to dependence, to consumerism.
Scams beget more scams
Practically speaking, the work described would most likely never have been done, rather than been done by an artist if that were the only option - it’s uncommon to employ artists to help with incidental tasks relative to side projects, etc.
The market is saturated and the way it works means ten get rich for every million artists. I feel as though this has been pretty constant throughout history.
Of course there's a lot of talent out there, "wasted", but I think that's always been the case. How many William Shakesmans did we lose with all the war, famine, disease?
I actually decided I'd probably never write music again after 1-shot making a song about the south Korea coup attempt several months ago. I had the song done before the news really even hit the US. Why would I destroy my own hearing writing music anymore when I can prompt an AI to do it for me, with the same net result - no one cares.
here's the 3-shot remix, the triangle cracks me up so much that i had to upload it https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/coup-detat-symphony-remix
the "original" "1-shot" is on my soundcloud page as well. https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music-a...
it's in lojban. That's why you can't understand it. Yes. Lojban. Brings a tear to my eye every time i hear it. fkin AI
[0] more my style - hold music for our PBX https://soundcloud.com/djoutcold/bew-hold-music also all my stuff is CC licensed, mostly CC0 at this point.
(Just a small comment out of context of the remaining discussion:)
Maybe not many? It could be that "cultural attention" is limited and there's not much space at the top anyways. In other words: It might be that there's always a few famous artists that get remembered and the rest is forgotten. Same as winning the world cup: There's always a team that wins and it says nothing about the quality in a universal way. At best it says something about quality relative to the competition.
(Not sure I'd fully get behind the argument i composed here. But I found it interesting.)
Or maybe they just really were that good.
It hasn't. Look up the collapse of the viability of music as a career. Jaron Lanier has written on this.
So stating that people shouldn't need to worry about starving (metaphorically or otherwise) would be roughly equivalent.
And many fold more than that are forced to drop out to "get a real job".
Of course all of the above is a good thing from the perspective of maximizing the quality of life across society as a whole. But wouldn't it be nicer if we didn't have to do (as much of) that?