My issue with this line of argument is that it’s anthropomorphizing machines. It’s fine to compare how humans do a task with how a machine does a task, but in the end they are very different from each other, organic vs hardware and software logic.
First, you need to prove that generative AI works fundamentally the same way as humans at the task of learning. Next you have to prove that it recalls information in the same way as humans. I don’t think anyone would say these are things that we can prove, let alone believe they do. So what we get is comments like they are similar.
What this means, is these systems will fall into different categories of law around copyright and free-use. What’s clear is that there are people who believe that they are harmed by the use of their work in training these systems and it reproducing that work in some manner later on (the degree to which that single work or the corpus of their work influences that final product is an interesting question). If your terms of use/copyright/license says “you may not train on this data”, then should that be protected in law? If a system like nightshade can effectively influence a training model enough to make it clear that something protected was used in its training, is that enough proof that the legal protections were broken?
>First, you need to prove that generative AI works fundamentally the same way as humans at the task of learning. Next you have to prove that it recalls information in the same way as humans.
No, you don't need to prove any of those things. They're irrelevant. You'd need to prove that the AI is itself morally (or, depending on the nature of the dispute, legally) equivalent to a human and therefore deserving of (or entitled to) the same rights and protections as a human. Since it is pretty indisputably the case that software is not currently legally equivalent to a human, you're stuck with the moral argument that it ought to be, but I think we're very far from a point where that position is warranted or likely to see much support.
Few people are claiming that the AI itself has the same rights as a human. They are arguing that a human with an AI has the same rights as a human who doesn't have an AI.
> ou'd need to prove that the AI is itself morally (or, depending on the nature of the dispute, legally) equivalent to a human and therefore deserving of
No you don't.
A human using a computer to make art doesn't automatically lose their fair use rights as a human.
> indisputably the case that software is not currently legally equivalent to a human
Fortunately it is the human who uses the computer who has the legal rights to use computers in their existing process of fair use.
Human brains or giving rights to computers has absolutely nothing to do with the rights of human to use a camera, use photoshop, or even use AI, on a computer.
No, it's not. It's merely pointing out the similarity between the process of training artists (by ingesting publicly available works) and ML models (which ingest publicly available works).
> First, you need to prove that generative AI works fundamentally the same way as humans at the task of learning.
Given that there is no comprehensive model for how humans actually learn things, that would be an unfeasible requirement.
We are machines. We just haven't evenly accepted it yet.
Our biology is mechanical, and lay people don't possess an intuition about this. Unless you've studied molecular biology and biochemistry, it's not something that you can easily grasp.
Our inventions are mechanical, too, and they're reaching increasing levels of sophistication. At some point we'll meet in the middle.
This is the truth. And it's also the reason why this stuff will be in court until The Singularity itself. Most people will never be able to come to terms with this.
The way these ML models and humans operate are indeed quite different.
Humans work by abstracting concepts in what they see, even when looking at the work of others. Even individuals with photographic memories mentally abstract things like lighting, body kinetics, musculature, color theory, etc and produce new work based on those abstractions rather than directly copying original work (unless the artist is intentionally plagiarizing). As a result, all new works produced by humans will have a certain degree of originality to them, regardless of influences due to differences in perception, mental abstraction processes, and life experiences among other factors. Furthermore, humans can produce art without any external instruction or input… give a 5 year old that’s never been exposed to art and hasn’t been shown how to make art a box of crayons and it’s a matter of time before they start drawing.
ML models are closer to highly advanced collage makers that take known images and blend them together in a way that’s convincing at first glance, which is why it’s not uncommon to see elements lifted directly from training data in the images they produce. They do not abstract the same way and by definition cannot produce anything that’s not a blend of training data. Give them no data and they cannot produce anything.
It’s absolutely erroneous to compare them to humans, and I believe it will continue to be so until ML models evolve into something closer to AGI which can e.g. produce stylized work with nothing but photographic input that it’s gathered in a robot body and artistic experimentation.
You're wrong in your concept of how AI/ML works. Even trivial 1980's neural networks generalize, it's the whole point of AI/ML or you'd just have a lookup-table (or, as you put it, something that copies and pastes images together).
I've seen "infographics" spread by anti-AI people (or just attention-seekers) on Twitter that tries to "explain" that AI image generators blend together existing images, which is simply not true..
It is however the case that different AI models (and the brain) generalize a bit differently. That is probably the case between different humans too. Not the least with for example like you say those with photographic memory, autists etc.
What you call creativity in humans is just noise in combination with a boatload of exposure to multi-modal training data. Both aspects are already in the modern diffusion models. I would however ascribe a big edge in humans to what you normally call "the creative process" which can be much richer, like a process where you figure out what you lack to produce a work, go out and learn something new and specific, talk with your peers, listen to more noise.. stuff like that seems (currently) more difficult for AIs, though I guess plugins that do more iterative stuff like chatgpt's new plugins will appear in media generators as well eventually..
> The way these ML models and humans operate are indeed quite different.
Given that there is no comprehensive understanding of how human learning works, let alone how humans operate on and integrate on what they learned in a wider context...how do you know?
> Humans work by abstracting concepts in what they see
Newsflash: AI models do the same thing. That's the basis of generalization.
> ML models are closer to highly advanced collage makers that take known images and blend them together
Wrong. That's not even remotely how U-Net based diffusion models work. If you disagree, then please do show me where exactly the source images from where the "collage maker" takes the parts to "blend" together are stored. I think you'll find that image datasets on the scale of LAION will not quite fit into checkpoint files of about 2GB in size (pruned SD1.5 checkpoint in safetensors format).
The first perceptron was explicitly designed to be a trainable visual pattern encoder. Zero assumptions about potential feelings of the ghost in the machine need to be made to conclude the program is probably doing what humans studying art say they assume is happening in their head when you show both of them a series of previous artists' works. This argument is such a tired misdirection.
> What this means, is these systems will fall into different categories of law around copyright and free-use.
No they won't.
A human who uses a computer as a tool (under all the previous qualifications of fair use) is still a human doing something in fair use.
Adding a computer to the workflow of a human doesn't make fair use disappear.
A human can use photoshop, in fair use. They can use a camera. They can use all sorts of machines.
The fact that photoshop is not the same as a human brain is simply a completely unrelated non sequitur. Same applies to AI.
And all the legal protections that are offered to someone who uses a regular computer, to use photoshop in fair use, are also extended to someone who uses AI in fair use.
Yet the copyright office has already stated that getting an AI to create an image for you does not have sufficient human authorship to be copyrighted. There's already a legal distinction here between this "tool" and tools like photoshop and cameras.
It's also presumptive to assume that AI tools have these fair use protections when none of this has actually been decided in a court of law yet. There's still several unsettled cases here.
What we actually need to prove is whether such technology is a net benefit to society all else is essentially hand waving. There is no natural right to poorly named intellectual property and even if there was such a matter would never be decided based on the outcome of a philosophical argument because we don't decide anything that way.
>My issue with this line of argument is that it’s anthropomorphizing machines. It’s fine to compare how humans do a task with how a machine does a task, but in the end they are very different from each other, organic vs hardware and software logic.
There's an entire branch of philosophy that calls these assumptions into question:
>Martin Heidegger viewed humanism as a metaphysical philosophy that ascribes to humanity a universal essence and privileges it above all other forms of existence. For Heidegger, humanism takes consciousness as the paradigm of philosophy, leading it to a subjectivism and idealism that must be avoided.
>Processes of technological and non-technological posthumanization both tend to result in a partial "de-anthropocentrization" of human society, as its circle of membership is expanded to include other types of entities and the position of human beings is decentered. A common theme of posthumanist study is the way in which processes of posthumanization challenge or blur simple binaries, such as those of "human versus non-human", "natural versus artificial", "alive versus non-alive", and "biological versus mechanical".
And? Even if neural networks learn the same way humans do, this is not an argument against taking measures against one's art being used as training data, since there are different implications if a human learns to paint the same way as another human vs. if an AI learns to paint the same way as a human. If the two were exactly indistinguishable in their effects no one would care about AIs, not even researchers.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say different implications existing is subjective, since they clearly aren't, but regardless of who has more say in general terms, the author of a work can decide how to publish it, and no one has more say than them on that subject.
And yet, some people don't even want their artwork studied in schools. Even if you argue that an AI is "human enough" the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.
>the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.
No, that right doesn't exist. If you put your work of art out there for people to see, people will see it and learn from it, and be inspired by it. It's unavoidable. How could it possibly work otherwise?
Artist A: You studied my work to produce yours, even when I asked people not to do that!
Artist B: Prove it.
What kind of evidence or argument could Artist A possibly provide to show that Artist B did what they're accusing them of, without being privy to the internal state of their mind. You're not talking about plagiarism; that's comparatively easy to prove. You're asking about merely studying the work.
> And yet, some people don't even want their artwork studied in schools.
You can either make it for yourself and keep it for yourself or you can put it out into the world for all to see, criticize, study, imitate, and admire.
> the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.
Why? That certainly isn't a right spelled out in either patents or copyrights, both of which are supposed to support the development of arts and technology, not hinder it.
If I discover a new mathematical formula, musical scale, or whatnot, should I be able to prevent others from learning about it?
Is it strange to you that cars and pedestrians are both subject to different rules? They both utilise friction and gravity to travel along the ground. I'm curious if you see a difference between them, and if you could describe what it is.
Both cars and pedestrians can be videotaped in public, without asking for their explicit permission. That video can be manipulated by a computer to produce an artwork that is then put on public display. No compensation need be offered to anyone.
This is not one artist inspiring another. This is all artists providing their work for free to immensely capitalized corporations for the corporations sole profit.
People keep making metaphors as if the AI is an entity in this transaction: it’s not! The AI is only the mechanism by which corporations launder IP.
>This is all artists providing their work for free to immensely capitalized corporations for the corporations sole profit.
No, the artists would be within their rights to do that if they chose to. This is corporations taking all the work of all artists regardless of the terms under which it was provided.
Would it change your view if only open-source models were allowed to use the art in their training sets? What if a "capitalized corporation" starts using the open-source model?
This is such a nothing argument. Yes, new artists are inspired by other artists and sometimes make art similar to others, but a huge part of learning and doing art is to find a unique style.
But that’s not even the important part of the argument. A lot of artists work for commission, and are hired for their style. If an AI can be trained without explicit permission from their images, they lose work because a user can just prompt “in the style of”.
There’s no real great solution, outside of law, because the possibility of doing that is already here. But I’ve seen this argument so much and it’s just low effort
That is not how artists learn. This is a false equivalence used to justify the imitation and copying of artists’ work.
Artists’ work isn’t derivative in the same way that AI work is. Artists create work based on other sources of inspiration, some of them almost or completely to the disregard of other art.
Many artists don’t even go to art school. And those that do, do not spend most (all) of that time learning how to copy or imitate other artists.
I’m not expressing an opinion of whether GenAI is unethical or illegal - I think that’s a really difficult issue to wrestle with - just that this argument is a post-hoc rationalisation made in ignorance of how good artists work (not to say ignorance of the difference between illustration and art, conceptual art training vs say a foundation course etc).
If that's true, then it should be fine for that human to paint with the brush of his AI tool. Why should that human artist be restricted in the types of tools he uses to create his artwork?
Very true. I was watching a video yesterday learning how to make brush work digitally. While there were examples, they were just examples but the rest was specific techniques and demonstrations.
It is only natural to see a moral difference between people going to school and learn from your art because they are passionate about it, versus someone on the internet just scraping as many images as possible and automating the learning process.
his handle is KingOfCoders - self-aggrandizing, insufferable, impotent in its attempts to be meta.
He thinks he's an artist because he now has the ability to curate a dataset based off of one artist's work and prompt more art generated in that style. He did it, so clearly he is an artist now.
Most artists are happy to see more people getting into art and joining the community. More artists means the skills of this culture get passed down to the next generation.
Obviously a billion dollar corporation using their work to create an industrial tool designed to displace them is very different.
Who cares? With AI, you don't need art school. AI is making humanities redundant, and people are too proud to admit it.
I can't believe how many people are not in awe of the possibilities of AI art, so it's great to see AI disturbing the cynics until they learn. Not everything is political, but I'll let them have this one.
Artists learning to innovate a trade defend their trade from incursion by bloodthirsty, no-value-adding vampiric middle men attempting to cut them out of the loop.
This is a tired argument; whether or not the diffusion models are "learning", they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists, and should be resisted for that reason alone.
As a human artist I don't feel the same as you, and I somehow doubt that you care all that much about what we think anyways. You already made up your mind about the tech, so don't feel the need to protect us from "a tool of capital [sic]" to fortify your argument.
My opinion is based on my interactions with my friends who are artists. I admit freely to caring less about what people I don't know say, in the absence of additional evidence.
imagine being a photographer that takes decades to perfect their craft. sure another student can study and mimic your style. but it's still different than some computer model "ingesting" vast amount of photos and vomiting something similar for $5.99 in aws cpu cost so that some prompt jockey can call themselves an AI artist and make money off of other peoples talent.
i get that this is cynical and does not encompass all ai art, but why not let computers develop their own style wihout ingesting human art? that's when it would actually be AI art
Like 99.9% of the art the common people care about is Darth Vader and Taylor Swift and other pop culture stuff like that.
These people literally don’t care what your definition of what is and isn’t art is, or how it’s made, they just want a lock screen wallpaper of themselves fighting against Thanos on top of a volcano.
The argument of “what is art” has been an academic conversation largely ignored by the people actually consuming the art for hundreds of years. Photography was just pop culture trash, comics were pop culture trash, stick figure web comics were pop culture trash. Today’s pop culture trash is the “prompt jockey”.
I make probably 5-10 pictures every day over the course of maybe 20 minutes as jokes on Teams because we have Bing Chat Enterprise. My coworkers seem to enjoy it. Nobody cares that it’s generated. I’m also not trying to be an “artist” whatever that means. It just is, and it’s fun. I wasn’t gonna hire an artist to draw me pictures to shitpost to my coworkers. It’s instead unlocked a new fun way to communicate.
That's a funny argument because artists lost their shit over photography too. Now anyone can make a portrait! Photography will kill art!
Art is the biggest gate kept industry there is and I detest artists who believe only they are the chosen one.
Art is human expression. We all have a right to create what we want with whatever tools we want. They can adapt or be left behind. No sympathy from me.
Because that's not what happens, ever. You wouldn't ask a human to have their style of photographing when they don't know what a photograph even looks like.
Exactly. Artists should drop the pretentious philosophical bumbling and accept what this is, a fight for their livelihood. Which is, in every sense, completely warranted and good.
Putting blame on the technology and trying to limit public access to software will not go anywhere. Your fight for regulation needs to be with publishers and producers, not with the teen trying to make a cool new wallpaper or the office-man trying to make an aesthetic powerpoint presentation.
> they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists
So are the copyright and intellectual property laws that artists rely on. From my perspective, you are the capital and I am the one being fucked. So are you ready to abolish all that?
As a representative of a lot of things but hardly any capital who uses diffusion models to get something I would otherwise not pay a human artist for anyway, I testify that, the models are not exclusively what you describe them to be.
I do not support indiscriminate banning of anything and everything that can potentially be used to fuck someone over.
I did not say they were exclusively that; I said they were that.
Once we as a society have implemented a good way for the artists whose work powers these machines to survive, you can feel good about using them. Until then, frankly, you're doing something immoral by paying to use them.
That's an intentional misinterpretation, I think. I mention art as an economic activity because it's primarily professional artists that are harmed by the widespread adoption of this technology.
They tried to use the labor theory early on by claiming, "real art takes hard work and time as opposed to the miniscule cpu hours computers use to make 'AI art". The worst thing AI brings to the table is amplifying these types of sentiments to control industry in their favor where they would otherwise be unheard and relegated to Instagram likes
> It's funny that these people use the langauge of communism, but apparently see artwork as purley an economic activity.
You hit the nail on the head. Copyright is, by its very nature, a "tool of capital." It's a means of creating new artificial property fiefdoms for a select few capital holders to lord over, while taking rights from anyone else who wants to engage in the practice of making art.
Everyone has their right to expression infringed upon, all so the 1% of artists can perpetually make money on things, which are ultimately sold to corporations that only pay them pennies on the dollar anyway.
You, as an indie hip hop or house musician supported by a day job, can't sample and chop some vocals or use a slice of a chord played in a song (as were common in the 80s and 90s) for a completely new work, but apparently the world is such a better place because Taylor Swift is a multimillionaire and Disney can milk the maximum value from space and superhero films.
I'd rather live in a world where anyone is free to make whatever art they want, even if everyone has to have a day job.
Human beings and LLMs are essentially equivalent, and their processes of "learning" are essentially equivalent, yet human artists are not affected by tools like Nightshade. Odd.
Sigh. Once again: I always love it when techbros say that AI learning and human learning are exactly the same, because reading one thing at a time at a biological pace and remembering takeaway ideas rather than verbatim passages is obviously exactly the same thing as processing millions of inputs at once and still being able to regurgitate sources so perfectly that verbatim copyrighted content can be spit out of an LLM that doesn't 'contain' its training material.
I'm just glad that so many more people have caught on to the bullshit than this time last year, or even six months ago.
I really don't even get the endgame. Art gets "democratized", so anyone who doesn't want their style copied stops putting stuff on the internet, and eventually all human art is trained, so the only new contributions are genAI. Maybe we could get a few centuries worth of stuff of "robot unicorn in the style of Artist X with a flair of Y" permutations, but even ignoring the centipede, that just sounds... boring. worthless.
Since techbros are stupid: "Note that people could always do these kinds of repurposing, and it was never a problem from a copyright perspective. We have a problem now because those things are being done (1) in an automated way (2) at a billionfold greater scale (3) by companies that have vastly more power in the market than artists, writers, publishers, etc. Incidentally, these three reasons are also why AI apologists are wrong when claiming that training image generators on art is just like artists taking inspiration from prior works."
A human artist does not need to look at and memorize 100000 pictures in any span of time, period. Current AI does.
We needed huge amounts of human labor to fund and build Versailles. I'm sure many died as a result. Now we have machines that save many of those lives and labor.
That perhaps we shoildnt compare modern capitalistic societies to 18th century European royalty? I sure don't sympathize with the justification of the ability to use less labor to feed the rich.
My issue with this line of argument is that it’s anthropomorphizing machines. It’s fine to compare how humans do a task with how a machine does a task, but in the end they are very different from each other, organic vs hardware and software logic.
First, you need to prove that generative AI works fundamentally the same way as humans at the task of learning. Next you have to prove that it recalls information in the same way as humans. I don’t think anyone would say these are things that we can prove, let alone believe they do. So what we get is comments like they are similar.
What this means, is these systems will fall into different categories of law around copyright and free-use. What’s clear is that there are people who believe that they are harmed by the use of their work in training these systems and it reproducing that work in some manner later on (the degree to which that single work or the corpus of their work influences that final product is an interesting question). If your terms of use/copyright/license says “you may not train on this data”, then should that be protected in law? If a system like nightshade can effectively influence a training model enough to make it clear that something protected was used in its training, is that enough proof that the legal protections were broken?
>First, you need to prove that generative AI works fundamentally the same way as humans at the task of learning. Next you have to prove that it recalls information in the same way as humans.
No, you don't need to prove any of those things. They're irrelevant. You'd need to prove that the AI is itself morally (or, depending on the nature of the dispute, legally) equivalent to a human and therefore deserving of (or entitled to) the same rights and protections as a human. Since it is pretty indisputably the case that software is not currently legally equivalent to a human, you're stuck with the moral argument that it ought to be, but I think we're very far from a point where that position is warranted or likely to see much support.
Few people are claiming that the AI itself has the same rights as a human. They are arguing that a human with an AI has the same rights as a human who doesn't have an AI.
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You don't even need to do that. Art is an act of ontological framing.
Duchamp didn't need negotiate with the ceramic makers to make the Fountain into art.
> ou'd need to prove that the AI is itself morally (or, depending on the nature of the dispute, legally) equivalent to a human and therefore deserving of
No you don't.
A human using a computer to make art doesn't automatically lose their fair use rights as a human.
> indisputably the case that software is not currently legally equivalent to a human
Fortunately it is the human who uses the computer who has the legal rights to use computers in their existing process of fair use.
Human brains or giving rights to computers has absolutely nothing to do with the rights of human to use a camera, use photoshop, or even use AI, on a computer.
> that it’s anthropomorphizing machines.
No, it's not. It's merely pointing out the similarity between the process of training artists (by ingesting publicly available works) and ML models (which ingest publicly available works).
> First, you need to prove that generative AI works fundamentally the same way as humans at the task of learning.
Given that there is no comprehensive model for how humans actually learn things, that would be an unfeasible requirement.
What a reductive way to describe learning art. The similarities are merely surface level.
> Given that there is no comprehensive model for how humans actually learn things, that would be an unfeasible requirement.
That is precisely why we should not be making this comparison.
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We are machines. We just haven't evenly accepted it yet.
Our biology is mechanical, and lay people don't possess an intuition about this. Unless you've studied molecular biology and biochemistry, it's not something that you can easily grasp.
Our inventions are mechanical, too, and they're reaching increasing levels of sophistication. At some point we'll meet in the middle.
This is the truth. And it's also the reason why this stuff will be in court until The Singularity itself. Most people will never be able to come to terms with this.
100% this. Labor and all these other concepts are outdated ways to interpret reality
Humans are themselves mechanical so at the end of the day none of these issues actually matter
The way these ML models and humans operate are indeed quite different.
Humans work by abstracting concepts in what they see, even when looking at the work of others. Even individuals with photographic memories mentally abstract things like lighting, body kinetics, musculature, color theory, etc and produce new work based on those abstractions rather than directly copying original work (unless the artist is intentionally plagiarizing). As a result, all new works produced by humans will have a certain degree of originality to them, regardless of influences due to differences in perception, mental abstraction processes, and life experiences among other factors. Furthermore, humans can produce art without any external instruction or input… give a 5 year old that’s never been exposed to art and hasn’t been shown how to make art a box of crayons and it’s a matter of time before they start drawing.
ML models are closer to highly advanced collage makers that take known images and blend them together in a way that’s convincing at first glance, which is why it’s not uncommon to see elements lifted directly from training data in the images they produce. They do not abstract the same way and by definition cannot produce anything that’s not a blend of training data. Give them no data and they cannot produce anything.
It’s absolutely erroneous to compare them to humans, and I believe it will continue to be so until ML models evolve into something closer to AGI which can e.g. produce stylized work with nothing but photographic input that it’s gathered in a robot body and artistic experimentation.
You're wrong in your concept of how AI/ML works. Even trivial 1980's neural networks generalize, it's the whole point of AI/ML or you'd just have a lookup-table (or, as you put it, something that copies and pastes images together).
I've seen "infographics" spread by anti-AI people (or just attention-seekers) on Twitter that tries to "explain" that AI image generators blend together existing images, which is simply not true..
It is however the case that different AI models (and the brain) generalize a bit differently. That is probably the case between different humans too. Not the least with for example like you say those with photographic memory, autists etc.
What you call creativity in humans is just noise in combination with a boatload of exposure to multi-modal training data. Both aspects are already in the modern diffusion models. I would however ascribe a big edge in humans to what you normally call "the creative process" which can be much richer, like a process where you figure out what you lack to produce a work, go out and learn something new and specific, talk with your peers, listen to more noise.. stuff like that seems (currently) more difficult for AIs, though I guess plugins that do more iterative stuff like chatgpt's new plugins will appear in media generators as well eventually..
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> The way these ML models and humans operate are indeed quite different.
Given that there is no comprehensive understanding of how human learning works, let alone how humans operate on and integrate on what they learned in a wider context...how do you know?
> Humans work by abstracting concepts in what they see
Newsflash: AI models do the same thing. That's the basis of generalization.
> ML models are closer to highly advanced collage makers that take known images and blend them together
Wrong. That's not even remotely how U-Net based diffusion models work. If you disagree, then please do show me where exactly the source images from where the "collage maker" takes the parts to "blend" together are stored. I think you'll find that image datasets on the scale of LAION will not quite fit into checkpoint files of about 2GB in size (pruned SD1.5 checkpoint in safetensors format).
Beautifully put. I wish this nuance was more widely understood in the current AI debate.
The first perceptron was explicitly designed to be a trainable visual pattern encoder. Zero assumptions about potential feelings of the ghost in the machine need to be made to conclude the program is probably doing what humans studying art say they assume is happening in their head when you show both of them a series of previous artists' works. This argument is such a tired misdirection.
> What this means, is these systems will fall into different categories of law around copyright and free-use.
No they won't.
A human who uses a computer as a tool (under all the previous qualifications of fair use) is still a human doing something in fair use.
Adding a computer to the workflow of a human doesn't make fair use disappear.
A human can use photoshop, in fair use. They can use a camera. They can use all sorts of machines.
The fact that photoshop is not the same as a human brain is simply a completely unrelated non sequitur. Same applies to AI.
And all the legal protections that are offered to someone who uses a regular computer, to use photoshop in fair use, are also extended to someone who uses AI in fair use.
Yet the copyright office has already stated that getting an AI to create an image for you does not have sufficient human authorship to be copyrighted. There's already a legal distinction here between this "tool" and tools like photoshop and cameras.
It's also presumptive to assume that AI tools have these fair use protections when none of this has actually been decided in a court of law yet. There's still several unsettled cases here.
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Why do you have to prove that? There is no replication (except in very rare cases), how someone draws a line should not be copyrightable.
Therein lies the crux of the issue: AI is not “someone”. We need to approach this without anthropomorphizing the AI.
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What we actually need to prove is whether such technology is a net benefit to society all else is essentially hand waving. There is no natural right to poorly named intellectual property and even if there was such a matter would never be decided based on the outcome of a philosophical argument because we don't decide anything that way.
How do you measure "benefit", and what does "net" actually mean?
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> such technology is a net benefit to society all else is essentially hand waving
Some might have said this about cars ... yet, here we are. Cars are definitely the opposite, except for longer-distance travel.
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>My issue with this line of argument is that it’s anthropomorphizing machines. It’s fine to compare how humans do a task with how a machine does a task, but in the end they are very different from each other, organic vs hardware and software logic.
There's an entire branch of philosophy that calls these assumptions into question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthumanism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihumanism
>Martin Heidegger viewed humanism as a metaphysical philosophy that ascribes to humanity a universal essence and privileges it above all other forms of existence. For Heidegger, humanism takes consciousness as the paradigm of philosophy, leading it to a subjectivism and idealism that must be avoided.
>Processes of technological and non-technological posthumanization both tend to result in a partial "de-anthropocentrization" of human society, as its circle of membership is expanded to include other types of entities and the position of human beings is decentered. A common theme of posthumanist study is the way in which processes of posthumanization challenge or blur simple binaries, such as those of "human versus non-human", "natural versus artificial", "alive versus non-alive", and "biological versus mechanical".
And? Even if neural networks learn the same way humans do, this is not an argument against taking measures against one's art being used as training data, since there are different implications if a human learns to paint the same way as another human vs. if an AI learns to paint the same way as a human. If the two were exactly indistinguishable in their effects no one would care about AIs, not even researchers.
But the 'different implications' only exist in the heads of said artists?
EDIT: removed a part.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say different implications existing is subjective, since they clearly aren't, but regardless of who has more say in general terms, the author of a work can decide how to publish it, and no one has more say than them on that subject.
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And yet, some people don't even want their artwork studied in schools. Even if you argue that an AI is "human enough" the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.
>the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.
No, that right doesn't exist. If you put your work of art out there for people to see, people will see it and learn from it, and be inspired by it. It's unavoidable. How could it possibly work otherwise?
Artist A: You studied my work to produce yours, even when I asked people not to do that!
Artist B: Prove it.
What kind of evidence or argument could Artist A possibly provide to show that Artist B did what they're accusing them of, without being privy to the internal state of their mind. You're not talking about plagiarism; that's comparatively easy to prove. You're asking about merely studying the work.
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> And yet, some people don't even want their artwork studied in schools.
You can either make it for yourself and keep it for yourself or you can put it out into the world for all to see, criticize, study, imitate, and admire.
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> the artists should still have the right to refuse their art being studies.
Why? That certainly isn't a right spelled out in either patents or copyrights, both of which are supposed to support the development of arts and technology, not hinder it.
If I discover a new mathematical formula, musical scale, or whatnot, should I be able to prevent others from learning about it?
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Is it strange to you that cars and pedestrians are both subject to different rules? They both utilise friction and gravity to travel along the ground. I'm curious if you see a difference between them, and if you could describe what it is.
Both cars and pedestrians can be videotaped in public, without asking for their explicit permission. That video can be manipulated by a computer to produce an artwork that is then put on public display. No compensation need be offered to anyone.
> Both cars and pedestrians can be videotaped in public, without asking for their explicit permission.
This is not universally true. Legislation is different from place to place.
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This is not one artist inspiring another. This is all artists providing their work for free to immensely capitalized corporations for the corporations sole profit.
People keep making metaphors as if the AI is an entity in this transaction: it’s not! The AI is only the mechanism by which corporations launder IP.
>This is all artists providing their work for free to immensely capitalized corporations for the corporations sole profit.
No, the artists would be within their rights to do that if they chose to. This is corporations taking all the work of all artists regardless of the terms under which it was provided.
Would it change your view if only open-source models were allowed to use the art in their training sets? What if a "capitalized corporation" starts using the open-source model?
This is such a nothing argument. Yes, new artists are inspired by other artists and sometimes make art similar to others, but a huge part of learning and doing art is to find a unique style.
But that’s not even the important part of the argument. A lot of artists work for commission, and are hired for their style. If an AI can be trained without explicit permission from their images, they lose work because a user can just prompt “in the style of”.
There’s no real great solution, outside of law, because the possibility of doing that is already here. But I’ve seen this argument so much and it’s just low effort
That is not how artists learn. This is a false equivalence used to justify the imitation and copying of artists’ work. Artists’ work isn’t derivative in the same way that AI work is. Artists create work based on other sources of inspiration, some of them almost or completely to the disregard of other art.
Many artists don’t even go to art school. And those that do, do not spend most (all) of that time learning how to copy or imitate other artists.
I’m not expressing an opinion of whether GenAI is unethical or illegal - I think that’s a really difficult issue to wrestle with - just that this argument is a post-hoc rationalisation made in ignorance of how good artists work (not to say ignorance of the difference between illustration and art, conceptual art training vs say a foundation course etc).
It's not the learning per se what's concerning here but the ease of production (e.g. generate thousands of images in a day)
AI is just a tool in someone's hand, there's a human who intends something
If that's true, then it should be fine for that human to paint with the brush of his AI tool. Why should that human artist be restricted in the types of tools he uses to create his artwork?
Should I be restricted in using copy paste as my tool for creating art?
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You might as well compare a Xerox copier to a human.
Art schools don't teach people how to paint in different artistic styles. They teach materials and technique.
Very true. I was watching a video yesterday learning how to make brush work digitally. While there were examples, they were just examples but the rest was specific techniques and demonstrations.
It is only natural to see a moral difference between people going to school and learn from your art because they are passionate about it, versus someone on the internet just scraping as many images as possible and automating the learning process.
Not being snarky, but if you believe that, then you clearly are not an artist.
his handle is KingOfCoders - self-aggrandizing, insufferable, impotent in its attempts to be meta.
He thinks he's an artist because he now has the ability to curate a dataset based off of one artist's work and prompt more art generated in that style. He did it, so clearly he is an artist now.
(salty salty~)
Human learning =/= machine learning
Most artists are happy to see more people getting into art and joining the community. More artists means the skills of this culture get passed down to the next generation.
Obviously a billion dollar corporation using their work to create an industrial tool designed to displace them is very different.
The memetic weapons humans unleashed on other humans at art school to deter copying are brutal. Just wait until critique.
"Sorry, this is not art, is AI generated trash."
Who cares? With AI, you don't need art school. AI is making humanities redundant, and people are too proud to admit it.
I can't believe how many people are not in awe of the possibilities of AI art, so it's great to see AI disturbing the cynics until they learn. Not everything is political, but I'll let them have this one.
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This seems more like looking at other artists and being totally incapacitated by some little touch in the painting you're looking at.
The Nam-shub of Hockney?
Artists learning to innovate a trade defend their trade from incursion by bloodthirsty, no-value-adding vampiric middle men attempting to cut them out of the loop.
This is a tired argument; whether or not the diffusion models are "learning", they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists, and should be resisted for that reason alone.
As a human artist I don't feel the same as you, and I somehow doubt that you care all that much about what we think anyways. You already made up your mind about the tech, so don't feel the need to protect us from "a tool of capital [sic]" to fortify your argument.
My opinion is based on my interactions with my friends who are artists. I admit freely to caring less about what people I don't know say, in the absence of additional evidence.
Among working human artists your opinion is in the minority. Most professionals are not a fan of this.
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Do you make your living as an artist?
You've done the same thing in this comment so what makes you think you're the superior specimen?
great comment!
imagine being a photographer that takes decades to perfect their craft. sure another student can study and mimic your style. but it's still different than some computer model "ingesting" vast amount of photos and vomiting something similar for $5.99 in aws cpu cost so that some prompt jockey can call themselves an AI artist and make money off of other peoples talent.
i get that this is cynical and does not encompass all ai art, but why not let computers develop their own style wihout ingesting human art? that's when it would actually be AI art
Like 99.9% of the art the common people care about is Darth Vader and Taylor Swift and other pop culture stuff like that.
These people literally don’t care what your definition of what is and isn’t art is, or how it’s made, they just want a lock screen wallpaper of themselves fighting against Thanos on top of a volcano.
The argument of “what is art” has been an academic conversation largely ignored by the people actually consuming the art for hundreds of years. Photography was just pop culture trash, comics were pop culture trash, stick figure web comics were pop culture trash. Today’s pop culture trash is the “prompt jockey”.
I make probably 5-10 pictures every day over the course of maybe 20 minutes as jokes on Teams because we have Bing Chat Enterprise. My coworkers seem to enjoy it. Nobody cares that it’s generated. I’m also not trying to be an “artist” whatever that means. It just is, and it’s fun. I wasn’t gonna hire an artist to draw me pictures to shitpost to my coworkers. It’s instead unlocked a new fun way to communicate.
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That's a funny argument because artists lost their shit over photography too. Now anyone can make a portrait! Photography will kill art!
Art is the biggest gate kept industry there is and I detest artists who believe only they are the chosen one.
Art is human expression. We all have a right to create what we want with whatever tools we want. They can adapt or be left behind. No sympathy from me.
Because that's not what happens, ever. You wouldn't ask a human to have their style of photographing when they don't know what a photograph even looks like.
Exactly. Artists should drop the pretentious philosophical bumbling and accept what this is, a fight for their livelihood. Which is, in every sense, completely warranted and good.
Putting blame on the technology and trying to limit public access to software will not go anywhere. Your fight for regulation needs to be with publishers and producers, not with the teen trying to make a cool new wallpaper or the office-man trying to make an aesthetic powerpoint presentation.
> they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists
So are the copyright and intellectual property laws that artists rely on. From my perspective, you are the capital and I am the one being fucked. So are you ready to abolish all that?
Right. This new outrage is just the copyright owners realising that their power is not safe. Where is the outrage when self checkouts happened?
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As a representative of a lot of things but hardly any capital who uses diffusion models to get something I would otherwise not pay a human artist for anyway, I testify that, the models are not exclusively what you describe them to be.
I do not support indiscriminate banning of anything and everything that can potentially be used to fuck someone over.
I did not say they were exclusively that; I said they were that.
Once we as a society have implemented a good way for the artists whose work powers these machines to survive, you can feel good about using them. Until then, frankly, you're doing something immoral by paying to use them.
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"Cameras are a tool of captial to fuck over human portrait artists"
It's funny that these people use the langauge of communism, but apparently see artwork as purley an economic activity.
That's an intentional misinterpretation, I think. I mention art as an economic activity because it's primarily professional artists that are harmed by the widespread adoption of this technology.
They tried to use the labor theory early on by claiming, "real art takes hard work and time as opposed to the miniscule cpu hours computers use to make 'AI art". The worst thing AI brings to the table is amplifying these types of sentiments to control industry in their favor where they would otherwise be unheard and relegated to Instagram likes
> It's funny that these people use the langauge of communism, but apparently see artwork as purley an economic activity.
You hit the nail on the head. Copyright is, by its very nature, a "tool of capital." It's a means of creating new artificial property fiefdoms for a select few capital holders to lord over, while taking rights from anyone else who wants to engage in the practice of making art.
Everyone has their right to expression infringed upon, all so the 1% of artists can perpetually make money on things, which are ultimately sold to corporations that only pay them pennies on the dollar anyway.
You, as an indie hip hop or house musician supported by a day job, can't sample and chop some vocals or use a slice of a chord played in a song (as were common in the 80s and 90s) for a completely new work, but apparently the world is such a better place because Taylor Swift is a multimillionaire and Disney can milk the maximum value from space and superhero films.
I'd rather live in a world where anyone is free to make whatever art they want, even if everyone has to have a day job.
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Human beings and LLMs are essentially equivalent, and their processes of "learning" are essentially equivalent, yet human artists are not affected by tools like Nightshade. Odd.
As another posted out, modern models like BLIP or GPT4V aren't affected by this either.
Humans don't fall for optical illusions? News to me.
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Lol, the scale is other-worldly different...
Sigh. Once again: I always love it when techbros say that AI learning and human learning are exactly the same, because reading one thing at a time at a biological pace and remembering takeaway ideas rather than verbatim passages is obviously exactly the same thing as processing millions of inputs at once and still being able to regurgitate sources so perfectly that verbatim copyrighted content can be spit out of an LLM that doesn't 'contain' its training material.
I'm just glad that so many more people have caught on to the bullshit than this time last year, or even six months ago.
I really don't even get the endgame. Art gets "democratized", so anyone who doesn't want their style copied stops putting stuff on the internet, and eventually all human art is trained, so the only new contributions are genAI. Maybe we could get a few centuries worth of stuff of "robot unicorn in the style of Artist X with a flair of Y" permutations, but even ignoring the centipede, that just sounds... boring. worthless.
Since techbros are stupid: "Note that people could always do these kinds of repurposing, and it was never a problem from a copyright perspective. We have a problem now because those things are being done (1) in an automated way (2) at a billionfold greater scale (3) by companies that have vastly more power in the market than artists, writers, publishers, etc. Incidentally, these three reasons are also why AI apologists are wrong when claiming that training image generators on art is just like artists taking inspiration from prior works."
https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/generative-ais-end-run-around-c...
A human artist cannot look at and memorize 100000 pictures in a day, and cannot paint 100000 pictures in a day.
I am SO tired of this non-argument
A human artist does not need to look at and memorize 100000 pictures in any span of time, period. Current AI does.
We needed huge amounts of human labor to fund and build Versailles. I'm sure many died as a result. Now we have machines that save many of those lives and labor.
What's your non-argument?
The argument is that the humans producing the work should be willing participants. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.
>What's your non-argument?
That perhaps we shoildnt compare modern capitalistic societies to 18th century European royalty? I sure don't sympathize with the justification of the ability to use less labor to feed the rich.
These AIs are not people. They do not learn.
Define learn.
Define people.
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