Comment by gfodor
3 years ago
Huge market for snake oil here. There is no way that such tools will ever win, given the requirements the art remain viewable to human perception, so even if you made something that worked (which this sounds like it doesn’t) from first principles it will be worked around immediately.
The only real way for artists or anyone really to try to hold back models from training on human outputs is through the law, ie, leveraging state backed violence to deter the things they don’t want. This too won’t be a perfect solution, if anything it will just put more incentives for people to develop decentralized training networks that “launder” the copyright violations that would allow for prosecutions.
All in all it’s a losing battle at a minimum and a stupid battle at worst. We know these models can be created easily and so they will, eventually, since you can’t prevent a computer from observing images you want humans to be able to observe freely.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
True I can imagine that kind of thing becoming popular.
>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.
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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)
GP almost certainly mean "make physical art." Pictures of that can get online, but it's not the real thing.
Can you elaborate on how they supplement their income?
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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.
"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.
> 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 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.
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.
You don’t need it to visible. You only need it to be scrapped to poison the models. I think that’s the idea.
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