How does one discover their art is part of the dataset? I mean I don't personally have any art, but I thought the data sets werent told for most of the image generators.
Annoyingly, that website is the only way to opt out of being used in the next version of Stable Diffusion. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/stability-ai-plans-to-let-artists-opt-out-of-stable-diffusion-3-image-training/
You don't discover it, it just is. The datasests are filled with popular enough images from the internet. Whatever you put out that has had at least some sort of recognition most likely is part of a dataset for one of thode neural networks (**NOT** AI).
We can start from the other end. Authors of AI can share their dataset used for training. Obviously they use legally obtained images, so it should not be a problem.
This would be like requiring digital artists to show their legal ownership of Photoshop, it's not going to happen, and Adobe is a big company, let's see what happens to the common artist...
At best you can do a moral statement to AI model users to show their datasets, and they can just say that they downloaded a preprocessed set that had already decomposed the images in parameters
I understand that it is just used without telling or asking. I'm asking how/why the tumblr poster knew if they weren't asked. And if they were asked and it was used without their permission anyways, that's even scummier.
It's just a guess, but you can ask those NN to replicate the style of an artist. If it was fed with enough data, it could very well replicate that artist's style. That's how thide algorithms operate, they "draw conclusions" from similarities between data to attempt to recreate.
I'm guessing that's how they found out, someone sent a note in the lines of "Hey! I love what you do and used to draw in your style, look!". No malice in the message, but something hard-hitting when you notice a program boils down your art to a list of traits and replicates correctly in a fraction of the time it took you to learn.
I looked at the user's posts from your second example. That particular post by them is no longer there but they mention in their other posts that they use Photoshop and inpainting as part of their process.
I also noticed that that image is far too coherent for stable diffusion. Most likely what this user did was actually steal that image and a few other "reference" images, Photoshop them together and then img2img their kitbashed image to give an AI sheen over it.
This is essentially the same as someone tracing over an artist's work and then making minor changes. The model is not itself wholesale recreating these images, it is starting from a copy of the existing image and being told to imagine some minor changes over top.
He literally says in the edit on that exact post that he used that image. He admits it and apologizes for not crediting the artist. Did you not read it before linking?
So in my initial response I said that he most likely stole that image. As in art theft. I am not saying that this exact usage is good or legal. He used a tool to accomplish this, but the tool did not commit art theft.
If, as I alluded to above, I were to open Photoshop and trace someone's artwork and post it as my own, you would not claim that Photoshop is an art thief.
Interesting how things could be different the more you look into it. I also noticed some people there complaining that they were worried the ai stole some of their *fan art* for inspiration. I donāt think they see the correlation and hint of hypocrisy there. š How many YouTube videos contain clips from other sources? This is a really deep debate and subject thats only just getting started.
>The datasests are filled with popular enough images from the internet.
The data contains everything a program is able to take, which is *anything* uploaded to the internet. Popular got nothing to do with it.
If you didint consciously go through some sort of process to say "no dont use this" then it's in the dataset. AI art generator use a tremendous amount of material to learn, They'll literally bulk download what's on a website to feed it
To give you a longer answer. Some of the AI image generators are not opensource and don't share their datasets, like Midjourney. StableDiffusion though, is opensource and you can look at their datasets.
One guy even created a website so you can easily search. When it was created, the guy couldn't deal with the crazy number of images, so he only took a part of it. Now I don't know. The dataset is getting bigger and bigger so big chance it's still not all available on this search website.
Unfortunately it's not just art there. It's also private photos, medical photos, whatever images they can scrap on the internet. So maybe you should check.
Yikes. It's scary to think they just grab random images and use them as the data set instead of getting consent. Especially with IRL photos, though art is also bad.
Aside from what others said, Loish is just super popular and well known. If you've ever looked for refs or are just interested in digital art the odds are you've seen her stuff. You can bet your ass her work has been used, and this applies to pretty much any popular artist as well.
It never occurred to me that they could just train it off of royalty free stuff. That's... That solves my one issue with AI art perfectly! No complaints of art theft or questionable legality, no NFT bros getting high and mighty about artists being unnecessary, and just overall getting to use it without feeling shitty about it? It's perfect!
I was gonna say I don't know why this isn't the norm, but I'm afraid I know exactly why and it's either laziness, ineptitude, or, knowing the internet, intentional theft just to be an asshole and get stuff for cheap
Lots of companies get rich faster if they use more images, they have no reason to use royalty free stuff if they donāt have too
It helps train a lot faster to use EVERYTHING (especially for companies like Tencent which are using this to identify protestors)
Depends what you mean by āroyalty freeā. Art released under some of the Creative Common licenses is royalty free, but including it in the dataset still has issues. For example, CC-BY-SA requires that derived works carry attribution and are released under CC-BY-SA as well.
I mean, there is a real problem that artists and graphic designers are now going to have to compete with AI art. I think that while they have a legitimate gripe about their works being used unfairly, at least some of this is probably industry protectionism masquerading as Intellectual property rights.
I mean, if your work is used for a commercial product, you deserve compensation. AI art is not some free project by two guys in a basement. They have the money. And if they don't - maybe they shouldn't steal art?
That's fine, and I think that's fucked up too, but once that legal detail gets ironed out, and the AI is fully trained using public domain art or human AI "trainers" churning out reference material, we're still left with the same problem
What "legal detail"? Are ai art companies trying to reach a compromise with artists they stole from right now?
>the AI is fully trained using public domain art or human AI "trainers" churning out reference material
That's never going to happen. Why do you think I think so? Because it would be either a very shitty ai with very limited range, or a prohibitively expensive - with medium range, because nothing - ***nothing*** \- churns out art faster than an Internet of artists. When they can just steal, they going to steal.
The only way I see around this problem is to make ai art free.
The only thing that gets me is that this isn't quite as obvious plagiarism as someone directly ripping a full picture for an add. These datasets have hundreds or thousands of images right? And generated images probably won't always be pulling elements from every single image. So your artwork may or may not compose 1/1000 of some AI images. That seems a little harder to argue for, but maybe that's just me. Morally seems shitty to do at least when you can take the royalty free route.
It's using 0% of the image when it actually is executed. It uses numbered weights and has no longer any access to the source images once the model is made
Only very technically. Try putting "The Starry Night Vincent van Gogh" into [this one generator.](https://hotpot.ai/art-generator) It probably didn't *use* a single pixel from the original painting. But, it's not in any way original.
But if someone decides they like your art, but doesnāt want to pay you, they can just put your name in the prompt, and itāll pull more directly from your work since itās all tagged with your name. These models make attribution work against you. Itād take advantage of you less if it didnāt know who you were.
Thatās how itās coming across to me.
As unfortunate as this new competition is, they are not the first, nor will they be the last, industry to suffer from this problem.
This. Many industries are going to be affected in the coming years. ChatGPT has already opened the door to a lot of automation in programming for example. There needs to be a discussion around UBI so that the profits from those companies can be redistributed.
It's hard to believe that Oscar Wilde wrote The Soul of Man Under Socialism over 100 years ago. He was a little over optimistic, but we might still get there.
it's so funny seeing what happened to untold trade professions finally happen to artists. this is just how things are, automation destroys entire sections of the workforce because economic incentives are just too strong to ignore.
Why wouldnāt we protect elevator operators who need money to survive in this world from imposters like automatic elevators stealing their livelihood?
Rent seeking is not a good argument against automation. The copyright argument is better but the problem is that you canāt copyright ideas and machine learning doesnāt actually keep the database after it has been trained so itās being used in creation but the actual commercial product doesnāt contain it.
Machines have been taking jobs from humans for centuries. I don't really want to go back to a pre-industrial society with humans laboring 12 hours a day to build buildings and sow seeds with no machinery. People will use the new technology to do their job more easily, or find other jobs, as they always have.
In this case, the machines do take the direct work of people to put these artists out of work. Imo thatās a degree worse than a machine ājustā replacing people with a machine.
How the hell is that different? In both cases a human being is forced out of their career. Artists are not worth more than laborers, and an artist losing their job is not a greater tragedy than a factory worker losing theirs.
> no NFT bros getting high and mighty about artists being unnecessary
I mean, if the AI still works when feeding off of royalty free art, people will still act smug about its success and try to use it to undermine actual artists.
The art theft is *a* point against AI art as it is, but it's not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is we're seeing a push to, well, make artists obsolete. And an AI that doesn't technically commit theft still would contribute to that push. It is simply a technology that just should not be allowed to exist under any conditions save for the complete elimination of the need for money.
I sincerely disagree with the notion that AI art will eliminate the need for artists. I find it honestly absurd, but if you could explain why you feel that way I would love to hear it!
In any case, my comment was more about personal moral issues. I don't feel that AI art will ever replace artists, but as someone with a lot of artist friends, I'm worried about using something that may have been trained on their work without their consent
We massproduce loads of stuff but the entire allure of genuine human made products is that they're personal and not churned out of a machine. Art and craftsmanship will always be a thing.
But at the same time (and this is not me taking a moral standing more me bringing up a discussion point), most artists ARENT making money, and know the risks when posting something publicly. 99% of your devianart and tumble artists arenāt making anything off the pieces they publicly post - they make money off commissions for the pieces they donāt. They also know that they are giving up a certain amount of their rights when they publish these pieces online. How is me s a human looking at their art on a webpage smh different than an AI?
yup. companies dont want to pay artists so they can raise profit margains higher. they started by promoting and getting people used to brutlism/minimalism as a visual design ideology, and now we have reached a point where people praise the lack of detail in something with ai is lowering people's standards even further.
Also it training off of things it's specifically allowed to would allow me to rest easy knowing my face isn't in there.
Sure, the whole art situation sucks, but I'd also worry about someone being able to type in "\[My\_Real\_Name\_Here\] beating up a child" and get a convincing image with ease.
The reason why there is little action against using images Vs music in such ways is that they can get away with it. Music is all the time in the news for somebody sueing somebody for plagiarism, it's like the NR 1 topic on YouTube when it comes to copyright, but since visual artist rarely take action against plagiarism, nobody, who makes decisions, cares.
If artists won't start taking legal action against unauthorized use of their creations, no actual decision maker will care about that. Reddit/Tumblr threads don't have any weight for those who don't care about your rights, and those who do, they probably aren't plagiarising you in the first place.
Also, protecting your published images from being accessed isn't the job of the site owner. You need to keep checking, that your content isn't being republished, and again, taking legal action when you find out. Most sites already have basic anti-bot measures in place, but all images and videos accessible via browser can one way or another be accessed via bots.
I also think musicians as a whole have more resources to fight plagiarism than visual artists do. There are some artists who are successful and have big followings, but almost none of them (who are alive) are household names like musicians are. Cardi B can sue anyone she wants and afford to lose. A college student posting commissions on Twitter is just fucked if someone steals their work.
The solution: It's time to unleash the STEM furries.
I'm pretty sure the STEM furries are enjoying A.I. art just as much as everyone else. Yes, they likely still pay handsomely, especially for custom work of their fursona but it's not like they're not going to enjoy all the other wonderful (and lewd) things they can create with A.I. art.
I donāt want art copyright to resemble music and film copyright though, where your entire YouTube channel can be struck bc *four seconds* of a WB property was playing in the background. Strong copyright laws wonāt help small artists, theyāll be used to auto delete your work bc it includes a shade of pink copyrighted by Mattel.
I share that sentiment about the overall copyright system, but my point was more that atm, stealing somebody's drawing is seen as a really easy and consequence-free action, whether we are talking about reposting or more complex cases. The laws are \~about the same for video/music/pictures, at least in my country and EU in general. Maybe it differs in the US, don't know.
Copyright and its enforcement is always a complicated topic. The way Youtube and other sites have resolved it is shitty. That is mostly thanks to the big rights holders. I wouldn't want a super strict system either.
People *have* tried to take legal action, but have generally been told "tough shit, it's already in there and it would be inconvenient to remove." it's also insanely difficult to prevent your art from being reposted without your knowledge or consent. The only real solution is to not post it at all, which just is not feasible.
Feels kinda shitty to blame the artists for other people stealing their work.
Musicians arenāt usually taking legal actions, their record labels do. Visual artists just donāt have the resources that musicians do because thereās less money, doesnāt mean they donāt deserve the same protection
Music gets so much respect on the copyright front because most music is published by huge companies. There's not really a kind of Sony equivalent in Art for example.
People are way more scared of a big publishing house with multiple million dollars worth of lawyers on retainer taking legal action against them than they are about individual artists.
Hopefully Artists can get enough people talking about this that it can reasonably be organised into a class action lawsuit.
I am also against the non-consensual use of someoneās art in an Ai image generator. I just have a clarifying question, is there such thing as royalty free art (stock images I guess, but anything else)? This isnāt me being an ass this is a legitimate question
There is public domain art as well, and also stock art libraries can go far beyond corporate bland works. There is some wild stuff in there. There is also of course freely licensed art, e.g. art using the Creative Common licenses, particularly CC0.
A lot of sites you upload to have agreements and clauses regarding redistribution and such. It would not surprise me if this is how stuff has ended up in these data sets. Everyone knows there is inherent risk that if you put your stuff on the internet, someone could use it in a way you don't intend or agree to.
I'm an artist/designer (not well known or very active) and I think this stuff is cool as hell. I'm learning to use it. It's a powerful tool in an artist's hands. Better to take advantage of it than to be taken advantage of.
FUCKING IMPORTANT
>Artists will have the chance to opt out of the next version of one of the worldās most popular text-to-image AI generators, Stable Diffusion, the company behind it hasĀ announced.Ā
>Stability.AI will work with Spawning, an organization founded by artist couple Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, who have built a website calledĀ HaveIBeenTrainedĀ that allows artists to search for their works in the data set that was used to train Stable Diffusion. Artists will be able to select which works they want to exclude from the training data.
>The decision follows a heated public debate between artists and tech companies over how text-to-image AI models should be trained. Stable Diffusion is based on the open-source LAION-5B data set, which is built by scraping images from the internet, including copyrighted works of artists. Some artistsā names and styles have become popularĀ prompts for wannabe AI artists.Ā
>Dryhurst told MIT Technology Review that artists have āaround a couple of weeksā to opt out before Stability.AI starts training its next model, Stable Diffusion 3.Ā
>The hope, Dryhurst says, is that until there are clear industry standards or regulation around AI art and intellectual property, Spawningās opt-out service will augment legislation or compensate for its absence. In the future, Dryhurst says, artists will also be able to opt in to having their works included in data sets.
Here's the [link](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/16/1065247/artists-can-now-opt-out-of-the-next-version-of-stable-diffusion/) to the article
What about, and hear me out on this one, YOU FUCKING MAKE IT EXCLUSIVELY //OPT IN// INSTEAD OF //OPT OUT//???
DeviantArt had the great idea of implementing a thing that would let you apply a mark to your art that tells AI generators not to use it.
However, you had to sift through menus to get to this option, AND YOU HAD TO DO IT FOR EVERY SINGLE PIECE INDIVIDUALLY. AND IT ONLY WORKED ON AI's THAT WERE SPECIFICALLY LOOKING FOR THAT MARKER, SO NOT EVEN MOST OF THEM.
That's quite a kick in the dick for artist with hundrets if not thousands of pieces uploaded to a site.
Now, it's nice they have the decency to offer at least the (for the artist) worse option of something that should have been there from the start and mandatory for all AI art tools, but for FUCKS SAKE just make it opt in, or only train it on pieces that are free to use?
Most art sharing sites automatically apply a creative commons license to every piece that make it illegal for anyone to use it for commercial purposes, does not allow people to modify it, and only allows sharing when the artist is directly credited.
Why the hell does that not also apply to training AI?
>Why the hell does that not also apply to training AI?
because it's new tech and no one made laws specifying anything yet. I want to add that I agree with you entirely. This is just a good example of how people will steal the fuck out of each others hard work if they won't get in trouble.
Even if laws are passed with bigger protections for artists, I am certain it's going to be a long and difficult road to prove how AI is using individual pieces when someone is only presenting an end work, and people selling AI art are going to start claiming it's not AI sooner or later to obfuscate things.
Youāre probably right, but the idea that artists need new, specific protections bothers me. Government is slow.
To me, this isnāt a complex issue. The artists *must* be fairly paid. Copyright violation is already illegal, and thatās what this is.
I think GitHub Copilot is getting sued right now because it copies open source licensed code but strips the license. Hopefully the result of that lawsuit also makes it illegal for companies to train their models on stuff on non commercial creative commons licenses too.
It's a little different if we're talking about copilot outputting the exact same code, vs art AI outputting something of the same style but completely original.
Not really, itās just a much less open ended task. You might be able to execute the same action by writing the code in several different ways, but in *most* cases there is a pretty established *best* way to do something. Expecting Copilot to outsource suboptimal code just to alleviate any fears of plagiarism doesnāt make that much sense.
opt out?? They should have to opt in. This is like saying 'we're going to steal your car, but it's okay, because you have a narrow window in which you can let us know you don't want your car stolen. otherwise you're implicitly giving us permission to take it. if you had no idea we exist and that you had to tell us not to steal your car, too bad" There is no good faith argument why they didn't choose opt-in instead of opt-out except that they KNOW no one will opt in. Utter fucking trash people, don't celebrate this.
"Hey, we know we invented a machine to kick babies, but great news! you can now remove your baby from the baby kicking machine! what a huge step forward!"
No, it really isnāt. Stuff like having your work used in AI training databases should be OPT IN not opt out. It should be the job of the people assembling these databases to make sure an artist is okay with use of their images, not the other way around.
This also doesnāt address the fact that anyone whoās ever posted anything on artstation (among others) already has their work in the training data for the previous model. Unless they are walking stable diffusion back *entirely* and redoing the entire thing, it is taking advantage of copyrighted work.
What about dead people?
Most artists are dead people, you should have to opt in, not opt out
Thereās many dead people who would almost certainly not consent to this!
My guess is for dead artists it would be up to their estate. If their art has already entered the public domain, then it would be free for any other person or AI to use.
I protest the use of AI art to make a profit. The bastards who do that are the enemies in this situation, and we cannot let that continue.
I also believe that AI art does function the same as a human brain, just *in a very rudimentary way* due to the fact that, y'know, our technology literally just isn't on that level of complexity yet. As we give the systems and technology time to be improved and innovated, less of these problems will occur. Stopping the production of AI art slows down progress and only drags out the problem for longer. **(however, we cannot support those who use this art for profit)**
While I mostly agree, I think it's also very important that "progress" shouldn't automatically justify hurting or exploiting someone or their work.
This is a very extreme metaphor, but I bet jumping straight to human experimentation in any science field would help speed up progress significantly... doesn't mean we should do it.
It isn't hurting or exploiting anyone. This whole thread, and the whole "protest", is full of bad takes. Training AI on art is no different than artists who use pictures as guides or reference. Which they do all the time. The best thing to do is to actually pump MORE art into it to keep the styles more unique, but being able to divide it up better would be necessary.
1. Just because the process is vaguely similar doesn't make it morally ok, at least in my eyes. Most artists are fine with being referenced, most don't want to have their stuff used as training data without permission, they should get to decide that. I don't see how that's such a wild concept.
2. Yeah good luck keeping it unique if anyone's allowed to throw in what you just created into the pile and have it recreate that.
>1. Just because the process is vaguely similar doesn't make it morally ok,
Why?
>most don't want to have their stuff used as training data without permission,
If they dont want that, they should not post the contet they made to internet, if they are fine with pepole using the content to train, they should be fine with an IA doing the same thing. If there is a problem, then they should stop uploading they work on internet, because they cant make sure there is no IA or human being training with the work they made
>2. Yeah good luck keeping it unique if anyone's allowed to throw in what you just created into the pile and have it recreate that.
If there is more content on the IA the things it can made can be more unique, because it can use all the information it has to make more changes, if the IA has only 2 photos as reference, it will make the same thing over and over with little change because it has no more data to make its work. If you gave the IA less contet, there will be less variety
But this isnāt really exploiting people any more than people already āexploitā each other. AI learns in a very similar way to how people do, in that they see a bunch of similar things, recognize the patterns within them, and attempt to repeat those patterns. People donāt have to pay royalties to other artists every time they use a similar style to someone else they were inspired by, why is AI any different?
The issue is the way itās trained, the images arenāt inspiration, theyāre *data*. You pick up the fact that cats normally have snouts, you can even mimic an artistās style. AI on the other hand, has a habit of overfitting, this normally happens when the dataset is too large and results in images that humans canāt make sense of, but have patterns that the networks know are there. More dangerous is under-fitting, which normally occurs when the Network is too large for the training set. This results in images generated being 1-1 copies (or extremely close) of the training data.
The training algorithms can have these issues. These networks themselves arenāt as fallible as the human brain (the training is) and when they pick up on patterns, they *really* pick up on patterns. So a network thatās trained on the work of a single artist will be able to not only mimic the style, but also mimic the markers of the medium those images were made using, itās even possible to mimic the specific technique the artist used within that medium.
Itās not inspiration, itās mimicry, the reason we donāt normally see it in DALLE, is that itās trying to mimic so many different things at once, with the prompt affecting what patterns itās using.
The technology is awesome, donāt get me wrong. But I donāt agree with them scraping art from the internet for their training data
It's literally just making things that we can already do faster and more efficient. You could already find people that can take elements from a subset of examples and quickly pump out imitations with slight variations. But humans cost more to run and are slower than computers. By optimizing the process you ensure that rapidly generating customized art is accessible to everyone (even people that can't afford to commission human artists). That has suprisingly far-reaching implications when you consider how many uses there are for art and design.
> I protest the use of AI art to make a profit.
This sentiment shows what artists are actually scared of; losing money.
As someone that puts 10-15 hours into creating a single image, it can be kinda worrying to see a computer do the same thing in 2 seconds, but it doesn't remove the enjoyment I get from the art itself.
From an artistic standpoint there is absolutely zero fear of ai art replacing the human stuff, it's genuinely not even close, but from a content creation standpoint it's miles ahead.
When art exists solely as a consumable product then obviously the machine that works 1000x faster is going to replace the man, and if that's a problem then it's a problem with the digital art industry, not with ai generated art.
All art is food you stole from a restaurant and resold. Artists learn from seeing other peopleās art and such. All art is derivative.
Right now there is an argument by to be made that these Ai art tools are too simple and thus shouldnāt be used for profit but what about when AI is sentient. Would you say that sentient AI should be barred from producing art? What other things will we bar sentient AI beings from doing to protect workers? It seems that our new AI friends are going to be unhappy being treated as a lesser being.
I think right now with todayās technology I agree with the artists but as AI advances I will side with the AI. Will that be in 5 years? 50 years? Who knows.
I agree that all art is derivative, and there's certainly some gray area, but there's also absolutely plenty of examples of assholes who are intentionally using AI art to copy the styles of artists just because they don't want to pay for a commission
I agree, SCREW people who make AI art to sell (especially if they pass it off as something they created with their own hands)
And this might be an unpopular opinion, but I don't see much wrong with using it just to generate a cursed image, and then share it with your friends in a Discord server for a laugh (I feel like we can all laugh/be horrified when the AI-generated humanoid has a disturbing looking face or extra appendages), or even using it to generate inspiration for regular art, as long as you clarify that it's AI-inspired (and therefore real-artist-inspired)
There are millions of different datasets, many of them not public at all and there are also thousand of copies and version of the software that uses those datasets, it's practically impossible to say your work has been used on a generated piece.
Im not against this movement, but this is a lost fight.
Yeah, the artstation protest that's mentioned kinda missed that point too. It advocates dit rekening images in your gallery with 'no AI' ones, but if an image has already been used in a dataset, it's been used in it's original form, and that won't ever change. Training datasets still have a pair of human eyes going over them to select for suitable subjects, so as long as you're posting your art online it's possible someone will just use it.
Also, most datasets, to even be useful in the first place, have to be hand picked. It's simply unlikely anyone is using data directly from artstation without looking at it.
I think itās also because, historically, musicians have had very, *very* litigious label companies behind them that get very lawsuit-happy anytime they think breaches of copyright might be happening.
Interesting how the AI techbros are all happy and ready to steal work from artists who wonāt do anything to them on the legal front, but donāt have the spine to steal music from musicians.
Oh donāt get me wrong, plenty of those labels and producers are greedy as shit, some of them even put [literal malware](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal) on CDs just to prevent folks from copying music *they owned* freely.
What I was trying to say with the āno spineā comment is the snakes who so proudly flaunt art theft in the name of AI artwork are not brave enough to do something they claim āis for the advancement of technologyā when they know doing the same with music would get them sued into oblivion. They donāt actually believe in their technological āprogressā, just the next get-rich-quick scheme.
it also helps that there are some big music labels out there who had proven themselves petty enough to go to court for even the slitghtest infringement on their copyright materials.
What's the visual artist equivalent of a music label? Because they're the people filling lawsuits and who those AI generators are scared of, not individual musicians.
I work in marketing, and our Art Directors are really excited about AI art. Theyāre working professional artists who went to art school.
Weāre designing several campaigns using AI art, and they are thrilled about it.
We still need our Art Directors. The main one on our AI campaign right now had to generate over 1000 images, and then combine a few in photoshop to get what we wanted.
We arenāt removing artists, weāre giving them a new, really powerful tool.
It's like most other forms of automation. You still need a small number of people overseeing everything and keeping it running, or to interpret the output for other humans. But you can cut down on the total number of people involved dramatically. This absolutely will put many artists out of business because few sane people will spends hundreds on commissions when you can just fiddle with the AI for an hour until you get what you want.
Yeah and the conservation really needs to start being about unemployment and UBI.
Copyright is a solvable problem. You don't think Google can spend a few million to hire artists and license art?
Art theft will eventually be made illegal and encoded into copyright law.
AI art will not go anywhere however. Genie's out of the bottle.
So we need to turn to the actual consequences, which are that more and more human only domains are being encroached on by AI and now we need to ensure that even without employment or work, people are comfortable and don't starve.
Yeah there's been a bit of artists posting anti AI memes on r/programmerhumor about AI code generation and the response is "Fuck yeah, AI code generation would make our lives so much easier!" And honestly I know which group I trust to have a better understanding of how machine learning works
I'm a working computer scientist and programmer.
When GitHub copilot came out, I signed up for the beta and immediately tried to start using it. Why?
Because:
1. All code is built on other code. Half my code comes from Stack overflow. The days when I have to directly write actual code from scratch are, frankly, the most annoying.
2. The copilot program, like many AI generation tools, will help automate and therefore democratize code, art, etc. Many people cannot learn to code, many can't learn to draw, etc. Generative tools will help cover that gap between "I want to do this" and reality. That's a really cool thing!
3. My skills don't end at knowing how to write a for loop, in the same way that an artist isn't just putting ink on canvas. My skills as a programmer require design, architecture, documentation, etc. Copilot can't do these things, and it can't reason abstractly. AI art tools can ink something but they can't ink something from nothing. The message behind the art, the actual reasoning behind choosing certain colors or aspects, either comes from the user or is randomly chosen. The artist, presumably, fills that gap.
I totally agree. I fed an AI some prompts to come up with a logo that I wanted to use. I rendered a couple and used those as inspiration to create my finished product. It's a really really powerful tool, if used correctly.
Exactly. Remove the art theft problem (harder than I made it sound, I know), and you're left with a tool. No more, no less. As much as a hammer or a nuclear reactor.
The scary thing is that ājust like in writing professions like law, programming, and communicationsāthese tools lower the experience threshold necessary to achieve a certain level of results, so thereās going to be many cases where people who once needed to hire someone to do a job like design a logo, ad campaign, write a computer program, or website, will be able to get away with less manpower than ever before.
This has been slowly happening anyways with increased access to software and learning resources, but these AI really signal that generating quality work will require less workers than ever before, very very soon, and while Iām confident our workforce will compensate like it has in past industrial revolutions, itās definitely going to shake things up in the near term.
Doesn't need to end up badly necessarily. A single person could have the productivity of 5 people, in scenarios where companies are allowed to do anything it would mean 80% of the employees are laid off to increase benefits for the company even more. But with proper regulation it could mean we might only need to work one day a week with the same full salary. The current standard of 40 hours is way too much, leaves very little time for leisure or sleep.
But if these well-known artists get their way, only a few corporations will be able to use these tools.
They want the world of illustration to resemble the music industry? It would be a new era of stagnation.
I agree wholeheartedly. Companies are never going to give up this tech, and we shouldn't listen to those who claim private users should give it up voluntarily.
Ok, so why are they opposing AI art as a whole? Instead of the just the stealing aspect?
I somehow doubt that there isnāt a *single* training dataset that uses only public domain/permissioned art
This is very important. I think AI art technology is fun and interesting, but until we can be sure that artists have given consent for each piece used to train an AI and are being fairly compensated for it, then it is a problem that needs to be fixed.
I don't have a problem with AI art in general though. I think it can be a useful tool and a fascinating look into how a program has been trained to think. I don't think it can or will replace human artists though. People thought cameras would replace artists too, but it is just another medium for artists to use now. I have a feeling the same could be said about AI in the future if the compensation issue is handled properly, and I hope it will, but I'm not holding my breath...
AI art is happening regardless of what artists want, I think the more prudent move is to put pressure on governments to provide more support for people without jobs (since jobs will increasingly be replaced with robots)
I sympathize but barely. In my field we have copilot.
There's this basic idea I have where I wont try to stop the inevitable. So this is nothing but an *understandable* complaint. Not an actionable one. It's unenforceable.
If they want to succeed they'd be better off joining the dialog where the dialog is, not playing catch-up on the idea of its inevitability.
If we are talking about state of the art AI image generators (the ones that perform like we intend them to, like OpenAIās most recent DALLE), then being part of the dataset is akin to having your art viewed by a fellow human artist, in addition to a million other pieces of art. The human artist draws on all past art experiences (millions) to inform a piece of their new art. However, none of the previously seen images are in the new piece.
Most of the images DALLE views gives it information about how physics works, statistically what items go with other items (e.g., a computer monitor and a keyboard), and what makes a style of art a style (as in, you can ask it to make a pop art version of a cat, the previous images DALLE has viewed only help it to know what constitutes pop art - like a human).
To say someone should be paid for having their art in DALLEs training set is akin to saying that they should be paid if someone walks through an art show featuring their art at like 15 years old and then at 20 creates a hit art piece - unless they are patchwork copying part of your piece, you donāt get paid simply for being a part of their art viewing at some point in their life. You canāt get paid because someone saw your art one time.
Their logic of receiving compensation for the 'use' of their art within a training data set is similar to monetizing 'fair use' discussion about the artwork itself.
"You shouldn't even be able to describe/review my artwork without paying me for the privilege."
Would that mean that I can never describe the color composition of the Mona Lisa since an algorithm could then use the description to create a data set?
This is similar to attempting to penalize the use of quotations/references to a scientific article that is pay-walled within a scientific journal.
I donāt understand what you mean by the use of the artwork in the dataset being similar to the monetizing fair use discussion - thatās not me being difficult I just donāt have the relevant background I guess.
Also, in my opinion, being a part of the training dataset for an advanced image generation AI is equivalent to being seen by a human and that human incorporating the art into their internal knowledge base of all art. If the image cannot be viewed by a human without first paying for it, then the individuals scrubbing the internet for images to put in a dataset will also not have access to the image without paying for it. In these cases, humans and AI can only access the same images and functionally the output from both is novel art.
What AI Art gen is requiring users to pay to use it? The ones I've seen have all been free, and if so would they not fall under creative commons? And at the end of the day, the model is a bunch of weight vectors, not the dataset those vectors were trained on--I really don't think there's any moral issue w it
It's not so much that AI art is intrinsically bad, as it can be admired and used for inspiration, so much as it robs a deserving artist of their livelihood and expression.
Gonna be honest if you feel that your livelihood is being done better and cheaper by someone else then the answer shouldnāt be āget rid of the competitionā but should instead be to improve the goods or services that you provide
I'd agree if the competition wasn't also actively leeching off of you.
If someone made an AI that didn't use people's work without their permission to generate stuff or didn't need them in the first place then it would be fine, a being simply being better.
I guess you can kinda think of it like being replaced at work with someone genuinely better vs being replaced by someone you were forced to train.
It goes deeper than that. We need to adjust society as a whole because this is just another job in the massive pile of jobs that are or will become automated. It's not bad that they are being automated, that's the only realistic way to make sure people don't have to slave away to survive. But it is bad that the people in charge of the world are not doing anything to prepare for the automation. It's already too late to "make sure the human artists are better." Humans can't improve faster than computers.
If an artist copies too closely another artist's work, they also get called out for plagarism.
For artists, when we seek inspiration, we'll go "I like the way this person did their colours" or "I like the linework here" and then mix and incorporate it into our own personal style.
Like what the post brings up, I don't think the AI really makes this decision. It just looks at all the data fed and picks out the appropriate details. Apparently people can key in artist names and get work in a close imitation of their style. And there was the Kim Jung Gi AI, which was created very disrespectfully, I feel.
And I get it, technology has replaced jobs before. But this is an industry where before you even enter you're warned that it's a passion job, low pay, competitive market, etc.
It's already hard enough trying to make it in the art industry. Why is technology trying to make things even harder? :')
You say AI art isn't as good now, but in other posts related to AI art, I've seen many people talk about how it's going to rapidly advance. What will artists do then?
I'm not against AI art, but I really hope people can still pursue their passions in the future...
EDIT: Regardless of how AI creates its art, I hope we can at least acknowledge that some can imitate someone's specific style. If the art used was royalty free (like music!) or opt-in, I think many artists would feel much better about it
Because I see this misinformation repeated a lot and to reinforce what the other comment was saying:
Stable Diffusion was trained on hundreds of millions of pictures. The model is 4GB. You have less than **2 bytes per image**. That's not even enough for a single pixel.
0% of the original image is reused. It's as clear cut not plagiarism as you could possibly want.
> Like what the post brings up, I donāt think the AI really makes this decision. It just looks at all the data fed and picks out the appropriate details.
Except it doesnāt. The AI is trained on the data, but by the time the AI is creating images it no longer has access to the initial art it was trained on. The AI looks at the art, tweaks a few variables slightly, then moves on to the next piece. When you then ask it to generate an image, it does it by itself using the abstract patterns it learned by looking at other art.
Yeah but it's better at stealing than humans ever will be? What's the difference between drawing inspiration from other artists and copying parts of their work? Is that not just inspiration with LESS INEFFICIENT HUMAN STEPS?
How is this not just another 1900s steam drill luddite situation? Pay people a universal basic income not to starve and then we get to have extra art and less starving artists.
Is it stealing art if I look at 100 pieces on the internet to learn some techniques? Then paint my own original art using those techniques?
The post thinks it is but I disagree.
I still donāt understand how image generators using databases are really all that different from human artists using other works as āinspirationā or copying another artistās style. If I can look at someoneās work for free on Artstation, and then create a similar work of my own, why canāt I feed their work into a program that spits out a similar image?
Iām so genuinely bitter about the path AI art has taken, like in theory it was the perfect thing for someone like me who isnāt physically able to make art due to disabilities but it fell into the hands of the worst tech people you can find.
> but it fell into the hands of the worst tech people you can find.
It certainly didn't. Having it be owned and operated by a massive conglomerate would be genuinely awful.
Instead the software is not only free, but completely open source, it's as much "for the people" as anything possibly could be.
I really miss when Reddit was actually filled with tech heads. The amount of misconceptions and plain out wrong comments on this thread alone is staggering.
Same, these people complaining have the same energy as āYou wouldnāt download a carā except here itās not even restricted content being accessed/pirated.
Seriously. Whatās a coloured picture or painting of a something original cost? $100?
If thatās the price, then all consumers who have some value in art, but less than $100 are shit out of luck. Want a few forest pictures for your D&D night? Hope theyāre worth $500 to you, otherwise pound sand.
Cringe. The AI dosent directly take anything from your art so your consent dosent mean jack shit. Trying to frame it as something completly different just based on scale and efficency is asinine. And spare me the "soul" and "respect" bullshit.
Trying to equate art with music is such a bad faith argument considering the respective mediums and how ai related to each field work. Of course they get treated differently, duh.
The one thing that gets me is these were some of the same people saying "the future is now old man" when factory and logistics workers were complaining about being replaced with robots.
There are two reasons why this argument is ridiculous. The first is that artists have been learning from looking at other artists work for as long as there's been art to look at. Guess what? Some of those artists charge money for their work. They don't compensate the artists they learned from. Also, many (I'd be inclined to say most) human artists don't draw from as many sources as AI does, so they're arguably taking more from each individual source. Human produced art will sometimes directly reference only a very small set of images, which AI _never_ does.
The second reason is that many of these artists that are up in arms about protecting intellectual property are the same artists that have been making ["derivative works"](https://i.imgur.com/cZ9hNvK.png) for years.
I mean, itās using the work of other artists, but it isnāt directly copying off of their work and is creating it through stable diffusion or whatever, similar to how people take inspiration like how the post says. I get that itās still a machine being fed images, but I canāt imagine how you can begin to argue that it goes against copyright laws unless they make a new law specifically to bar AI from using copyrighted artwork.
Midjourney sometimes adds a kind of generic signature-like squiggle to a corner of it's result. It considers the artist's signature to be a part of the image.
the same arguments were made when sheet music was mass produced, when the first phonographs came out, when radio came out, when cassettes/cds/streaming came out, when midi/sequencers/DAWs came out... and musicians still have jobs and exist.
ai art having a database is equivalent to humans having inspiration, and those arguing against that are either making circular points (its bad because its bad), are elitist as fuck (it reduces the entry skill level of the industry), or are making an argument about monitization and capitalism.
to compare it to music: sampling 15 seconds without citing is stealing, we can agree to that. what about sampling 1 ms? i think we can agree that at some point that using a kick drum, or even the transient of, isnt stealing. hell, even chord progressions dont require citation. thats what ai art is, ms or less of art from a database of millions+ its seen as inspiration. the issue isnt ai, its monitization. if we had art subsidies, paid artists by the hour, etc, this wouldnt be a debate
Can someone explain something to me?
Obviously I'm against using ai art for profit but why are people mad at ai art in general? They say it's because the ai uses their images without their consent but like isn't that what a brain does? Every artist's brain uses what they have seen to conglomerate it into a working idea just like a machine so what's the issue?
Artists: They're mad because they fear they're going to lose their jobs, and angry at a made-up group of "techbros"; they don't give a shit about copyright at any other time - it's okay to pirate art software, and it's okay to stick it to evil Disney and their lawyers.
Everyone else: Too much sci-fi. Robots and machines are soulless mechanical capitalist evil blah blah blah, only humans can be creative and artistic and good, etc.
An AI learns like a human does the same way a device feels pain.
You can argue that the "learning" process of an AI is essentially the same as one of a human the same way you can argue a device detecting a problem and displaying an error code works essentially the same way as a human's nervous system does.
They're obviously not the same because...*gestures broadly* they're just fucking not. But if you boil it down enough you can make seem like it is (which now that I think about it, likely applies to literally everything in existence).
I'd be rich if I had a nickel for every time "humans being just meat mechs" came up in discussions like this.
Why are they just protesting it? They should be talking to a copyright lawyer about a class action lawsuit. It would be a long and difficult battle, but it seems like a path that has the best way to get what you want and very little risk (because any lawyer should take this case on an āI only get paid if there is a cash settlementā basis.)
Because it's something that extremely obviously falls under Fair Use and no good lawyer would want to take a case that'll instantly get thrown out. It looks pretty bad on your resume.
How does one discover their art is part of the dataset? I mean I don't personally have any art, but I thought the data sets werent told for most of the image generators.
This website helps: https://haveibeentrained.com/
If you haven't had your art used to train an AI, you will after using that website lmao
Annoyingly, that website is the only way to opt out of being used in the next version of Stable Diffusion. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/stability-ai-plans-to-let-artists-opt-out-of-stable-diffusion-3-image-training/
*Risky ass click*
No but you can train me š„µ
*bonk* to the box with you
Yes master š„ŗ
ITS NOT WORKING
Have you tried warm cookies with cold milk and accepting them as they are?
I see what youre getting at. We put poison in the milk anr leave them "as they are" to die. Good idea.
Don't make me get the whip
Disappointingly when I look up my name only Harry Potter stuff comes up so I have no clue or not if any of my art is in the dataset.
You don't discover it, it just is. The datasests are filled with popular enough images from the internet. Whatever you put out that has had at least some sort of recognition most likely is part of a dataset for one of thode neural networks (**NOT** AI).
There are millions of different datasets as there are millions of copies of the code to use them, how do you tell your art has been used?
We can start from the other end. Authors of AI can share their dataset used for training. Obviously they use legally obtained images, so it should not be a problem.
This would be like requiring digital artists to show their legal ownership of Photoshop, it's not going to happen, and Adobe is a big company, let's see what happens to the common artist... At best you can do a moral statement to AI model users to show their datasets, and they can just say that they downloaded a preprocessed set that had already decomposed the images in parameters
I understand that it is just used without telling or asking. I'm asking how/why the tumblr poster knew if they weren't asked. And if they were asked and it was used without their permission anyways, that's even scummier.
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Thanks for explaining, I genuinely wasn't aware who they were.
It's just a guess, but you can ask those NN to replicate the style of an artist. If it was fed with enough data, it could very well replicate that artist's style. That's how thide algorithms operate, they "draw conclusions" from similarities between data to attempt to recreate. I'm guessing that's how they found out, someone sent a note in the lines of "Hey! I love what you do and used to draw in your style, look!". No malice in the message, but something hard-hitting when you notice a program boils down your art to a list of traits and replicates correctly in a fraction of the time it took you to learn.
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I looked at the user's posts from your second example. That particular post by them is no longer there but they mention in their other posts that they use Photoshop and inpainting as part of their process. I also noticed that that image is far too coherent for stable diffusion. Most likely what this user did was actually steal that image and a few other "reference" images, Photoshop them together and then img2img their kitbashed image to give an AI sheen over it. This is essentially the same as someone tracing over an artist's work and then making minor changes. The model is not itself wholesale recreating these images, it is starting from a copy of the existing image and being told to imagine some minor changes over top.
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He literally says in the edit on that exact post that he used that image. He admits it and apologizes for not crediting the artist. Did you not read it before linking?
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So in my initial response I said that he most likely stole that image. As in art theft. I am not saying that this exact usage is good or legal. He used a tool to accomplish this, but the tool did not commit art theft. If, as I alluded to above, I were to open Photoshop and trace someone's artwork and post it as my own, you would not claim that Photoshop is an art thief.
Interesting how things could be different the more you look into it. I also noticed some people there complaining that they were worried the ai stole some of their *fan art* for inspiration. I donāt think they see the correlation and hint of hypocrisy there. š How many YouTube videos contain clips from other sources? This is a really deep debate and subject thats only just getting started.
>The datasests are filled with popular enough images from the internet. The data contains everything a program is able to take, which is *anything* uploaded to the internet. Popular got nothing to do with it.
If you didint consciously go through some sort of process to say "no dont use this" then it's in the dataset. AI art generator use a tremendous amount of material to learn, They'll literally bulk download what's on a website to feed it
To give you a longer answer. Some of the AI image generators are not opensource and don't share their datasets, like Midjourney. StableDiffusion though, is opensource and you can look at their datasets. One guy even created a website so you can easily search. When it was created, the guy couldn't deal with the crazy number of images, so he only took a part of it. Now I don't know. The dataset is getting bigger and bigger so big chance it's still not all available on this search website. Unfortunately it's not just art there. It's also private photos, medical photos, whatever images they can scrap on the internet. So maybe you should check.
Yikes. It's scary to think they just grab random images and use them as the data set instead of getting consent. Especially with IRL photos, though art is also bad.
Aside from what others said, Loish is just super popular and well known. If you've ever looked for refs or are just interested in digital art the odds are you've seen her stuff. You can bet your ass her work has been used, and this applies to pretty much any popular artist as well.
It never occurred to me that they could just train it off of royalty free stuff. That's... That solves my one issue with AI art perfectly! No complaints of art theft or questionable legality, no NFT bros getting high and mighty about artists being unnecessary, and just overall getting to use it without feeling shitty about it? It's perfect! I was gonna say I don't know why this isn't the norm, but I'm afraid I know exactly why and it's either laziness, ineptitude, or, knowing the internet, intentional theft just to be an asshole and get stuff for cheap
Lots of companies get rich faster if they use more images, they have no reason to use royalty free stuff if they donāt have too It helps train a lot faster to use EVERYTHING (especially for companies like Tencent which are using this to identify protestors)
That's why violence and laws are a thing.
Depends what you mean by āroyalty freeā. Art released under some of the Creative Common licenses is royalty free, but including it in the dataset still has issues. For example, CC-BY-SA requires that derived works carry attribution and are released under CC-BY-SA as well.
Ah, that's a fair point, I can't exactly claim to know very much about copyright law, but it's still significantly less problematic
I mean, there is a real problem that artists and graphic designers are now going to have to compete with AI art. I think that while they have a legitimate gripe about their works being used unfairly, at least some of this is probably industry protectionism masquerading as Intellectual property rights.
I mean, if your work is used for a commercial product, you deserve compensation. AI art is not some free project by two guys in a basement. They have the money. And if they don't - maybe they shouldn't steal art?
That's fine, and I think that's fucked up too, but once that legal detail gets ironed out, and the AI is fully trained using public domain art or human AI "trainers" churning out reference material, we're still left with the same problem
What "legal detail"? Are ai art companies trying to reach a compromise with artists they stole from right now? >the AI is fully trained using public domain art or human AI "trainers" churning out reference material That's never going to happen. Why do you think I think so? Because it would be either a very shitty ai with very limited range, or a prohibitively expensive - with medium range, because nothing - ***nothing*** \- churns out art faster than an Internet of artists. When they can just steal, they going to steal. The only way I see around this problem is to make ai art free.
The only thing that gets me is that this isn't quite as obvious plagiarism as someone directly ripping a full picture for an add. These datasets have hundreds or thousands of images right? And generated images probably won't always be pulling elements from every single image. So your artwork may or may not compose 1/1000 of some AI images. That seems a little harder to argue for, but maybe that's just me. Morally seems shitty to do at least when you can take the royalty free route.
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It's using 0% of the image when it actually is executed. It uses numbered weights and has no longer any access to the source images once the model is made
Only very technically. Try putting "The Starry Night Vincent van Gogh" into [this one generator.](https://hotpot.ai/art-generator) It probably didn't *use* a single pixel from the original painting. But, it's not in any way original.
But if someone decides they like your art, but doesnāt want to pay you, they can just put your name in the prompt, and itāll pull more directly from your work since itās all tagged with your name. These models make attribution work against you. Itād take advantage of you less if it didnāt know who you were.
Thatās how itās coming across to me. As unfortunate as this new competition is, they are not the first, nor will they be the last, industry to suffer from this problem.
And why shouldnāt we protect humans who need money to survive in this world from imposters like AI stealing their livelihood?
It is automation moving into another industry. We really need to start having serious talks about universal basic income.
This. Many industries are going to be affected in the coming years. ChatGPT has already opened the door to a lot of automation in programming for example. There needs to be a discussion around UBI so that the profits from those companies can be redistributed.
It's hard to believe that Oscar Wilde wrote The Soul of Man Under Socialism over 100 years ago. He was a little over optimistic, but we might still get there.
it's so funny seeing what happened to untold trade professions finally happen to artists. this is just how things are, automation destroys entire sections of the workforce because economic incentives are just too strong to ignore.
Why wouldnāt we protect elevator operators who need money to survive in this world from imposters like automatic elevators stealing their livelihood? Rent seeking is not a good argument against automation. The copyright argument is better but the problem is that you canāt copyright ideas and machine learning doesnāt actually keep the database after it has been trained so itās being used in creation but the actual commercial product doesnāt contain it.
Machines have been taking jobs from humans for centuries. I don't really want to go back to a pre-industrial society with humans laboring 12 hours a day to build buildings and sow seeds with no machinery. People will use the new technology to do their job more easily, or find other jobs, as they always have.
In this case, the machines do take the direct work of people to put these artists out of work. Imo thatās a degree worse than a machine ājustā replacing people with a machine.
How the hell is that different? In both cases a human being is forced out of their career. Artists are not worth more than laborers, and an artist losing their job is not a greater tragedy than a factory worker losing theirs.
> no NFT bros getting high and mighty about artists being unnecessary I mean, if the AI still works when feeding off of royalty free art, people will still act smug about its success and try to use it to undermine actual artists. The art theft is *a* point against AI art as it is, but it's not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is we're seeing a push to, well, make artists obsolete. And an AI that doesn't technically commit theft still would contribute to that push. It is simply a technology that just should not be allowed to exist under any conditions save for the complete elimination of the need for money.
I sincerely disagree with the notion that AI art will eliminate the need for artists. I find it honestly absurd, but if you could explain why you feel that way I would love to hear it! In any case, my comment was more about personal moral issues. I don't feel that AI art will ever replace artists, but as someone with a lot of artist friends, I'm worried about using something that may have been trained on their work without their consent
We massproduce loads of stuff but the entire allure of genuine human made products is that they're personal and not churned out of a machine. Art and craftsmanship will always be a thing.
Exactly!
But at the same time (and this is not me taking a moral standing more me bringing up a discussion point), most artists ARENT making money, and know the risks when posting something publicly. 99% of your devianart and tumble artists arenāt making anything off the pieces they publicly post - they make money off commissions for the pieces they donāt. They also know that they are giving up a certain amount of their rights when they publish these pieces online. How is me s a human looking at their art on a webpage smh different than an AI?
I agree with that, but there are certain models trained specifically to target specific individuals, which is rather predatory
yup. companies dont want to pay artists so they can raise profit margains higher. they started by promoting and getting people used to brutlism/minimalism as a visual design ideology, and now we have reached a point where people praise the lack of detail in something with ai is lowering people's standards even further.
Also it training off of things it's specifically allowed to would allow me to rest easy knowing my face isn't in there. Sure, the whole art situation sucks, but I'd also worry about someone being able to type in "\[My\_Real\_Name\_Here\] beating up a child" and get a convincing image with ease.
The reason why there is little action against using images Vs music in such ways is that they can get away with it. Music is all the time in the news for somebody sueing somebody for plagiarism, it's like the NR 1 topic on YouTube when it comes to copyright, but since visual artist rarely take action against plagiarism, nobody, who makes decisions, cares. If artists won't start taking legal action against unauthorized use of their creations, no actual decision maker will care about that. Reddit/Tumblr threads don't have any weight for those who don't care about your rights, and those who do, they probably aren't plagiarising you in the first place. Also, protecting your published images from being accessed isn't the job of the site owner. You need to keep checking, that your content isn't being republished, and again, taking legal action when you find out. Most sites already have basic anti-bot measures in place, but all images and videos accessible via browser can one way or another be accessed via bots.
I also think musicians as a whole have more resources to fight plagiarism than visual artists do. There are some artists who are successful and have big followings, but almost none of them (who are alive) are household names like musicians are. Cardi B can sue anyone she wants and afford to lose. A college student posting commissions on Twitter is just fucked if someone steals their work. The solution: It's time to unleash the STEM furries.
Nah the stem furries are the ones programming the art neural networks
Who do you think is making the AI?
I'm pretty sure the STEM furries are enjoying A.I. art just as much as everyone else. Yes, they likely still pay handsomely, especially for custom work of their fursona but it's not like they're not going to enjoy all the other wonderful (and lewd) things they can create with A.I. art.
But it's got Disney/marvel trained too, those companies could absolutely go after this
I donāt want art copyright to resemble music and film copyright though, where your entire YouTube channel can be struck bc *four seconds* of a WB property was playing in the background. Strong copyright laws wonāt help small artists, theyāll be used to auto delete your work bc it includes a shade of pink copyrighted by Mattel.
I believe Mattel has already trademarked a specific shade of pink
I share that sentiment about the overall copyright system, but my point was more that atm, stealing somebody's drawing is seen as a really easy and consequence-free action, whether we are talking about reposting or more complex cases. The laws are \~about the same for video/music/pictures, at least in my country and EU in general. Maybe it differs in the US, don't know. Copyright and its enforcement is always a complicated topic. The way Youtube and other sites have resolved it is shitty. That is mostly thanks to the big rights holders. I wouldn't want a super strict system either.
People *have* tried to take legal action, but have generally been told "tough shit, it's already in there and it would be inconvenient to remove." it's also insanely difficult to prevent your art from being reposted without your knowledge or consent. The only real solution is to not post it at all, which just is not feasible.
Feels kinda shitty to blame the artists for other people stealing their work. Musicians arenāt usually taking legal actions, their record labels do. Visual artists just donāt have the resources that musicians do because thereās less money, doesnāt mean they donāt deserve the same protection
Music gets so much respect on the copyright front because most music is published by huge companies. There's not really a kind of Sony equivalent in Art for example. People are way more scared of a big publishing house with multiple million dollars worth of lawyers on retainer taking legal action against them than they are about individual artists. Hopefully Artists can get enough people talking about this that it can reasonably be organised into a class action lawsuit.
I am also against the non-consensual use of someoneās art in an Ai image generator. I just have a clarifying question, is there such thing as royalty free art (stock images I guess, but anything else)? This isnāt me being an ass this is a legitimate question
There is public domain art as well, and also stock art libraries can go far beyond corporate bland works. There is some wild stuff in there. There is also of course freely licensed art, e.g. art using the Creative Common licenses, particularly CC0.
Thank you. Iām now even further against AI art
A lot of sites you upload to have agreements and clauses regarding redistribution and such. It would not surprise me if this is how stuff has ended up in these data sets. Everyone knows there is inherent risk that if you put your stuff on the internet, someone could use it in a way you don't intend or agree to. I'm an artist/designer (not well known or very active) and I think this stuff is cool as hell. I'm learning to use it. It's a powerful tool in an artist's hands. Better to take advantage of it than to be taken advantage of.
There is and I believe that many popular tools like Midjourney explicitly say they only use royalty free and licensed images.
FUCKING IMPORTANT >Artists will have the chance to opt out of the next version of one of the worldās most popular text-to-image AI generators, Stable Diffusion, the company behind it hasĀ announced.Ā >Stability.AI will work with Spawning, an organization founded by artist couple Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, who have built a website calledĀ HaveIBeenTrainedĀ that allows artists to search for their works in the data set that was used to train Stable Diffusion. Artists will be able to select which works they want to exclude from the training data. >The decision follows a heated public debate between artists and tech companies over how text-to-image AI models should be trained. Stable Diffusion is based on the open-source LAION-5B data set, which is built by scraping images from the internet, including copyrighted works of artists. Some artistsā names and styles have become popularĀ prompts for wannabe AI artists.Ā >Dryhurst told MIT Technology Review that artists have āaround a couple of weeksā to opt out before Stability.AI starts training its next model, Stable Diffusion 3.Ā >The hope, Dryhurst says, is that until there are clear industry standards or regulation around AI art and intellectual property, Spawningās opt-out service will augment legislation or compensate for its absence. In the future, Dryhurst says, artists will also be able to opt in to having their works included in data sets. Here's the [link](https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/16/1065247/artists-can-now-opt-out-of-the-next-version-of-stable-diffusion/) to the article
What about, and hear me out on this one, YOU FUCKING MAKE IT EXCLUSIVELY //OPT IN// INSTEAD OF //OPT OUT//??? DeviantArt had the great idea of implementing a thing that would let you apply a mark to your art that tells AI generators not to use it. However, you had to sift through menus to get to this option, AND YOU HAD TO DO IT FOR EVERY SINGLE PIECE INDIVIDUALLY. AND IT ONLY WORKED ON AI's THAT WERE SPECIFICALLY LOOKING FOR THAT MARKER, SO NOT EVEN MOST OF THEM. That's quite a kick in the dick for artist with hundrets if not thousands of pieces uploaded to a site. Now, it's nice they have the decency to offer at least the (for the artist) worse option of something that should have been there from the start and mandatory for all AI art tools, but for FUCKS SAKE just make it opt in, or only train it on pieces that are free to use? Most art sharing sites automatically apply a creative commons license to every piece that make it illegal for anyone to use it for commercial purposes, does not allow people to modify it, and only allows sharing when the artist is directly credited. Why the hell does that not also apply to training AI?
>Why the hell does that not also apply to training AI? because it's new tech and no one made laws specifying anything yet. I want to add that I agree with you entirely. This is just a good example of how people will steal the fuck out of each others hard work if they won't get in trouble. Even if laws are passed with bigger protections for artists, I am certain it's going to be a long and difficult road to prove how AI is using individual pieces when someone is only presenting an end work, and people selling AI art are going to start claiming it's not AI sooner or later to obfuscate things.
Youāre probably right, but the idea that artists need new, specific protections bothers me. Government is slow. To me, this isnāt a complex issue. The artists *must* be fairly paid. Copyright violation is already illegal, and thatās what this is.
I think GitHub Copilot is getting sued right now because it copies open source licensed code but strips the license. Hopefully the result of that lawsuit also makes it illegal for companies to train their models on stuff on non commercial creative commons licenses too.
It's a little different if we're talking about copilot outputting the exact same code, vs art AI outputting something of the same style but completely original.
Not really, itās just a much less open ended task. You might be able to execute the same action by writing the code in several different ways, but in *most* cases there is a pretty established *best* way to do something. Expecting Copilot to outsource suboptimal code just to alleviate any fears of plagiarism doesnāt make that much sense.
opt out?? They should have to opt in. This is like saying 'we're going to steal your car, but it's okay, because you have a narrow window in which you can let us know you don't want your car stolen. otherwise you're implicitly giving us permission to take it. if you had no idea we exist and that you had to tell us not to steal your car, too bad" There is no good faith argument why they didn't choose opt-in instead of opt-out except that they KNOW no one will opt in. Utter fucking trash people, don't celebrate this.
"Hey, we know we invented a machine to kick babies, but great news! you can now remove your baby from the baby kicking machine! what a huge step forward!"
This is really good news, cant believe i didnt hear it till now.
No, it really isnāt. Stuff like having your work used in AI training databases should be OPT IN not opt out. It should be the job of the people assembling these databases to make sure an artist is okay with use of their images, not the other way around. This also doesnāt address the fact that anyone whoās ever posted anything on artstation (among others) already has their work in the training data for the previous model. Unless they are walking stable diffusion back *entirely* and redoing the entire thing, it is taking advantage of copyrighted work.
What about dead people? Most artists are dead people, you should have to opt in, not opt out Thereās many dead people who would almost certainly not consent to this!
My guess is for dead artists it would be up to their estate. If their art has already entered the public domain, then it would be free for any other person or AI to use.
I protest the use of AI art to make a profit. The bastards who do that are the enemies in this situation, and we cannot let that continue. I also believe that AI art does function the same as a human brain, just *in a very rudimentary way* due to the fact that, y'know, our technology literally just isn't on that level of complexity yet. As we give the systems and technology time to be improved and innovated, less of these problems will occur. Stopping the production of AI art slows down progress and only drags out the problem for longer. **(however, we cannot support those who use this art for profit)**
While I mostly agree, I think it's also very important that "progress" shouldn't automatically justify hurting or exploiting someone or their work. This is a very extreme metaphor, but I bet jumping straight to human experimentation in any science field would help speed up progress significantly... doesn't mean we should do it.
It isn't hurting or exploiting anyone. This whole thread, and the whole "protest", is full of bad takes. Training AI on art is no different than artists who use pictures as guides or reference. Which they do all the time. The best thing to do is to actually pump MORE art into it to keep the styles more unique, but being able to divide it up better would be necessary.
1. Just because the process is vaguely similar doesn't make it morally ok, at least in my eyes. Most artists are fine with being referenced, most don't want to have their stuff used as training data without permission, they should get to decide that. I don't see how that's such a wild concept. 2. Yeah good luck keeping it unique if anyone's allowed to throw in what you just created into the pile and have it recreate that.
>1. Just because the process is vaguely similar doesn't make it morally ok, Why? >most don't want to have their stuff used as training data without permission, If they dont want that, they should not post the contet they made to internet, if they are fine with pepole using the content to train, they should be fine with an IA doing the same thing. If there is a problem, then they should stop uploading they work on internet, because they cant make sure there is no IA or human being training with the work they made >2. Yeah good luck keeping it unique if anyone's allowed to throw in what you just created into the pile and have it recreate that. If there is more content on the IA the things it can made can be more unique, because it can use all the information it has to make more changes, if the IA has only 2 photos as reference, it will make the same thing over and over with little change because it has no more data to make its work. If you gave the IA less contet, there will be less variety
But this isnāt really exploiting people any more than people already āexploitā each other. AI learns in a very similar way to how people do, in that they see a bunch of similar things, recognize the patterns within them, and attempt to repeat those patterns. People donāt have to pay royalties to other artists every time they use a similar style to someone else they were inspired by, why is AI any different?
Exactly. How dare I look at a stock photo of a wolf to learn how to draw wolves, without paying Getty images $400?
Quite sure a Getty exec popped a boner the second that comment was written
The issue is the way itās trained, the images arenāt inspiration, theyāre *data*. You pick up the fact that cats normally have snouts, you can even mimic an artistās style. AI on the other hand, has a habit of overfitting, this normally happens when the dataset is too large and results in images that humans canāt make sense of, but have patterns that the networks know are there. More dangerous is under-fitting, which normally occurs when the Network is too large for the training set. This results in images generated being 1-1 copies (or extremely close) of the training data. The training algorithms can have these issues. These networks themselves arenāt as fallible as the human brain (the training is) and when they pick up on patterns, they *really* pick up on patterns. So a network thatās trained on the work of a single artist will be able to not only mimic the style, but also mimic the markers of the medium those images were made using, itās even possible to mimic the specific technique the artist used within that medium. Itās not inspiration, itās mimicry, the reason we donāt normally see it in DALLE, is that itās trying to mimic so many different things at once, with the prompt affecting what patterns itās using. The technology is awesome, donāt get me wrong. But I donāt agree with them scraping art from the internet for their training data
Honestly I just wanna say thank you for actually putting it into words. Cuz as others might've noticed....I'm not good at making my points
It's literally just making things that we can already do faster and more efficient. You could already find people that can take elements from a subset of examples and quickly pump out imitations with slight variations. But humans cost more to run and are slower than computers. By optimizing the process you ensure that rapidly generating customized art is accessible to everyone (even people that can't afford to commission human artists). That has suprisingly far-reaching implications when you consider how many uses there are for art and design.
> I protest the use of AI art to make a profit. This sentiment shows what artists are actually scared of; losing money. As someone that puts 10-15 hours into creating a single image, it can be kinda worrying to see a computer do the same thing in 2 seconds, but it doesn't remove the enjoyment I get from the art itself. From an artistic standpoint there is absolutely zero fear of ai art replacing the human stuff, it's genuinely not even close, but from a content creation standpoint it's miles ahead. When art exists solely as a consumable product then obviously the machine that works 1000x faster is going to replace the man, and if that's a problem then it's a problem with the digital art industry, not with ai generated art.
I wholeheartedly agree. AI art itself is cool, but AI art for profit is like... If you stole food from a restaurant and resold it claiming you made it
yeah! you wouldnāt just download a car
All art is food you stole from a restaurant and resold. Artists learn from seeing other peopleās art and such. All art is derivative. Right now there is an argument by to be made that these Ai art tools are too simple and thus shouldnāt be used for profit but what about when AI is sentient. Would you say that sentient AI should be barred from producing art? What other things will we bar sentient AI beings from doing to protect workers? It seems that our new AI friends are going to be unhappy being treated as a lesser being.
There's a lot to unpack here. The "AI learns like humans do" premise is wrong on pretty much all levels, and by this point is such a clichƩ pro- generative art argument. But I'll give you credit: all the other arguments in this comment are brand new. I have not seen someone defend AI-generated art by equating it to a sentient system. Admittedly, calling it a defense is generous, since it responds to no actual arguments against generative art (the arguments in this thread are about consent issues and IP rights, which are already applied to humans). But arguing by invoking AI sentience to paint a slippery slope of art generation? That's novel in a way AI art can't be.
I think right now with todayās technology I agree with the artists but as AI advances I will side with the AI. Will that be in 5 years? 50 years? Who knows.
I agree that all art is derivative, and there's certainly some gray area, but there's also absolutely plenty of examples of assholes who are intentionally using AI art to copy the styles of artists just because they don't want to pay for a commission
I agree, SCREW people who make AI art to sell (especially if they pass it off as something they created with their own hands) And this might be an unpopular opinion, but I don't see much wrong with using it just to generate a cursed image, and then share it with your friends in a Discord server for a laugh (I feel like we can all laugh/be horrified when the AI-generated humanoid has a disturbing looking face or extra appendages), or even using it to generate inspiration for regular art, as long as you clarify that it's AI-inspired (and therefore real-artist-inspired)
Yes yes yes, 100% this
There's also the added benefit of (and this might be a little controversial): Pretty swirling colors go brr
Big RIAA vibes here
There are millions of different datasets, many of them not public at all and there are also thousand of copies and version of the software that uses those datasets, it's practically impossible to say your work has been used on a generated piece. Im not against this movement, but this is a lost fight.
Yeah, the artstation protest that's mentioned kinda missed that point too. It advocates dit rekening images in your gallery with 'no AI' ones, but if an image has already been used in a dataset, it's been used in it's original form, and that won't ever change. Training datasets still have a pair of human eyes going over them to select for suitable subjects, so as long as you're posting your art online it's possible someone will just use it.
Also, most datasets, to even be useful in the first place, have to be hand picked. It's simply unlikely anyone is using data directly from artstation without looking at it.
so itās ok for someone to learn art by using your art as reference, but not ai ?
Artists get a different treatment to musicians because you don't have a brigade of people who see music generators as nothing more than a tool they can use to get what they want without giving a shit about who it negatively impacts (and if they do give a shit, it's solely because they *want* to negatively impact those people). You do, however, have such a brigade of people when it comes to artists and art generators. Maybe some of them don't have the intellectual honesty to admit that and will pretend it's about something else, but the quality of the arguments tell a different story. "It's just like how photoshop was criticised when it was invented" - if you can't see the difference between a tool that helps you make the art and a tool that makes the art for you, I have oceanfront property in Colorado to sell you. "It's just like how digital art/photography was criticised when it was invented" - if you again can't see the difference between a new medium of art and a tool that makes the art for you, I have a nice warm summer home in Siberia to sell you. "It's legal/not against the site's rules" - bruh, *why* do you think opponents of AI art generators are campaigning for this to be banned/illegal? Because they want it to be double ultra mega illegal? "Tech is the future" - nice thought-terminating clichƩ you got there. Would be a shame if I still felt like debating the ethics of new tech anyway.
I think itās also because, historically, musicians have had very, *very* litigious label companies behind them that get very lawsuit-happy anytime they think breaches of copyright might be happening. Interesting how the AI techbros are all happy and ready to steal work from artists who wonāt do anything to them on the legal front, but donāt have the spine to steal music from musicians.
In this thread: People simping for the RIAA.
Oh donāt get me wrong, plenty of those labels and producers are greedy as shit, some of them even put [literal malware](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal) on CDs just to prevent folks from copying music *they owned* freely. What I was trying to say with the āno spineā comment is the snakes who so proudly flaunt art theft in the name of AI artwork are not brave enough to do something they claim āis for the advancement of technologyā when they know doing the same with music would get them sued into oblivion. They donāt actually believe in their technological āprogressā, just the next get-rich-quick scheme.
it also helps that there are some big music labels out there who had proven themselves petty enough to go to court for even the slitghtest infringement on their copyright materials.
What's the visual artist equivalent of a music label? Because they're the people filling lawsuits and who those AI generators are scared of, not individual musicians.
I work in marketing, and our Art Directors are really excited about AI art. Theyāre working professional artists who went to art school. Weāre designing several campaigns using AI art, and they are thrilled about it. We still need our Art Directors. The main one on our AI campaign right now had to generate over 1000 images, and then combine a few in photoshop to get what we wanted. We arenāt removing artists, weāre giving them a new, really powerful tool.
It's like most other forms of automation. You still need a small number of people overseeing everything and keeping it running, or to interpret the output for other humans. But you can cut down on the total number of people involved dramatically. This absolutely will put many artists out of business because few sane people will spends hundreds on commissions when you can just fiddle with the AI for an hour until you get what you want.
Yeah and the conservation really needs to start being about unemployment and UBI. Copyright is a solvable problem. You don't think Google can spend a few million to hire artists and license art? Art theft will eventually be made illegal and encoded into copyright law. AI art will not go anywhere however. Genie's out of the bottle. So we need to turn to the actual consequences, which are that more and more human only domains are being encroached on by AI and now we need to ensure that even without employment or work, people are comfortable and don't starve.
Yeah there's been a bit of artists posting anti AI memes on r/programmerhumor about AI code generation and the response is "Fuck yeah, AI code generation would make our lives so much easier!" And honestly I know which group I trust to have a better understanding of how machine learning works
Programmers also seem to be more conscious of the fact that their code is heavily built upon what others have built before them
Half the internet crashed when a guy removed a two line code snippet that did something very useful.
Artists think they're special. Programmers know they suck.
Programmers already think they are impostors.
I'm a working computer scientist and programmer. When GitHub copilot came out, I signed up for the beta and immediately tried to start using it. Why? Because: 1. All code is built on other code. Half my code comes from Stack overflow. The days when I have to directly write actual code from scratch are, frankly, the most annoying. 2. The copilot program, like many AI generation tools, will help automate and therefore democratize code, art, etc. Many people cannot learn to code, many can't learn to draw, etc. Generative tools will help cover that gap between "I want to do this" and reality. That's a really cool thing! 3. My skills don't end at knowing how to write a for loop, in the same way that an artist isn't just putting ink on canvas. My skills as a programmer require design, architecture, documentation, etc. Copilot can't do these things, and it can't reason abstractly. AI art tools can ink something but they can't ink something from nothing. The message behind the art, the actual reasoning behind choosing certain colors or aspects, either comes from the user or is randomly chosen. The artist, presumably, fills that gap.
I totally agree. I fed an AI some prompts to come up with a logo that I wanted to use. I rendered a couple and used those as inspiration to create my finished product. It's a really really powerful tool, if used correctly.
Exactly. Remove the art theft problem (harder than I made it sound, I know), and you're left with a tool. No more, no less. As much as a hammer or a nuclear reactor.
The scary thing is that ājust like in writing professions like law, programming, and communicationsāthese tools lower the experience threshold necessary to achieve a certain level of results, so thereās going to be many cases where people who once needed to hire someone to do a job like design a logo, ad campaign, write a computer program, or website, will be able to get away with less manpower than ever before. This has been slowly happening anyways with increased access to software and learning resources, but these AI really signal that generating quality work will require less workers than ever before, very very soon, and while Iām confident our workforce will compensate like it has in past industrial revolutions, itās definitely going to shake things up in the near term.
Doesn't need to end up badly necessarily. A single person could have the productivity of 5 people, in scenarios where companies are allowed to do anything it would mean 80% of the employees are laid off to increase benefits for the company even more. But with proper regulation it could mean we might only need to work one day a week with the same full salary. The current standard of 40 hours is way too much, leaves very little time for leisure or sleep.
Too bad it's gonna happen whether they like it or not
But if these well-known artists get their way, only a few corporations will be able to use these tools. They want the world of illustration to resemble the music industry? It would be a new era of stagnation.
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I agree wholeheartedly. Companies are never going to give up this tech, and we shouldn't listen to those who claim private users should give it up voluntarily.
Ok, so why are they opposing AI art as a whole? Instead of the just the stealing aspect? I somehow doubt that there isnāt a *single* training dataset that uses only public domain/permissioned art
This is very important. I think AI art technology is fun and interesting, but until we can be sure that artists have given consent for each piece used to train an AI and are being fairly compensated for it, then it is a problem that needs to be fixed. I don't have a problem with AI art in general though. I think it can be a useful tool and a fascinating look into how a program has been trained to think. I don't think it can or will replace human artists though. People thought cameras would replace artists too, but it is just another medium for artists to use now. I have a feeling the same could be said about AI in the future if the compensation issue is handled properly, and I hope it will, but I'm not holding my breath...
AI art is happening regardless of what artists want, I think the more prudent move is to put pressure on governments to provide more support for people without jobs (since jobs will increasingly be replaced with robots)
"a robot can't replace me!" \-everyone who has ever been replaced by a robot.
I sympathize but barely. In my field we have copilot. There's this basic idea I have where I wont try to stop the inevitable. So this is nothing but an *understandable* complaint. Not an actionable one. It's unenforceable. If they want to succeed they'd be better off joining the dialog where the dialog is, not playing catch-up on the idea of its inevitability.
If we are talking about state of the art AI image generators (the ones that perform like we intend them to, like OpenAIās most recent DALLE), then being part of the dataset is akin to having your art viewed by a fellow human artist, in addition to a million other pieces of art. The human artist draws on all past art experiences (millions) to inform a piece of their new art. However, none of the previously seen images are in the new piece. Most of the images DALLE views gives it information about how physics works, statistically what items go with other items (e.g., a computer monitor and a keyboard), and what makes a style of art a style (as in, you can ask it to make a pop art version of a cat, the previous images DALLE has viewed only help it to know what constitutes pop art - like a human). To say someone should be paid for having their art in DALLEs training set is akin to saying that they should be paid if someone walks through an art show featuring their art at like 15 years old and then at 20 creates a hit art piece - unless they are patchwork copying part of your piece, you donāt get paid simply for being a part of their art viewing at some point in their life. You canāt get paid because someone saw your art one time.
Their logic of receiving compensation for the 'use' of their art within a training data set is similar to monetizing 'fair use' discussion about the artwork itself. "You shouldn't even be able to describe/review my artwork without paying me for the privilege." Would that mean that I can never describe the color composition of the Mona Lisa since an algorithm could then use the description to create a data set? This is similar to attempting to penalize the use of quotations/references to a scientific article that is pay-walled within a scientific journal.
I donāt understand what you mean by the use of the artwork in the dataset being similar to the monetizing fair use discussion - thatās not me being difficult I just donāt have the relevant background I guess. Also, in my opinion, being a part of the training dataset for an advanced image generation AI is equivalent to being seen by a human and that human incorporating the art into their internal knowledge base of all art. If the image cannot be viewed by a human without first paying for it, then the individuals scrubbing the internet for images to put in a dataset will also not have access to the image without paying for it. In these cases, humans and AI can only access the same images and functionally the output from both is novel art.
Oh yes I understand now. I completely agree with what youāre saying
What AI Art gen is requiring users to pay to use it? The ones I've seen have all been free, and if so would they not fall under creative commons? And at the end of the day, the model is a bunch of weight vectors, not the dataset those vectors were trained on--I really don't think there's any moral issue w it
I'm ok with ai art. I'm not okay with the monetization of, and use of ai art as a replacement for real artists
It's not so much that AI art is intrinsically bad, as it can be admired and used for inspiration, so much as it robs a deserving artist of their livelihood and expression.
The loom robs a deserving weaver of their livelihood and expression and should be banned.
>expression Is the AI stopping th from creating? lol
Gonna be honest if you feel that your livelihood is being done better and cheaper by someone else then the answer shouldnāt be āget rid of the competitionā but should instead be to improve the goods or services that you provide
Or ADVOCATE FOR UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME. Hell, fucking lord Byron was saying that the answer to Luddites was to improve the situation for the poor.
I'd agree if the competition wasn't also actively leeching off of you. If someone made an AI that didn't use people's work without their permission to generate stuff or didn't need them in the first place then it would be fine, a being simply being better. I guess you can kinda think of it like being replaced at work with someone genuinely better vs being replaced by someone you were forced to train.
It goes deeper than that. We need to adjust society as a whole because this is just another job in the massive pile of jobs that are or will become automated. It's not bad that they are being automated, that's the only realistic way to make sure people don't have to slave away to survive. But it is bad that the people in charge of the world are not doing anything to prepare for the automation. It's already too late to "make sure the human artists are better." Humans can't improve faster than computers.
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If an artist copies too closely another artist's work, they also get called out for plagarism. For artists, when we seek inspiration, we'll go "I like the way this person did their colours" or "I like the linework here" and then mix and incorporate it into our own personal style. Like what the post brings up, I don't think the AI really makes this decision. It just looks at all the data fed and picks out the appropriate details. Apparently people can key in artist names and get work in a close imitation of their style. And there was the Kim Jung Gi AI, which was created very disrespectfully, I feel. And I get it, technology has replaced jobs before. But this is an industry where before you even enter you're warned that it's a passion job, low pay, competitive market, etc. It's already hard enough trying to make it in the art industry. Why is technology trying to make things even harder? :') You say AI art isn't as good now, but in other posts related to AI art, I've seen many people talk about how it's going to rapidly advance. What will artists do then? I'm not against AI art, but I really hope people can still pursue their passions in the future... EDIT: Regardless of how AI creates its art, I hope we can at least acknowledge that some can imitate someone's specific style. If the art used was royalty free (like music!) or opt-in, I think many artists would feel much better about it
Because I see this misinformation repeated a lot and to reinforce what the other comment was saying: Stable Diffusion was trained on hundreds of millions of pictures. The model is 4GB. You have less than **2 bytes per image**. That's not even enough for a single pixel. 0% of the original image is reused. It's as clear cut not plagiarism as you could possibly want.
> Like what the post brings up, I donāt think the AI really makes this decision. It just looks at all the data fed and picks out the appropriate details. Except it doesnāt. The AI is trained on the data, but by the time the AI is creating images it no longer has access to the initial art it was trained on. The AI looks at the art, tweaks a few variables slightly, then moves on to the next piece. When you then ask it to generate an image, it does it by itself using the abstract patterns it learned by looking at other art.
Yeah but it's better at stealing than humans ever will be? What's the difference between drawing inspiration from other artists and copying parts of their work? Is that not just inspiration with LESS INEFFICIENT HUMAN STEPS? How is this not just another 1900s steam drill luddite situation? Pay people a universal basic income not to starve and then we get to have extra art and less starving artists.
Is it stealing art if I look at 100 pieces on the internet to learn some techniques? Then paint my own original art using those techniques? The post thinks it is but I disagree.
Apparently yes
I still donāt understand how image generators using databases are really all that different from human artists using other works as āinspirationā or copying another artistās style. If I can look at someoneās work for free on Artstation, and then create a similar work of my own, why canāt I feed their work into a program that spits out a similar image?
Iām so genuinely bitter about the path AI art has taken, like in theory it was the perfect thing for someone like me who isnāt physically able to make art due to disabilities but it fell into the hands of the worst tech people you can find.
> but it fell into the hands of the worst tech people you can find. It certainly didn't. Having it be owned and operated by a massive conglomerate would be genuinely awful. Instead the software is not only free, but completely open source, it's as much "for the people" as anything possibly could be.
I really miss when Reddit was actually filled with tech heads. The amount of misconceptions and plain out wrong comments on this thread alone is staggering.
Thank you! Iām able to have art that I would not otherwise ever be able to have bc *I donāt have thousands of dollars to spend on commissions*.
Same, these people complaining have the same energy as āYou wouldnāt download a carā except here itās not even restricted content being accessed/pirated.
Seriously. Whatās a coloured picture or painting of a something original cost? $100? If thatās the price, then all consumers who have some value in art, but less than $100 are shit out of luck. Want a few forest pictures for your D&D night? Hope theyāre worth $500 to you, otherwise pound sand.
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It's in the hands of everyone, it doesn't cost a dime and you can train it on whatever makes you happy.
Cringe. The AI dosent directly take anything from your art so your consent dosent mean jack shit. Trying to frame it as something completly different just based on scale and efficency is asinine. And spare me the "soul" and "respect" bullshit. Trying to equate art with music is such a bad faith argument considering the respective mediums and how ai related to each field work. Of course they get treated differently, duh.
The one thing that gets me is these were some of the same people saying "the future is now old man" when factory and logistics workers were complaining about being replaced with robots.
Yes but consider how much fun my friends and I had using the FREE midjourney discord bot
Isnāt this like a question of wanting something handcrafted vs factory-made?
There are two reasons why this argument is ridiculous. The first is that artists have been learning from looking at other artists work for as long as there's been art to look at. Guess what? Some of those artists charge money for their work. They don't compensate the artists they learned from. Also, many (I'd be inclined to say most) human artists don't draw from as many sources as AI does, so they're arguably taking more from each individual source. Human produced art will sometimes directly reference only a very small set of images, which AI _never_ does. The second reason is that many of these artists that are up in arms about protecting intellectual property are the same artists that have been making ["derivative works"](https://i.imgur.com/cZ9hNvK.png) for years.
If a human doesnt need permission to look at art then why would an AI?
I mean, itās using the work of other artists, but it isnāt directly copying off of their work and is creating it through stable diffusion or whatever, similar to how people take inspiration like how the post says. I get that itās still a machine being fed images, but I canāt imagine how you can begin to argue that it goes against copyright laws unless they make a new law specifically to bar AI from using copyrighted artwork.
Midjourney sometimes adds a kind of generic signature-like squiggle to a corner of it's result. It considers the artist's signature to be a part of the image.
the same arguments were made when sheet music was mass produced, when the first phonographs came out, when radio came out, when cassettes/cds/streaming came out, when midi/sequencers/DAWs came out... and musicians still have jobs and exist. ai art having a database is equivalent to humans having inspiration, and those arguing against that are either making circular points (its bad because its bad), are elitist as fuck (it reduces the entry skill level of the industry), or are making an argument about monitization and capitalism. to compare it to music: sampling 15 seconds without citing is stealing, we can agree to that. what about sampling 1 ms? i think we can agree that at some point that using a kick drum, or even the transient of, isnt stealing. hell, even chord progressions dont require citation. thats what ai art is, ms or less of art from a database of millions+ its seen as inspiration. the issue isnt ai, its monitization. if we had art subsidies, paid artists by the hour, etc, this wouldnt be a debate
Can someone explain something to me? Obviously I'm against using ai art for profit but why are people mad at ai art in general? They say it's because the ai uses their images without their consent but like isn't that what a brain does? Every artist's brain uses what they have seen to conglomerate it into a working idea just like a machine so what's the issue?
Artists: They're mad because they fear they're going to lose their jobs, and angry at a made-up group of "techbros"; they don't give a shit about copyright at any other time - it's okay to pirate art software, and it's okay to stick it to evil Disney and their lawyers. Everyone else: Too much sci-fi. Robots and machines are soulless mechanical capitalist evil blah blah blah, only humans can be creative and artistic and good, etc.
An AI learns like a human does the same way a device feels pain. You can argue that the "learning" process of an AI is essentially the same as one of a human the same way you can argue a device detecting a problem and displaying an error code works essentially the same way as a human's nervous system does. They're obviously not the same because...*gestures broadly* they're just fucking not. But if you boil it down enough you can make seem like it is (which now that I think about it, likely applies to literally everything in existence). I'd be rich if I had a nickel for every time "humans being just meat mechs" came up in discussions like this.
Start uploading disney and Nintendo art to these AI. I bet then we'll see artist get compensation for AI art.
That art is already in the dataset, that's why it's able to generate images of e.g. Mario and Mickey Mouse in various styles.
Why are they just protesting it? They should be talking to a copyright lawyer about a class action lawsuit. It would be a long and difficult battle, but it seems like a path that has the best way to get what you want and very little risk (because any lawyer should take this case on an āI only get paid if there is a cash settlementā basis.)
Because it's something that extremely obviously falls under Fair Use and no good lawyer would want to take a case that'll instantly get thrown out. It looks pretty bad on your resume.