Obviously requires an Adobe account, which hints at it being folded into their subscription pricing. I wonder if this is a customer retention move given the number of third-party plugins to use Dall-E, SD, Midjourney, etc. with Photoshop.
(I also wonder who is powering this or if it's an in-house solution -- that should be telling...)
Edit: Why, they've trained this on Adobe stock images. OK, this may be very interesting for publications worried about copyright.
Their blog about their methodology[1] implies to me it's an in-house solution. They also talk at length about maintaining provenance, ethics, and transparency. I found it a much more informative read than the product announcement.
There are a variety of consumer products (and Adobe Reader) that are still non-subscription. There also subsets of Creative Cloud. But, yes, this will presumably be part of their subscriptions at some point.
> I don't think you can use any adobe product today without Adobe Creative Cloud
The Elements versions of Photoshop and Premiere are paid for with a one-off purchase and are not part of a cloud subscription.
I use Creative Cloud photoshop but a while ago purchased a separate Premiere Elements license for video editing - this was cheaper than extending my CC subscription to include Premiere Pro. But I switched to (the awesome) Davinci Resolve for video editing when my copy of Premiere elements wasn't able to open video clips from just-released cameras and phones.
Did you bother to browse the entire page? There are videos showing live editing and changing a backdrop. This is a teaser of a live product that is actually working remarkably well.
I would consider both Stable Diffusion and MidJourney to be startups and both are better by far than the established companies like OpenAI, and there are dozens of LLMs soon catching up with GPT3/4. As you say, it will be a very interesting next 6-12 months..
I played around (till free account expired) with MidJourney and what one can produce out of blue is mind-boggling. Indie devs can with a bit of effort generate much of their art via this for peanuts (the only problem may be consistency from what I've seen, basically every image is like from another artist, even in same batch)
The biggest problem is that you can't do much if not conditioning the generation with your prompt and maybe image embeddings, if you are an indie dev you would probably find much more useful Stable Diffusion.
Stable Diffusion is a thing you can run on your computer for free and train models for. It's from a research university. Is this one of those more expansive definitions of startup?
Dall-E is still ahead of the competition for some tasks. Midjourney has a very polished look but it lacks the depth of understanding that Dall-E can manage. I regularly hit prompts that I need to jump into Dall-E for.
For playing around, sure. For serious work though you probably need control-net in some way, otherwise you end up with a bunch of images which are great on their own but make no sense together.
Yeah, but text understanding is just one part of the "product" in this space nowadays. If you look at all the modes and features a GUI around SD can do now (like AUTOMATIC1111's) and compare to what you can do at the DALLE2 webpage it's night and day.
I wouldnt consider stable diffusion, mid journey and Open AI products. Little bit too low level, they seem to be more platforms that the products are built on. Not to say they aren’t amazing, just that the productized versions (one level up) are being executed really well by the big companies.
In Adobe's case, it absolutely makes sense it would be a feature of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere. They've been adding various "smart" masking features and the like over time already.
Part of the reason for this is that very often the best applications of AI are really invisible to the user, making everything a little bit better, quietly behind the scenes.
The same is true for software in general. The best software products automate loads of stuff behind the scenes so from the user perspective they just click a button and the thing they want to happen, happens.
Perhaps the most successful and important AI product is a great example of this: the spam filter. I bet most younger email users don't even realize how much value this old AI tool provides them unseen.
But the trouble is making effective AI products is not "sexy" right now, and if your team ships one it won't get any credit in a big company. I've had my PM instantly shoot down plenty of interesting applications of AI that wouldn't be very visible to the customer or larger product-org.
You must have a smarter toaster than I do. My toaster is a completely deterministic mechanism that knows nothing about my past toasting experience, nor makes any inference about future toast.
A spam filter:
- Is provided historic information about the problem
- Learns from this information to construct a basic model of language
- Is then provided unseen information
- Then makes a probabilistic decision based on a degree of uncertainty.
The exact model behind the spam filtering can be extremely simple (naive Bayes) but could easily (and probably will without you even realizing it) expand to include things like GPT.
A spam filter is making decisions under uncertainty with new information based on patterns it learned from previous information. If this doesn't fit your definition of "AI" then I think if you understood what was happening under the hood I don't think you would consider GPT to be AI either.
If you toaster does learn your toast preference over time from your toasting behavior (unlike mine) then I would consider that AI as well.
>A spam filter is making decisions under uncertainty with new information based on patterns it learned from previous information. If this doesn't fit your definition of "AI"
No, I don't. I would generously call it an "algorithm", but at the end of the day it's just a script with lots of if statements getting processed by an interpreter.
>I don't think you would consider GPT to be AI either.
I don't. "AI" in this context stands for Automated Interpolation. Nothing about this is intelligent.
Isn’t almost everything on this page concept stuff though? Seems like the only thing they’re shipping is text to image and the results they show look pretty underwhelming.
Seems like all these big companies are pushing amazing looking concept videos more than anything.
Yeah, I thought it was funny that most of the page is "in the future...". Guess they're trying to get attention for the product before it's ready and gauge interest/response.
Based on my experience with the podcast product they released recently I am excited to see what this would look like. I think they can execute on UI for working with generative AI much better than others.
> The current Firefly generative AI model is trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock, along with openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired.
I'm sure it's all of their content plus half of the web. The proprietary data they get from Behance, Lightroom, Photoshop and Illustrator (and soon figma) has to be a great advantage for them though.
What this reinforces is that unlike with previous big innovations (cloud, iphone, etc), incumbents will not sit on their laurels with the AI wave. They are aggressively integrating it into their products which (1) provides a relatively cheap step function upgrade and (2) keeps the barrier high for startups to use AI as their wedge.
I attribute the speed at which incumbents are integrating AI into their products to a couple things:
* Whereas AI was a hand-wavey marketing term in the past, it's now the real deal and provides actual value to the end user.
* The technology and DX with integrating w/products from OpenAPI, SD, is good.
* AI and LLMs are capturing a lot of attention right now (as seen easily by how often they pop up on HN these days). It's in the zeigeist so you get a marketing boost for free.
Another point is that many of the incumbents have seen the trend for far longer than the general public, and had time to gather inhouse talent. For example this isn't Adobe's first stint into generative AI, back in 2016 they announced (and quietly dropped after the backlash) Adobe VoCo, "photoshop for voice".
This is a great point. It appears the success of OpenAPI has validated their approach, specifically around (1) using the web as a training set and (2) using transformers.
I imagine a lot conversations with in-house AI folks is around deploying these methods.
> * Whereas AI was a hand-wavey marketing term in the past, it's now the real deal and provides actual value to the end user.
Ehhh.... Sometimes. It's still a hand-wavey marketing term today. Almost every sales call I'm in either the prospect is asking about AI, or more likely the vendor is saying something like "We use our AI module to help you [do some function not at all related to AI]". Also, even when it's "real" AI (in the sense that we're talking about here), it's not always providing actual value to the end user. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't.
Yes, not everything AI is working out – never has, and never will. The same is true in any field. And yes, there will be a display of incompetence, delusion and outright fraud. Again, in any field, always.
However, with AI in general, we have very decidedly passed the point where it Works (image generation probably being the most obvious example of it)
Even if, starting now, the underlying technology did not improve in the slightest, while adoption rises as it is going to with any new technology that provides value, anyone who does not adopt is going to be increasingly uncompetitive. It quite simply is too good already, to not to be used to challenge what a lot of average humans are paid to do in these fields.
I think you're missing a fundamental reason: adding AI functionality into products is simply easier.
That is, these companies are largely not doing the hard part, which is creating and training these models in the first place. The examples you gave of of cloud and iPhone have both huge capital barriers to entry, and in iPhones case other phone companies just didn't have the unique design talent combination of Jobs and Ive.
Adobe in particular, however, has been more twords the forefront of AI research. I'm pretty sure they aren't just using SD here. They might not even be using transformers at all. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35089661
They also have the resources to build a huge training set, together with people who willingly upload their art and photos to them, which they can use to make the training set better than publicly available data.
One step further, they already have a huge training set. Stock libraries have the luxury of the hard part already being done: labeling. As of today, that's >313M labeled images they can use with no fear of legal woes: https://stock.adobe.com/search/images?filters%5Bcontent_type...
Stable Diffusion was trained on billions of images, of course. But having explored some of LAION-2B, it's clear that Adobe Stock has far better source images and labels.
Is it also trained on all of the Adobe Stock images which were created with Generative AIs in the first place? I think that could get into a messy spot too. It looks like there are already millions on there, not all of which is actually labeled as generative.
If you go to https://stock.adobe.com/ and search for `-generative` you can see it filters out ~3M of them, but then go to the "undiscovered content" filter, and it appears to me like the vast majority of it is generative too.
They also know most of their business customers already have GPUs, and often have high-end GPUs, so they're able to tailor solutions to the hardware their customers already have. For example, the speech to text feature in Adobe Premeire runs on local hardware, and is actually pretty good.
Hopefully they'll continue to push the potential for locally run models.
> That is, these companies are largely not doing the hard part,
Are they the hard parts though? The short time it took from the first waves of public excitment around DALL-E to stable diffusion being the well established baseline looks more like the class quantity of problems that can be reliably solved by shoving enough resources at it. What I consider hard problems are those full of non-obvious dead ends are where no matter how much you invest, you might just dig yourself in deeper.
I am definitely glad to see attention being paid to ethical sourcing of training images but I am curious: did the people who made all those stock images get paid for their work being used for training? Did they check a box that explicitly said "Adobe can train an AI on my work"? Or is there a little clause lurking in the Adobe Stock agreement that says this can be done without even a single purchase happening?
I'm sure that's a no. When you license a stock image you license it for any use whatsoever. You don't get to complain if it becomes the background to a porn movie or an advert for a product or person you despise. Songs can licensed on a case-by-case basis but images are so plentiful as to be a commodity.
Not quite. For example, this is one thing Adobe says in their FAQ: Images showing models can't be used in a manner that the models could perceive as offensive. (For example, avoid using images with models on the cover of a steamy romance novel or a book about politics or religion, etc.)
There are also a few other more Adobe-specific restrictions.
Well, Adobe are publishers of the stock images so they can enforce such terms. What I mean is that the person selling a stock image to Adobe, Getty, Shutterstock or whoever has no say on what happens to it afterward. The publisher is going to assert universal rights in exchange for cash. If they narrow their own terms as in your example above, they don't necessarily create any sort of duty to the seller whose photo rights they purchased.
I should have been clearer and specified sale of rights rather than licensing of a stock image in my original reply, which I now realize is confusing.
Companies certainly can offer more narrow terms/commitments about what the stock images can or cannot be used for if they want to, but economically they're incentivized to maximize their own freedom, and not to negotiate a complex bundle of rights for individual images. Of course for journalistic and artistic images that are unique in some way, the original creator can negotiate.
It's probably not very common but people can and will absolutely bring lawsuits if you misrepresent them based on stock photography including but not limited to manipulating the photographs. (Of course, people can sue for whatever reason but using random stock photos for "bad people" can get you in trouble.)
That's not what happens when you sign a contributor license with Adobe, Getty, Shutterstock or other stock image libraries... These companies pay you 0 until the time a customer of theirs acquires a license to reproduce the image you contributed. Only at that point do you get paid a percentage of the license fee. Currently nobody has been paid anything by Adobe for their stock images used in the training (at least as far as I know).
Sure, but once you sign you're agreeing to whatever terms are in force at the time of signing. I would guess that Adobe granted itself universal rights to do whatever they think will bring the customers in, but I haven't looked at one of their contracts.
The contributor agreement linked from here[1] is this: [2]
"You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, fully-paid, and royalty-free license to use, reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, distribute, index, translate, and modify the Work for the purposes of operating the Website; presenting, distributing, marketing, promoting, and licensing the Work to users; developing new features and services; archiving the Work; and protecting the Work. "
I guess this would fall under the "developing new features and services".
What is funny is that "we may compensate you at our discretion as described in section 5 (Payment) below". :) I like when I may be compensated :)
And in section 5 they say: "We will pay you as described in the pricing and payment details at [...] for any sales of licenses to Work, less any cancellations, returns, and refunds."
So yeah. Sucks to the artist who signed this. They can use your work to develop new features and services, and they do not have to pay you for that at all, since it is not a sale of a license.
> They can use your work to develop new features and services, and they do not have to pay you for that at all, since it is not a sale of a license.
And in this case, to develop new features and services that specifically undercuts your existing business, viz. selling stock photos for money. Sucks to the artists, indeed.
The terms seem like legalese for "you pay me money now and get to do anything with it". It doesn't seem far-fetched for training AI models to be a valid use-case. This is way better than scraping the whole internet, for art by artists who have had no commercial arrangement with Adobe.
I'm starting to think that use of works in a training set is a category not covered well by existing copyright law, and it may be important to require separate explicit opt-in agreement by law (and receipt of some consideration in return) in order to be considered legitimate use.
The vast majority of copyrighted works were conceived and negotiated under conditions where ML reproduction capabilities didn't exist and nobody knew what related value they were negotiating away or buying.
Derivative works or remixes usually require a license. Artists could very reasonably argue that AI-generated images are derivative works from their own images - especially if there is notable similarity or portions appear to be copied. They could also point out that their images were used for commercial purposes without permission and without compensation to generate works that compete with their own.
For example, even a short sample used in a song usually has to be licensed. Cover versions of songs may qualify for a compulsory license with a set royalty payment scale.
However some reuse (such as transformative use, parodies, or use of snippets for various purposes, especially non-commercial purposes) may be considered fair use. AI companies could very reasonably argue that use of images for training AI models is transformative and qualifies as fair use, that no components of the original images are reused in AI-generated images, and that AI-generated images are no more infringing than human-generated images which show influences from other artists.
Absent additional law, I expect the legal system will have to sort out whether AI-generated images infringe the copyright of their training images, and if so what sort of licensing would be appropriate for AI-generated (or other software/machine-generated) images based on training data from images that are under copyright.
I propose that it is impossible to prove that any content created after 2022 did or did not utilize ML/AI during the process of its creation (art, code, music, audio, text.) Thus, anything produced after 2022 should not be eligible for copyright protection. Everything pre-2022 may retain the existing copyright protection but should be subject to extra taxes on royalties and fees given the exorbitant privilege.
Though this sounds extreme, enforcing the alternative would break any last remnant of human privacy. It would kill the independent operation of computing as we know it and severely cripple AI/ML research when we need it most: human alignment.
It is possible that a catastrophic event occurs and halts the supply chain of advanced semiconductors in the near future, in which case the debate can be postponed indefinitely.
> AI companies could very reasonably argue that use of images for training AI models is transformative and qualifies as fair use
Yep. They could. And people do.
But this particular use is entirely new, though. Old conceptions of fair use can't and shouldn't cover it. "Transformative"? Sure, but there's a difference between transforming a work once and laying hold of it in automation to be transformed on request millions or billions of times in degrees ranging from simple to convoluted. It's hard to argue that the right to this exists in fair use when awareness of the possibility didn't exist when fair use conceptions were constructed.
The output isn't the issue so much as the consent & consideration for use of the input. We'll need case law or statutory law that understands this. It should be possible, but it should be possible on an opt-in basis. When you're training a model, you should know.
> AI-generated images are no more infringing than human-generated images which show influences from other artists.
If we end up with a policy differentiating the two and privileging humans and works created by them, I'm fine with that.
If this kind of abstract copyright regime of 'I had the idea first, and anyone who uses a derivative of my idea must pay me money!' is a very sillpery slope of anyone who makes art or music of any genre needing to pay a royalty to sony/disney, because that is where these 'flavor copyrights' will end up going. The right kind of ambitious amoral lawyer in a common law regime will leverage an AI royalty law into a generic style copyright law because that is what will be needed to write this law properly.
And on top of that, it will become a spotify where each creator gets a sum total of $0.00000000001 per AI their media item was trained on and maybe a few dollars a month, while paying a greater tax to apple-sony-disney whenever their AI style recognizers charge you a royalty bill for using whatever bullshit styles it notices in your media items.
Copyright should stay in it's 'exact duplication' box, lest we release an even worse intellectual property monster on the world.
> If this kind of abstract copyright regime of 'I had the idea first, and anyone who uses a derivative of my idea must pay me money!' is a very sillpery slope
This is a cartoon conception of both existing copyright and the proposal I described.
Copyright applies to works, not "ideas" (William Gibson doesn't have a copyright claim on the "idea" of a virtual reality but he does on _Neuromancer_ as a work). It gives creators incentives and a stake in their work by allowing for some degree of control in how works are used and especially how they're distributed.
What I'm proposing isn't that different, and it's simple:
People should be able to decide if their work is put into a training set, and what they get in return for it.
That's it. No "flavor copyrights." No ownership of ideas. Just a claim on the creator's work and how it's used/ distributed. Specifically updated to cover a case that didn't exist 10 years ago, a case whose explicit intention is reproduction of not just one narrow aspect of the work but a combinatorially large number of aspects of the work (there's no other reason for adding it to the training set, that's the nature of these models).
> it will become a spotify where each creator gets a sum total of $0.00000000001 per AI their media item was trained on
"the artists will get such a small payout so we should make sure they get nothing" is quite the take.
I think "artists should be able to negotiate what consideration they want in return for their work for a training set" is a better one. It's certainly better than "people collecting training data should be able to take anything they can get their digital hands on without any consideration other than possession." Maybe some artists would take a nanocent per use. Maybe they wouldn't. That should be up to them.
Part of the reason why services like Spotify are so terrible economically is the way digital rights were assumed by labels and streamers often as extensions of older pre-digital conceptions without much in the way of negotiation by artists. The current moment is a chance to do better across an equally large (if not larger) technological shift.
That is basically the same boiler plate legal release for photography/videography/audio works in general. You sell me this thing, and I can do whatever I want with it.
From the popular Getty Images, used by media worldwide:
> When a customer uses one of your files, it may appear in advertising, marketing, apps, websites, social media, TV and film, presentations, newspapers, magazines, books, or product packaging, among many other uses.
Nobody owes creators who have been paid fully for their work "extra" compensation just because AI is involved. Assuming they have been paid, the work belongs to Adobe.
That is the question we are asking, yes. Based on the reading of the contributor agreement it sounds like Adobe doesn’t have to pay a cent to the creators to train models on their work.
No one is screwing anyone. I also learned from reading GitHub code and continue to do so. I haven't "screwed" the original code authors by forming an abstract memory of their code.
Any country that tries to forbid this will be torpedoing their economic competitiveness against countries that allow it.
It might also be wrong, yes. I have plenty of code licensed under very permissive licenses that still requires attribution. It is an open question of how much the AI system is a "derived" work in a specific, technical sense. And it probably will remain hard, since the answer is probably on a continuum.
The creators of these images assigned the rights to adobe, including allowing Adobe to develop future products using the images. So yes, this is perfectly fair.
It's completely different than many (most?) other companies, which are training on data they don't have the right to re-distribute.
I think you are making a jump here. I’m not a lawyer, but your first sentence seems to be about why it is legal. And then you conclude that that is why it is also fair. I’m with you on the first one, but not sure on the second.
The creators uploaded their images so adobe can sell licences for them and they get a share of the licence fees. Just a year ago if you asked almost any people what “using the images to develop new products and services” mean they would have told you something like these examples: Adobe can use the images in internal mockups if they are developing a new ipad app to sell the licences, or perhaps a new website where you can order a t-shirt print of them.
The real test of fairness I think is to imagine what would have happened if Adobe ring the doorbell of any of the creators and asked them if they can use their images to copy their unique style to generate new images. Probably most creators would have agreed on a price. Maybe a few thousand dollars? Maybe a few million? Do you think many would have agreed to do it for zero dollars? If not, then how could that be fair?
No that isn't how it works with Adobe or any of the other big stock photo companies. The photographers or creators of the images still own the copyright. Both with rights managed and royalty free they aren't assigning rights to anyone else.
And I am sure that you use your computer for work, to make money, and yet you based on the reading of the contributor agreement it sounds like [The computer buyer/you] doesn’t have to pay a cent to the [computer creator] for all the money you make using that computer.
It sounds stupid because it's a completely different thing.
A tool maker does not have a claim on the work made with a tool, except by (exceptionally rare) prior agreement.
Creative copyright explicitly does give creators a claim on derivative work made using their creative output.
That includes patents. If you use a computer protected by patents to create new items which specifically ignore those patents, see how far that gets you.
I expect you find this inconvenient, but it's how it works.
> Creative copyright explicitly does give creators a claim on derivative work made using their creative output.
No actually, not for this situation. They don't if they sold the right to do that, which they did.
> except by (exceptionally rare) prior agreement
Oh ok. So then, if in situation 1, and situation 2, there is the same exact prior agreement on the specific topic of if you are allowed to make derivative works, then the situations are exactly same.
Which is the situation.
So yes, the situations are the same, because of the same prior agreement.
Thats why the situation is stupid. The creator sold the rights to make derivative works away. Just like if someone sold you a computer.
And then people used the computer, and also used the sold rights to make derivatives works for the art, because both the computer and the right to make derivative works were equally sold.
> which specifically ignore those patents
Ok now imagine someone sells the rights to use the patent in any way that they want, and then you come along and say "Well, can you considered that if the person didn't sell the patent, that this would be illegal?"
I don't know if there is a concept in copyright that prevents someone from viewing your work.
Like, if you created a lovely piece of art, hung it on the outside of your house, and I was walking on the sidewalk and viewed it. I would not owe you money and you would have no claim of copyright against me.
Copyright covers copying. Not viewing.
So an AI views your art, classifies it, does whatever magic it does to turn your art into a matrix of numbers. The model doesn't contain a copy of your art.
Of course, a court needs to decide this. But I can't see how allowing an AI model to view a picture constitutes making an illegal copy.
> Of course, a court needs to decide this. But I can’t see how allowing an AI model to view a picture constitutes making an illegal copy.
Memory involves making a copy, and copies anywhere except in the human brain are within the scope of copyright (but may fall into exceptions like Fair Use.)
And this is where it becomes tricky as holding a copy in memory so software can "use" it being against copyright also prevents it being displayed on Adobe's website, or Adobe shrinking it to fit on advertising collage for Adobe Stock images etc, all of which the artist would say is fine as otherwise their work cannot be advertised for them to make money through Adobe's service.
Supposing the AI said "here's the picture you asked for, btw it's influenced most by these four artists and here's links to their works on Adobe Stock"... is that better (or worse)?
When the agreement was signed no one was even able to imagine their work being used for AI. As far as they knew they were signing a standard distribution agreement with one particular rights outlet, while reserving all other rights for more general use. If anyone had asked about automated use in AI it's very likely the answer would have been a clear "No."
It's predatory and very possibly unlawful to assume the original agreement wording grants that right automatically.
The existence of contract wording does not automatically imply the validity of that wording. Contracts can always be ruled excessive, predatory, and unlawful no matter what they say or who signed them.
> If anyone had asked about automated use in AI it's very likely the answer would have been a clear "No."
Maybe. Maybe not. Very clearly there is a price point where it could be worth it for the artist. Like if adobe paid more for the rights than they recon they will ever earn in a lifetime or something. But clearly everybody would have said “no” at the great price point of 0 dollars.
I'm not sure it true that creators are owed nothing further... It seems analogous to a musician signing over rights for one thing, like recording rights on wax disks, records or whatever. Then along comes radio, after the artists signed away a smaller set of rights. The radio companies claim that they owe the artists nothing. But is that true?
And that's a different question from whether or not they deserve extra compensation. Is it moral or ethical to use their work to directly undercut them via ai 'copying' their work?
Half the problems with music is because of record companies magically inventing new ways to try and extract more money from each other and their supply chain.
"Oh, your band looked at some hookers they passed on the way to the recording studio? Well, they obviously owe those hookers a cut of the royalties now for inspiration..."
Trying to use AI as an excuse to be paid a 2nd time (for previously fully paid works) seems like another attempt at rent seeking in a similar manner.
The prior deal was based on royalties for use. Adobe pays you 33% percent of anything they make. It is consignment. So if someone uses a specific photo for $20, you get paid $6.60, no money us paid upfront.
So what should adobe pay you for using the data in training? Some kind of fraction of the overall revenue they generate from the new product? The license currently used for their stock program make it seem like they don't have to pay anything at all, because this use cases wasn't understood previously. Adobe reserved to rights to do it, so legally they can - but if they want to continue getting contributions they will need to figure out some kind of updated royalty sharing agreement.
Defining how “fully” paid a creator has been is the entire point of license agreements. It defines the extent of how much the rights have been purchased away from them.
It merits investigation as to have these creators been “fully” paid to the extent that they have no claim to any future royalties and can have no objection to their work being used as training data.
Switch "creators" with "musicians" and "AI" with "streaming" and I we feel like we went back to early 2000. Same arguments.
Adapting what Steve Albini said at the time: If you're an artist, negotiate your future "AI training rights" separately. Make sure they're in writing. Make sure attribution rights stay yours.
I would be very, very interested to see a compensation system that took into account the outputs of the trained model - as in, weights derived from your work are attributable to X% of the output of this system, and therefore you are due Y% of the revenue generated by it. It sounds like Adobe is taking seriously the question of artist compensation, and I'd love to see someone tackle the "Hard Problem" of actual attribution in these types of systems.
I've looked a few times, but have not seen any research on assigning provenance to the weights used in a particular inference run. It's a super interesting space for a bunch of reasons.
But the naive approach of having a table of how much each individual training item influenced every weight in the model seems impossibly big. For DALL-E 2's 6.5B parameters and 650m training items, that's 4.2 quadrillion associations. And then you have to figure out which weights contributed the most to an output.
I would love to see any research or even just thinking that anyone's done on this topic. It seems like it will be important in the future, but it also seems like a crazy difficult scale problem as models get bigger.
Could you not use tags used to label the image? If your image contains more niche tags that match the user input, your revenue share will be higher. Depending how much extra people earn for certain tags, it might incentivise people to upload more images of what is missing from the training data.
That's interesting, but I'm not sure it works. I think that works out to "for any given prompt, distribute credit to every source image that has a keyword that appears in the prompt, proportional to how many other source images had that same keyword".
If I include the tag "floor", do I get some (tiny) percentage of every image that uses "floor" in the prompt, even if the bits from my image did not end up affecting model weights much at all in training?
Worse, for tags like "dramatic lighting", it's likely that the important source images will depend on the other words in the prompt; "sunset, dramatic lighting" will probably not use the rely on the same weights or source images as "theater interior, dramatic lighting".
And then you get the perverse incentives to tag every image with every possible tag :)
I'd love to be convinced otherwise, but I'm not seeing prompt-to-tag association working.
The tags could be added by a model rather than the user submitting the image. Maybe do both and verify the tags with a model? Users could get a rating based on how reliably they tag their pictures and are trusted to add more niche tags at higher ratings. You could even help tag other pictures to improve your rating.
> How can we explain the predictions of a black-box model? In this paper, we use influence functions -- a classic technique from robust statistics -- to trace a model's prediction through the learning algorithm and back to its training data, thereby identifying training points most responsible for a given prediction.
That is impossible. You might be able to do it if you invented a completely different method of image generation, but the amount of original images present in a diffusion model is 0% with reasonable training precautions, and attributing its weights to particularly any of its input is nearly arbitrary.
(Also, it's entirely possible that eg a model could generate images resembling your work without "seeing" any of your work and only reading a museum website describing some of it. Resemblance is in the eye of the beholder.)
Hope I can get better rates from this compared than those offered by Spotify to my musician friends. How much are we talking about? 0.00001¢ per licensed generated image?
Stable Diffusion 1.x isn't original work either; it uses OpenAI CLIP.
But training your own is pretty doable if you have the budget and enough image/text pairs. Most people don't have the budget, but at least Midjourney and Google have their own models.
Public domain content. So if i host a large cluster of AI generated lighthouses that slightly look like cocksOnTheRocks, Firefly will suggest that after crawling and retraining?
>>"They are aggressively integrating it into their products which (1) provides a relatively cheap step function upgrade and (2) keeps the barrier high for startups to use AI as their wedge."
Also missed: All these big tech companies were already invested in AI and using it in their products: it just happens that the latest batch of AI tools are far more impressive than their internal efforts.
That is, these companies are largely not doing the hard part, which is creating and training these models in the first place.
No, there is no real "hard part" to AI current. Training is simply "the expensive part".
It seems "the bitter lesson" has gone from reflection to paradigm[1] and with that as paradigm, the primary barrier to entering AI is cash for cpu cycles, other things matter but recipes is relatively simple and relatively available.
Which checks the box for great timing. All these companies with billions in the bank needing a new thing to prove they still warrant their growth valuation will dump obscene sums into this and cause things to evolve at a staggering pace, much like we've seen with AR and VR.
> I attribute the speed at which incumbents are integrating AI into their products to a couple things
And also it's something many companies have been working on for a big part of the last decade. Kevin Kelly in particular has been talking about it for at least the past 7 years. In 2016 he released a book titled "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future" and the addition of AI to everything is covered in that book.
I think what we're going to see is that all the small startups going for big, broad ideas ("we do AI writing for anything", "your one-stop marketing content automation platform", etc) are going to flat out lose to the big companies. I predict that the startups we'll see survive are the ones that find tight niches and solve for prompt engineering and UX around a very specific problem.
Creating AI models has proven to simply be easier than other past innovations. Much lower barrier to entry, the knowledge seems to be spread pervasively within months of breakthroughs.
People seem to take offense at this idea, but the proof is in the pudding. Every week there's a new company with a new model coming out. What good did Google's "AI Talent" do for them when OpenAI leapfrogged them with only a few hundred people?
It's difficult to achieve high margins when barrier to entry is low. These AI companies are going to be moreso deflationary for society rather than high margin cash cows as the SaaS wave was
It's easier for large rich companies with infrastructure and datasets. It's very hard for small startups to build useful real world models from scratch, so you see most people building on top of SD and APIs, but that limits what you can build, for example it's very hard to build realistic photo editing on top of stable diffusion.
I've tried it, sure it's good, but not even close to the real thing. But yes it's getting cheaper through better hardware, better data and better architectures. Also it builds on Facebook's models that were trained for months on thousands of A100 GPUs.
I wrote it from the perspective of a small startup (<10 people, bootstrapped or small funding). I think it's far cheaper and easier to build a nice competitive mobile app/saas than to build a really useful model.
But yes I agree, it will be very competitive with much smaller margins.
It's important to note that this is generative AI.
As pretty much everyone on HN is aware, AI is a broad term for a variety of technologies.
AI has been in our everyday lives for quite some time, but not in a way that generated (no pun intended) such buzz.
Having my iphone scan emails and pre-populate my calendar with invite suggestions is far less newsworthy as the ability to generate a script for an Avengers film where all the members are as in articulate as the Incredible Hulk.
If anything, with generative AI being so buzzy, this latest round of AI integration is more marketing.
I can’t think of a company more suited to take advantage of the generative AI hype. If firefly is built into the adobe stack you’ll have a rather elegant composition and refinement toolkit to modify anything you dislike about the generative output.
Except for Chat GPT I havent yet seen super impressive implementations. Dall-e, codepilots, text to speech etc. are still all not good enough to use for more then playing around.
Midjourney v5 might be ready for prime time, in most cases it seems to have solved faces, hands, etc. The difference between version 1 from exactly one year ago and v5 now is rather striking: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
This is effectively DALLE-2 (apparently retrained on different data) with a native frontend designed by experienced designers.
You don't see the value in effectively not needing any art/design skills to make aesthetically pleasing logos/mockups/memes? Even just for "playing around" - I bet there's a large market of people who want to add "fun edits" to their existing personal photo library.
Focus less on landing pages and more on the implications a technology brings. Then you'll see where things are headed.
Yeah I was just using DALLE2 for the first time in awhile because I hoped it would integrate more simply alongside my code for the GPT4 api. Results are just objectively underwhelming after having used stable diffusion for so long.
It’s also still under beta and given the recent codex termination, I wouldn’t be surprised if they get rid of it.
Let’s just take this moment to declare that AI did not turn out to be the next 3D hype.
That’s something I almost forgot about. This was not a forgone conclusion - there was a pretty big divide between people who thought AI would have real value and staying power and those that didnt.
> unlike with previous big innovations (cloud, iphone, etc), incumbents will not sit on their laurels with the AI wave
Adobe had a whole bunch of smart people including Dave Abrahams helping transition to iPhone and iPad, and to build for the cloud, so I'm not sure what you're thinking here.
> They are aggressively integrating it into their products
And no reason to suspect that it won't spectacularly backfire. Not that they're integrating (or more correctly slapping it on with some hot glue) transformative technology they barely understand into legacy products which are themselves likely to go defunct. Why even use a spreadsheet when you can get GPT-4 to write a whole data analysis pipeline and summarize everything? Or why bother with word documents when GPT-4 can generate, spell/grammar check, translate (if necessary), format and output into any format you want?
From a practical perspective, because of inertia and all managers seemingly being "burned once, twice shy" on re-designs.
If my company already uses spreadsheets and teams of people skilled at manipulating them, it might not be very hard to convince my manager that good AI use cases (quick formatting, intelligent auto-completes, intention detection from sheet structure) could probably speed us up by 20% - but convincing management of the value of a full system re-design by comparison would likely be a very tough sell, if not viewed as an insult or sign that I'm not a team player.
Just because the future may prove these methods antiquated doesn't mean management is liable or likely to change their tune today.
> good AI use cases (quick formatting, intelligent auto-completes, intention detection from sheet structure) could probably speed us up by 20%
That would imply these AI systems have been integrated well, which in most cases are not and I suspect the amount of work it would take to do it properly would not pay off considering the limited window available before people transition to a fully chat based system.
> but convincing management of the value of a full system re-design by comparison would likely be a very tough sell
In this case it would be convincing the management to transition to a system where you can just order around and someone/something would get the job done, which is well in their comfort zone (I'm only half joking).
Exactly this. This makes will eventually make it difficult for new AI startups, once those existing solutions get technically up to speed, if they can't differentiate in a meaningful way.
My own startup is https://inventai.xyz. Subscriptions aren't ready, so you can't actually generate anything yet, just trying to move quickly.
> “incumbents will not sit on their laurels with the AI wave.”
Yes, because they are already technology companies who understand tech. In the disruptive times of the Internet, then iPhone (mobile Internet), the companies being disrupted were not tech companies, so they didn’t know how to catch up.
This time this is a massive tech improvement, but in a market already saturated by key tech power players who are in prime position to implement these improvements into their existing competitive advantage.
I think the other thing driving this is the market / investors.
Companies have to get involved in this field because it's all the buzz, while everything else you said is true, this means companies have no choice to get involved.
If someone like Adobe, google etc, doesn't get into the game, they are sure going to be a lot of questions on there next investment / financial calls.
The incumbents need to keep up appearances and not look like they are behind / unaware of AI, else investors will be worried that they will simply be sidelined/replaced at some point in the future.
> unlike with previous big innovations (cloud, iphone, etc), incumbents will not sit on their laurels with the AI wave
Wasn’t “cloud” also added to major products? Even Adobe relies on that heavily. Similarly, most big companies (including Adobe) offer an App Store app.
IMHO,it was only a matter of time before the big names started to include AI generations on their software. I'm guessing if most of the AI design tools that are being launched everyday and which relies mostly in consuming a public api could be easily absorbed?
People have been talking about things like ChatGPT Doing code, but I just realized... something like ChatGPT could be incorporated right into your IDE.
Think Clippy, for Code... "I see you're trying to write a recursive function to compute finocacci. Would you like help?"
Or Code Reviews / Static-Code-Analysis: "Hey Visual Studio. I've written a RESTful API for my application. What do you think of the approach, architecture, and adherence to best practices? What can I do to improve it?"
Or instead of scratching your head going "why doesn't this work?", just typing that question directly into your IDE....
AI Waitlist Management Solutions (AWMS) is a startup that aims to streamline and manage the ever-increasing demand for AI services by providing a one-stop platform for tracking and managing AI waitlists. Leveraging the advanced capabilities of GPT-4, our service will analyze the market, monitor AI waitlist positions, and provide customers with real-time updates on their status. Additionally, AWMS will offer recommendations on alternative services and provide estimated wait times for better decision-making. Our target audience includes businesses and individuals who require AI services and are looking for a way to efficiently manage their place in multiple queues, as well as AI service providers seeking to optimize their waitlist management processes.
To further enhance our value proposition, we will incorporate a waitlist for our own platform, adding a sense of exclusivity and generating buzz around our service. This humorous, self-referential twist will serve as a unique marketing strategy, setting us apart from competitors and attracting potential clients. Our revenue model will include a tiered subscription plan, offering various features and services at different price points to cater to a wide range of customers. With a strong focus on customer satisfaction and continuous improvement, AWMS will strive to become the go-to solution for managing AI waitlists and revolutionize the way users access and interact with AI services.
This will supercharge artists, it won’t replace them because details matter and when you need to get it just right, you cannot just keep rolling the dice by “prompting better”
There are interfaces where you can not just "prompt better" but change the image with a tool like Photoshop and then feed that back into the diffusion model.
Also there are people who really don't care about quality. There have always been different tiers of art: it's one thing to have clip art for a throwaway blog post (royalty free stock), it's another thing to base a marketing campaign around images (rights managed stock) because you don't to have all your competitors choose the same image.
The bottom feeders will be very happy to accept the problems of A.I. art and in fact you might not have the embarrassing
dogpiling problem that the above blog post describes.
I think it will decrease iteration time during an exploration phase for new artists or when you're not quite sure what you want and want to explore your idea space more quickly (and maybe even get new ideas as you iterate).
It's similar with these coding AIs. A lot of the time it's great for the "blank page" phase of a project where you have to do all the "boring" stuff out of the way. Another great example (I think it was a blog post here) where the AI recommended a method the author didn't know about that yielded a crazy performance boost.
I tried to get some help from copilot on writing a shader the other day, and it was really an amazing experience. One still needs to have a pretty deep understanding of what needs to be done to use these tools.
I imagine it's similar for writers. Maybe they want some help to reword a sentence to be more succinct, but the ideas will still come from their heads.
I can't predict if this will one day be so sophisticated that you can have it do both low level and high level "thinking" when exploring ideas, but if that day comes I don't think it will mean an end to jobs, just that some jobs will become more accessible, or that it won't be so much about nitty-gritty work and more about higher level idea-level work (which to me sound good, not bad).
Obviously there's people who enjoy the nitty gritty (as a developer, and amateur painter who does enjoythe process), and I don't think that will fully go away, just become more of a creative/artisan field maybe. Who knows, though? I may be way off, but I don't think it's as bleak as some people fear.
As a writer, I find ChatGPT can provide some vaguely useful scaffolding. On the other hand, I'm not someone who finds a blank page especially difficult to start writing on--and, in fact, I generally want to start off with something non-formulaic to draw a reader in. Still I can see it being helpful in a way that automated spellchecking and grammar checking is.
Im a generalist who has been trying to kick an obsessive habit of perusing tech news and trying new/old tech for 8 years. You made me realize that may be one reason I feel like this tool i have just enough depth in many areas that I’m able to scrutinize the output and it’s making up for the lack of depth all over the place.
I actually find the artwork/design generative AI a lot more interesting than the text. (Don't really have an opinion on the code generation.) While it's obviously early days, something like Stable Diffusion can, with a bit of work, generate artwork that neither I (nor I assume the vast bulk of the population) could. On the other hand, the text it generates might pass muster for content farms or a starting point for a human editor familiar with the topic but certainly isn't producing anything I could use out of the box.
For instance, I'd like to make a game. But I don't have enough money to even hire an artist to help with concept art. So I don't get to the point where I can raise money off that art, and hire an artist to make game assets.
Now I can generate all the concept art I want for free, and I can raise money off of that (wallets open faster with pretty pictures than with words). What am I going to do with it? Hire artists! They will probably be better at using AI art generators than I am, and they have the skills to actually work with the generated results, unlike me.
Except now you’re competing for the attention and disposable income of everybody else doing that. How are consumers going to tell your stuff apart from all the other AI placeholder games that will flood the market?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in the course of developing anything, one goes through various stages of development. Depending on the expertise of the individual, they will be able to take a project further before bringing on more people. If an idea is well-trodden, then it's easy to get people on board without much convincing. If an idea is brand new and far out there, it will take a lot of work to convince people before they get on board.
For someone like me, I can do a lot, but not everything. I've managed to get my own project to a stage where I had felt I would have to bring on more people to advance it much further. But I had lacked the funds to do so, and it's hard to get people to do things for free when they don't believe in it. It's also hard to get people to believe in something without seeing it. My project was very likely.
So that's where tools like stable diffusion and chatgpt come in. I'm now suddenly unstuck; I have a cheap tool to do work I wasn't capable of before, so I can now take the project further than I could have otherwise. Whereas before I might have abandoned it, now I can take it further and maybe get it to the point where I can hire people. The question now is: how many projects are now going to take off? Is there funding out there for them? Can they hire more artists than are displaced?
That artists will be able to do more not necessarily mean that fewer of them will ne needed. I bet the opposite actually. Companies will want to produce more (with more resources) not the same (with less resources).
I guess a better way to rephrase that: would it make them more profitable to produce more art? Or to keep producing the same amount but paying fewer people to do so?
When something becomes much cheaper than it was before, people tend to find much more uses for it. In game development, for example, amount of money that could be spent on art almost always amount and quality of content; if art becomes 10 times cheaper, a typical indie game will have 2 times more different pieces of content with 5 times variants of each.
But now the situation is bit different, coz there's a limit to the number of pieces before it looks awkward and that limit can be reached by AI generated contents quite easily and quickly thus not needing to have more man power.
On social media and elsewhere, companies need more and more varied content on a daily basis. Many are effectively now producing something akin to a magazine or a TV show to stay present in feeds or minds.
This is completely ignoring the thousands, maybe millions, of non-notorious artists that do their art, in whatever form, because it's fun, because it allows them to express themselves or as a creative outlet or as a mere hobby to unwind after a hard day of work.
Honestly, I'm an artist myself. I'm competent enough to be reposted and plagiarized (to my amusement) in places, and I have influenced people with my designs or style, even unwillingly. I mean, I can say anything on the internets, but I've been through all of the "artist's phases of grief" and nobody can take that from me.
Let's humor this thought for the sake of discussion: What if, maybe, just maybe, the artists that get replaced by an stable diffusion instance...deserve to be replaced?
People keeps talking business and not enough people is talking about ART. Something which is baffling to me as an artist. A lot of artists have a lot of technical skill obtained through grinding (and learning from others) but have zero passion to improve further or have any real distinctive traits to stand out.
It's double baffling coming from places such as Hacker News, where a majority, being tech workers, know that you need to keep improving and recycling yourself to stay relevant to employers. We know that pressure very well. You think art is not a competitive field? Every day 10 people can just pop out of nowhere to compete in your niche and take your audience away, with a much lower barrier of entry. That other person just needs their art to look good, no need for qualifications. Some people are just gifted, too.
If your art stagnates and all you do is sexy ladies for overblown prices, then, yes, you failed to keep up and someone else will replace you. If it was not the AI, it would have been another human being, as always.
Besides, corporate entities usually use custom photographs with photogenic actors, carefully staged for maximum engagement, or generic, parametric, inclusive-yet-bland art in the lines of Alegria.
The whole notion of megacorps purposely stealing from indie artists (when their models are usually curated, or going to have to be curated for maximum advertiser friendliness, and a lot of indies draw cheesecake because it's what people commissions...) paints a pretty tale of David vs Goliath, but it's completely absurd in practice. And the risk of some random dude "stealing" your style has existed always.
I wonder what happens over time as more and more workflows use AI generated content as the starting point? Will all images slowly start looking the same?
It's currently unknown, but copyright law is really political in nature and companies are hopping on using AI like crazy and delivering real value so my expectation is that it will be granted fair use for no philosophical reason but because US legislators don't want to put their boot-heel on American business.
Because if they stifle this is will basically cement China is the world's AI powerhouse who will give zero shits about copyright.
This is gonna be interesting times for copyright because this is the first time copyrighted works are actually useful in building tools. I think it's a very neat real-world example of how universities are actually right to make engineers take humanities courses because your code writing AI is actually better for having read Vonnegut.
Aware of the ruling, reviewed it when it was released, though it does not appears to cover any aspect related to for example layout, color select, etc — and to me targets one-shot generative art; poorly so at that.
As is, landscape photographers for example, control camera angle, timing of photograph, camera type, lens type, etc — but they rarely create the landscape itself or for that matter the equipment and related technologies.
Basically, no one knows. But the IP lawyers I know are generally of the opinion that, manufactured possible violations notwithstanding, it's probably OK for the most part.
There are at least two potential issues pertaining to copyright law here, and it's not clear which one you're asking about. That's why the responses you're getting here seem to be answering different questions.
1. Are the AI systems violating the copyright protections of the images they were trained on? If so, are users of such AI systems also in violation of those copyrights when they create works derived from those training images?
Answer: That's not yet settled.
2. If you make an image with an AI system, is your new image eligible for copyright protection, or is it ineligible due to the "human authorship requirement"?
Answer: The US Copyright Office recently wrote[1] that your work is eligible for copyright if you altered it afterwards in a meaningful way. Here's a quote:
>When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.
>In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection.
Will say that post you linked to also states, “17 U.S.C. 101 (definition of “compilation”). In the case of a compilation including AI-generated material, the computer-generated material will not be protected outside of the compilation.” — the problem is that unlike say for example a compilation of recipes, where the individual recipes are not protected, but the compilation is, there is no clear delineation within a singular work of art such delineation. As such, injecting such delineations is counterproductive and shows no understanding of the nature and spirit of the rule of law. Further, while their opinion appears to be a prompt is somehow a recipe and not a novel expression that merits copyright, clearly photographs of the output of a recipes are commonly photographed and given copyright protection.
Sure others have made far more compelling arguments against the ruling, but to me, the ruling lacks merit as is.
No, this is highly misleading, if not outright wrong.
First, a picture taken of the Mona Lisa is only covered by copyright if it contains additional human creativity. Now, the bar for that is very low, and in practice many people don't challenge that copyright very often. But a perfect recreation of the Mona Lisa with a camera is not covered by copyright. You need human creativity as part of the process, and merely taking a picture is not enough on its own. There's actual case-law on the books about this[0].
Second, the additional creativity protects the photo, not the original picture itself. So in the most recent case with AI images used in a book, that additional creativity protected the book and the arrangement of those images, but it did not protect the images themselves -- in other words, entirely consistent with a photograph of the Mona Lisa.
To analogize that to AI art, it would absolutely be the case that doing additional modifications on an AI image would make the resulting image eligible for copyright. It would not make the base image spit out by the AI eligible for copyright, only the derivative work.
Where prompts are concerned, the US has argued that some prompts would be eligible for some kind of IP protection on their own. But a prompt that doesn't meet copyright muster on its own would not be eligible, and the same rules apply to photography.
> a prompt is somehow a recipe and not a novel expression that merits copyright
People keep bringing up photographs, I think the better analogy is commissions. And in fact, the copyright office points towards commissions in its explanation of its policy.
Under current copyright law, if I work with an artist to produce a commission by giving that artist repeated prompts, pointing out areas in the image I'd like changed, etc... I don't have any claim of copyright on the artist's final product unless they sign that copyright over to me. My artist "prompts" are not treated as creative input for the purpose of copyright.
I would love to hear an argument for why prompting stable diffusion should grant copyright over the final image, but prompting a human being doesn't grant copyright over the final image. Directing an artist is just as much work as directing an AI, and in many ways will put you much closer to the creative process and will give you more control over the final product. You can direct an artist in much more specific detail than you can direct stable diffusion. You can be a lot more involved in the creative process with a human artist. And just like with an AI, if you take that artist's final drawing and do your own work on top of it, you can still end up with something that's covered by copyright.
But despite that, we've never assumed you intrinsically get any copyright claim over the artist's final picture that they give you.
So the "prompt as a recipe" analogy seems to hold up pretty well for both AI generators and human "generators". All of the same questions and tests seem to apply to both scenarios, which makes me feel like the copyright office's conclusion is pretty reasonable: prompt-generated art isn't copyrightable, but prompts may be protected in some way, and of course additional modifications can still be covered.
Yes, there's grey area, but no more grey area than already exists in commissioning, and the creative industry has been just fine with those grey areas in commissioning for a long time; they haven't been that big of a deal.
Point is the critical issue to copyright is lack of a human in creating the work. A commissioned work is done by a human, as such it’s irrelevant as a comparison.
It's completely relevant. In both cases, you are describing what image you want created.
The fact that you are describing it to a human isn't materially different from the fact that you're describing it to an AI. I mean, heck, this has been the exact argument people have used about why it's OK to train an AI on copyrighted material -- that it's just like a human "learning" from the image. And now comparisons with a human aren't allowed? You can't have it both ways, you can't argue that a generative AI isn't any materially different from a human when it's imitating or learning from a work, but that using that AI suddenly puts the prompter in a completely brand new category of copyright. :)
And we're really talking about the prompter here, not the AI. Focusing specifically on the prompter, what precedent do we have in copyright law that describing the image you want created is a creative act? None, as far as I can see. And we have a ton of precedent that it's not a creative act, ie the entire history of copyright policy around prompting/directing. Nobody argues that directing a creative process means you inherently get copyright over the result.
It think the parent's point here could be rephrased like this:
Copyright law treats "involved a human" vs. "involved a machine" as fundamentally different just because humans are special-cased, not due to any deeper reason. Just by fiat.
The law gives special consideration to humans "just because". Therefore, if one situation involves a human in a particular role and another situation involves a machine, then there is no useful analogy to be drawn -- as far as the law is concerned. Even if the analogy makes perfect sense to you and me, the law treats humans and machines as fundamentally different, so all bets are off.
Isn't this just agreeing with what the copyright office said?
When prompting a human being, that human makes the image, so that human gets the copyright. When prompting an AI, no human makes the image, so no human gets the copyright. But in both cases, the prompter doesn't.
We've never treated writing a description of what to draw or providing iterative feedback on an image as an act that grants someone copyright over that image.
What I love about this AI generative art is it will finally put the right price on computer generated art: $0.
It will be interesting to watch the entire Hollywood and associated creative industries lose control to AI. Entire movies will be created in small basements. Same with AAA video games.
Kids at street corners have idea and vision, no shortage in that. What matters is putting together idea and vision with execution. And for anything that is beyond basement scope, execution further subdivides into craft and access. Access to the means, and that is true for Hollywood as much as it is true for the smallest-time painter who might not be good at making friends with gallerists. The outliers are those that learn the craft, network into a position of access and still retain some trace of idea and vision through all of that.
Kids on corners have ideas. Very few of them are GOOD ideas. Anyone can say 'Make a movie with lots of aliens and lasers'. It still takes Ridley Scott to make Alien.
Yet at the same time that "Pinback chased by the beach ball monster" scene that eventually evolved into Alien is hilariously deep in "kids on street corner ideas" territory
Kids at street corners have idea and vision, but may lack TASTE - the ability to discern the good from the bad. If the button-pushers have great AI but lack taste they will still produce a terrible end product.
I hope we will see much bigger universes with intricate and detailed lore where human steers parts of storylines and visuals to make them interesting and fit together but AI fills in the blanks.
Gamedev example: If NPCs lines can be generated quickly, maybe it's possible to develop open world games that change their character throughout the game.
Way to often addons and expansions are carefully cordoned off from the main game because no one wants to redo all that work.
Will any of these meaningfully enhance gameplay? Sure, there could be more features, but what is the marginal utility? I think people assume more immersive, more expansive is better for games, but I'm not sure this is the case.
Dungeons & Dragons demonstrated that intelligent open world is so attractive people will crank through it with all the friction of paper character sheets, rule books, encyclopedias of creature stats, dice, dungeon masters prep and problem solving…
I would love to collect a group of human and NPC players and attempt a heist from an actually intelligent dragon in an environment where no action was guardrailed
Encounter creatures and cultures with no documentation but what you learn my interacting with them
I was thinking of enhancing existing capabilities to develop open world games of smaller teams or to buff out a main storyline with "world chatter".
This would act as a multiplier for writers to better use the available budget/time. Sure it may not write a brilliant and engaging story (without human editing) but given the "lore" of a village and it's geographical/political position in the world I can definitely see it being useful to "set the tone" of otherwise generic background NPCs.
PS: Maybe this is me trying to find use cases for current LLMs (with their known capabilities and weaknesses) that don't involve dismissing them out of hand or "the singularity".
Not just dreamed of doing as youths, they are also exactly the jobs that AI positivists promised we would be doing instead when robots took away all the boring "make rent" crap.
They won't. They own the hardware, the distribution channels and the datacenters.
For comparison, despite making professional music is even easier (a copy of Ableton Live Lite and a few hours of studio recording for the vocals makes for less than 300$) every single music chart is still dominated by music made by corporations (Universal Sony / Time Warner, mainly).
On the other hand, music is less valuable than ever. From 20$/unit (the price of a CD) to 0.0004c for stream. Or you get lucky and somehow someone buys your music during bandcamp friday.
Just a subset of Musicians are still around because they're famous enough to get an audience for their tours and/or dj sets. Visual artists have nothing comparable to sustain themselves.
One thing that disturbs me is the push to censor the AI output.
Photoshop is used to produce a ton of porn, but Adobe doesn’t try to stop that.
In terms of “safety”, models Photoshopped to impossible standards have helped create impossible beauty standards causing depression and even life threatening eating disorders in teenage girls.
Yet, Adobe and all the others will carefully censor the output of these generative models.
I found the little sketch-to-vector-variations part interesting and surprising- this is something that is solidly not done via a diffusion model unlike everything else shown. Although I note it says "We plan to build this into Firefly" implying that... this isn't something already finished.
I imagine this would use "in the style of a line drawing" prompts under the hood to produce line-esque raster images suitable for vectorization, with the resulting vectorized images being what's shown to the user.
That was also my first instinct, but is vectorization from a line sketch really that smooth and reliable now, though? It has been some time since I've used modern tools, but last I tried any raster-to-vector on line drawings that weren't super basic, the results left a lot to be desired. Jittery, under- or over-fit, etc.
I’m intrigued as well, but especially with regards to how it would perform in the real world given that I’ve also observed that diffusion models aren’t great with vectors.
I suspect the example they used might have been cherry-picked
The high compute costs for training and legacy software foothold seems that it may encourage rent seeking in the big tech companies. I hope the huge costs and compute demands won't only enrich the big tech companies that can afford to run the models on heavy duty hardware. If it does,
it will potentially lead to the rich companies, individuals, and persons greatly outpacing their peers.
These models can be run locally, but I see far too many businesses and bloggers resign themselves to renting OpenAI's cloud instead of tinkering with LLaMA/Alpaca, the community Stable Diffusion finetunes and such.
Adobe does have a legal edge here, which is interesting and perhaps actually worth a subscription if needed.
The problem is that GPT-3.5 is so cheap, and the results that you get out of it are still quite a bit better than LLaMA/Alpaca. There just doesn't seem to be any solid economic reason to run it locally except to keep inputs and/or outputs private.
Is there any concrete evidence for that? Like, did anyone try to calculate how much power it actually costs to run the ChatGPT API at its present scale? My understanding is that the upfront costs on hardware are really expensive, but powering it + amortized wear and tear to replace it eventually is orders of magnitude smaller. So, what is the actual estimated cost of one ChatGPT token, and how much money is getting burned?
But also, even if they double the price at some point, it'd still be cheap enough for this to apply.
I wonder about how companies are approaching letting their customers understand what is and isn't copyrightable with the results of these ai models.
The us copyright office has made it clear that elements of designs that lack human authorship cannot be copyrighted. A prompt is not enough - the same way if you provided a prompt to an artist while commissioning a work does not grant you copyright to that work. The results (including specific elements) of these ai models cannot be copyrighted which has extreme implications to commerical art in general. If you have your ai models come up with a character you cannot claim copyright of that character. If your ai models comes up with a composition you cannot claim copyright on that composition.
If you use the ai to generate an idea and then have a human develop the idea, the elements of the design that the ai came up with cannot be copyrighted because they lack human authorship.
on the opposite - existing legal frameworks protect human works, and altering them to allow corporations to own any idea they can provide a prompt for is directly harmful to society and the future of intellectual property in every country.
using ml is already powerful and fast. protecting ideas from mass corporate ownership so that your grandchildren will be allowed to think freely is more important than chat gpt or stable diffusion or whatever algorithm replaces them next week.
I did that once. Never again. What a shit company. Cancelling the subscription was a total drag. Fuck you Adobe, I hope you go bankrupt sooner rather than later.
What they did to allegorithmic, the substance suite and the on boarding process to even learn the system is a travesty
Substance Designer used to have a platform called substance share where anyone could share and open source knowledge of complex parametric textures for free to anyone with a substance account, obviously the first draft for how Adobe would get the money back from their purchase is to monetize the entire learning processes by shutting down that website and adding pay walls to near every single interaction to even learn the software, it is just so horribly shortsighted and these ideas can only be approved and implemented by sheer rentiers managers
Finally a big player is talking about image to vector using generative AI. This will make the lives of graphic designers so much better. No reason that humans will continue to trace images in this day and age
Possible this is not significant, appears that within the feature set is a text-to-vector image generator that produces editable vectors art. There’s no direct link I was able to find, but feature is listed here:
> services that handle text-to-vector generative AI
I think I used one...maybe Kittl or Illustroke. Not FOSS though. In the FOSS world there are some really brilliant tools like potrace at the very least. That one is still built into Inkscape, I believe.
> trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock, along with openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired
> We do not train on any Creative Cloud subscribers’ personal content. For Adobe Stock contributors, the content is part of the Firefly training dataset, in accordance with Stock Contributor license agreements. The first model did not train on Behance.
> During the beta phase of Adobe Firefly, any Adobe Firefly generated assets cannot be used for commercial purposes.
> Can I opt [my Adobe Stock content] of the dataset training?
> No, there is no option to opt-out of data set training for content submitted to Stock. However, Adobe is continuing to explore the possibility of an opt-out.
Still on the fence for whether or not you should be able to opt out of training (I'm sure many artists would love to "opt out" of humans looking at their art if the human intends to, or might, copy the artists' style at some point).
Yes, AI should be trained on every piece of information possible. Am I allowed to become a better programmer by looking at private, (illegally leaked) closed-source, proprietary code?
Yes you are allowed to read closed-source, proprietary code and become a better programmer for it.
I've decompiled games to learn how they structure their code to improve the structure of games that I program. I had no right to that code and I used it to become a better programmer just like AI do.
That's not copyright infringement. You have a right to stop me from using your code, not learning from it.
Now granted most EULAs and Terms of Service documents aren't legally enforced, most software licenses explicitly prohibit decompiling or otherwise disassembling binaries.
So, yes: They have a right to stop you from "learning" from their code. If you want that right, see if they're willing to sell that right to you.
> They have a right to stop you from "learning" from their code.
They absolutely do not, and as pedantic as it may be I think it's very important that you and everyone else in this thread know what their rights are.
If you sign a contract / EULA that says you cannot decompile someone's code than yes you are liable for any damages promised in that contract for violating it.
But who says that I ever signed a EULA for the games I decompiled? Who says I didn't find a copy on a hard drive I bought at a yard sale or someone sent me the decompiled binary themselves?
Those people may have violated the contract but I did not.
There is no law preventing you from learning from code, art, film or any other copyrighted media. Nor is there any law (or should there be any law IMO) that stops an AI from learning from copyrighted media.
Learning from each other regardless of intellectual property law is how the human race advances itself. The fact that we've managed to that automate human progress is incredible, and it's very good that our laws are the way they are that we can allow that to happen.
This is a pretty extreme stance. There is a fine line between "learning from" proprietary code and outright stealing some of the key insights and IP. Sometimes it takes a very difficult conceptual leap to solve some of the more difficult computer science and math problems. "Learning" (aka stealing) someone's solution is very problematic and will get you sued if you are not careful.
If you think that's extreme, wait until you hear my stance that code shouldn't be something that you can own (and can therefore "steal") to begin with.
I didn't ask if can I use other people's proprietary closed source code, obviously they have the right to that code and how it's used.
I asked if I can learn from that code, which obviously I can. There is no license that says "You cannot learn from this code and take the things you learn to become a better programmer".
That's exactly what I do and it's exactly what AI do.
If you study a closed source compiler (or whatever) in order to write a competitive product, and the company who wrote the original product sues you for copying it, as the parent suggests, you're on shaky legal ground. Which is why clean room design is a thing.
A clean room design ensures the new code is 100% original, and not a copy of the base code. That is why it is legally preferable, because it is easy to prove certain facts in court.
But fundamentally the problem is copyright, the copying of existing IP, not knowledge. grondo4 is completely correct that there is no legal framework that prevents learning from closed-source IP.
If such a framework existed, clean room design would not work. The initial spec-writers in a clean room design are reading the protected work.
>The initial spec-writers in a clean room design are reading the closed-source work.
Right. And they're only exposing elements presumably not covered by copyright to the developers writing the code. (Of course, this assumes they had legitimate access to the code in the first place.)
Clean room design isn't a requirement in the case of, say, writing a BIOS which may have been when this first came up. But it's a lot easier to defend against a copyright claim when it's documented that the people who wrote the code never saw the original.
Unlike with patents, independent creation isn't a copyright violation.
I don't understand what your point here is. The initial spec-writers learned from the original code. This is not illegal, we seem to be agreed on this point. grondo made the point that learning from code should not be prohibited.
My point was that, assuming access to the code was legit, and the information being passed from the spec-writers to the developers wasn't covered by copyright (basically APIs and the like), it's a much better defense against a copyright claim that any code written by the developers isn't a copyright violation given they never saw the original code.
> I asked if I can learn from that code, which obviously I can.
Did you actually read the link you were given? Clean room design is because you may inadvertently plagiarize copyrighted works from your memory of reading it.
i.e. the act of reading may cause accidental infringement when implementing the "things you learn"
Rewriting the code verbatim and distributing it would be a copyright infringement, yes, you do not have a write to distribute code written by other people
That's completely different from reading and learning from code, which is what grondo described.
Clean room design relies on this, in a clean room design you have one party read and describe the protected work, and another party implement it. That first party reading the protected work is learning from closed-source IP.
If an AI infringes on copyright then it infringes on copyright, that's unfortunate for the distributors of that code.
Humans accidentally infringe on copyright sometimes too. It's not a unique problem to machine learning. The potential to infringe on copyright has not made observing/learning/watching/reading copyright materials prohibited for humans, nor should it or (likely) will it become prohibited for machine learning algorithms.
Grondo said that AI should be given access to all code, including private and unlicensed code.
He was given a link to Clean Room Design demonstrating the problem with the same entity (the AI) reading and learning from the existing code and the risk of regurgitation when writing new code.
He goes on to say thats what he does, which doesn't change that fact.
> Humans accidentally infringe on copyright sometimes too.
Indeed we do, and its almost entirely unnoticed, even by the author.
> nor should it or (likely) will it become illegal for machine learning algorithms.
If those machine learning algorithms are taking in unlicensed material and then they later output unlicensed and/or copyrighted material, then they are a liability. Why would you want that when you can train it otherwise and be sure it NEVER infringes others IP? Its a no-brainer, surely. Or are you assuming there is some magic inherent in other peoples private code?
> If those machine learning algorithms are taking in unlicensed material and then they later output unlicensed and/or copyrighted material, then they are a liability. Why would you want that when you can train it otherwise and be sure it NEVER infringes others IP?
Because it could produce a better model that produces better code.
You're now arguing a heavily reduced point. That a model that trained on proprietary code is at higher risk of reproducing infringing code is not a point under contention. The clean room serves the same purpose, it is a risk mitigation strategy.
Risk mitigation is a choice, left up to individuals. Maybe you use a clean room design, maybe you don't. Maybe you use a model trained on closed-source IP, maybe you don't. There are risks associated with these choices, but that is up to individuals to make.
The choice to observe closed source IP and learn from it shouldn't be prohibited just because some won't want to assume that risk.
> i.e. the act of reading may cause accidental infringement when implementing the "things you learn"
Surely you know this isn't the case right? Maybe you're confused because we're talking about programming and not a different creative artform?
Great artists read, watch and consume copyrighted works of art all day, if they didn't they wouldn't be great artists. And yet the content they produce is entirely there own, free from the copyright of the works they learned from.
What's the difference then in programming? Why can an artist be trusted not to reproduce the copyrighted works that they learned from but not the programmer?
Artists get into trouble all the time for producing works very close to something that already exist. That's like the number one reason artists get shunned in the communities they were in.
Unless you're arguing that every single artist across every field of artistic expression is constantly being jeopardized by claims of copyright infringement, this is a nonsensical point to make.
I would seriously question if this happens all the time, these days. The whole copyright thing is way behind the digital and internet revolution. Look at what the Prince case did for transformation copyright fair use.
> Why can an artist be trusted not to reproduce the copyrighted works that they learned from but not the programmer?
They cant. which is why that quote "Good artists copy, great artists steal" exists.
AI has already been shown to be "accidentally" reproducing copyrighted work. You too, can do the same.
Its likely no-one (including yourself) will ever be aware of it - but strictly speaking it would still be copyright infringement. This is the relevance and context of the link you were given.
One motivation for artists to create and share new work is the expectation that most people won't just outright copy their work, based on the social norm that stealing is dishonorable. This social norm comes with some level of legal protection, but it largely depends on a common expectation of what is considered stealing or not.
Once we have adopted the attitude that we can just copy as we please without attribution, it would be much more difficult to find motivated artists, and we would have failed as a society.
> I'm sure many artists would love to "opt out" of humans looking at their art if the human intends to, or might, copy the artists' style at some point
I’m pretty sure that would be a death knell for art. Where are these mythical artists who have never looked at anyone else’s art?
It's the same problem with fake copies of Van Gogh and so forth, except historically those fakes were produced at a much slower rate because of the time needed to master the skills to produce those fakes. With modern tools, those fakes could be mass produced, while the original artists are still alive.
> It's the same problem with fake copies of Van Gogh and so forth, except historically those fakes were produced at a much slower rate because of the time needed to master the skills to produce those fakes. With modern tools, those fakes could be mass produced, while the original artists are still alive.
Those people got in trouble for recreating specific works, or creating new works in his style and defrauding people by saying they were originals. Safe to say that not disclosing "this is not actually a work created by <artist>, just in their style" would be grounds for fraud, especially if you were to sell it.
AI training is a one-way operation - you can't reconstruct the dataset from a model/lora/ti. Unless it's something really blatant like real people, widely recognised copyrighted characters like Batman or Iron Man - it's going to be hard to prove that someone used your art to train an AI model. I'm not required to publish my model or the datasets that I used anywhere.
hi, I'm an artist, I do not give a shit about other humans looking at my work, I am delighted when a younger pro comes to me and thanks me for what they learnt from my work. That tells me they were fascinated enough with it to look at it and analyze it again and again. I made a connection with them via my drawing skills.
I am catastrophically unhappy at the prospect of a corporation ingesting a copy of my work and stuffing it into a for-profit machine without my permission. If my work ends up significantly influencing a generated image you love, nobody will ever know. You will never become a fan of my work through this. You will never contribute to my Patreon. You will never run into me at a convention and tell me how influential my work was to something in your life. Instead, the corporation will get another few pennies, and that is all.
If, as I alluded to, you and the SCOTUS (and other courts) interpret AI art as similar enough to humans where the 'training' process is analogous to a human looking at art and learning how to create good art (or even copy another artist's style), then the license you apply to art does not matter, because it'd just be "learning" about how art works, and not any actual usage of the original work. In this case the AI would be considered a human for the purposes of copyright infringement, where it would infringe on the original work if it recited or recreated any single work from memory without any substantial changes to turn it into either a parody (fair use) or its own work separate from the images it has learned from, even if it mimics the art style of any single artist (since artists can't copyright their styles).
I think you’d consider those responsible for the model to be humans, the model to be a machine, and all outputs to be derivative works of the training set with the humans holding culpability.
Not as far as I know. There needs to be one, and internet-scrapers need to be able to be sued for ludicrous amounts of money if they violate it, IMHO. Training AI models feels way outside the scope of what I think "fair use" should cover.
They do not currently operate on the basis of fair use. Operating as a human by looking at images and learning how to draw or paint is not 'fair use', it's a right given to you by either God or Mother Nature, so the legal basis for neural nets learning from other art is that it's learning like a human and creating new art from just knowing what art human think is good and optimizing its creation of art to mimic if not borrow the same qualities while still making something new.
The rights are exercised by the humans building and operating the machines. You're saying the hammer doesn't have rights. Well, yeah, duh. It's the person holding it.
"so the legal basis for neural nets learning from other art is that it's learning like a human and creating new art from just knowing what art human think is good and optimizing its creation of art to mimic if not borrow the same qualities while still making something new" sure sounds like it's attributing the rights to the machine, not the person using it, to me.
Also if you are going to say that the neural net has the same divinely-given right as humans then I feel you are also implying that the neural net has all the other rights of a human, and I think labor laws would have something to say about keeping a six-month-old idiot savant in a box and making them draw whatever random querents on the Internet asked for, 24/7.
Non-commercial internet scraping for model creation is explicitly legal in the EU; the result of a model trained on a billion images really has nothing to do with anyone in particular's art. Although the model would likely work pretty well without ever seeing any "art" images.
I'm an artist as well. I think this can happen whenever anyone sees your art anywhere online. They can copy it. They won't tell you about it. They might copy it really well. And they might copy not just your technical style, but what your art says and how it says it.
As a fellow artist, I can kind of see where you are coming from. I've had my art copied in several places, nobody ever asked for permission and probably nobody knows I did it. Nor will. I've seen my work in memes, Doom mods, promotional posters and even ads. It's harsh, but it's naive to expect a reward, the world doesn't work like that in practice. And that's human fault and has happened way before AI imaging was even considered a possibility. Look at how many "classic" artists only became known by chance (and posthumously), despite the quality of their output.
Also, if anything, being included in a training set means you are already notorious. The big ones are usually trained on stock art or famous professionals/classics, and the ones trained by random people are going to use quality filters to get the best images of a specific subject. If you aren't already notorious, you simply will not make it into a set. The other possible motivation is spite, but that'll only happen if you participate in internet slapfights.
And...Patreon? Fans? Influence? "younger PRO" (so a non-pro doesn't count even if they are trying their best?) I sincerely recommend you choose sentences more carefully. Makes you sound phony and using art as a social strategy. When there's so much talk about art and its "soul" you really don't want to make yourself sound like art is a mere means to an end or you risk making the cold, calculating machine seem "purer".
Personally, art should be its own goal. I had plenty of time to stomach one isn't entitled to anything just because effort, so I just want to make my art better. And saves me from the trouble of chasing trends to stay relevant.
Honestly having worked as an artist and illustrator for a long time I'm kinda relaxed when it comes to this.
companies stealing your work isn't a thing that just happened to become possible because AI can make it easier to imitate. The real world scenario is much rather: _they just steal your existing work_
ever since I've been publishing my own illustrations I've always ran an image search on the stuff I've got on my homepage once or twice a year, and almost every time i did this I've found multiple individuals or companies who just used my illustrations for something without ever contacting me.
On the other hand, if my style was ever to become known and sought after enough for people prompting AIs with my name, I'm pretty confident that this would mean that:
A) I've grown big enough to have more inquiries than i could serve anyway and
B) The ones doing this are neither people or companies I'd liked to have as clients, nor would they have booked my services for the price I ask if it weren't for AI.
Big agencies with interesting clients couldn't allow themselves to risk their reputation with faking original work, and other large corporations that just don't give a fuck because they are ready to litigate if i challenge their usage are likely to have such reach that they'll end up still contributing to the desirability of my original artwork if they appropriate it. And the smaller ones, they fulfill premise B) on the one hand and would also feed the hype.
So I truly feel what actually bothers you, forever I've been drawing first and foremost because i want to inspire people to express themselves and make experience the same experiences I've had when loosing myself in a drawing. And i do think the bittersweetness of imaging AI remains that while some people will gain the confidence to DO try to express themselves creatively, others will at the same time never want to seek achieving this by their own physical skill and raw will.
But when it comes to myself and my art, I actually see only benefit and progression, regardless of what current dystopic scenarios might manifest :)
The problem is to be impacted negatively doesn't necessary mean "I've grown big enough to have more inquiries than i could serve anyway".
It could just mean AI can imitate above a certain "good enough" level the kind of style you and others working in a similar vain do (say "whimsical children illustrations") and all other styles besides, so once-would-have-been-customers now just use some AI stuff with a generic prompt.
In other words, AI aet doesn't have to request your specific name to affect you. It's enough that it provides art for many/most gigs that would now go to a human illustrator.
It would be hard to see just "good developments" when paying gigs dry out.
It's not like 90% of the work available to human commercial artists would even be there in the future with these developments...
Most customers currently paying an artist will just slap some quick AI stuff and call it a day.
Big customers might still make it a matter of prestige or pride or "quality" differentiator to use "real human art" from some famous graphic designers, but that is like 1/1000 of the commercial gigs going on today.
It's not quite the same... And I'm not sure how people on HN of all places are failing to grasp that these algorithms aren't sentinet, much less people.
I think this is incredibly cool technology, but using other people's property without their consent is stealing (I'm not talking about legality, but morality here).
The second reason why it's not the same is that people can't look at X million pictures and become proficient in thousands of different art styles. So, again its not legality but more about ethics.
I guess different people have lower moral standards than others, and that's always been part of the human condition.
With all that out of the way, I think artists won't get replaced, because these tools don't really produce anything... Substantial on their own. An artist still needs to compose them to tell a story. So, all this nonsense about how it will replace artists is misguided. It can only replace some parts of an artist's workflow.
I know there was an art competition where someone won with a piece that was AI-aided, but honestly it looked like colour sludge. The only thing that was really well executed in it was the drama created by the contrast from sharp changes in values near the centre of that work, and something vaguely resembling a humanoid silhouette against it. You could've called it abstract art if you squinted.
I'm curious, do you hold the same beliefs about text?
Do you think ChatGPT should not be allowed to read books and join ideas across them without paying the original authors for their contribution to the thought?
I do! If they aren't in some way public domain, then the authors should have a say, or be if the work is purchased.
I have a bit of cognitive dissonance on the subject of blog posts or articles in general, since those are kinda public domain? But I still think it should be opt in/out-able.
I realise I'm also a bit of a hypocrite since I've enjoyed playing with these AI tools myself, and I realise they'd be nowhere as cool if they didn't have access to such large datasets.
In order for blog posts (or other written works) to be in the public domain, authors must explicitly waive those rights. But, not that it needs saying, copyright's applicability in training data is basically the entire subject of debate right now. https://creativecommons.org/2023/02/17/fair-use-training-gen...
Ah, I had no idea that was protected too! That's good. I think the reason I was morally on the fence was that people already put blog posts out with the intent of sharing their knowledge with the rest of the Internet...
So my assumption was that anything trained on it will just help further expand that knowledge.
Although I do realise now as I'm typing this—AI could diminish their audience, clout and motivation, which isn't what I'd want.
But these stock image artists provided consent when signing a contract and selling their work to Adobe. The contract is pretty clear that you basically don't own the work anymore and Adobe can do whatever they want with it.
Oh right, sorry. I was talking generally, not specifically to Firefly.
Yeah, I think Adobe is a publisher and as such, you give it distribution rights. So, I agree with you on this case.
Slightly tangential, but Imagine a singer or actor's voice of face being used without their consent just because the publisher has rights to distribute their performance. That probably wouldn't fly very well, and I assume this doesn't fly with some artists either (even though they signed a contract).
I assume publishers will probably have an AI consent form soon.
It's all very exciting, and I hope we don't ruin it with greed and disregard for the works of the very people that made these technologies so successful. Like, if it weren't for the scraped works, the AI feats would've been both much more underwhelming and and much more expensive to train.
"I guess different people have lower moral standards than others, and that's always been part of the human condition."
Instead of lower morality, I'd say it's selective morality.
I bet quite a few artists (rightfully) feeling threatened by this phenomenon would have absolutely no problem watching a pirated movie, using an ad blocker, read paywall-stripped articles, the like....whilst this is principally the same thing: taking the work of others without consent or compensation.
Are you saying all those art styles are original? They are not. Artists influence artists. Sometimes the influence is strong, other times just a glimmer.
Perhaps the burden of responsibility shouldn't be on Ai machine learning, but the human prompt author who chooses the instruction: "...in the style of Jo Blow". Who owns the ethical dilemma in that case? Who is being unfair to Jo Blow in that case? I'm quite certain whoever wrote the prompt is 100% responsible.
I think this is a futile discussion. I think originality certainly exists, and I've seen it may times in the art world.
I could be wrong, but you seem to imply originality is a made up concept?
Do original thoughts even exist?
Are our comments original or just regurgitation?
Do you believe nothing ever created throughout history is original then?
If you believe originality does exist, where and how do you draw the line?
I don't think people are as boring as you think they are. Or maybe you just don't appreciate art. I can't tell. Some people say they do, but they really don't.
And further, even if we do ignore originality as a concept and pretend for the sake of the argument it doesn't exist, someone still values that style or approach to creation. That probably makes a living based on the subjective value it brings to the table. They sold their work. An AI company now profits off of their work, having used it in an algorithm, without paying anything to those artists.
As an experiment: Give me an example of something you've made yourself that you valued enough to sell, and then tell me why I deserve to have it for free. Maybe that will help me understand. Maybe you can work for me for free?
If none of their work was original or valuable, why even train on it, and why can you even ask for "in style of X"?
Also, the approach of waving responsibility onto individuals is too naïve. If that worked, we'd not need laws or any type of regulation.
Anyway, even with this diatribe I still don't think AI is a bad thing or that it will replace people or or their work—in its current iteration at least. It'll probably improve it, but I certainly understand why people feel violated.
You spent a lot of time deconstructing something I never said or implied.
The keyword you missed is "style". Your word, that I quoted.
As in, "the style of that artist". I wasn't referring to individual pieces of original art.
"Black and white street photography, gritty contrast, low wide angles, urban decay, weathered characters"... could be a style shared by many, that Ai learns.
Nobody owns a "style". A style is merely a convenient way to describe art. It belongs to the art critic more than the artist.
Many have made art in the style of say Andy Warhol - minimal flat colors, mass produced product imagery. Or surrealist styles, "like Dali", with dreamscapes, imaginary landscapes, twisted architecture and optical illusions. Things Ai can learn without being accused of stealing. Unless you're arguing a kind of "theft of humanity".
> Also, the approach of waving responsibility onto individuals is too naïve.
You want others to take responsibility for your actions?
Prompt: "image like Jon Doe's fantasy illustrations"... Prompting with intent. That's on you, not others to regulate your adult choices.
Before Ai, you could hire an artist to help you learn the style of another artist, living or dead. Maybe a drawing style you like. So you hire a skilled artist to point you in the right direction for acquiring a similar result with the pencil. Nothing ethically unsound there. Ai just skips the lessons and time it takes you to draw in the style of your favourite artist. Nothing has been stolen.
> You spent a lot of time deconstructing something I never said or implied.
> The keyword you missed is "style". Your word, that I quoted.
>
> As in, "the style of that artist". I wasn't referring to individual pieces of original art.
Sorry I miss-interpreted a little.
I guess we disagree on what style means maybe:
> Black and white street photography, gritty contrast, low wide angles, urban decay, weathered characters"... could be a style shared by many, that Ai learns.
I still think there's a lot more individual flavour in art that can't be captured with words.
You described a specific art style in your example, and within that there's probably a plethora that fit that description roughly, but there's often a unique signature every artists brings to the table through different application and mixture of those "sub styles" and techniques.
You can try to reduce Matt Inman's (Oatmeal) style to "line art, blobs for humans, vivid colours, absurdist face expressions, comic" etc, and spend ages explaining to an AI to steal the style, and it wouldn't get it probably, but just slapping "in style of Oatmeal" would probably get you very close.
Similar for xkcd, Oglaf, specific anime styles, concept artists (often time this is what gets them hired). They all have a flavour of style that's unique to them even if they use similar approaches and techniques. All manga or anime is in the similar vein of line art, but Miyazaki Hayao is indisputably Hayao; any fan of anime will recognise his style immediately. If this weren't true, nobody would be putting "in style of X", they'd just be saying "{generic technique}" instead.
Listing the individual composition of technique won't really get you close to how they work, but saying "in style of X" gets you crazy close.
You bring up a bunch of dead and famous artists, but ignore the fact that their styles can only be mimiced because they were studied. And they can only be mimced by someone with enough knowledge the theory behind the techniques composed to achieve the style, and the skills they spent years building to to execute it.
> You want others to take responsibility for your actions?
No, but the problem is that currently nobody is being held responsible. Not the model devs for using works without consent, nor the actors benefitting from it. For example, Fiverr is currently flooded with AI scam artists who get away with saying "in style of X" without even having a basic comprehension or intuition what that style is composed off, much less be able to describe the style intelligently. Everyone's turning a blind eye, artists are protesting, and people there's people saying "yes, this is the way it's meant to be".
You can't expect everyone to have the same moral standards as you do. If it's you create a tool and put it into the world, people will use/abuse it. That's just the way it is.
Who should be responsible? Like I agree with you that the profiteers abusing this "in style of X" are much worse and bigger assholes than the people developing the models, but nonconsensual use of someone else's work without their consent, or without any way to prevent abuse of that content (eg by properly anonymising the training data, at the very least) is also bad. The devs didn't even pay a one-time fee to the artists to use their work; which is IMO the rock bottom expectations of decency. They just paid to get the training set, which was probably collated through some scummy ToS loophole.
So they're eating the market of someone who spent a lot of time developing a unique style. Can these artists use the tools? Yeah, and I hope they do, but I still think it's a bit ludicrous how easy it is for me (or anyone else) to mimic a style someone spent years building, with a few words. And that's "thanks" to that artist tryi...
It's fine we disagree. Let's avoid the trap of right or wrong. Ai is new, and our opinions will evolve over time. With that said...
> "indisputably Hayao; any fan of anime will recognise his style immediately"
No they wouldn't. If you're talking about a still frame, nobody can be certain who the artist is. Why? Because LOTS of artists make similar work. You think there's an indisputable signature in every drawing from every artist? There really isn't.
There may be an obvious signature, such as placing an "upside down umbrella" in every piece they make. But the Ai won't copy the umbrella, because that would be replicating the work rather than style.
There are books about Miyazaki's style, authored by him that go into detail and share everything from concept sketches to the use of computer graphics in his films. It's all there in the books he wrote explaining and SHARING his techniques with the world. But what he can't share, and what can't be replicated with prompts, is the brilliance of the storytelling that threads the vast body of visual work to create the whole.
> unique style
Again, you're claiming an artist's style is unique, when in fact the vast majority of "styles" are blends of other styles and influences. No artist was born in a bubble.
Even if there is a unique visual signature, so what? It's not the heart of the work. It's a preferential technical characteristic.
Not only that, but this world is saturated with images. Even in music, it's difficult to come up with an original riff that doesn't sound like an existing song. The musician, in order to be awarded "originality", needs to use the full 3 minutes of the song to involve lyrics and other elements before something truly "unique" emerges.
You think there's an infinite bucket of "styles" visual artists can tap into? There isn't.
Content choices and narrative choices are more important anyway. For example, the artist may have something to say about humans being cogs in the machine. Sounds interesting. Such concepts form part of the style and reputation of the artist. People follow artists largely because of their artistic substance.
You're too focused on visual technique. The guts of any good artwork is the whole package, including the symbolism and balance of meaning in the work.
What is the artist SAYING with the work. Ai won't help prompters with quality of symbolic meaning, concepts and interlinking symbolism, subtext, balance of imagery, subtle visual tension... all the things that make ART ART -- the ESSENCE of art is found in the body of work.
So... Ai can generate a sci-fi robot running through the city, and your concern is this impedes the profit margin of real artists pumping out the same generic stuff? Sorry, but I won't shed a tear for the loss of artistic mediocrity in a world saturated with stock images.
Artists are adaptable, and should be doing a lot more than selling robot images to stock art collections anyway. Time to level up. Nothing wrong with Ai keeping us on our toes.
I find this situation a bit funny. I agree with you on almost everything you said.
I think the only part we maybe disagree is on the importance of style as a form of expression. I think style is a big part of it (or mixture of styles). To me, there was a style-space where each technique is a dimension (kinda like a colourspace), you can position yourself anywhere within that space. And I think that the choice of that position matters to artists a lot. It doesn't matter _for_ the artist, but it matters _to_ the artist. They could've spent a long time searching the style space to find their own individual style, and it's a part of their art. Maybe thinking about styles mathematically here is a mistake here?
To me it feels unfair their efforts to build this style is being treated dismissively by some. I don't think you yourself treat it dismissively, since you seem to appreciate art too. But I don't think every employer in need of art will see it like that.
Also, I as I read your reply and thought about the topic a bit and you partially changed my mind:
I believe established artists won't be impacted by this, but I fear that certain entry-level positions in some industries will be jeopardised by AI. I'm not even sure why I think this. Maybe it's no more than a hunch based on what I've seen happening to people in entry positions already being treated like throwaways in film and game industry.
An alternative and more optimistic way to look at it would be that entry-level positions will evolve to be more quality/fulfilling work. I hope that's what happens, then.
I also think it's hard to sufficiently develop in any field if you don't do some of the "grunt work" too. I guess I'm not a trained nor is art my career (just a self-taught hobby). So, maybe the exploration and development of styles isn't as big of a deal as I make it out to be for day-to-day artists. Maybe they do the grunt work in art school?
You mentioned mediocre art and stock images. I know what you mean, but I also think that's just a phase lot of people go through. Nobody is born a great artist (or anything else), they become it. People need to start somewhere.
I think it's all very complicated... This is somewhat tangentially related (which I think was the real thing that sent me down this spiral, more than anything else): I wish the artists' wishes about their works were treated with more respect by the people training the models, since I think it's difficult to expect every user of the tool to do the same. Or allow them to opt in and be compensated for their works.
Anyway, thank you for indulging me in this long thread! :)
I didn't see this before I posted, but I'm glad that's the case. In fact, it might be great for contributors that don't have a large library or aren't ranked as well.
with ai image generation the value of stock imagery in terms of licensing out to third parties approaches zero. On the other hand, in terms of its contribution to training a model, the image value also approaches zero on a per image basis.
I dont have any confidence they can create a fair compensation method.
Thanks for the response. This and the proposed compensation for stock contributions demonstrate that you are taking the right and correct path.
I hope you do continue doing so. I'm all but disappointed in others' approaches in this area, and it paints a very bad image for the potential of AI as tools.
It's also worth considering is that there are quite a number of fraudulent images on Adobe Stock, which means that the Firefly dataset without a doubt contains some amount of unlicensed material.
LLM-based AI is tech's equivalent of mortgage-backed securities. Lump in the bad stuff with the legitimate, hope no one notices, and when they do, blame the inherent black-box nature of the product.
> trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock, along with openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired
As someone who has contributed stock to Adobe Stock I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm sure they have language in their TOS that covers this, but I'm guessing all contributors will see nothing out of this. Fine if this is free forever, but this is Adobe.
I would not be surprised if behind the scenes they are starting the lobbying engine to safely mine whatever they want. The universe of existing content out there is simply too enticing and out there. This is Google Search vs authors all over again.
speaking of Adobe and AI I really hope they would somehow make finding useful help in their help system somehow possible. It is an endless labyrinth with an almost useful but usually ruined item in each dead end.
Generative AI with ClipSeg/ControlNet is the main way to make Adobe products obsolete. No wonder they are pushing it into production ASAP but their investments to advanced tools they had edge over competition like e.g. intelligent background filling can be easily replicated/overcome now. We might see a quick commoditization of Adobe image processing tools.
Yeah but Adobe will presumably outspend stability.ai/midjourney/the stable diffusion community 10 to 1, plus they have access to better datasets. I think if they play this right this could end up building them a moat rather than filling it in.
Yes but Adobe tools are both expensive and their subscription system and website are full of horrible dark patterns. There's a reason Figma users were upset and pissed to hear Adobe was buying them. Adobe used to be a loved company, but this was many many years ago at this point.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 377 ms ] thread(I also wonder who is powering this or if it's an in-house solution -- that should be telling...)
Edit: Why, they've trained this on Adobe stock images. OK, this may be very interesting for publications worried about copyright.
[1] https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/21/responsible-inn...
The Elements versions of Photoshop and Premiere are paid for with a one-off purchase and are not part of a cloud subscription.
I use Creative Cloud photoshop but a while ago purchased a separate Premiere Elements license for video editing - this was cheaper than extending my CC subscription to include Premiere Pro. But I switched to (the awesome) Davinci Resolve for video editing when my copy of Premiere elements wasn't able to open video clips from just-released cameras and phones.
Nothing to see here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkTXyY9cnEs
and there is a live stream later today here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3z9jYtPx-4
Source: I was on Adobe's container infrastructure team 2017-2021, most of that time as a lead.
Makes me think that we haven’t seen what true innovation looks like in this space. Right now, AI is a feature, not a product.
Edit: Not talking about the models themselves (stability, mid journey, GPT-x), talking about what is built on those models.
Not talking about LLMs/underlying model. I don’t think adobe makes their own either. Talking about the interface to it.
Part of the reason for this is that very often the best applications of AI are really invisible to the user, making everything a little bit better, quietly behind the scenes.
The same is true for software in general. The best software products automate loads of stuff behind the scenes so from the user perspective they just click a button and the thing they want to happen, happens.
Perhaps the most successful and important AI product is a great example of this: the spam filter. I bet most younger email users don't even realize how much value this old AI tool provides them unseen.
But the trouble is making effective AI products is not "sexy" right now, and if your team ships one it won't get any credit in a big company. I've had my PM instantly shoot down plenty of interesting applications of AI that wouldn't be very visible to the customer or larger product-org.
A spam filter:
- Is provided historic information about the problem
- Learns from this information to construct a basic model of language
- Is then provided unseen information
- Then makes a probabilistic decision based on a degree of uncertainty.
The exact model behind the spam filtering can be extremely simple (naive Bayes) but could easily (and probably will without you even realizing it) expand to include things like GPT.
A spam filter is making decisions under uncertainty with new information based on patterns it learned from previous information. If this doesn't fit your definition of "AI" then I think if you understood what was happening under the hood I don't think you would consider GPT to be AI either.
If you toaster does learn your toast preference over time from your toasting behavior (unlike mine) then I would consider that AI as well.
No, I don't. I would generously call it an "algorithm", but at the end of the day it's just a script with lots of if statements getting processed by an interpreter.
>I don't think you would consider GPT to be AI either.
I don't. "AI" in this context stands for Automated Interpolation. Nothing about this is intelligent.
Seems like all these big companies are pushing amazing looking concept videos more than anything.
This is an indicative signal. It's amazing how easily it is ignored.
> Makes me think that we haven’t seen what true innovation looks like in this space.
It's interesting that a bunch of product add-ons could be considered "innovation" in the first place.
Clicking through the available pages it seems like a lot of 'coming soon' talk, so there's not really any detail about any of the underlying process.
https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html#faqs
https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learnin...
"The insights obtained through content analysis will not be used to re-create your content or lead to identifying any personal information."
I attribute the speed at which incumbents are integrating AI into their products to a couple things:
* Whereas AI was a hand-wavey marketing term in the past, it's now the real deal and provides actual value to the end user.
* The technology and DX with integrating w/products from OpenAPI, SD, is good.
* AI and LLMs are capturing a lot of attention right now (as seen easily by how often they pop up on HN these days). It's in the zeigeist so you get a marketing boost for free.
I imagine a lot conversations with in-house AI folks is around deploying these methods.
Ehhh.... Sometimes. It's still a hand-wavey marketing term today. Almost every sales call I'm in either the prospect is asking about AI, or more likely the vendor is saying something like "We use our AI module to help you [do some function not at all related to AI]". Also, even when it's "real" AI (in the sense that we're talking about here), it's not always providing actual value to the end user. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't.
However, with AI in general, we have very decidedly passed the point where it Works (image generation probably being the most obvious example of it)
Even if, starting now, the underlying technology did not improve in the slightest, while adoption rises as it is going to with any new technology that provides value, anyone who does not adopt is going to be increasingly uncompetitive. It quite simply is too good already, to not to be used to challenge what a lot of average humans are paid to do in these fields.
That is, these companies are largely not doing the hard part, which is creating and training these models in the first place. The examples you gave of of cloud and iPhone have both huge capital barriers to entry, and in iPhones case other phone companies just didn't have the unique design talent combination of Jobs and Ive.
Stable Diffusion was trained on billions of images, of course. But having explored some of LAION-2B, it's clear that Adobe Stock has far better source images and labels.
Firefly was trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content, where copyright has expired.
https://firefly.adobe.com/faq
We do not train on user content. More info here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learnin...
If you go to https://stock.adobe.com/ and search for `-generative` you can see it filters out ~3M of them, but then go to the "undiscovered content" filter, and it appears to me like the vast majority of it is generative too.
Hopefully they'll continue to push the potential for locally run models.
Are they the hard parts though? The short time it took from the first waves of public excitment around DALL-E to stable diffusion being the well established baseline looks more like the class quantity of problems that can be reliably solved by shoving enough resources at it. What I consider hard problems are those full of non-obvious dead ends are where no matter how much you invest, you might just dig yourself in deeper.
The rest is just technology.
fyi, for Adobe Firefly, we are training or models. From the FAQ:
"What was the training data for Firefly?
Firefly was trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content, where copyright has expired."
https://firefly.adobe.com/faq
(I work for Adobe)
I instantly thought of how bitchin' their library of images must be.
Can you tell us how many images/size of set?
There are also a few other more Adobe-specific restrictions.
I should have been clearer and specified sale of rights rather than licensing of a stock image in my original reply, which I now realize is confusing.
Companies certainly can offer more narrow terms/commitments about what the stock images can or cannot be used for if they want to, but economically they're incentivized to maximize their own freedom, and not to negotiate a complex bundle of rights for individual images. Of course for journalistic and artistic images that are unique in some way, the original creator can negotiate.
The contributor agreement linked from here[1] is this: [2]
"You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, fully-paid, and royalty-free license to use, reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, distribute, index, translate, and modify the Work for the purposes of operating the Website; presenting, distributing, marketing, promoting, and licensing the Work to users; developing new features and services; archiving the Work; and protecting the Work. "
I guess this would fall under the "developing new features and services".
What is funny is that "we may compensate you at our discretion as described in section 5 (Payment) below". :) I like when I may be compensated :)
And in section 5 they say: "We will pay you as described in the pricing and payment details at [...] for any sales of licenses to Work, less any cancellations, returns, and refunds."
So yeah. Sucks to the artist who signed this. They can use your work to develop new features and services, and they do not have to pay you for that at all, since it is not a sale of a license.
1: https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/submission-gu...
2: https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/service...
And in this case, to develop new features and services that specifically undercuts your existing business, viz. selling stock photos for money. Sucks to the artists, indeed.
The vast majority of copyrighted works were conceived and negotiated under conditions where ML reproduction capabilities didn't exist and nobody knew what related value they were negotiating away or buying.
For example, even a short sample used in a song usually has to be licensed. Cover versions of songs may qualify for a compulsory license with a set royalty payment scale.
However some reuse (such as transformative use, parodies, or use of snippets for various purposes, especially non-commercial purposes) may be considered fair use. AI companies could very reasonably argue that use of images for training AI models is transformative and qualifies as fair use, that no components of the original images are reused in AI-generated images, and that AI-generated images are no more infringing than human-generated images which show influences from other artists.
Absent additional law, I expect the legal system will have to sort out whether AI-generated images infringe the copyright of their training images, and if so what sort of licensing would be appropriate for AI-generated (or other software/machine-generated) images based on training data from images that are under copyright.
Though this sounds extreme, enforcing the alternative would break any last remnant of human privacy. It would kill the independent operation of computing as we know it and severely cripple AI/ML research when we need it most: human alignment.
It is possible that a catastrophic event occurs and halts the supply chain of advanced semiconductors in the near future, in which case the debate can be postponed indefinitely.
Yep. They could. And people do.
But this particular use is entirely new, though. Old conceptions of fair use can't and shouldn't cover it. "Transformative"? Sure, but there's a difference between transforming a work once and laying hold of it in automation to be transformed on request millions or billions of times in degrees ranging from simple to convoluted. It's hard to argue that the right to this exists in fair use when awareness of the possibility didn't exist when fair use conceptions were constructed.
The output isn't the issue so much as the consent & consideration for use of the input. We'll need case law or statutory law that understands this. It should be possible, but it should be possible on an opt-in basis. When you're training a model, you should know.
> AI-generated images are no more infringing than human-generated images which show influences from other artists.
If we end up with a policy differentiating the two and privileging humans and works created by them, I'm fine with that.
And on top of that, it will become a spotify where each creator gets a sum total of $0.00000000001 per AI their media item was trained on and maybe a few dollars a month, while paying a greater tax to apple-sony-disney whenever their AI style recognizers charge you a royalty bill for using whatever bullshit styles it notices in your media items.
Copyright should stay in it's 'exact duplication' box, lest we release an even worse intellectual property monster on the world.
This is a cartoon conception of both existing copyright and the proposal I described.
Copyright applies to works, not "ideas" (William Gibson doesn't have a copyright claim on the "idea" of a virtual reality but he does on _Neuromancer_ as a work). It gives creators incentives and a stake in their work by allowing for some degree of control in how works are used and especially how they're distributed.
What I'm proposing isn't that different, and it's simple:
People should be able to decide if their work is put into a training set, and what they get in return for it.
That's it. No "flavor copyrights." No ownership of ideas. Just a claim on the creator's work and how it's used/ distributed. Specifically updated to cover a case that didn't exist 10 years ago, a case whose explicit intention is reproduction of not just one narrow aspect of the work but a combinatorially large number of aspects of the work (there's no other reason for adding it to the training set, that's the nature of these models).
> it will become a spotify where each creator gets a sum total of $0.00000000001 per AI their media item was trained on
"the artists will get such a small payout so we should make sure they get nothing" is quite the take.
I think "artists should be able to negotiate what consideration they want in return for their work for a training set" is a better one. It's certainly better than "people collecting training data should be able to take anything they can get their digital hands on without any consideration other than possession." Maybe some artists would take a nanocent per use. Maybe they wouldn't. That should be up to them.
Part of the reason why services like Spotify are so terrible economically is the way digital rights were assumed by labels and streamers often as extensions of older pre-digital conceptions without much in the way of negotiation by artists. The current moment is a chance to do better across an equally large (if not larger) technological shift.
From the popular Getty Images, used by media worldwide: > When a customer uses one of your files, it may appear in advertising, marketing, apps, websites, social media, TV and film, presentations, newspapers, magazines, books, or product packaging, among many other uses.
https://www.gettyimages.com/workwithus
That is the question we are asking, yes. Based on the reading of the contributor agreement it sounds like Adobe doesn’t have to pay a cent to the creators to train models on their work.
Does that sound fair to you?
Any country that tries to forbid this will be torpedoing their economic competitiveness against countries that allow it.
I don’t see why you are asking this. Which part of my comment made you think it is preferable?
It's completely different than many (most?) other companies, which are training on data they don't have the right to re-distribute.
I think you are making a jump here. I’m not a lawyer, but your first sentence seems to be about why it is legal. And then you conclude that that is why it is also fair. I’m with you on the first one, but not sure on the second.
The creators uploaded their images so adobe can sell licences for them and they get a share of the licence fees. Just a year ago if you asked almost any people what “using the images to develop new products and services” mean they would have told you something like these examples: Adobe can use the images in internal mockups if they are developing a new ipad app to sell the licences, or perhaps a new website where you can order a t-shirt print of them.
The real test of fairness I think is to imagine what would have happened if Adobe ring the doorbell of any of the creators and asked them if they can use their images to copy their unique style to generate new images. Probably most creators would have agreed on a price. Maybe a few thousand dollars? Maybe a few million? Do you think many would have agreed to do it for zero dollars? If not, then how could that be fair?
Have you read the contributor agreement? That seems to contradict what you are saying.
Does that sound fair to you?
See how stupid that sounds?
A tool maker does not have a claim on the work made with a tool, except by (exceptionally rare) prior agreement.
Creative copyright explicitly does give creators a claim on derivative work made using their creative output.
That includes patents. If you use a computer protected by patents to create new items which specifically ignore those patents, see how far that gets you.
I expect you find this inconvenient, but it's how it works.
No actually, not for this situation. They don't if they sold the right to do that, which they did.
> except by (exceptionally rare) prior agreement
Oh ok. So then, if in situation 1, and situation 2, there is the same exact prior agreement on the specific topic of if you are allowed to make derivative works, then the situations are exactly same.
Which is the situation.
So yes, the situations are the same, because of the same prior agreement.
Thats why the situation is stupid. The creator sold the rights to make derivative works away. Just like if someone sold you a computer.
And then people used the computer, and also used the sold rights to make derivatives works for the art, because both the computer and the right to make derivative works were equally sold.
> which specifically ignore those patents
Ok now imagine someone sells the rights to use the patent in any way that they want, and then you come along and say "Well, can you considered that if the person didn't sell the patent, that this would be illegal?"
That wouldn't make any sense to say that.
Like, if you created a lovely piece of art, hung it on the outside of your house, and I was walking on the sidewalk and viewed it. I would not owe you money and you would have no claim of copyright against me.
Copyright covers copying. Not viewing.
So an AI views your art, classifies it, does whatever magic it does to turn your art into a matrix of numbers. The model doesn't contain a copy of your art.
Of course, a court needs to decide this. But I can't see how allowing an AI model to view a picture constitutes making an illegal copy.
Memory involves making a copy, and copies anywhere except in the human brain are within the scope of copyright (but may fall into exceptions like Fair Use.)
Supposing the AI said "here's the picture you asked for, btw it's influenced most by these four artists and here's links to their works on Adobe Stock"... is that better (or worse)?
When the agreement was signed no one was even able to imagine their work being used for AI. As far as they knew they were signing a standard distribution agreement with one particular rights outlet, while reserving all other rights for more general use. If anyone had asked about automated use in AI it's very likely the answer would have been a clear "No."
It's predatory and very possibly unlawful to assume the original agreement wording grants that right automatically.
The existence of contract wording does not automatically imply the validity of that wording. Contracts can always be ruled excessive, predatory, and unlawful no matter what they say or who signed them.
Maybe. Maybe not. Very clearly there is a price point where it could be worth it for the artist. Like if adobe paid more for the rights than they recon they will ever earn in a lifetime or something. But clearly everybody would have said “no” at the great price point of 0 dollars.
And that's a different question from whether or not they deserve extra compensation. Is it moral or ethical to use their work to directly undercut them via ai 'copying' their work?
Half the problems with music is because of record companies magically inventing new ways to try and extract more money from each other and their supply chain.
"Oh, your band looked at some hookers they passed on the way to the recording studio? Well, they obviously owe those hookers a cut of the royalties now for inspiration..."
Trying to use AI as an excuse to be paid a 2nd time (for previously fully paid works) seems like another attempt at rent seeking in a similar manner.
So what should adobe pay you for using the data in training? Some kind of fraction of the overall revenue they generate from the new product? The license currently used for their stock program make it seem like they don't have to pay anything at all, because this use cases wasn't understood previously. Adobe reserved to rights to do it, so legally they can - but if they want to continue getting contributions they will need to figure out some kind of updated royalty sharing agreement.
It merits investigation as to have these creators been “fully” paid to the extent that they have no claim to any future royalties and can have no objection to their work being used as training data.
Adapting what Steve Albini said at the time: If you're an artist, negotiate your future "AI training rights" separately. Make sure they're in writing. Make sure attribution rights stay yours.
The training is based on the licensing agreement for Adobe contributors for Adobe Stock.
(I work for Adobe)
But the naive approach of having a table of how much each individual training item influenced every weight in the model seems impossibly big. For DALL-E 2's 6.5B parameters and 650m training items, that's 4.2 quadrillion associations. And then you have to figure out which weights contributed the most to an output.
I would love to see any research or even just thinking that anyone's done on this topic. It seems like it will be important in the future, but it also seems like a crazy difficult scale problem as models get bigger.
If I include the tag "floor", do I get some (tiny) percentage of every image that uses "floor" in the prompt, even if the bits from my image did not end up affecting model weights much at all in training?
Worse, for tags like "dramatic lighting", it's likely that the important source images will depend on the other words in the prompt; "sunset, dramatic lighting" will probably not use the rely on the same weights or source images as "theater interior, dramatic lighting".
And then you get the perverse incentives to tag every image with every possible tag :)
I'd love to be convinced otherwise, but I'm not seeing prompt-to-tag association working.
> How can we explain the predictions of a black-box model? In this paper, we use influence functions -- a classic technique from robust statistics -- to trace a model's prediction through the learning algorithm and back to its training data, thereby identifying training points most responsible for a given prediction.
Why do you have to, though? What do you hope to trace back to exactly?
(Also, it's entirely possible that eg a model could generate images resembling your work without "seeing" any of your work and only reading a museum website describing some of it. Resemblance is in the eye of the beholder.)
Fine tuning Stable Diffusion with your own images is way easier than creating Stable Diffusion in the first place.
If you're creating your own I stand corrected and that's some serious investment.
But training your own is pretty doable if you have the budget and enough image/text pairs. Most people don't have the budget, but at least Midjourney and Google have their own models.
(i work for Adobe)
What a time to be alive.
But this phrase from GP is pretty darn salient:
>>"They are aggressively integrating it into their products which (1) provides a relatively cheap step function upgrade and (2) keeps the barrier high for startups to use AI as their wedge."
No, there is no real "hard part" to AI current. Training is simply "the expensive part".
It seems "the bitter lesson" has gone from reflection to paradigm[1] and with that as paradigm, the primary barrier to entering AI is cash for cpu cycles, other things matter but recipes is relatively simple and relatively available.
[1] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
People are already using these plugins to do inpainting etc with Stable Diffusion. Adobe is trying to provide official support simply to keep up.
To me, the most novel thing is the data source being free of licensing concerns.
But that, too, will be eroded as more models appear based on datasets with straightforward licensing for derived works.
Image stock collections (and prior deals around them) seem more valuable now than they did before all this.
And also it's something many companies have been working on for a big part of the last decade. Kevin Kelly in particular has been talking about it for at least the past 7 years. In 2016 he released a book titled "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future" and the addition of AI to everything is covered in that book.
The skeptic in me thinks it's more:
* The market is rewarding companies for doing X (integrating AI), so companies are doing X (integrating AI).
Song as old as time.
I never thought about it that way, but now that you mention it, it makes so much sense.
People seem to take offense at this idea, but the proof is in the pudding. Every week there's a new company with a new model coming out. What good did Google's "AI Talent" do for them when OpenAI leapfrogged them with only a few hundred people?
It's difficult to achieve high margins when barrier to entry is low. These AI companies are going to be moreso deflationary for society rather than high margin cash cows as the SaaS wave was
[1] https://newatlas.com/technology/stanford-alpaca-cheap-gpt/
Training an AI model, while expensive, is vastly cheaper than most large scale products.
This wave will be nothing like the SaaS wave. Hyper competitive rather than weakly-competitive/margin preserving
But yes I agree, it will be very competitive with much smaller margins.
It's too early to say how hard this is, for all we know no one but OpenAI will match it before 2024.
As pretty much everyone on HN is aware, AI is a broad term for a variety of technologies.
AI has been in our everyday lives for quite some time, but not in a way that generated (no pun intended) such buzz.
Having my iphone scan emails and pre-populate my calendar with invite suggestions is far less newsworthy as the ability to generate a script for an Avengers film where all the members are as in articulate as the Incredible Hulk.
If anything, with generative AI being so buzzy, this latest round of AI integration is more marketing.
However this landingpage looks amazing.
Any good other tips?
You don't see the value in effectively not needing any art/design skills to make aesthetically pleasing logos/mockups/memes? Even just for "playing around" - I bet there's a large market of people who want to add "fun edits" to their existing personal photo library.
Focus less on landing pages and more on the implications a technology brings. Then you'll see where things are headed.
As we speak I’m generating images of my dog as every Pokémon type (for fun) that are frankly quite a bit better than the art of most Pokémon cards.
I’ve also used it for a photo composite: https://youtu.be/c_1mRWthhek
It’s also still under beta and given the recent codex termination, I wouldn’t be surprised if they get rid of it.
That’s something I almost forgot about. This was not a forgone conclusion - there was a pretty big divide between people who thought AI would have real value and staying power and those that didnt.
Adobe had a whole bunch of smart people including Dave Abrahams helping transition to iPhone and iPad, and to build for the cloud, so I'm not sure what you're thinking here.
And no reason to suspect that it won't spectacularly backfire. Not that they're integrating (or more correctly slapping it on with some hot glue) transformative technology they barely understand into legacy products which are themselves likely to go defunct. Why even use a spreadsheet when you can get GPT-4 to write a whole data analysis pipeline and summarize everything? Or why bother with word documents when GPT-4 can generate, spell/grammar check, translate (if necessary), format and output into any format you want?
If my company already uses spreadsheets and teams of people skilled at manipulating them, it might not be very hard to convince my manager that good AI use cases (quick formatting, intelligent auto-completes, intention detection from sheet structure) could probably speed us up by 20% - but convincing management of the value of a full system re-design by comparison would likely be a very tough sell, if not viewed as an insult or sign that I'm not a team player.
Just because the future may prove these methods antiquated doesn't mean management is liable or likely to change their tune today.
That would imply these AI systems have been integrated well, which in most cases are not and I suspect the amount of work it would take to do it properly would not pay off considering the limited window available before people transition to a fully chat based system.
> but convincing management of the value of a full system re-design by comparison would likely be a very tough sell
In this case it would be convincing the management to transition to a system where you can just order around and someone/something would get the job done, which is well in their comfort zone (I'm only half joking).
My own startup is https://inventai.xyz. Subscriptions aren't ready, so you can't actually generate anything yet, just trying to move quickly.
Yes, because they are already technology companies who understand tech. In the disruptive times of the Internet, then iPhone (mobile Internet), the companies being disrupted were not tech companies, so they didn’t know how to catch up.
This time this is a massive tech improvement, but in a market already saturated by key tech power players who are in prime position to implement these improvements into their existing competitive advantage.
Companies have to get involved in this field because it's all the buzz, while everything else you said is true, this means companies have no choice to get involved.
If someone like Adobe, google etc, doesn't get into the game, they are sure going to be a lot of questions on there next investment / financial calls.
The incumbents need to keep up appearances and not look like they are behind / unaware of AI, else investors will be worried that they will simply be sidelined/replaced at some point in the future.
Wasn’t “cloud” also added to major products? Even Adobe relies on that heavily. Similarly, most big companies (including Adobe) offer an App Store app.
Didn't the incumbents come together for Android as a group?
Think Clippy, for Code... "I see you're trying to write a recursive function to compute finocacci. Would you like help?"
Or Code Reviews / Static-Code-Analysis: "Hey Visual Studio. I've written a RESTful API for my application. What do you think of the approach, architecture, and adherence to best practices? What can I do to improve it?"
Or instead of scratching your head going "why doesn't this work?", just typing that question directly into your IDE....
But it does appear that we are all doomed to spend our lives with assigned clippai’s
Dystopia. Dystopai?
To further enhance our value proposition, we will incorporate a waitlist for our own platform, adding a sense of exclusivity and generating buzz around our service. This humorous, self-referential twist will serve as a unique marketing strategy, setting us apart from competitors and attracting potential clients. Our revenue model will include a tiered subscription plan, offering various features and services at different price points to cater to a wide range of customers. With a strong focus on customer satisfaction and continuous improvement, AWMS will strive to become the go-to solution for managing AI waitlists and revolutionize the way users access and interact with AI services.
Airdrops can be very lucrative (5, 6 figures with market depth supported by VCs allowing easy conversion to cash)
Also there are people who really don't care about quality. There have always been different tiers of art: it's one thing to have clip art for a throwaway blog post (royalty free stock), it's another thing to base a marketing campaign around images (rights managed stock) because you don't to have all your competitors choose the same image.
https://cxl.com/blog/stock-photography-vs-real-photos-cant-u...
The bottom feeders will be very happy to accept the problems of A.I. art and in fact you might not have the embarrassing dogpiling problem that the above blog post describes.
I think it will decrease iteration time during an exploration phase for new artists or when you're not quite sure what you want and want to explore your idea space more quickly (and maybe even get new ideas as you iterate).
It's similar with these coding AIs. A lot of the time it's great for the "blank page" phase of a project where you have to do all the "boring" stuff out of the way. Another great example (I think it was a blog post here) where the AI recommended a method the author didn't know about that yielded a crazy performance boost.
I tried to get some help from copilot on writing a shader the other day, and it was really an amazing experience. One still needs to have a pretty deep understanding of what needs to be done to use these tools.
I imagine it's similar for writers. Maybe they want some help to reword a sentence to be more succinct, but the ideas will still come from their heads.
I can't predict if this will one day be so sophisticated that you can have it do both low level and high level "thinking" when exploring ideas, but if that day comes I don't think it will mean an end to jobs, just that some jobs will become more accessible, or that it won't be so much about nitty-gritty work and more about higher level idea-level work (which to me sound good, not bad).
Obviously there's people who enjoy the nitty gritty (as a developer, and amateur painter who does enjoythe process), and I don't think that will fully go away, just become more of a creative/artisan field maybe. Who knows, though? I may be way off, but I don't think it's as bleak as some people fear.
For instance, I'd like to make a game. But I don't have enough money to even hire an artist to help with concept art. So I don't get to the point where I can raise money off that art, and hire an artist to make game assets.
Now I can generate all the concept art I want for free, and I can raise money off of that (wallets open faster with pretty pictures than with words). What am I going to do with it? Hire artists! They will probably be better at using AI art generators than I am, and they have the skills to actually work with the generated results, unlike me.
For someone like me, I can do a lot, but not everything. I've managed to get my own project to a stage where I had felt I would have to bring on more people to advance it much further. But I had lacked the funds to do so, and it's hard to get people to do things for free when they don't believe in it. It's also hard to get people to believe in something without seeing it. My project was very likely.
So that's where tools like stable diffusion and chatgpt come in. I'm now suddenly unstuck; I have a cheap tool to do work I wasn't capable of before, so I can now take the project further than I could have otherwise. Whereas before I might have abandoned it, now I can take it further and maybe get it to the point where I can hire people. The question now is: how many projects are now going to take off? Is there funding out there for them? Can they hire more artists than are displaced?
I guess a better way to rephrase that: would it make them more profitable to produce more art? Or to keep producing the same amount but paying fewer people to do so?
Honestly, I'm an artist myself. I'm competent enough to be reposted and plagiarized (to my amusement) in places, and I have influenced people with my designs or style, even unwillingly. I mean, I can say anything on the internets, but I've been through all of the "artist's phases of grief" and nobody can take that from me.
Let's humor this thought for the sake of discussion: What if, maybe, just maybe, the artists that get replaced by an stable diffusion instance...deserve to be replaced?
People keeps talking business and not enough people is talking about ART. Something which is baffling to me as an artist. A lot of artists have a lot of technical skill obtained through grinding (and learning from others) but have zero passion to improve further or have any real distinctive traits to stand out. It's double baffling coming from places such as Hacker News, where a majority, being tech workers, know that you need to keep improving and recycling yourself to stay relevant to employers. We know that pressure very well. You think art is not a competitive field? Every day 10 people can just pop out of nowhere to compete in your niche and take your audience away, with a much lower barrier of entry. That other person just needs their art to look good, no need for qualifications. Some people are just gifted, too.
If your art stagnates and all you do is sexy ladies for overblown prices, then, yes, you failed to keep up and someone else will replace you. If it was not the AI, it would have been another human being, as always.
Besides, corporate entities usually use custom photographs with photogenic actors, carefully staged for maximum engagement, or generic, parametric, inclusive-yet-bland art in the lines of Alegria. The whole notion of megacorps purposely stealing from indie artists (when their models are usually curated, or going to have to be curated for maximum advertiser friendliness, and a lot of indies draw cheesecake because it's what people commissions...) paints a pretty tale of David vs Goliath, but it's completely absurd in practice. And the risk of some random dude "stealing" your style has existed always.
The AI can have pretty dark uses in the wrong hands, but a lot of the situations described say more about the lack of passion or excess of ego of the one crying foul, than actual reality. And, take it from an artist, we do have an issue with inflated egos. All of this sounds to me like a huge case of "Do not steal", when making it into any huge training set in any significant capacity should be a badge of honor to wear. If even The Algorithm© recognizes the value of your art then you are already pretty well established anyway. I really can't wrap my head around the strange perspective of other artists.
People should really put all those strong emotions onto the canvas instead of internet kerfuffles, is what I'm saying.
Although in this case, it’s an adobe product, the only people who will use it are artists.
Because if they stifle this is will basically cement China is the world's AI powerhouse who will give zero shits about copyright.
This is gonna be interesting times for copyright because this is the first time copyrighted works are actually useful in building tools. I think it's a very neat real-world example of how universities are actually right to make engineers take humanities courses because your code writing AI is actually better for having read Vonnegut.
A Rule by the Copyright Office, Library of Congress on 03/16/2023 ```
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...
As is, landscape photographers for example, control camera angle, timing of photograph, camera type, lens type, etc — but they rarely create the landscape itself or for that matter the equipment and related technologies.
Even “found object” art is covered by copyright:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object
At this point, to me, it’s unclear author of that ruling even understands technology used to create the outputs that were the subject of that ruling.
1. Are the AI systems violating the copyright protections of the images they were trained on? If so, are users of such AI systems also in violation of those copyrights when they create works derived from those training images?
Answer: That's not yet settled.
2. If you make an image with an AI system, is your new image eligible for copyright protection, or is it ineligible due to the "human authorship requirement"?
Answer: The US Copyright Office recently wrote[1] that your work is eligible for copyright if you altered it afterwards in a meaningful way. Here's a quote:
>When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.
>In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection.
[1]: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35247377
Will say that post you linked to also states, “17 U.S.C. 101 (definition of “compilation”). In the case of a compilation including AI-generated material, the computer-generated material will not be protected outside of the compilation.” — the problem is that unlike say for example a compilation of recipes, where the individual recipes are not protected, but the compilation is, there is no clear delineation within a singular work of art such delineation. As such, injecting such delineations is counterproductive and shows no understanding of the nature and spirit of the rule of law. Further, while their opinion appears to be a prompt is somehow a recipe and not a novel expression that merits copyright, clearly photographs of the output of a recipes are commonly photographed and given copyright protection.
Sure others have made far more compelling arguments against the ruling, but to me, the ruling lacks merit as is.
Is it not? Does typing in 'cat' in SD, as millions of people will, count as novel expression?
First, a picture taken of the Mona Lisa is only covered by copyright if it contains additional human creativity. Now, the bar for that is very low, and in practice many people don't challenge that copyright very often. But a perfect recreation of the Mona Lisa with a camera is not covered by copyright. You need human creativity as part of the process, and merely taking a picture is not enough on its own. There's actual case-law on the books about this[0].
Second, the additional creativity protects the photo, not the original picture itself. So in the most recent case with AI images used in a book, that additional creativity protected the book and the arrangement of those images, but it did not protect the images themselves -- in other words, entirely consistent with a photograph of the Mona Lisa.
To analogize that to AI art, it would absolutely be the case that doing additional modifications on an AI image would make the resulting image eligible for copyright. It would not make the base image spit out by the AI eligible for copyright, only the derivative work.
Where prompts are concerned, the US has argued that some prompts would be eligible for some kind of IP protection on their own. But a prompt that doesn't meet copyright muster on its own would not be eligible, and the same rules apply to photography.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....
People keep bringing up photographs, I think the better analogy is commissions. And in fact, the copyright office points towards commissions in its explanation of its policy.
Under current copyright law, if I work with an artist to produce a commission by giving that artist repeated prompts, pointing out areas in the image I'd like changed, etc... I don't have any claim of copyright on the artist's final product unless they sign that copyright over to me. My artist "prompts" are not treated as creative input for the purpose of copyright.
I would love to hear an argument for why prompting stable diffusion should grant copyright over the final image, but prompting a human being doesn't grant copyright over the final image. Directing an artist is just as much work as directing an AI, and in many ways will put you much closer to the creative process and will give you more control over the final product. You can direct an artist in much more specific detail than you can direct stable diffusion. You can be a lot more involved in the creative process with a human artist. And just like with an AI, if you take that artist's final drawing and do your own work on top of it, you can still end up with something that's covered by copyright.
But despite that, we've never assumed you intrinsically get any copyright claim over the artist's final picture that they give you.
So the "prompt as a recipe" analogy seems to hold up pretty well for both AI generators and human "generators". All of the same questions and tests seem to apply to both scenarios, which makes me feel like the copyright office's conclusion is pretty reasonable: prompt-generated art isn't copyrightable, but prompts may be protected in some way, and of course additional modifications can still be covered.
Yes, there's grey area, but no more grey area than already exists in commissioning, and the creative industry has been just fine with those grey areas in commissioning for a long time; they haven't been that big of a deal.
The fact that you are describing it to a human isn't materially different from the fact that you're describing it to an AI. I mean, heck, this has been the exact argument people have used about why it's OK to train an AI on copyrighted material -- that it's just like a human "learning" from the image. And now comparisons with a human aren't allowed? You can't have it both ways, you can't argue that a generative AI isn't any materially different from a human when it's imitating or learning from a work, but that using that AI suddenly puts the prompter in a completely brand new category of copyright. :)
And we're really talking about the prompter here, not the AI. Focusing specifically on the prompter, what precedent do we have in copyright law that describing the image you want created is a creative act? None, as far as I can see. And we have a ton of precedent that it's not a creative act, ie the entire history of copyright policy around prompting/directing. Nobody argues that directing a creative process means you inherently get copyright over the result.
Copyright law treats "involved a human" vs. "involved a machine" as fundamentally different just because humans are special-cased, not due to any deeper reason. Just by fiat.
The law gives special consideration to humans "just because". Therefore, if one situation involves a human in a particular role and another situation involves a machine, then there is no useful analogy to be drawn -- as far as the law is concerned. Even if the analogy makes perfect sense to you and me, the law treats humans and machines as fundamentally different, so all bets are off.
When prompting a human being, that human makes the image, so that human gets the copyright. When prompting an AI, no human makes the image, so no human gets the copyright. But in both cases, the prompter doesn't.
We've never treated writing a description of what to draw or providing iterative feedback on an image as an act that grants someone copyright over that image.
It will be interesting to watch the entire Hollywood and associated creative industries lose control to AI. Entire movies will be created in small basements. Same with AAA video games.
Gamedev example: If NPCs lines can be generated quickly, maybe it's possible to develop open world games that change their character throughout the game.
Way to often addons and expansions are carefully cordoned off from the main game because no one wants to redo all that work.
I would love to collect a group of human and NPC players and attempt a heist from an actually intelligent dragon in an environment where no action was guardrailed
Encounter creatures and cultures with no documentation but what you learn my interacting with them
And with beautiful scenery to boot
I was thinking of enhancing existing capabilities to develop open world games of smaller teams or to buff out a main storyline with "world chatter".
This would act as a multiplier for writers to better use the available budget/time. Sure it may not write a brilliant and engaging story (without human editing) but given the "lore" of a village and it's geographical/political position in the world I can definitely see it being useful to "set the tone" of otherwise generic background NPCs.
PS: Maybe this is me trying to find use cases for current LLMs (with their known capabilities and weaknesses) that don't involve dismissing them out of hand or "the singularity".
Who dreamed of cleaning bathrooms or flipping burgers? Too bad, that's still done by manual humans.
But who dreamed of being an artist or a writer? Great, we've figured out how to replace you with a generative algorithm!
For comparison, despite making professional music is even easier (a copy of Ableton Live Lite and a few hours of studio recording for the vocals makes for less than 300$) every single music chart is still dominated by music made by corporations (Universal Sony / Time Warner, mainly).
On the other hand, music is less valuable than ever. From 20$/unit (the price of a CD) to 0.0004c for stream. Or you get lucky and somehow someone buys your music during bandcamp friday.
Just a subset of Musicians are still around because they're famous enough to get an audience for their tours and/or dj sets. Visual artists have nothing comparable to sustain themselves.
Photoshop is used to produce a ton of porn, but Adobe doesn’t try to stop that.
In terms of “safety”, models Photoshopped to impossible standards have helped create impossible beauty standards causing depression and even life threatening eating disorders in teenage girls.
Yet, Adobe and all the others will carefully censor the output of these generative models.
I suspect the example they used might have been cherry-picked
Adobe does have a legal edge here, which is interesting and perhaps actually worth a subscription if needed.
But also, even if they double the price at some point, it'd still be cheap enough for this to apply.
The us copyright office has made it clear that elements of designs that lack human authorship cannot be copyrighted. A prompt is not enough - the same way if you provided a prompt to an artist while commissioning a work does not grant you copyright to that work. The results (including specific elements) of these ai models cannot be copyrighted which has extreme implications to commerical art in general. If you have your ai models come up with a character you cannot claim copyright of that character. If your ai models comes up with a composition you cannot claim copyright on that composition.
If you use the ai to generate an idea and then have a human develop the idea, the elements of the design that the ai came up with cannot be copyrighted because they lack human authorship.
Commercial operations that care about ip beware.
AI generated content is about to sprint so far ahead of the existing legal framework that something will just have to give.
using ml is already powerful and fast. protecting ideas from mass corporate ownership so that your grandchildren will be allowed to think freely is more important than chat gpt or stable diffusion or whatever algorithm replaces them next week.
I did that once. Never again. What a shit company. Cancelling the subscription was a total drag. Fuck you Adobe, I hope you go bankrupt sooner rather than later.
Substance Designer used to have a platform called substance share where anyone could share and open source knowledge of complex parametric textures for free to anyone with a substance account, obviously the first draft for how Adobe would get the money back from their purchase is to monetize the entire learning processes by shutting down that website and adding pay walls to near every single interaction to even learn the software, it is just so horribly shortsighted and these ideas can only be approved and implemented by sheer rentiers managers
Open source creative alternatives have a even harder time (Blender, inkscape, krita, Gnu Image Manipulation Program)...
Since Adobe lack of Linux support holds it back significantly with creatives, this makes opens source more of a challenge.
https://firefly.adobe.com/
Is anyone aware of any similar open source or services that handle text-to-vector generative AI?
I think I used one...maybe Kittl or Illustroke. Not FOSS though. In the FOSS world there are some really brilliant tools like potrace at the very least. That one is still built into Inkscape, I believe.
> trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock, along with openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired
> We do not train on any Creative Cloud subscribers’ personal content. For Adobe Stock contributors, the content is part of the Firefly training dataset, in accordance with Stock Contributor license agreements. The first model did not train on Behance.
Not sure what "first model" means there.
Also interesting: https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/firefly-faq-f...
> During the beta phase of Adobe Firefly, any Adobe Firefly generated assets cannot be used for commercial purposes.
> Can I opt [my Adobe Stock content] of the dataset training?
> No, there is no option to opt-out of data set training for content submitted to Stock. However, Adobe is continuing to explore the possibility of an opt-out.
Yes you are allowed to read closed-source, proprietary code and become a better programmer for it.
I've decompiled games to learn how they structure their code to improve the structure of games that I program. I had no right to that code and I used it to become a better programmer just like AI do.
That's not copyright infringement. You have a right to stop me from using your code, not learning from it.
So, yes: They have a right to stop you from "learning" from their code. If you want that right, see if they're willing to sell that right to you.
They absolutely do not, and as pedantic as it may be I think it's very important that you and everyone else in this thread know what their rights are.
If you sign a contract / EULA that says you cannot decompile someone's code than yes you are liable for any damages promised in that contract for violating it.
But who says that I ever signed a EULA for the games I decompiled? Who says I didn't find a copy on a hard drive I bought at a yard sale or someone sent me the decompiled binary themselves?
Those people may have violated the contract but I did not.
There is no law preventing you from learning from code, art, film or any other copyrighted media. Nor is there any law (or should there be any law IMO) that stops an AI from learning from copyrighted media.
Learning from each other regardless of intellectual property law is how the human race advances itself. The fact that we've managed to that automate human progress is incredible, and it's very good that our laws are the way they are that we can allow that to happen.
I asked if I can learn from that code, which obviously I can. There is no license that says "You cannot learn from this code and take the things you learn to become a better programmer".
That's exactly what I do and it's exactly what AI do.
But fundamentally the problem is copyright, the copying of existing IP, not knowledge. grondo4 is completely correct that there is no legal framework that prevents learning from closed-source IP.
If such a framework existed, clean room design would not work. The initial spec-writers in a clean room design are reading the protected work.
Right. And they're only exposing elements presumably not covered by copyright to the developers writing the code. (Of course, this assumes they had legitimate access to the code in the first place.)
Clean room design isn't a requirement in the case of, say, writing a BIOS which may have been when this first came up. But it's a lot easier to defend against a copyright claim when it's documented that the people who wrote the code never saw the original.
Unlike with patents, independent creation isn't a copyright violation.
What are you contesting?
Did you actually read the link you were given? Clean room design is because you may inadvertently plagiarize copyrighted works from your memory of reading it.
i.e. the act of reading may cause accidental infringement when implementing the "things you learn"
You're describing thought crime right now. It's not illegal to learn things.
That's completely different from reading and learning from code, which is what grondo described.
Clean room design relies on this, in a clean room design you have one party read and describe the protected work, and another party implement it. That first party reading the protected work is learning from closed-source IP.
AI (e.g. copilot) has already been shown to break copyright of material in its training set. Thats the context of this whole thread.
If an AI infringes on copyright then it infringes on copyright, that's unfortunate for the distributors of that code.
Humans accidentally infringe on copyright sometimes too. It's not a unique problem to machine learning. The potential to infringe on copyright has not made observing/learning/watching/reading copyright materials prohibited for humans, nor should it or (likely) will it become prohibited for machine learning algorithms.
Grondo said that AI should be given access to all code, including private and unlicensed code.
He was given a link to Clean Room Design demonstrating the problem with the same entity (the AI) reading and learning from the existing code and the risk of regurgitation when writing new code.
He goes on to say thats what he does, which doesn't change that fact.
> Humans accidentally infringe on copyright sometimes too.
Indeed we do, and its almost entirely unnoticed, even by the author.
> nor should it or (likely) will it become illegal for machine learning algorithms.
If those machine learning algorithms are taking in unlicensed material and then they later output unlicensed and/or copyrighted material, then they are a liability. Why would you want that when you can train it otherwise and be sure it NEVER infringes others IP? Its a no-brainer, surely. Or are you assuming there is some magic inherent in other peoples private code?
Because it could produce a better model that produces better code.
You're now arguing a heavily reduced point. That a model that trained on proprietary code is at higher risk of reproducing infringing code is not a point under contention. The clean room serves the same purpose, it is a risk mitigation strategy.
Risk mitigation is a choice, left up to individuals. Maybe you use a clean room design, maybe you don't. Maybe you use a model trained on closed-source IP, maybe you don't. There are risks associated with these choices, but that is up to individuals to make.
The choice to observe closed source IP and learn from it shouldn't be prohibited just because some won't want to assume that risk.
Surely you know this isn't the case right? Maybe you're confused because we're talking about programming and not a different creative artform?
Great artists read, watch and consume copyrighted works of art all day, if they didn't they wouldn't be great artists. And yet the content they produce is entirely there own, free from the copyright of the works they learned from.
What's the difference then in programming? Why can an artist be trusted not to reproduce the copyrighted works that they learned from but not the programmer?
Every author reads books
Every painter view paintings
Unless you're arguing that every single artist across every field of artistic expression is constantly being jeopardized by claims of copyright infringement, this is a nonsensical point to make.
They cant. which is why that quote "Good artists copy, great artists steal" exists.
AI has already been shown to be "accidentally" reproducing copyrighted work. You too, can do the same.
Its likely no-one (including yourself) will ever be aware of it - but strictly speaking it would still be copyright infringement. This is the relevance and context of the link you were given.
Did you acquire it illegally? That's illegal.
Was it publicly available? That's fine, so long as you aren't producing exact copies and violate normal copyright law.
Once we have adopted the attitude that we can just copy as we please without attribution, it would be much more difficult to find motivated artists, and we would have failed as a society.
Your argument is based on the idea that you and AI should have the same rights?
I do not see how this works unless AI going to be entitled to minimum wage and paid leave?
Otherwise it is just a money grab
I’m pretty sure that would be a death knell for art. Where are these mythical artists who have never looked at anyone else’s art?
Those people got in trouble for recreating specific works, or creating new works in his style and defrauding people by saying they were originals. Safe to say that not disclosing "this is not actually a work created by <artist>, just in their style" would be grounds for fraud, especially if you were to sell it.
It's about actually being able to use that content legally (and commercially) that matters to most in this conversation.
I am catastrophically unhappy at the prospect of a corporation ingesting a copy of my work and stuffing it into a for-profit machine without my permission. If my work ends up significantly influencing a generated image you love, nobody will ever know. You will never become a fan of my work through this. You will never contribute to my Patreon. You will never run into me at a convention and tell me how influential my work was to something in your life. Instead, the corporation will get another few pennies, and that is all.
Also, if anything, being included in a training set means you are already notorious. The big ones are usually trained on stock art or famous professionals/classics, and the ones trained by random people are going to use quality filters to get the best images of a specific subject. If you aren't already notorious, you simply will not make it into a set. The other possible motivation is spite, but that'll only happen if you participate in internet slapfights.
And...Patreon? Fans? Influence? "younger PRO" (so a non-pro doesn't count even if they are trying their best?) I sincerely recommend you choose sentences more carefully. Makes you sound phony and using art as a social strategy. When there's so much talk about art and its "soul" you really don't want to make yourself sound like art is a mere means to an end or you risk making the cold, calculating machine seem "purer".
Personally, art should be its own goal. I had plenty of time to stomach one isn't entitled to anything just because effort, so I just want to make my art better. And saves me from the trouble of chasing trends to stay relevant.
companies stealing your work isn't a thing that just happened to become possible because AI can make it easier to imitate. The real world scenario is much rather: _they just steal your existing work_
ever since I've been publishing my own illustrations I've always ran an image search on the stuff I've got on my homepage once or twice a year, and almost every time i did this I've found multiple individuals or companies who just used my illustrations for something without ever contacting me.
On the other hand, if my style was ever to become known and sought after enough for people prompting AIs with my name, I'm pretty confident that this would mean that:
A) I've grown big enough to have more inquiries than i could serve anyway and
B) The ones doing this are neither people or companies I'd liked to have as clients, nor would they have booked my services for the price I ask if it weren't for AI.
Big agencies with interesting clients couldn't allow themselves to risk their reputation with faking original work, and other large corporations that just don't give a fuck because they are ready to litigate if i challenge their usage are likely to have such reach that they'll end up still contributing to the desirability of my original artwork if they appropriate it. And the smaller ones, they fulfill premise B) on the one hand and would also feed the hype.
So I truly feel what actually bothers you, forever I've been drawing first and foremost because i want to inspire people to express themselves and make experience the same experiences I've had when loosing myself in a drawing. And i do think the bittersweetness of imaging AI remains that while some people will gain the confidence to DO try to express themselves creatively, others will at the same time never want to seek achieving this by their own physical skill and raw will.
But when it comes to myself and my art, I actually see only benefit and progression, regardless of what current dystopic scenarios might manifest :)
It could just mean AI can imitate above a certain "good enough" level the kind of style you and others working in a similar vain do (say "whimsical children illustrations") and all other styles besides, so once-would-have-been-customers now just use some AI stuff with a generic prompt.
In other words, AI aet doesn't have to request your specific name to affect you. It's enough that it provides art for many/most gigs that would now go to a human illustrator.
It would be hard to see just "good developments" when paying gigs dry out.
Most customers currently paying an artist will just slap some quick AI stuff and call it a day.
Big customers might still make it a matter of prestige or pride or "quality" differentiator to use "real human art" from some famous graphic designers, but that is like 1/1000 of the commercial gigs going on today.
We are making huge steps to promoting ourselves in last decades.
I think this is incredibly cool technology, but using other people's property without their consent is stealing (I'm not talking about legality, but morality here).
The second reason why it's not the same is that people can't look at X million pictures and become proficient in thousands of different art styles. So, again its not legality but more about ethics.
I guess different people have lower moral standards than others, and that's always been part of the human condition.
With all that out of the way, I think artists won't get replaced, because these tools don't really produce anything... Substantial on their own. An artist still needs to compose them to tell a story. So, all this nonsense about how it will replace artists is misguided. It can only replace some parts of an artist's workflow.
I know there was an art competition where someone won with a piece that was AI-aided, but honestly it looked like colour sludge. The only thing that was really well executed in it was the drama created by the contrast from sharp changes in values near the centre of that work, and something vaguely resembling a humanoid silhouette against it. You could've called it abstract art if you squinted.
Do you think ChatGPT should not be allowed to read books and join ideas across them without paying the original authors for their contribution to the thought?
I have a bit of cognitive dissonance on the subject of blog posts or articles in general, since those are kinda public domain? But I still think it should be opt in/out-able.
I realise I'm also a bit of a hypocrite since I've enjoyed playing with these AI tools myself, and I realise they'd be nowhere as cool if they didn't have access to such large datasets.
In order for blog posts (or other written works) to be in the public domain, authors must explicitly waive those rights. But, not that it needs saying, copyright's applicability in training data is basically the entire subject of debate right now. https://creativecommons.org/2023/02/17/fair-use-training-gen...
So my assumption was that anything trained on it will just help further expand that knowledge.
Although I do realise now as I'm typing this—AI could diminish their audience, clout and motivation, which isn't what I'd want.
If you don't like it, don't sign the contract.
Yeah, I think Adobe is a publisher and as such, you give it distribution rights. So, I agree with you on this case.
Slightly tangential, but Imagine a singer or actor's voice of face being used without their consent just because the publisher has rights to distribute their performance. That probably wouldn't fly very well, and I assume this doesn't fly with some artists either (even though they signed a contract).
I assume publishers will probably have an AI consent form soon.
It's all very exciting, and I hope we don't ruin it with greed and disregard for the works of the very people that made these technologies so successful. Like, if it weren't for the scraped works, the AI feats would've been both much more underwhelming and and much more expensive to train.
Instead of lower morality, I'd say it's selective morality.
I bet quite a few artists (rightfully) feeling threatened by this phenomenon would have absolutely no problem watching a pirated movie, using an ad blocker, read paywall-stripped articles, the like....whilst this is principally the same thing: taking the work of others without consent or compensation.
Are you saying all those art styles are original? They are not. Artists influence artists. Sometimes the influence is strong, other times just a glimmer.
Perhaps the burden of responsibility shouldn't be on Ai machine learning, but the human prompt author who chooses the instruction: "...in the style of Jo Blow". Who owns the ethical dilemma in that case? Who is being unfair to Jo Blow in that case? I'm quite certain whoever wrote the prompt is 100% responsible.
I could be wrong, but you seem to imply originality is a made up concept? Do original thoughts even exist?
Are our comments original or just regurgitation?
Do you believe nothing ever created throughout history is original then?
If you believe originality does exist, where and how do you draw the line?
I don't think people are as boring as you think they are. Or maybe you just don't appreciate art. I can't tell. Some people say they do, but they really don't.
And further, even if we do ignore originality as a concept and pretend for the sake of the argument it doesn't exist, someone still values that style or approach to creation. That probably makes a living based on the subjective value it brings to the table. They sold their work. An AI company now profits off of their work, having used it in an algorithm, without paying anything to those artists.
As an experiment: Give me an example of something you've made yourself that you valued enough to sell, and then tell me why I deserve to have it for free. Maybe that will help me understand. Maybe you can work for me for free?
If none of their work was original or valuable, why even train on it, and why can you even ask for "in style of X"?
Also, the approach of waving responsibility onto individuals is too naïve. If that worked, we'd not need laws or any type of regulation.
Anyway, even with this diatribe I still don't think AI is a bad thing or that it will replace people or or their work—in its current iteration at least. It'll probably improve it, but I certainly understand why people feel violated.
The keyword you missed is "style". Your word, that I quoted.
As in, "the style of that artist". I wasn't referring to individual pieces of original art.
"Black and white street photography, gritty contrast, low wide angles, urban decay, weathered characters"... could be a style shared by many, that Ai learns.
Nobody owns a "style". A style is merely a convenient way to describe art. It belongs to the art critic more than the artist.
Many have made art in the style of say Andy Warhol - minimal flat colors, mass produced product imagery. Or surrealist styles, "like Dali", with dreamscapes, imaginary landscapes, twisted architecture and optical illusions. Things Ai can learn without being accused of stealing. Unless you're arguing a kind of "theft of humanity".
> Also, the approach of waving responsibility onto individuals is too naïve.
You want others to take responsibility for your actions?
Prompt: "image like Jon Doe's fantasy illustrations"... Prompting with intent. That's on you, not others to regulate your adult choices.
Before Ai, you could hire an artist to help you learn the style of another artist, living or dead. Maybe a drawing style you like. So you hire a skilled artist to point you in the right direction for acquiring a similar result with the pencil. Nothing ethically unsound there. Ai just skips the lessons and time it takes you to draw in the style of your favourite artist. Nothing has been stolen.
Sorry I miss-interpreted a little.
I guess we disagree on what style means maybe:
> Black and white street photography, gritty contrast, low wide angles, urban decay, weathered characters"... could be a style shared by many, that Ai learns.
I still think there's a lot more individual flavour in art that can't be captured with words.
You described a specific art style in your example, and within that there's probably a plethora that fit that description roughly, but there's often a unique signature every artists brings to the table through different application and mixture of those "sub styles" and techniques.
You can try to reduce Matt Inman's (Oatmeal) style to "line art, blobs for humans, vivid colours, absurdist face expressions, comic" etc, and spend ages explaining to an AI to steal the style, and it wouldn't get it probably, but just slapping "in style of Oatmeal" would probably get you very close.
Similar for xkcd, Oglaf, specific anime styles, concept artists (often time this is what gets them hired). They all have a flavour of style that's unique to them even if they use similar approaches and techniques. All manga or anime is in the similar vein of line art, but Miyazaki Hayao is indisputably Hayao; any fan of anime will recognise his style immediately. If this weren't true, nobody would be putting "in style of X", they'd just be saying "{generic technique}" instead.
Listing the individual composition of technique won't really get you close to how they work, but saying "in style of X" gets you crazy close.
You bring up a bunch of dead and famous artists, but ignore the fact that their styles can only be mimiced because they were studied. And they can only be mimced by someone with enough knowledge the theory behind the techniques composed to achieve the style, and the skills they spent years building to to execute it.
> You want others to take responsibility for your actions?
No, but the problem is that currently nobody is being held responsible. Not the model devs for using works without consent, nor the actors benefitting from it. For example, Fiverr is currently flooded with AI scam artists who get away with saying "in style of X" without even having a basic comprehension or intuition what that style is composed off, much less be able to describe the style intelligently. Everyone's turning a blind eye, artists are protesting, and people there's people saying "yes, this is the way it's meant to be".
You can't expect everyone to have the same moral standards as you do. If it's you create a tool and put it into the world, people will use/abuse it. That's just the way it is.
Who should be responsible? Like I agree with you that the profiteers abusing this "in style of X" are much worse and bigger assholes than the people developing the models, but nonconsensual use of someone else's work without their consent, or without any way to prevent abuse of that content (eg by properly anonymising the training data, at the very least) is also bad. The devs didn't even pay a one-time fee to the artists to use their work; which is IMO the rock bottom expectations of decency. They just paid to get the training set, which was probably collated through some scummy ToS loophole.
So they're eating the market of someone who spent a lot of time developing a unique style. Can these artists use the tools? Yeah, and I hope they do, but I still think it's a bit ludicrous how easy it is for me (or anyone else) to mimic a style someone spent years building, with a few words. And that's "thanks" to that artist tryi...
> "indisputably Hayao; any fan of anime will recognise his style immediately"
No they wouldn't. If you're talking about a still frame, nobody can be certain who the artist is. Why? Because LOTS of artists make similar work. You think there's an indisputable signature in every drawing from every artist? There really isn't.
There may be an obvious signature, such as placing an "upside down umbrella" in every piece they make. But the Ai won't copy the umbrella, because that would be replicating the work rather than style.
There are books about Miyazaki's style, authored by him that go into detail and share everything from concept sketches to the use of computer graphics in his films. It's all there in the books he wrote explaining and SHARING his techniques with the world. But what he can't share, and what can't be replicated with prompts, is the brilliance of the storytelling that threads the vast body of visual work to create the whole.
> unique style
Again, you're claiming an artist's style is unique, when in fact the vast majority of "styles" are blends of other styles and influences. No artist was born in a bubble.
Even if there is a unique visual signature, so what? It's not the heart of the work. It's a preferential technical characteristic.
Not only that, but this world is saturated with images. Even in music, it's difficult to come up with an original riff that doesn't sound like an existing song. The musician, in order to be awarded "originality", needs to use the full 3 minutes of the song to involve lyrics and other elements before something truly "unique" emerges.
You think there's an infinite bucket of "styles" visual artists can tap into? There isn't.
Content choices and narrative choices are more important anyway. For example, the artist may have something to say about humans being cogs in the machine. Sounds interesting. Such concepts form part of the style and reputation of the artist. People follow artists largely because of their artistic substance.
You're too focused on visual technique. The guts of any good artwork is the whole package, including the symbolism and balance of meaning in the work.
What is the artist SAYING with the work. Ai won't help prompters with quality of symbolic meaning, concepts and interlinking symbolism, subtext, balance of imagery, subtle visual tension... all the things that make ART ART -- the ESSENCE of art is found in the body of work.
So... Ai can generate a sci-fi robot running through the city, and your concern is this impedes the profit margin of real artists pumping out the same generic stuff? Sorry, but I won't shed a tear for the loss of artistic mediocrity in a world saturated with stock images.
Artists are adaptable, and should be doing a lot more than selling robot images to stock art collections anyway. Time to level up. Nothing wrong with Ai keeping us on our toes.
I think the only part we maybe disagree is on the importance of style as a form of expression. I think style is a big part of it (or mixture of styles). To me, there was a style-space where each technique is a dimension (kinda like a colourspace), you can position yourself anywhere within that space. And I think that the choice of that position matters to artists a lot. It doesn't matter _for_ the artist, but it matters _to_ the artist. They could've spent a long time searching the style space to find their own individual style, and it's a part of their art. Maybe thinking about styles mathematically here is a mistake here?
To me it feels unfair their efforts to build this style is being treated dismissively by some. I don't think you yourself treat it dismissively, since you seem to appreciate art too. But I don't think every employer in need of art will see it like that.
Also, I as I read your reply and thought about the topic a bit and you partially changed my mind:
I believe established artists won't be impacted by this, but I fear that certain entry-level positions in some industries will be jeopardised by AI. I'm not even sure why I think this. Maybe it's no more than a hunch based on what I've seen happening to people in entry positions already being treated like throwaways in film and game industry.
An alternative and more optimistic way to look at it would be that entry-level positions will evolve to be more quality/fulfilling work. I hope that's what happens, then.
I also think it's hard to sufficiently develop in any field if you don't do some of the "grunt work" too. I guess I'm not a trained nor is art my career (just a self-taught hobby). So, maybe the exploration and development of styles isn't as big of a deal as I make it out to be for day-to-day artists. Maybe they do the grunt work in art school?
You mentioned mediocre art and stock images. I know what you mean, but I also think that's just a phase lot of people go through. Nobody is born a great artist (or anything else), they become it. People need to start somewhere.
I think it's all very complicated... This is somewhat tangentially related (which I think was the real thing that sent me down this spiral, more than anything else): I wish the artists' wishes about their works were treated with more respect by the people training the models, since I think it's difficult to expect every user of the tool to do the same. Or allow them to opt in and be compensated for their works.
Anyway, thank you for indulging me in this long thread! :)
If they can properly compensate the stock contributors based on usage then I think this is a very fair approach.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/photoshop/comments/11xgft4/discussi...
I dont have any confidence they can create a fair compensation method.
I hope it's fair to say that they do train on your work.
>The insights obtained through content analysis will not be used to re-create your content or lead to identifying any personal information.
https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learnin...
I hope you do continue doing so. I'm all but disappointed in others' approaches in this area, and it paints a very bad image for the potential of AI as tools.
As someone who has contributed stock to Adobe Stock I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm sure they have language in their TOS that covers this, but I'm guessing all contributors will see nothing out of this. Fine if this is free forever, but this is Adobe.