I agree with that aspect of it, the democratization of individual artist's styles is okay and probably good for art. I think it's more the stuff said like:
> all you have to do is just use those scraped datasets and then conveniently forget what you used to train the model. Boom legal problems solved forever
showing that they plan to do this without any intention of attributing or fairly reimbursing the artists who's 'styles' (IP) they are localizing (and profiting off)
It’s good for art, conditional on the fact that artists get paid. Obviously, more recognition is always better as long as it is compensated appropriately. Maybe democratisation was the wrong word; makes it seem like it should be ‘free’
Many people in the world don't have access to a pencil and paper, and may not possess the will or motivation to spend many hours studying a difficult skill.
> may not possess the will or motivation to spend many hours studying a difficult skill.
The cruel tyranny of “not doing a thing because I don’t want to do it” rears its ugly head once again. Why isn’t everyone more concerned about all of the things I could do but don’t want to?? It is the ultimate disadvantage!
For instance, Nintendo has entries in the artist DB - those affected by Japanese law may care:
> Japan’s new guidelines also sketch out pathways to protect artists’ work, but the legalities can quickly get dense. An aggrieved artist will have to prove that a commercially sold, AI-generated piece of art has “similarity” with their own work.
> “If a company isn’t careful, artists can sue or demand compensation if their work is used to create parts of commercial products.”
They can show the work’s “reliance on an existing image,” according to Taichi Kakinuma, an AI-focused partner at the law firm Storia. The fastest way to prove this is with evidence that the work was used as training data. But since training data sets are not publicly disclosed, they may have no knowledge of its use, let alone be able to secure evidence
Sounds like propoyed laws crafted by those in power clinging desperately to their control in fear of becoming opsolete. At the end of the day, there is no theft, no matter the pearl clutching moral outrage by those who want to keep some false artificial scarcity for their benefit.
Governments around the world have enforced artificial scarcity for centuries. Continuing to do so would be nothing new.
It takes resources and time to produce something unique that people want. For centuries governments have offered patents, licenses and protections for individuals so that people would continue to innovate, create something new and move the world forward. Will people continue to do so knowing that at a moments notice someone will rip you off?
Time will tell but for me personally I stopped publishing my side projects because why should I work hard for hundreds of hours just so Microsoft and AI companies can make more money using my work without giving me an ounce of credit?
Copyright came into being because of the printing press making things to easy to replicate.
If the current laws don’t protect works sufficiently history says more laws will be written that do rather than things will be a free for all.
Don't really care about comercial products like midjourney. Open source models are the future, and improving them will benefit all humanity, unless they are hobbled by restrictive copyright lawsuits, forcing everyone underground who isn't a massive corporation with a huge team of lawyers.
> Whats the difference between a commercial product and an open source product _to_ a commercial entity or a consumer of an artistic endeavour?
To a consumer, the difference between a commercial product and an open source product is price, security, dependability, and freedom. Commercial products will cost as much as the company that controls it can get away with charging and if they can charge a lot they will happily price out many people if that still makes them money. companies will also take a commercial product and add anti-features, spy on their users, prevent anyone from building off of the work to create something new, disable/discontinue the product at any time for any reason, etc.
To the consumer open source is much better.
If I want art and it comes from open source tools, I can use those same tools to modify/copy/customize that art according to my needs or learn to create similar art at no cost.
If I want art from a commercial product it will likely be DRM filled trash and I probably won't be able to use the same tools to modify the art or to create my own similar artistic works without being exploited somehow.
...and then having it taken away immediately on first payment, for someone else to constantly make money in the future.
There are many problems here, that society has 'built in' from the dawn of the printing press, to move the control and power into the hands of the 'publishers' and control/censorship into the hands of the government.
As a programmer, I create. Then my employer takes my work and makes it theirs, with control and ownership (and profits) going forward.
I could leave my job, open source my work for the good of society, but maybe not be paid.
I could 'license' my own work, and rely on copyright.
Licensing is the core of the problems here - the fact that easily (enough) reproducible creations are expected to keep bringing in payment for work done just once. It doesn't happen with most trade skills. It doesn't happen for physical works of art.
Perhaps society needs to look at this concept of 'intellectual property' and realise it's just another mechanism for control and power, that has no good effect or benefit to society, only to the wealthy and powerful.
I can assure you that it is 1000% moral, fine and historically, totally cool for artists to copy each other's styles, infact that's really the ONLY thing we do is copy each other. But sure, call it immoral if you want I guess.
One could argue art would be dead if styles would be exclusive property.
Ofc, "in the style of" is one thing, literally copying and selling the copy is something else.
Diffusion models blur the lines somewhat. Time will tell, but usually exclusive exploitation rights IMHO have not favored the benefit of humanity, but it is a nuanced discussion for sure.
Yes artists - on small scale and often with some form of attribution or acknowledgement. This is industrial scale copying - often with some other motivation than creativity alone and with active steps taken to avoid even having to think about the human whose work is being used.
It's not remotely small scale, there isn't a marketing shop, designer, studio musician, producer, etc alive today that doesn't perform do this as a part of their day-to-day work.
…with payment and attribution as appropriate. Any decent shop will have policies around this - it is not a free-for-all use what you like. It is absurd to suggest otherwise.
These people are not artists. They are commercial illustrators and barely have any real impact on style to begin with. Almost all of the plaintiffs, ie, complainers, are copying Japanese animation styles from the 80s and 90s.
Artists don’t create to get paid. Artists create because their souls demand the activity. Commercial activity might have an impact on art but art will never depend on commerce.
We’re literally complaining about the death of the computer, and by that I mean the individual whose job it was to compute calculations by hand without the use of a calculating or computing machine.
I have no doubt in my mind that this will end up with negative karma. I know my audience!
Software development is a process, the output is either art or not. You could say the same about painting, but painting a house and painting a painting aren't the same amount of art.
You’re right, and I could have been less pithy and perhaps made my point a bit more clear.
Software development is primary an activity concerned with creating useful products. It’s this usefulness that in contrast with art. Commercial art is useful. Painting for its own sake is not! Art for art’s sake, as they say!
Yes, but, in my opinion, there's an inverse correlation between how useful something is, and how much it is art. This isn't a hard rule, and what is and isn't art is a huge discussion that no two people can agree on, but I've found it useful as a general guideline.
No offense, but you seem to have an extremely narrow view of what art is and who works in that field. Have you literally never once looked at the credits of a video game or even a movie? Do you not know what art is at all?
Have you really never watched television or looked at a magazine and simply not considered the people who make these things?
You’ve described commercial animation and illustration, which certainly takes skill and perhaps talents one is born with.
I’m talking about art! Creation without deadlines, without the money men to distort the underlying creative act based on commercial and financial needs, etc.
I realize that technology puts creative people out of work but it doesn’t stop creative people from making art.
Have people been complaining about the decline of music studios as a laptop, a single microphone and a bedroom have become sufficient to create radio-ready pop music?
Almost every studio engineer and record producer that I know have had to find new careers. Some have even given up on art. My brother, after 30+ years of engineering and producing both indie and major label recording artists is now primarily engaged in creating large-scale public pieces that combine sound producing sculptural works with the ambient sounds of the surrounding environment and subsisting entirely off of grant money and the dole!
There is nothing about midnourney that makes me appreciate artists less. In fact it’s the opposite. It’d be a thousand times easier to describe what I want to a human.
I'm not clear on what the "laundering" is supposed to be here. I feel like that screenshot doesn't give me any context for what the user is saying. Given that Codex is a code model, it seems unlikely it's directly related to artists.
The artist list looks to me like a list of names to try in a prompt - my guess is they were creating something like this: https://remidurant.com/artists/, a reference for how different styles and names affect the model's outputs. I don't think an artist's name being on the list implies that Midjourney was specifically trained to mimic that artist. At least that's not my reading of the little snippets we have here.
I feel like if you're going to be upset about Midjourney, you'd be upset about the training data. Not a compilation of names to try in prompts. That list of names doesn't change the model (assuming I've understood what it is, of course - and I could very well be wrong, given how little context we're given).
Why put shit on the internet if you don’t want people to see and use it?
The collective naivete of artists continues to astound me.
If a human can look at your art and learn from it, replicate it, and sell it, then so can an AI. If the human doesn’t pay for it, then neither should the AI.
Of course you are not allowed to use the exact same (or close enough) piece of art, but that’s no different for a human.
There are many reasons artists make their work available for others - enriching hustlers who crap on the artist’s work while making a buck is probably low on the list though.
It's astounding to me that people still don't seem to understand the difference between chopping down a tree and clear cutting a forest. Your callous disrespect for the people who made these ai systems possible proves my point, so thanks I guess.
Pray tell who loses out here? A cut forest is gone. A forest photographed now exists in two places where previously there was one. AI generated art doesn’t replace artist created art, it allows people that can’t use artist created art to enjoy a shadow of the real thing (the photograph of the forest).
I would certainly enjoy it if my generated pictures were annotated with the artists that were used to inspire it because it would lead me to a better source for future work, but it’s not a requirement.
The developer community has done such a poor job explaining to artists why using their work without compensation is necessary. It's unrealistic to expect that a startup could purchase hundreds and millions of artists' images for training. The only alternative would be to not use them at all, and then things like Midjourney and Dall-E wouldn't even exist!
I assume in the perspective of artists that is not a bad thing. Why should MJ exist in its current form if it has to take earnings from artists? Maybe science and engineering could have found another way to do this, but this seems like the easy way out and now we’re trying to rationalize it.
The taxi community has done such a poor job explaining to the car industry why using their cars without paying for them is necessary. It's unrealistic to expect that a starting driver could pay for a drivers license, a car and a taxi-license. The only alternative would be...
...loans or investment. It would be loans or investments. Like any other business.
You can't just steal cars either just to kickstart your taxi business...
They don’t have to purchase millions of artists’ images for training. They just have to purchase as many as their budget allows. That’s what VC money is for.
If their business model requires either infringing copyright or paying billions of dollars for the rights, then perhaps it is a bad business model.
I’m glad midjourney and dall-e showed us what’s possible, but now we must take a step back, delete those models, and do it right.
Single companies should not hold the power to steal whatever they want from humanity and then capitalize on it.
> The only alternative would be to not use them at all, and then things like Midjourney and Dall-E wouldn't even exist!
Oh, no, what a tragedy.
Like, seriously, "our business model relies on stealing all the art in the world, therefore it is right and proper that we do that" is a bit of a Bond villain take, when you think about it.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread> all you have to do is just use those scraped datasets and then conveniently forget what you used to train the model. Boom legal problems solved forever
showing that they plan to do this without any intention of attributing or fairly reimbursing the artists who's 'styles' (IP) they are localizing (and profiting off)
Is it? "The democratization of individual artist's styles" sure sounds like "automated ripping off" to me.
The cruel tyranny of “not doing a thing because I don’t want to do it” rears its ugly head once again. Why isn’t everyone more concerned about all of the things I could do but don’t want to?? It is the ultimate disadvantage!
> Japan’s new guidelines also sketch out pathways to protect artists’ work, but the legalities can quickly get dense. An aggrieved artist will have to prove that a commercially sold, AI-generated piece of art has “similarity” with their own work.
> “If a company isn’t careful, artists can sue or demand compensation if their work is used to create parts of commercial products.” They can show the work’s “reliance on an existing image,” according to Taichi Kakinuma, an AI-focused partner at the law firm Storia. The fastest way to prove this is with evidence that the work was used as training data. But since training data sets are not publicly disclosed, they may have no knowledge of its use, let alone be able to secure evidence
It takes resources and time to produce something unique that people want. For centuries governments have offered patents, licenses and protections for individuals so that people would continue to innovate, create something new and move the world forward. Will people continue to do so knowing that at a moments notice someone will rip you off?
Time will tell but for me personally I stopped publishing my side projects because why should I work hard for hundreds of hours just so Microsoft and AI companies can make more money using my work without giving me an ounce of credit?
Copyright came into being because of the printing press making things to easy to replicate.
If the current laws don’t protect works sufficiently history says more laws will be written that do rather than things will be a free for all.
To a consumer, the difference between a commercial product and an open source product is price, security, dependability, and freedom. Commercial products will cost as much as the company that controls it can get away with charging and if they can charge a lot they will happily price out many people if that still makes them money. companies will also take a commercial product and add anti-features, spy on their users, prevent anyone from building off of the work to create something new, disable/discontinue the product at any time for any reason, etc.
To the consumer open source is much better.
If I want art and it comes from open source tools, I can use those same tools to modify/copy/customize that art according to my needs or learn to create similar art at no cost.
If I want art from a commercial product it will likely be DRM filled trash and I probably won't be able to use the same tools to modify the art or to create my own similar artistic works without being exploited somehow.
There are many problems here, that society has 'built in' from the dawn of the printing press, to move the control and power into the hands of the 'publishers' and control/censorship into the hands of the government.
As a programmer, I create. Then my employer takes my work and makes it theirs, with control and ownership (and profits) going forward. I could leave my job, open source my work for the good of society, but maybe not be paid. I could 'license' my own work, and rely on copyright.
Licensing is the core of the problems here - the fact that easily (enough) reproducible creations are expected to keep bringing in payment for work done just once. It doesn't happen with most trade skills. It doesn't happen for physical works of art.
Perhaps society needs to look at this concept of 'intellectual property' and realise it's just another mechanism for control and power, that has no good effect or benefit to society, only to the wealthy and powerful.
Ofc, "in the style of" is one thing, literally copying and selling the copy is something else.
Diffusion models blur the lines somewhat. Time will tell, but usually exclusive exploitation rights IMHO have not favored the benefit of humanity, but it is a nuanced discussion for sure.
Artists don’t create to get paid. Artists create because their souls demand the activity. Commercial activity might have an impact on art but art will never depend on commerce.
We’re literally complaining about the death of the computer, and by that I mean the individual whose job it was to compute calculations by hand without the use of a calculating or computing machine.
I have no doubt in my mind that this will end up with negative karma. I know my audience!
You could say the same for software developers and still be wrong.
Software development is primary an activity concerned with creating useful products. It’s this usefulness that in contrast with art. Commercial art is useful. Painting for its own sake is not! Art for art’s sake, as they say!
Have you really never watched television or looked at a magazine and simply not considered the people who make these things?
I’m talking about art! Creation without deadlines, without the money men to distort the underlying creative act based on commercial and financial needs, etc.
I realize that technology puts creative people out of work but it doesn’t stop creative people from making art.
Have people been complaining about the decline of music studios as a laptop, a single microphone and a bedroom have become sufficient to create radio-ready pop music?
Almost every studio engineer and record producer that I know have had to find new careers. Some have even given up on art. My brother, after 30+ years of engineering and producing both indie and major label recording artists is now primarily engaged in creating large-scale public pieces that combine sound producing sculptural works with the ambient sounds of the surrounding environment and subsisting entirely off of grant money and the dole!
The artist list looks to me like a list of names to try in a prompt - my guess is they were creating something like this: https://remidurant.com/artists/, a reference for how different styles and names affect the model's outputs. I don't think an artist's name being on the list implies that Midjourney was specifically trained to mimic that artist. At least that's not my reading of the little snippets we have here.
I feel like if you're going to be upset about Midjourney, you'd be upset about the training data. Not a compilation of names to try in prompts. That list of names doesn't change the model (assuming I've understood what it is, of course - and I could very well be wrong, given how little context we're given).
The attacks will keep coming as people get dumber and dumber.
The collective naivete of artists continues to astound me.
If a human can look at your art and learn from it, replicate it, and sell it, then so can an AI. If the human doesn’t pay for it, then neither should the AI.
Of course you are not allowed to use the exact same (or close enough) piece of art, but that’s no different for a human.
I would certainly enjoy it if my generated pictures were annotated with the artists that were used to inspire it because it would lead me to a better source for future work, but it’s not a requirement.
"We want to use your work so you can be replaced many in jobs, but it's expensive to actually license your work, so we aren't paying."
There, that's easy!
...loans or investment. It would be loans or investments. Like any other business.
You can't just steal cars either just to kickstart your taxi business...
If their business model requires either infringing copyright or paying billions of dollars for the rights, then perhaps it is a bad business model.
I’m glad midjourney and dall-e showed us what’s possible, but now we must take a step back, delete those models, and do it right. Single companies should not hold the power to steal whatever they want from humanity and then capitalize on it.
Oh, no, what a tragedy.
Like, seriously, "our business model relies on stealing all the art in the world, therefore it is right and proper that we do that" is a bit of a Bond villain take, when you think about it.