6 ms·

Stealing people’s work to serve as your training set is not human progress. Sounds like the AI model should be paying royalties to every affected artist for th

Stealing people’s work to serve as your training set is not human progress. Sounds like the AI model should be paying royalties to every affected artist for the right to sample their work.

cercatrova 4y ago
The art that was trained on was all Creative Commons apparently, so perhaps artists should understand licenses first before giving their work a permissive license.
- teakettle42 4y ago
  All CC licenses, other than the “CC0 public domain dedication”, require attribution, but CC themselves have taken what I’d consider to be an ass-backwards position on the matter: > At CC, we believe that, as a matter of copyright law, the use of works to train AI should be considered non-infringing by default, assuming that access to the copyright works was lawful at the point of input. https://creativecommons.org/2021/03/04/should-cc-licensed-content-be-used-to-train-ai-it-depends/ https://creativecommons.org/2021/03/04/should-cc-licensed-co...
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    >backwards position It's not backwards. It's the same as if a human artist studied it. Backwards would be thinking that any creative work you make is a derivative work of many creative works that you've seen in the past which you aren't copying from.
    - teakettle42 4y ago
      > It's the same as if a human artist studied it. It’s not a human artist, and it can only regurgitate mash-ups of work stolen from others.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Where is this said? I'm looking at the collection of artists this site is happily offering to rip off (https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1558632898336501761/photo/1 https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1558632898336501761/photo...) and there's a lot of people with long careers making copyrighted work. I really can't imagine finding a ton of CC work by Bernie Wrightson or Wayne Barlowe or Brom or Junji Ito, for instance.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
luckylion 4y ago
What do you think the artists "trained on"? Didn't they ever see anyone else's art? Don't you think it influenced their art? If it's a 1:1 copy, I agree. If it's a "that looks vaguely like the style that xyz likes to use", I disagree. And I assume you'd run into plenty of situations where multiple people would discover that it's their unique style that is being imitated. Kind of like that story about a hipster threatening to sue a magazine for using his image in an article only to find out that he's a hipster and dresses and styles himself like countless other people, so much so that he himself wasn't able to tell himself apart from another guy.
- teakettle42 4y ago
  Your entire point hinges on a false assumption; “training” a human artist (or programmer) is the same as training an AI model. It is not. The AI model can only regurgitate stolen mash-ups of other people’s work. Everything it produces is trivially derivative of the work it has consumed. Where it succeeds, it succeeds because it successfully correlated stolen human-written descriptions to stolen human-produced images. Where it fails, it does so because it cannot understand what it’s regurgitating, and it regurgitates the wrong stolen images for the given prompt. AI models are incapable of producing anything but purely derivative stolen works, and the (often unwillingly) contributors to their training dataset should be entitled to copyright protections that extend to the derivative works. That’s true whether we’re discussing dall-e or GitHub copilot.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    > The AI model can only regurgitate stolen mash-ups of other people’s work. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. If you're very dismissive, I think it's easy to say the same about most artists. They're not genre-redefining, they carve out their niche that works (read: sells) for them.
shagie 4y ago
Every time I've been to an art museum (and this is a handful, not just SFMOMA), there has been a person or two in a room with some, well, art hanging on the wall. They had notebook of the appropriate paper medium and art supplies and were copying the existing work. This is not something new. https://www.realistartresource.com/the-tradition-of-copying https://www.realistartresource.com/the-tradition-of-copying Copying of existing works is part of how an art student learns. That this one happens to be a math model at its core is an interesting philosophical problem. The other people's work to serve as your training set is exactly what art students do - and the works they copied and the works that they have yet to produce are not royalty encumbered. Nor should a mathematical model. It happens that the developers working on this problem have gotten it so that it can do its learning and creation many times faster than an art student in a gallery... but it still can't get hands and faces right.
- teakettle42 4y ago
  > The other people's work to serve as your training set is exactly what art students do “Training” an art student and training an AI model are vastly different, and your equating the two is, frankly, nonsensical and absurd. An art student isn’t a trivial weighted model capable only of mapping stolen text prompts to stolen image representations of them. > It happens that the developers working on this problem have gotten it so that it can do its learning and creation many times faster than an art student in a gallery It hasn’t learned anything. It correlates stolen textual descriptions with stolen images, and then regurgitates mash-ups of the same. This type of AI model cannot produce anything other than purely derivative work stolen from others.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Ok... though I question the use of the word "stolen". If I was to dabble in sci-fi art and made something that fit in the art style of Steward Cowley ( https://archive.org/details/terrantradeauthorityhandbookstarliners https://archive.org/details/terrantradeauthorityhandbookstar... ) do I need to credit the art? When it comes to playing around in blender - my designs are obviously derivative of others - do I need to credit those artists? Even the ones that I don't remember more than a "I saw this print at a comic art show once..." How original does my own work have to be before it isn't a mashup of stolen images that I half remember?

Stealing people’s work to serve as your training set is not human progress. Sounds like the AI model should be paying royalties to every affected artist for the right to sample their work.

cercatrova 4y ago

The art that was trained on was all Creative Commons apparently, so perhaps artists should understand licenses first before giving their work a permissive license.

teakettle42 4y ago
All CC licenses, other than the “CC0 public domain dedication”, require attribution, but CC themselves have taken what I’d consider to be an ass-backwards position on the matter: > At CC, we believe that, as a matter of copyright law, the use of works to train AI should be considered non-infringing by default, assuming that access to the copyright works was lawful at the point of input. https://creativecommons.org/2021/03/04/should-cc-licensed-content-be-used-to-train-ai-it-depends/ https://creativecommons.org/2021/03/04/should-cc-licensed-co...
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >backwards position It's not backwards. It's the same as if a human artist studied it. Backwards would be thinking that any creative work you make is a derivative work of many creative works that you've seen in the past which you aren't copying from.
  - teakettle42 4y ago
    > It's the same as if a human artist studied it. It’s not a human artist, and it can only regurgitate mash-ups of work stolen from others.
egypturnash 4y ago
Where is this said? I'm looking at the collection of artists this site is happily offering to rip off (https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1558632898336501761/photo/1 https://twitter.com/arvalis/status/1558632898336501761/photo...) and there's a lot of people with long careers making copyrighted work. I really can't imagine finding a ton of CC work by Bernie Wrightson or Wayne Barlowe or Brom or Junji Ito, for instance.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

luckylion 4y ago

What do you think the artists "trained on"? Didn't they ever see anyone else's art? Don't you think it influenced their art? If it's a 1:1 copy, I agree. If it's a "that looks vaguely like the style that xyz likes to use", I disagree. And I assume you'd run into plenty of situations where multiple people would discover that it's their unique style that is being imitated. Kind of like that story about a hipster threatening to sue a magazine for using his image in an article only to find out that he's a hipster and dresses and styles himself like countless other people, so much so that he himself wasn't able to tell himself apart from another guy.

teakettle42 4y ago
Your entire point hinges on a false assumption; “training” a human artist (or programmer) is the same as training an AI model. It is not. The AI model can only regurgitate stolen mash-ups of other people’s work. Everything it produces is trivially derivative of the work it has consumed. Where it succeeds, it succeeds because it successfully correlated stolen human-written descriptions to stolen human-produced images. Where it fails, it does so because it cannot understand what it’s regurgitating, and it regurgitates the wrong stolen images for the given prompt. AI models are incapable of producing anything but purely derivative stolen works, and the (often unwillingly) contributors to their training dataset should be entitled to copyright protections that extend to the derivative works. That’s true whether we’re discussing dall-e or GitHub copilot.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > The AI model can only regurgitate stolen mash-ups of other people’s work. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. If you're very dismissive, I think it's easy to say the same about most artists. They're not genre-redefining, they carve out their niche that works (read: sells) for them.

shagie 4y ago

Every time I've been to an art museum (and this is a handful, not just SFMOMA), there has been a person or two in a room with some, well, art hanging on the wall. They had notebook of the appropriate paper medium and art supplies and were copying the existing work. This is not something new. https://www.realistartresource.com/the-tradition-of-copying https://www.realistartresource.com/the-tradition-of-copying Copying of existing works is part of how an art student learns. That this one happens to be a math model at its core is an interesting philosophical problem. The other people's work to serve as your training set is exactly what art students do - and the works they copied and the works that they have yet to produce are not royalty encumbered. Nor should a mathematical model. It happens that the developers working on this problem have gotten it so that it can do its learning and creation many times faster than an art student in a gallery... but it still can't get hands and faces right.

teakettle42 4y ago
> The other people's work to serve as your training set is exactly what art students do “Training” an art student and training an AI model are vastly different, and your equating the two is, frankly, nonsensical and absurd. An art student isn’t a trivial weighted model capable only of mapping stolen text prompts to stolen image representations of them. > It happens that the developers working on this problem have gotten it so that it can do its learning and creation many times faster than an art student in a gallery It hasn’t learned anything. It correlates stolen textual descriptions with stolen images, and then regurgitates mash-ups of the same. This type of AI model cannot produce anything other than purely derivative work stolen from others.
- shagie 4y ago
  Ok... though I question the use of the word "stolen". If I was to dabble in sci-fi art and made something that fit in the art style of Steward Cowley ( https://archive.org/details/terrantradeauthorityhandbookstarliners https://archive.org/details/terrantradeauthorityhandbookstar... ) do I need to credit the art? When it comes to playing around in blender - my designs are obviously derivative of others - do I need to credit those artists? Even the ones that I don't remember more than a "I saw this print at a comic art show once..." How original does my own work have to be before it isn't a mashup of stolen images that I half remember?