This is a tired argument; whether or not the diffusion models are "learning", they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists, and should be resisted for that reason alone.
As a human artist I don't feel the same as you, and I somehow doubt that you care all that much about what we think anyways. You already made up your mind about the tech, so don't feel the need to protect us from "a tool of capital [sic]" to fortify your argument.
My opinion is based on my interactions with my friends who are artists. I admit freely to caring less about what people I don't know say, in the absence of additional evidence.
And horse wages (some oats) were low when the car was invented. Yet they were still inflated. There used to be more horses than humans in this country. Couldn't even earn their keep when the Ford Model T came along.
It's not surprising, they prefer machines to people and call humans "stochastic parrots". The more humans are compared to animals, the more justified they feel writing them off as an expense and doing away with them.
If you're independent selling paintings, sure. Designing packaging or something commercial? 4 hours of work a week for nearly 6 figures. I know a couple graphic designers and they don't do shit for what they're paid.
You should probably tell the other millions of artists busting out 60+ hour workweek in industry for half that price where these jobs are. That could solve this problem overnight.
In a cosmic sense, no. Most of us are slaving away at some job when we would rather be doing something else but are bound by the need to fund lodging.
But in a more practical sense yes. There's not much personal nor logistical progression to make pushing pencils. Meanwhile, art is a craft that you can dedicate your life to improving and educating others on. It can be a career instead of merely a job to do.
imagine being a photographer that takes decades to perfect their craft. sure another student can study and mimic your style. but it's still different than some computer model "ingesting" vast amount of photos and vomiting something similar for $5.99 in aws cpu cost so that some prompt jockey can call themselves an AI artist and make money off of other peoples talent.
i get that this is cynical and does not encompass all ai art, but why not let computers develop their own style wihout ingesting human art? that's when it would actually be AI art
Like 99.9% of the art the common people care about is Darth Vader and Taylor Swift and other pop culture stuff like that.
These people literally don’t care what your definition of what is and isn’t art is, or how it’s made, they just want a lock screen wallpaper of themselves fighting against Thanos on top of a volcano.
The argument of “what is art” has been an academic conversation largely ignored by the people actually consuming the art for hundreds of years. Photography was just pop culture trash, comics were pop culture trash, stick figure web comics were pop culture trash. Today’s pop culture trash is the “prompt jockey”.
I make probably 5-10 pictures every day over the course of maybe 20 minutes as jokes on Teams because we have Bing Chat Enterprise. My coworkers seem to enjoy it. Nobody cares that it’s generated. I’m also not trying to be an “artist” whatever that means. It just is, and it’s fun. I wasn’t gonna hire an artist to draw me pictures to shitpost to my coworkers. It’s instead unlocked a new fun way to communicate.
not entirely sure what your point is, but i think you are saying that art is just a commodity we use for cheap entertainment so it's ok for computers to do the same?
in the context of what i was saying the definition of what is art can be summed up as anything made by humans. i have no problem when its used in memes and being open sourced etc.. the issue i have is when a human invests real time into it and then its taken and regurgitated without their permission. do you see that distinction?
I mean, I don't think many care about your personal use of art. You can take copyright images and shit post and Disney won't go suing your workplace.
But many big players do want to use this commercially and that's where a lot of these lines start to form. No matter how lawsuits go you will probably still be able to find some LLM to make Thanos fighting a volcano. It's just a matter of how/if companies can profit from it.
That's a funny argument because artists lost their shit over photography too. Now anyone can make a portrait! Photography will kill art!
Art is the biggest gate kept industry there is and I detest artists who believe only they are the chosen one.
Art is human expression. We all have a right to create what we want with whatever tools we want. They can adapt or be left behind. No sympathy from me.
Because that's not what happens, ever. You wouldn't ask a human to have their style of photographing when they don't know what a photograph even looks like.
Exactly. Artists should drop the pretentious philosophical bumbling and accept what this is, a fight for their livelihood. Which is, in every sense, completely warranted and good.
Putting blame on the technology and trying to limit public access to software will not go anywhere. Your fight for regulation needs to be with publishers and producers, not with the teen trying to make a cool new wallpaper or the office-man trying to make an aesthetic powerpoint presentation.
> they are a tool of capital to fuck over human artists
So are the copyright and intellectual property laws that artists rely on. From my perspective, you are the capital and I am the one being fucked. So are you ready to abolish all that?
Copyright owners indeed. That's what these artists are. They're copyright owners. Monopolists. They are the capital. Capitalism is all about owning property. Copyright is intellectual property. Literally imaginary property. Ownership of information, of bits, of numbers. These artists are the literal epitome of capitalism. They enjoy state granted monopolies that last multiple human lifetimes. We'll be long dead before their works enter the public domain. They want it to be this way. They want eternal rent seeking for themselves and their descendants. At least one artist has told me exactly that in discussions here on HN. They think it's fair.
They are the quintessential representation of capital. And they come here to ask us to "resist" the other forms of capital on principle.
I'm sorry but... No. I'm gonna resist them instead. It's my sincere hope that this AI technology hammers in the last nails on the coffin of copyright and intellectual property as a whole. I want all the models to leak so that it becomes literally impossible to get rid of this technology no matter how much they hate it. I want it to progress so that we can run it on our own machines, so that it'll be so ubiquitous it can't be censored or banned no matter how much they lobby for it.
Right. IP is about balancing the harms done to the public versus the incentives given to the creators. That's why discussions about "creators want this and that" produce unbalanced objectives because... what about the public? IP is meant to benefit the public domain, it is not meant to protect creator interests.
I'm glad free software came about, where software owners realised that the power they had over their users were unjust. Hopefully the same can happen to other creative fields.
The original social contract was we'd all pretend we couldn't trivially copy and reproduce "their" works so they could make some money for a decade or so and then their works would enter the public domain.
When's the last time your culture entered the public domain?
I grew up watching films like Star Wars and Home Alone, playing Super Nintendo and PlayStation games. All these corporations have already made a million fortunes off of these things. When is all this stuff gonna become public property?
What about the public? They couldn't give less of a fuck about the public. They don't even care enough to fulfill their end of the bargain which was agreed upon when this copyright nonsense was created. Oh look, our property's about to become public? Better lobby the government and get them to extend the terms. Just pull the rug from under everyone, just move the goalposts, they won't even notice.
They use their fortunes to systematically rob us of our public domain rights. Yes, rights. We have rights to "their" works which they actively deny. They're literal robber barons. Therefore copyright infringement is a moral imperative. We should all stop pretending that copyright exists because the reality is it doesn't, it's completely made up and unenforceable and there's absolutely no reason anyone should recognize it as a legitimate law. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience and morally justified.
This AI stuff is exactly what we need. It's world changing technology. It's subversive. It gives me hope.
Claiming that a single artist of modest means whose work was used for model training explicitly against their wishes.... is exactly the same as the multibillion corporation doing the training and profiting off it at fleet-of-megayachts scale.... certainly is a take, I'll give you that. If you ever quote "first they came" in a self-pitying context, remember that you deserve it.
The issue of white collar workers finding it harder to support themselves is real and valid. The solution is unionisation, social support nets and potential UBI, that includes all workers.
But campaigning for stricter IP laws only benefits the copyright owners (both you and Disney), a subset of white collar workers, and is still immoral for all the reasons that copyright is immoral in the first place. That is what we're against.
Capitalism is not defined by the relative wealth of individuals. It's defined by ownership. Capitalists own property. Factories, buildings, companies, land, goods, stock, assets, copyrights, patents... All privately owned. If you're an owner, you're a capitalist. It's that simple. You're part of the ownership class. The common serfs? They don't own, they rent.
Claiming you're not a calitalist owner just because you're a poor starving artist, when the government quite literally grants you functionally infinite monopolies over everything you create whether you want it or not, is quite the take indeed. Not my fault artists are prone to selling off the rights to that monopoly to corporations for short term profit. It's like they don't even realize the power they have and the real capitalists are only too happy to relieve them of it.
As a representative of a lot of things but hardly any capital who uses diffusion models to get something I would otherwise not pay a human artist for anyway, I testify that, the models are not exclusively what you describe them to be.
I do not support indiscriminate banning of anything and everything that can potentially be used to fuck someone over.
I did not say they were exclusively that; I said they were that.
Once we as a society have implemented a good way for the artists whose work powers these machines to survive, you can feel good about using them. Until then, frankly, you're doing something immoral by paying to use them.
By this logic we ought to start lynching artists, why they didn't care about all of those who lost their jobs making pigments, canvasses, pencils, brushes etc etc
Artists pay those people and make their jobs needed. Same as the person above claiming Duchamp didn't negotiate with the ceramics makers - yes, they absolutely did and do pay their suppliers. Artists aren't smash and grabbing their local Blick.
It is! This method of doing so has overwhelming negative externalities, though. I'd expect anyone who actually gave a shit about AI empowering people to create to spend just as much effort pushing legislation so the displaced artists don't starve on the street as a result.
Isn't high-quality open image generation almost entirely dependent on Stability releasing their foundational models for free, at great expense to them?
That's not something you'll be able to rely on long-term, there won't always be a firehose of venture capital money to subsidise that kind of charity.
The cost of training them is going down, though. Given the existence of models like Pixart, I don’t think we’ll stay dependent on corporate charity for long.
That's a terrible analogy. Until the scrapers start deleting all other copies of what what they're scraping, "stealing" the art in a traditional sense, there's no harm done in the process of training the network. Any harm done comes after that.
That's an intentional misinterpretation, I think. I mention art as an economic activity because it's primarily professional artists that are harmed by the widespread adoption of this technology.
They tried to use the labor theory early on by claiming, "real art takes hard work and time as opposed to the miniscule cpu hours computers use to make 'AI art". The worst thing AI brings to the table is amplifying these types of sentiments to control industry in their favor where they would otherwise be unheard and relegated to Instagram likes
> It's funny that these people use the langauge of communism, but apparently see artwork as purley an economic activity.
You hit the nail on the head. Copyright is, by its very nature, a "tool of capital." It's a means of creating new artificial property fiefdoms for a select few capital holders to lord over, while taking rights from anyone else who wants to engage in the practice of making art.
Everyone has their right to expression infringed upon, all so the 1% of artists can perpetually make money on things, which are ultimately sold to corporations that only pay them pennies on the dollar anyway.
You, as an indie hip hop or house musician supported by a day job, can't sample and chop some vocals or use a slice of a chord played in a song (as were common in the 80s and 90s) for a completely new work, but apparently the world is such a better place because Taylor Swift is a multimillionaire and Disney can milk the maximum value from space and superhero films.
I'd rather live in a world where anyone is free to make whatever art they want, even if everyone has to have a day job.
What do you mean? Copyright protects all creative works, and all authors of those creative works. That some have greater means to enforce was always true, and copyright doesn’t cause that, it (imperfectly) helps mitigate it. What copyright does is actually prevent them from stealing work from independent artists en masse, and force them to at least hire and pay some artists.
> I’d rather live in a world where anyone is free to make whatever art they want, even if everyone has to have a day job.
You’re suggesting abolish Copyright and/or the Berne Convention? Yeah the problem with this thinking is that then the big publishers are completely free to steal everyone’s work without paying for it. The very thing you’re complaining about would only get way way worse if we allowed anyone to “freely” make whatever art they want by taking it from others. “Anyone” means Disney too, and Disney is more motivated than you.
> You, as an indie hip hop or house musician supported by a day job, can’t sample and chop some vocals or use a slice of a chord played in a song… for a completely new work
Hehe, if you sample, you are by definition not making a completely new work. But this is a terrible argument since sampling in music is widespread and has sometimes been successfully defended in court. DJs are the best example of independent artists who need protection you can think of?
> It's a means of creating new artificial property fiefdoms for a select few capital holders to lord over, while taking rights from anyone else who wants to engage in the practice of making art.
I doubt even Disney sue people who want to make fan art. But if you want to sell said art or distribute it, they will.
