zlacker

>>dredmo+(OP)
I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around art AI among technical people is the complete lack of identification or empathy: it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! I am a failed artist (read, I studied painting in school and tried to make a go at being a commercial artist in animation and couldn't make the cut), and so I decided to do something easier and became a computer programmer, working for FAANG and other large companies and making absurd (to me!!) amounts of cash. In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a living- and, if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs?

The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...

>>meebob+kc
Setting aside questions of whether there is copyright infringement going on, I think this is an unprecedented case in the history of automation replacing human labor.

Jobs have been automated since the industrial revolution, but this usually takes the form of someone inventing a widget that makes human labor unnecessary. From a worker's perspective, the automation is coming from "the outside". What's novel with AI models is that the workers' own work is used to create the thing that replaces them. It's one thing to be automated away, it's another to have your own work used against you like this, and I'm sure it feels extra-shitty as a result.

>>Alexan+Xh1
Absolutely this -- and in many (maybe most cases), there was no consent for the use of the work in training the model, and quite possibly no notice or compensation at all.

That's a huge ethical issue whether or not it's explicitly addressed in copyright/ip law.

>>wwwest+gr1
It is not a huge ethical issue. The artists have always been at risk of someone learning their style if they make their work available for public viewing.

We've just made "learning style" easier, so a thing that was always a risk is now happening.

>>archon+Ww1
Make open source code open source always has the risk of someone copying it and distributing it in proprietary code. That doesn't make it right or ethical. Stealing an unlocked car is unethical. Raping someone who is weaker than you is unethical. Just because something isn't difficult doesn't make something ethical.

>>noober+lG2
This is kind of silly.

Both personal autonomy and private property are social constructs we agree are valuable. Stealing a car and raping a person are things we've identified as unacceptable and codified into law.

And in stark contrast, intellectual property is something we've identified as being valuable to extend limited protections to in order to incentivize creative and technological development. It is not a sacred right, it's a gambit.

It's us saying, "We identify that if we have no IP protection whatsoever, many people will have no incentive to create, and nobody will ever have an incentive to share. Therefore, we will create some protection in these specific ways in order to spur on creativity and development."

There's no (or very little) ethics to it. We've created a system not out of respect for people's connections to their creations, but in order to entice them to create so we can ultimately expropriate it for society as a whole. And that system affords protection in particular ways. Any usage that is permitted by the system is not only not unethical, it is the system working.