a) the panic is entirely misguided and based on two wrong assumptions. The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy; the field will just become more and more complex and technically involved, just like 3D CGI did, because if you don't use every trick available, you're missing out. The second wrong assumption is that it's going to replace anyone, instead of making many people re-learn a new tool and produce what was previously unfeasible due to the amount of mechanistic work involved. This second assumption stems from the fundamental misunderstanding of the value artists provide, which is conceptualization, even in a seemingly routine job.
b) the panic is entirely blown out of proportion by the social media. Most people have neither time nor desire to actually dive into this tech and find out what works and what doesn't. They just believe that a magical machine steals their works to replace them, because that's what everyone reposts on Twitter endlessly.
It has been fascinating to watch “copyright infringement is not theft” morph into “actually yes it’s stealing” over the last few years.
It used to be incredibly rare to find copyright maximalists on HackerNews, but with GitHub Co-pilot and StableDiffusion it seems to have created a new generation of them.
If artists I employ want to incorporate this stuff into their workflow, that sounds great. They can get more done. There won't be less artists on payroll, just more and better art will be produced. I don't even think it is at the point of incorporating it into a workflow yet though, so this really seems like a nothing burger to me.
At least github copilot is useful. This stuff is really not useful in a professional context, and the idea that it is going to take artists jobs really doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, if there aren't any artists then who exactly do I have that is using these AI tools to make new designs? If you think the answer to that is just some intern, then you really don't know what you're talking about.
Personally, I think "copyright infringement is not theft" but I also think that using artists' work without their permission for profit is never OK, and that's what's happening here.
Yes, artists can also utilize AI as a photoshop filter, and some artists have started using it to fill in backgrounds in drawings, etc. Inpainting can also be used to do unimportant textures for 3d models. But that doesn't mean that AI art is no threat to artists' livelihoods, especially for scenarios like "I need a dozen illustrations to go with these articles" where quality isn't so important to the commissioner that they are willing to spend an extra few hundred bucks instead of spending 15 minutes in midjourney or stable diffusion.
As long as these networks continue being trained on artists' work without permission or compensation, they will continue to improve in output quality and muscle the actual artists out of work.
The confusion is that “copyright infringement is not theft” really was about being against corporate abuse of individuals. It's still the same situation here.
> A small amount of actual artists
It's extremely funny that you say this, because taking a look at the Trending on Artstation page tells a different story.
How is training AI on imagery from the internet without permission different than decades of film and game artists borrowing H. R. Giger's style for alien technology?[1]
How is it different from decades of professional and amateur artists using the characteristic big-eyed manga/anime look without getting permission from Osamu Tezuka?
Copyright law doesn't cover general "style". Try to imagine the minefield that would exist if it were changed to work that way.
[1] No, I don't mean Alien, or other works that actually involved Giger himself.
Will human artists be able to compete with artificial artists commercially? If not, is that bad or is it progress, like Photoshop or Autotune?
Are there any documented cases where copyright law didn't seem to offer sufficient protection against something that really did seem like copyright infringement but done using AI tooling? I started looking for some a few weeks ago because of this debate and still haven't seen anything conclusive.
Take for example video games. They distracted many people from movies, but also created a huge new field, hungry for talents. Or another one, quite a few genres calcified into distinctive boring styles over the years (see anything related to manga/anime as an example) simply because those styles require less mechanical work and are cheaper to produce. They could use a deep refresh. This tech will also lead to novel applications, created by those who embraced it and are willing to learn the increasingly complex toolset. That's what been happening the last several decades, which have seen several tech revolutions.
>As long as these networks continue being trained on artists' work
This misses the point. The real power of those things is not in the collection of styles baked into it. It's in the ability to learn new stuff. Finetuning and style transfer is what all the wizards do. Construct your own visual style by hand, make it produce more of that. And that's not just about static 2D images; neither do 2D illustrators represent all artists in the broad sense. Everyone who types "blah blah in the style of Ilya Kuvshinov" or is using img2img or whatever is just missing out, because the same stuff is going to be everywhere real soon.
Try telling one of the programmers to produce a work of art based on a review of all of the works that went into training the models and see how it works out.
And ironically, the overwhelming majority of knowledge used by these models to produce pictures that superficially look like their work (usually not at all), is not coming from any artworks at all. It's as simple as that. They are mostly trained on photos which constitute the bulk of models' knowledge about the real world. They are the main source of coherency. Artist names and keywords like "trending on artstation" are just easily discoverable and very rough handles for pieces of the memory of the models.
It's almost like the real problem is asymmetry and abuse of power.
This is like saying that photoshop is going to put all the artists out of work because one artist can now do the work of a team of people drawing by hand. So far these AIs are just tools. Tools help humans to produce more and the economy keeps chugging ever upwards.
There is no upper limit of how much art we need. Marvel movies and videogames will just keep looking better and better as our artists increase their capabilities using AI tools to assist them.
Daz3d didn't put modelers and artists out of work, and what Daz and iClone can do is way way more impressive(and useful in a professional setting) than AI Art.
Can SD create artistic renderings without actual art being incorporated? Just from photos alone? I don't believe so, unless someone shows me evidence to the contrary.
Hence, SD necessitates having artwork in it's training corpus in order to emulate style, no matter how little it's represented in the training data.
Is it though? What if I were to look at your art style and replicate that style manually in my own works? I see no difference whether it's done by a machine, or done by hand. The reality is that every art is a derivative of some other art. Interestingly, the music industry has been doing this for years. Ever since samplers became a thing, musicians spliced and diced loops into their own tracks for donkeys years, and created an explosion of new genres and sound. Hip-hop, techno, dark ambient, EDM, ..., all fall into the same category. Machine learning is just another new tool to create something.
This is the first wave of half decent AI.
But more importantly, you are vastly underestimating the millions of small jobs out there that artists use as a stepping stone.
Think of the millions of managers who would happily be presented with a choice of 10 artistic interpretations, and pick one for the sake of getting a quick job done.
No way on earth this isn't going to make a major impact. Empathy absolutely required.
Personally, I'm all for AI training and using human artwork. I think telling it not to prevents progress/innovation, and that innovation is going to happen somewhere.
If it happens somewhere, humans who live in that somewhere will just use those tools to launder the AI-generated artwork, and companies will hire those offshore humans and reap the benefits, all the while, the effect on local artists' wages is even more negative because now they don't have access to the tools to compete in this ar(tificial intelligence)ms race.
Most people do not understand the purpose of copyright. Copyright is a bargain between society and the creator. The creator receives limited protection of the work for a limited time. Why is this the deal?
The purpose of copyright is to advance the progress of science and the useful arts. It is to benefit humanity as a whole.
AI takes nothing more than an idea. It does not take a “creative expression fixed in a tangible media”.
Style transfer combined with the overall coherency of pre-trained models is the real power of these. "Country house in the style of Picasso" is generally not how you use this at full power, because "Picasso" is a poor descriptor for particular memory coordinates. You type "Country house" (a generic descriptor it knows very well) and provide your own embedding or any kind of finetuned addon to precisely lean the result towards the desired style, whether constructed by you or anyone else.
So, if anyone believes that this thing would drive the artists out of their jobs, then removing their works from the training set will change very little as it will still be able to generate anything given a few examples, on a consumer GPU. And that's only the current generation of such models and tools. (which admittedly doesn't pass the quality/controllability threshold required for serious work, just yet)
We don’t need to “try to imagine”, we just need to wait a bit and watch Walt’s reanimated corpse and army of undead lawyers come out swinging for those “mice in the general style of Mickey Mouse”.
Ok so now many more people can generate cool looking photos now in an automatic fashion. So what? It just means we’ve raised the bar… for what can be considered cool.
I wonder if the nerds have shot themselves in the foot here with terminology? I suspect the nerd’s lawyers would have been much happier if the entire field was named “automated mechanical creativity” instead of “artificial intelligence”. It’d be kinda amusing to see the whole field of study lose in court because of their own persistent claims that what they’re doing is not just “creating in a mechanical fashion” but creating “intelligence” which can therefore be held to account for copyright infringement. Shades of Al Capone getting busted for taxes…
Also, should a human artist creating a pastiche count as copyright infringement as well?
Humans have my sympathy. We are literally at the brink of the multiple major industries being wiped out. What was only theoretical for the last 10-15 years started to happen right now.
In few short years most humans will not be able to find any employment because machine will be more efficient and cheaper. Society will transform beyond any previous transformations in history. Most likely it's going to be very rough. But we just argue that of course our specific jobs are going to stay.
Some artists just do the descriptive part though, right? The name I can think of is Sol LeWitt, but I'm sure there are others. A lot of it looks like it could be programmed, but might be tricky.
Essentially we are going to get away from market economy, money, private property. The problem is that once these things go personal freedom goes as well. So either accept the inevitable totalitarian society, or something else? But what?
One can see AI tools as progress here while also recognising that this is likely to have a huge impact on a lot of lives.
At the same time I recognise that this is a massive threat to artists, both low-visibility folks who throw out concepts and logos for companies, and people who may sell their art to the public. Because I can spend a couple of dollars and half an hour to come up with an image I’d be happy to put on my wall.
I’m not sure what the answer is here, but I don’t think a sort of “human origin art” Puritanism is going to hold back the flood, though it may secure a niche like handmade craft goods and organic food…
I have no idea how well it holds up to modern reading, but I found it interesting at the time.
He posits two outcomes - in the fictionalised US the ownership class owns more and more of everything, because automation and intelligence remove the need for workers and even most technicians over time. Everyone else is basically a prisoner given the minimum needed to maintain life.
Or we can become “socialist” in a sort of techno-utopian way, realising that the economy and our laws should work for us and that a post-labor society should be one in which humans are free from dependence on work rather than defined by it.
Does this latter one imply a total lack of freedom? It certainly implies dependence on the state, but for most people (more or less by definition) an equal share would be a better share than they can get now, and they would be free to pursue art or learning or just leisure.
As the price of a bit dropped the quality of the comms dropped. It is inevitable that the price of the creation of (crappy) art will do the same thing if only because it will drag down the average.
It amounts to saying that anything that benefits me is good and anything to my detriment is bad. Sure, there's a consistency to that. However, if that's the foundation of one's positions, it leads to all manner of other logical inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
I do wonder what happens as the market for the “old way” dries up, because it implies that there is no career path to lead to doing things better - any fool (I include myself) can be an AI jockey, but without people that need the skills of average designers, from what pool will the greats spring?
Intellectual property generally includes copyright, patents, trademark, and trade secrets, though there are broader claims such as likeness, celebrity rights, moral rights (e.g., droit d'auteur in French/EU law), and probably a few others since I began writing this comment (the scope seems to be increasing, generally).
I suspect you intended to distinguish trademark and copyright.
A few people engaged in “hand ringing” but not deep, regular discourse on the evolving nature of what we want “tech” and “programming” to be going forward.
Despite delivering transformative social shifts, even this last decade, where is the collective reflection?
It doesn’t really matter to humanity if strong people can still win fights, but it might matter if artists and designers who do produce great, original work stop being produced. It probably even matters to the AI models because that forms part of their input.
Case in point: https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy
> This trust is broken when users copy and paste information into answers without validating that the answer provided by GPT is correct, ensuring that the sources used in the answer are properly cited (a service GPT does not provide), and verifying that the answer provided by GPT clearly and concisely answers the question asked.