It’s so ridiculous when corporations steal everyone’s work for their own profit, no one bats an eye but when a group of individuals do the same to make education and knowledge free for everyone it’s somehow illegal, unethical, immoral and what not.
Cue the Max Headroom episode where the blanks (disconnected people) are chased by the censors because the blanks steal cable so their children can watch the educational shows and learn to read, and they are forced to use clandestine printing presses to teach them.
Using publically available data to train isn’t stealing.
Daily reminder that the ones pushing this narrative are literally corporation like OpenAI. If you can’t use copyright materials freely to train on, it brings up the cost in such a way that only a handful of companies can afford the data.
They want to kill the open-source scene and are manipulating you to do so. Don’t build their moat for them.
Scientific research papers are generally public too, in that you can always reach out to the researcher and they’ll provide the papers for free, it’s just the “corporate” journals that need their profit off of other peoples work…
We have a mechanism for people to make their work publically visible while reserving certain rights for themselves.
Are you saying that creators cannot (or ought not be able to) reserve the right to ML training for themselves? What if they want to selectively permit that right to FOSS or non-profits?
Essentially yes. There isn’t a happy solution where FOSS gets the best images and remains competitive. The amount of data needed is outside what can be donated. Any open source work will be so low in quality as to be unusable.
It also won’t be up to them. The platforms where the images are posted will be selling and brokering. No individual is getting a call unless they are a household name.
None of the artists are getting paid either way so yeah, I’m thinking of society in general first.
The point is the entire concept of AI training off people’s work to make profit for others is wrong without the permission of and compensation for the creator regardless if it’s corporate or open source.
I think I’ve decided to not publish anything that I want to keep ownership of, just in case. There’s an entire planet’s worth of countries, which will all have their own sets of laws. It takes waay too long to polish something, only to just give it away for free haha. Someone else is free to do that work if it is that easy. No skin off my back.
I think it’s similar to many other hand-made crafts/items. Most people will buy their clothes from stores, but there are definitely still people who make beautiful clothing from hand better than machines could.
Don’t even get me started on stuff like knitting. It already costs the creator a crap ton of money just for the materials. It takes a crap ton of time to make those, too. Despite the costs, many people just expect those knitted pieces for practically free. The people who expect that pricing are also free to go with machine-produced crafts/items instead.
It comes down to what people want, and what they’re willing to pay, imo. Some people will find value in something physically being put together by another human, and other people will find value in having more for less. Neither is “wrong” necessarily, so long as no one is literally ripped off. (With over 8 billion people, it’s bound to happen at least once. I feel bad for whoever that is.)
That being said, we’ll never be able to honestly say that the specific skills and techniques that are currenty required are the exact same. It would be like calling a photographer amazing at realism painting because their photo looks like real life. Photographers and painters both have their place, but they are not the exact same.
I think that’s also part of what’s frustrating so many artists. Coding AI is not the same as using the colour wheel, choosing materials, working fine motor control, etc. It’s not learning about shadows, contrast, focal points, etc. I can definitely understand people not wanting those aspects to be brushed off, especially since it usually takes most of a lifetime to achieve. A music generator and a violin may both make great music, but they are not the same, and they require different technical skills.
I’ll never buy AI art if I have any say in the matter. I’ll support handmade stuff first, every time.
I love that the people who push this kind of rhetoric often consider themselves left wing, it’s just so silly.
‘every word you ever utter must be considered private property and no other human may benefit from it without payments!’
I mean yes I know you’re going to say socialism is about workers getting fair pay but come on, this is just pure rent seeking. We’re a global community of people, if this comment helps train an ai that can help other people better live their lives, better access medicine and education or other services then I think that’s a wonderful thing.
And yes of course it should be open source and free to all people, that’s why these pushes to make sure only corporations can afford ai are so infuriating
So true.
This talking point, too, is so infuriatingly silly:
I mean yes I know you’re going to say socialism is about workers getting fair pay
Workers, by definition, don’t own what they produce. Copyrights are intellectual property; business capital. Somehow, capitalists are workers in the minds of these people. This is your mind on trickle-down economics.
Too bad
If you can’t afford to pay the authors of the data required for your project to work, then that sucks for you, but doesn’t give you the right to take anything you want and violate copyright.
Making a data agnostic model and releasing the source is fine, but a released, trained model owes royalties to its training data.
True, Big Tech loves monopoly power. It’s hard to see how there can be an AI monopoly without expanding intellectual property rights.
It would mean a nice windfall profit for intellectual property owners. I doubt they worry about open source or competition but only think as far as lobbying to be given free money. It’s weird how many people here, who are probably not all rich, support giving extra money to owners, merely for owning things. That’s how it goes when you grow up on Ayn Rand, I guess.
OpenAI is definitely not the one arguing that they have stole data to train their AIs, and Disney will be fine whether AI requires owning the rights to training materials or not. Small artists, the ones protesting the most against it, will not. They are already seeing jobs and commission opportunities declining due to it.
Being publicly available in some form is not a permission to use and reproduce those works however you feel like. Only the real owner have the right to decide. We on the internet have always been a bit blasé about it, sometimes deservedly, but as we get to a point we are driving away the very same artists that we enjoy and get inspired by, maybe we should be a bit more understanding about their position.
Thats basically my main point, Disney doesn’t need the data, Getty either. AI isn’t going away and the jobs will be lost no matter what.
Putting a price tag in the high millions for any kind of generative model only benefits the big players.
I feel for the artists. It was already a very competitive domain that didn’t really pay well and it’s now much worse but if they aren’t a household name, they aren’t getting a dime out of any new laws.
I’m not ready to give the economy to Microsoft, Google, Getty and Adobe so GRRM can get a fat payday.
If AI companies lose, small artists may have the recourse of seeking compensation for the use and imitation of their art too. Just feeling for them is not enough if they are going to be left to the wolves.
There isn’t a scenario here in which big media companies lose so talking of it like it’s taking a stand against them doesn’t make much sense. What are we fighting for here? That we get to generate pictures of Goofy? The small AI user’s win here seems like such a silly novelty that I can’t see how it justifies just taking for granted that artists will have it much rougher than they already have.
The reality here is that even if AI gets the free pass, large media and tech companies are still primed to profit from them far more than any small user. They will be the one making AI-assisted movies and integrating chat AI into their systems. They don’t lose in either situation.
There are ways to train AI without relying on unauthorized copyrighted data. Even if OpenAI loses, it wouldn’t be the death of the technology. It may be more efficient and effective to train them with that data, but why is “efficiency” enough to justify this overreach?
And is it even wise to be so callous about it? Because it’s not going to stop with artists. This technology has the potential to replace large swaths of service industries. If we don’t think of the human costs now, it will be even harder to make a case for everyone else.
I fully believe AI will be able to replace 50% or more of desk jobs in the near future. It’s definitely a complicated situation and you make good points.
First and foremost, I think it’s imperative the barrier for entry for model training is as low as possible. Anything else basically gives a select few companies the ability to charge a huge subscription fee on all our goods and services.
The data needed is pretty heavy as well, it’s not very pheasible to go off of donated or public domain data.
I also think any job loss is virtually guaranteed and trying to save them is misguided as well as not really benefiting most of those affected.
And yea, the big companies win either way but if it’s easier to use this new tech, we might not lose as hard. Disney for instance doesn’t have any competition but if a bunch of indie animation companies and groups start popping up, it levels the playing field a bit.
