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While some argue this is unethical, others justify it since Rutkowski's art has already been widely used in Stable Diffusion 1.5.
What kind of argument is that supposed to be? We've stolen his art before so it's fine? Dickheads. This whole AI thing is already sketchy enough, at least respect the artists that explicitly want their art to be excluded.
no one's art is being "stolen". you're mistaken.
That's true, but only in the sense that theft and copyright infringement are fundamentally different things.
Generating stuff from ML training datasets that included works without permissive licenses is copyright infringement though, just as much as simply copying and pasting parts of those works in would be. The legal definition of a derivative work doesn't care about the techological details.
(For me, the most important consequence of this sort of argument is that everything produced by Github Copilot must be GPL.)
That's incorrect in my opinion. AI learns patterns from its training data. So do humans, by the way. It's not copy-pasting parts of image or code.
By the same token, a human can easily be deemed to have infringed copyright even without cutting and pasting, if the result is excessively inspired by some other existing work.
It's actually not copyright infringement at all.
Edit: and even if it was, copyright infringement is a moral right, it's a good thing. copyright is theft.
Aside from all the artists whose work was fed into the AI learning models without their permission. That art has been stolen, and is still being stolen. In this case very explicitly, because they outright removed his work, and then put it back when nobody was looking.
What blurry line? An artist doesn’t what his art stolen from him. Seems pretty cut and dry to me.
I don’t disagree but stolen is a bit of a stretch
Nothing was stolen.
Drawing inspiration from someone else by looking at their work has been around for centuries.
Imagine if the Renaissance couldn't happen because artists didn't want their style stolen.
what I'm getting from all the AI stuff is the people in charge and the people that use it are scumbags
Pretty much. There are ways of using it that most artists would be okay with. Most of the people using it flat out refuse to use it like that though.
Edit: To expand on this:
Most artists would be okay with AI art being used as reference material, inspiration, assisting with fleshing out concepts (though you should use concept artists for that in a big production), rapid prototyping and whatnot. Most only care that the final product is at least mostly human-made.
Artists generally want you to actually put effort into what you're making because, at the end of the day, typing a prompt into stable diffusion has more in common with receiving a free commission from an artist than it has with actually being an artist. If you're going to claim that something AI had a hand in as being your art, then you need to have done the majority of the work on it yourself.
The most frustrating thing to me, however, is that there are places in art that AI could participate in which would send artists over the moon, but it's not flashy so no one seems to be working on making AI in those areas.
Most of what I'm personally familiar with has to do with 3d modeling, and in that discipline, people would go nuts if you released an AI tool that could do the UV work for you. Messing with UVs can be very tedious and annoying, to the point where most artists will just use a tool using conventional algorithms to auto-unwrap and pack UVs, and then call it a day, even if they're not great.
Another area is in rigging and weight painting. In order to animate a model, you have to rig it to a skeleton (unless you're a masochist or trying to make a game accurate to late 90s-early 00s animation), paint the bone weights (which bones affect which polygons, and by how much), add constraints, etc. Most 3d modelers would leap at the prospect of having high-quality rigging and UVs done for them at the touch of a button. However, again, because it's not flashy to the general public, no one's put any effort into making an AI that can do that (afaik at least).
Finally, even if you do use an AI in ways that most artists would accept as valid, you'll still have to prove it because there are so many people who put a prompt into stable diffusion, do some minor edits to fix hands (in older version), and then try to pass it off as their own work.
Welcome to the wonderful world of the silicon valley tech era! Everything must be profitable at all costs! Everything must steal every tiny fact about you! Everything must include ! Everything must go through enshittification!
Here's my argument: tough titties. Everything Greg Rutkowski has ever drawn or made has been inspired by other things he has seen and the experiences of his life, and this applies to all of us. Indeed, one cannot usually have experiences without the participation of others. Everyone wants to think they are special, and of course we are to someone, but to everyone no one is special. Since all of our work is based upon the work of everyone who came before us, then all of our work belongs to everyone. So tough fucking titties, welcome to the world of computer science, control c and control v is heavily encouraged.
In that Beatles documentary, Paul McCartney said he thought that once you uttered the words into the microphone, it belonged to everyone. Little did he know how right he actually was.
You think there is a line between innovation and infringement? Wrong, They are the same thing.
And for the record, I'm fine with anyone stealing my art. They can even sell it as their own. Attribution is for the vain.
I think people forget the reality when they take their supposedly brave and oh so altruistic stance of "there should be no copyright".
When people already know they won't even have a small chance of getting paid for the art they create, we will run out of artists.
Because most can not afford to learn and practice that craft without getting any form of payment. It will become a very rare hobby of a few decadent rich people who can afford to learn something like illustration in their free time.
You're fine with someone stealing your art and selling it?
The real issue here is the transfer of power away from the artist. This artist has presumably spent years and years perfecting his craft. Those efforts are now being used to line someone else’s pockets, in return for no compensation and a diminishment in the financial value of his work, and, by the sounds of it, little say in the matter either. That to me seems very unethical.
Personally, as an artist who spends the vast majority of their time on private projects that aren't paid, I feel like it's put power in my hands. It's best at sprucing up existing work and saving huge amounts of time detailing. Because of stable diffusion I'll be able to add those nice little touches and flashy bits to my work that a large corporation with no real vision has at their disposal.
To me it makes it much easier for smaller artists to compete, leveling the playing field a bit between those with massive resources and those with modest resources. That can only be a good thing in the long run.
But I also feel like copyright more often than not rewards the greedy and stifles the creative.
But that's sort of the nature of the beast when you put your content up for free on a public website. Does Kbin or Beehaw owe us money for our comments on this thread? What about everyone currently reading? At least KBin and Beehaw are making profit off of this.
The argument is not as clear cut as people are making it sound and it has potential to up-end some fundamental expectations around free websites and user-generated content. It's going to affect far more than just AI.
At least KBin and Beehaw are making profit off of this.
How?
Re: Stolen. Not stolen comments Copyright law as interpreted judges is still being worked out on AI. Stay tuned if it's defined as stolen or not. But even if the courts decide existing copyright law would define training on artists work as legitimate use. The law can change and it still could swing the way of the artist if congress got involved.
My personal opinion, which may not reflect what happens legally is I hope we all get more control over our data and how it's used and sold. Wether that's my personal data like my comments, location or my artistic data like my paintings. I think that would be a better world
AI art is factually not art theft. It is creation of art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it; except computers and AIs do not run on meat-based hardware that has an extraordinary number of features and demands that are hardwired to ensure survival of the meat-based hardware. It doesn't have our limitations; so it can create similar works in various styles very quickly.
Copyright on the other hand is, an entirely different and, a very sticky subject. By default, "All Rights Are Reserved" is something that usually is protected by these laws. These laws however, are not grounded in modern times. They are grounded in the past; before the information age truly began it's upswing.
Fair use generally encompasses all usage of information that is one or more of the following:
In most cases AI art is at least somewhat Transformative. It may be too complex for us to explain it simply; but the AI is basically a virtual brain that can, without error or certain human faults, ingest image information and make decisions based on input given to it in order to give a desired output.
Arguably; if I have license or right to view artwork; or this right is no longer reserved, but is granted to the public through the use of the World Wide Web...then the AI also has those rights. Yes. The AI has license to view, and learn from your artwork. It just so happens to be a little more efficient at learning and remembering than humans can be at times.
This does not stop you from banning AIs from viewing all of your future works. Communicating that fact with all who interact with your works is probably going to make you a pretty unpopular person. However; rightsholders do not hold or reserve the right to revoke rights that they have previously given. Once that genie is out of the bottle; it's out...unless you've got firm enough contract proof to show that someone agreed to otherwise handle the management of rights.
In some cases; that proof exists. Good luck in court. In most cases however; that proof does not exist in a manner that is solid enough to please the court. A lot of the time; we tend to exchange, transfer and reserve rights ephemerally...that is in a manner that is not strictly always 100% recognized by the law.
Gee; Perhaps we should change that; and encourage the reasonable adaptation and growth of Copyright to fairly address the challenges of the information age.
It doesn't change anything you said about copyright law, but current-gen AI is absolutely not "a virtual brain" that creates "art in the same rough and inexact way that we humans do it." What you are describing is called Artificial General Intelligence, and it simply does not exist yet.
Today's large language models (like ChatGPT) and diffusion models (like Stable Diffusion) are statistics machines. They copy down a huge amount of example material, process it, and use it to calculate the most statistically probable next word (or pixel), with a little noise thrown in so they don't make the same thing twice. This is why ChatGPT is so bad at math and Stable Diffusion is so bad at counting fingers -- they are not making any rational decisions about what they spit out. They're not striving to make the correct answer. They're just producing the most statistically average output given the input.
Current-gen AI isn't just viewing art, it's storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive. It doesn't create, it interpolates. In order to imitate a person't style, it must make a copy of that person's work; describing the style in words is insufficient. If human artists (and by extension, art teachers) lose their jobs, AI training sets stagnate, and everything they produce becomes repetitive and derivative.
None of this matters to copyright law, but it matters to how we as a society respond. We do not want art itself to become a lost art.
Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive.
This is factually untrue. For example, Stable Diffusion models are in the range of 2GB to 8GB, trained on a set of 5.85 billion images. If it was storing the images, that would allow approximately 1 byte for each image, and there are only 256 possibilities for a single byte. Images are downloaded as part of training the model, but they're eventually "destroyed"; the model doesn't contain them at all, and it doesn't need to refer back to them to generate new images.
It's absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images, but the product of training is a model that doesn't contain any of the original images.
None of that is to say that there is absolutely no valid copyright claim, but it seems like either option is pretty bad, long term. AI generated content is going to put a lot of people out of work and result in a lot of money for a few rich people, based off of the work of others who aren't getting a cut. That's bad.
But the converse, where we say that copyright is maintained even if a work is only stored as weights in a neural network is also pretty bad; you're going to have a very hard time defining that in such a way that it doesn't cover the way humans store information and integrate it to create new art. That's also bad. I'm pretty sure that nobody who creates art wants to have to pay Disney a cut because one time you looked at some images they own.
The best you're likely to do in that situation is say it's ok if a human does it, but not a computer. But that still hits a lot of stumbling blocks around definitions, especially where computers are used to create art constantly. And if we ever hit the point where digital consciousness is possible, that adds a whole host of civil rights issues.
Current AI models do not learn the way human brains do. And the way current models learn how do "make art" is very different from how human artists do it. To repeatedly try and recreate the work of other artists is something beginners do. And posting these works online was always shunned in artist communities. You also don't learn to draw a hand by remembering where a thousand different artists put the lines so it looks like a hand.
All this proves to me, based on the context from this post, is that people are willing to commit copyright infringement in order to make a machine produce art in a specific style.
It doesn't say anywhere they used copyrighted art though?
Seems the new model might use art inspired by him, not his art itself.
It's a moral gray zone. If you add enough freely available works inspired by someone, the model can produce a similar style without using any original works.
Is it still copyright infringement at that point?
Its unlikely that this did not use his work, these models require input data. Even if they took similar art, that would only resolve the issue of Greg himself but would shift it to those other artists. Unless there is some sort of unspoken artistic genealogical purity that prevents artists with similar or inspired styles from having equal claim on their own creations when inspired by another.
It also could be outputs generated from another AI model. But I don't think people who see ethical problems in this care about the number of steps removed and processing that occurs when the origin is his artwork and it ultimately outputs the same or similar style. The result is what bothers people, no matter how disparate or disconnected the source's influence is. If the models had simply found the Greg Rutkowski latent space through random chance people would still take issue with it.
The ability and willingness to generate images in a style associated with a person, without consent, is a threat to that persons job security and shows a lack of value for them as a human. As if their creative expression is worth nothing but as a commodity to be consumed.
The people supporting this don't care though. They want to consume this person's style in far greater quantities and variations then a human is capable or willing to fulfill. That's why these debates are so fierce, the two sides have incentives that are in direct conflict with one another.
We currently lack the economic ingenuity or willingness to create a system that will satisfy both parties. The barrier of entry to AI is low, someone at home has every incentive to maintain the status quo or even actively rail against artists. Artists will need a heavy handed approach from the government or as a collective to combat this effectively.
my take on the subject, as someone who worked both in design and arts, and tech, is that the difficulty in discussing this is more rooted on what is art as opposed to what is theft
we mistakingly call illustrator/design work as art work. art is hard to define, but most would agree it requires some level of expressiveness that emanates from the artist (from the condition of the human existence, to social criticism, to beauty by itself) and that's what makes it valuable. with SD and other AIs, the control of this aspect is actually in the hands of the AI illustrator (or artist?)
whereas design and illustration are associated with product development and market. while they can contain art in a way, they have to adhere to a specific pipeline that is generally (if not always) for profit. to deliver the best-looking imagery for a given purpose in the shortest time possible
designers and illustrators were always bound to be replaced one way or a another, as the system is always aiming to maximize profit (much like the now old discussions between taxis and uber). they have all the rights to whine about it, but my guess is that this won't save their jobs. they will have to adopt it as a very powerful tool in their workflow or change careers
on the other hand, artists that are worried, if they think the worth of their art lies solely in a specific style they've developed, they are in for an epiphany. they might soon realise they aren't really artists, but freelance illustrators. that's also not to mention other posts stating that we always climb on the shoulders of past masters - in all areas
both artists and illustrators that embrace this tool will benefit from it, either to express themselves quicker and skipping fine arts school or to deliver in a pace compatible with the market
all that being said I would love to live in a society where people cared more about progress instead of money. imagine artists and designers actively contributing to this tech instead of wasting time talking fighting over IP and copyright...
If an image is represented as a network of weighted values describing subtle patterns in the image rather than a traditional grid of pixel color values, is that copy of the image still subject to copyright law?
How much would you have to change before it isn’t? Or if you merged it with another representation, would that change your rights to that image?
It doesn't matter how you recreate an image, if you recreate someone else's work that is a violation of copyright.
Stealing someone's style is a different matter.
There’s a lot of disagreement here on what is theft, what is art, what is copyright… etc
The main issue people have with AI is fundamentally how is it going to be used? I know there isnt much we can do about it now, and its a shame because there it has so much potential good. Everyone defending AI is making a lot of valid points.
But at the end of the day it is a tool that is going to be misused by the rich and powerful to eliminate hundreds of millions of well paying careers, permanently. MOST well paying jobs in fact, not just artists. What the hell are people supposed to do? How is any of this a good thing?
What the hell are people supposed to do?
Eat the rich :)
More concretely, there are a number of smaller and larger sociopolitical changes that can be fought for. On the smaller side, there's rethinking the way our society values people and pushing for some kind of UBI, on the larger side there's shifting to postcapitalist economics and organisation to various degrees ^.^)
The rich and powerful must go away, or everyone else will suffer.
Soon enough they will succeed in eliminating most jobs, and the moment will come where action must be taken. Them or us.
The copyright argument is a bad argument against AI art. But there are also good arguments against it.
This person has no idea what machine learning actually is. And they hate such a generic concept on a "gut feeling" and come up with the reasons later?
If you want good reasons to hate AI generated art you won't find them in this shitty blogpost.
Apparently your comment really got to them, because the blogpost now contains a direct quote of you and a response.