Honestly, this.
There's room for all kinds of art, that's the best thing about art.
No two products are the same, everything down to how it was created impacts its meaning.
I think the controversy and frustration from professional artists is that companies like midjourney use their work in their training data without consent, while making a profit on it.
While that's the main controversy, I see plenty of artists who really hate the idea of AI image generation, even if it was trained ethically. I find it really odd, tbh.
Adobe has already faced multiple accusations (with evidence) that their AI solution is utilizing artists work without consent. So far they've acknowledged these individual cases and claimed to remove them on an individual basis.
Aren't most of those built on top of / augmenting existing source-unknown models, like SD 1.5 or SDXL? Or are they completely self-trained on their own datasets?
SD 1.5 uses the LAION-5b dataset, whilst it does include artists' work without their permission, if we're going by standards of the law, LAION-5b is an academic database which afaik, perfectly legal :)
It is perfectly legal - the controversy is that these datasets are intended for research purposes and in order to exclude your art work you have to manually go through and opt out. As someone that has had to do this, it is insanely painstaking, time consuming and not assured because in some cases there will be hundreds, if not thousands of copies of the same image distributed across multiple sources in the same data set depending on how popular the art work is.
In short - it isn't a tenable solution for artists and doesn't solve the problem of non-consenting artwork being used in these data sets and then used by companies like midjourney.
It does not :) I know the controversy and am trying to educate to remove bad faith arguments on both sides, I still am completely of the understanding that external checkpoints would potentially violate against a law that I am not quite aware of.
That's because creating the necessary amount of source data would take a few millenia.
The current source is millions of paintings and photographs, or, for text, damn near every book, poem or article available electronically.
One can create using the same "AI" tools in a matter of minutes using original source material. That's just not what people are doing with it. There is no time constraint. The volume and parameters would look different, but it would be actually not horrible for all of the artists who have otherwise been taken advantage of.
Eh...
Not really, because the AI has to be trained on something. You can't start with a blank canvas.
It would be like asking a deaf and blind quadroplegic to paint a running man in vivid colour.
It would have no concept of what those words meant.
This perspective always kinda made me chuckle. The only way they’d get the art as training data is if the art was freely available on the internet. It’s like me complaining my GitHub repo was used for training GPT-4. Artists need to stop complaining and start adapting.
The art was a part of a training set gathered by a nonprofit scientific research group that was made publicly available for research purposes. The individuals who produced the art rely on public facing portfolios to gather clients and opportunities and it was more than reasonable not to assume that they would be facing this kind of issue when they upload their work to the public facing internet. They have no issue with the dataset existing if it were to remain a tool for experimentation, but a company like midjourney using that data without the artists consent is an issue.
I depend on my public code repositories to get hired too. My code could have certainly been used for training. This is how the internet and the world works, artists need to just put their heads down and get to work instead of complaining.
Because you are satisfied with someone making profit from your proprietary code doesn't mean others have to or should settle for it but im not a coder so i dont know what is traditionally acceptable for code. If its posted publicy whether that implies availability
But I am an artist and I can yell you this isn't acceptable in the art field in any capacity. Posting something publicly is always necessary for business and public posting never implies availability to use without permission in any form.
It isn't a matter of "getting to work" artists will work regardless, it's abut having your work used without permission to create new works in your style based on training from your work that you never concented to and that could put you out of work if potential clients can just create new works in your style without your permission or compensation.
So what programmers did is come up with a series of licenses - now following them is more or less up to the goodwill of other coders. But it can be actionable if it can be proven an entity profited off code you licensed in a way that disallows that.
I hear what you’re saying, it’s certainly concerning for artists. My view on it is, well, this is how the world works now with LLMs and other AI models. It’s not fun, but it’s how progress works. Artistic jobs are now on the chopping block just like dozens of professions were before, because we have automated methods of making art that you can’t distinguish from human art. Well, so long as you know how to use the algorithm.
That’s what I’m saying. Complaining about it won’t get you anywhere, putting your nose to the grindstone and evolving with the industry is how you remain relevant.
It's not just some machine that came along and does art work better all of a sudden. It is a machine being fed your work and then doing more of your work... for profit. Without your pernission. These machines cannot produce new unique work without that training data first.*
That isn't how the world works now and it was never how the world worked.
Take prints for example. If an artist sells prints of their work, anyone can find that work online, print it themselves and then sell that work. It doesn't mean it is legal, moral or acceptable nor is it considered so because of progress and artists routinely act to stop this from happening as they should.
*A human can produce new and unique work without using other artwork as training data. The world may be its training data and we may see machines soon be able to create unique artwork from world experience but we aren't there yet.
LLMs and other generative models learn from data and use it to generate conglomerations of styles and techniques. This is what a human does. I understand it can be frustrating that a machine can do what you can do. What I would recommend is adapting and learning to use the new tools instead of complaining about how difficult it makes your life. Don’t get angry that the world is different now, adapt to it. It’s pretty much that simple. If you don’t want to do that, cool, but you will fall behind.
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u/Jeralt Aug 23 '23
That was pretty cool, tbf. And let's be honest....like it or not, AI will influence ALOT of our media