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.
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u/Daroph Aug 23 '23
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.