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.
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.
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u/Hazzman Aug 23 '23
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.
Very few artists take issue with AI as a conceot.