[HN Gopher] Who knew the first AI battles would be fought by art... ___________________________________________________________________ Who knew the first AI battles would be fought by artists? Author : dredmorbius Score : 312 points Date : 2022-12-15 11:49 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (vmst.io) (TXT) w3m dump (vmst.io) | cardanome wrote: | I don't see the point. There is a copyright (and in that regard | most of these images are fine) and then there is trademark which | they might violate. | | Regardless, the human generating and publishing these images is | obviously responsible to ensure they are not violating any IP | property. So they might get sued by Disney. I don't get why the | AI companies would be effected in any way. Disney is not suing | Blender if I render an image of Mickey Mouse with it. | | Though I am sure that artists might find an likely ally in Disney | against the "AI"'s when they tell them about their idea of making | art-styles copyright-able Being able to monopolize art styles | would be indeed a dream come true for those huge corporations. | xg15 wrote: | If thouse mouse images are generated, that implies that Disney | content is _already_ part of the training data and models. | | So in effect, they are pitting Disney's understanding of | copyright (maximally strict) against that of the AI companies | (maximally loose). | | Even if it's technically the responsibility of the user not to | publish generated images that contain copyrighted content, I | can't imagine that Disney is very happy with a situation where | everyone can download Stable Diffusion and generate their own | arbitrary artwork of Disney characters in a few minutes. | | So that strategy might actually work. I wish them good luck and | will restock my popcorn reserves just in case :) | | The problem I see though is that both sides are billion dollar | companies - and there is probably a lot of interest in AI tech | within Disney themselves. So it might just as well happen that | both sides find some kind of agreement that's beneficial for | both of them and leaves the artists holding the bag. | wnkrshm wrote: | You can search the LAION5B CLIP-space and you find a lot of | mickey in it, lots of fan art between photos of actual merch. | If you search with a high aesthetic score, you'll find lots | of actual Disney illustrations etc. in the neighbourhood. [0] | | [0] https://rom1504.github.io/clip-retrieval/ | xg15 wrote: | Yes, and probably the copyrighted art of lots of other | artists as well. That's the entire point. | astrange wrote: | > If thouse mouse images are generated, that implies that | Disney content is already part of the training data and | models. | | It doesn't mean that. You could "find" Mickey in the latent | space of any model using textual inversion and an hour of GPU | time. He's just a few shapes. | | (Main example: the most popular artist StableDiffusion 1 | users like to imitate is not in the StableDiffusion training | images. His name just happens to work in prompts by | coincidence.) | Taywee wrote: | If you can find a copyrighted work in that model that | wasn't put there with permission, then why would that model | and its output not violate the copyright? | mcv wrote: | The idea behind that is probably that any artist learns | from seeing other artists' copyrighted art, even if | they're not allowed to reproduce it. This is easily seen | from the fact that art goes through fashions; artists | copy styles and ideas from each other and expand on that. | | Of course that probably means that those copyrighted | images exist in some encoded form in the data or neural | network of the AI, and also in our brain. Is that legal? | With humans it's unavoidable, but that doesn't have to | mean that it's also legal for AI. But even if those | copyrighted images exist in some form in our brains, we | know not to reproduce them and pass them off as original. | The AI does that. Maybe it needs a feedback mechanism to | ensure its generated images don't look too much like | copyrighted images from its data set. Maybe art-AI | necessarily also has to become a bit of a legal-AI. | astrange wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel | | A latent space that contains every image contains every | copyrighted image. But the concept of sRGB is not | copyrighted by Disney just yet. | Taywee wrote: | Sure, but this isn't philosophy. An AI model that | contains every image is a copyright derivative of all | those images and so is the output generated from it. It's | not an abstract concept or a human brain. It's a pile of | real binary data generated from real input. | astrange wrote: | StableDiffusion is 4GB which is approximately two bytes | per training image. That's not very derivative, it's | actual generalization. | | "Mickey" does work as a prompt, but if they took that | word out of the text encoder he'd still be there in the | latent space, and it's not hard to find a way to | construct him out of a few circles and a pair of red | shorts. | mcv wrote: | How do you get that coincidence? To be able to accurately | respond to the cue of an artist's name, it has to know the | artist, doesn't it? | | In any case, in the example images here, the AI clearly | knew who Mickey is and used that to generate Mickey Mouse | images. Mickey has got to be in the training data. | esrauch wrote: | For other artist cases the corpus can include many images | that includes a description with phrases like "inspired | by Banksy". Then the model can learn to generate images | in the style of Banksy without having any copyrighted | images by Banksy in the training set. | | The Mickey Mouse case though is obviously bs, the | training data definitely does just have tons of | infringing examples of Mickey Mouse, it didn't somehow | reinvent the exact image of him from first principles. | taeric wrote: | This is a bit silly, though? Search Google images for Mickey | Mouse, is the results page a possible liability for Google? | Why not? | | Go to a baker and commission a Mickey Mouse cake. Is that a | violation if the bakery didn't advertise it? (To note, a | bakery can't advertise it due to trademark, not copyright. | Right?) | | For that matter, any privately commissioned art? Is that | really what artists want to lock away? | crote wrote: | > Is the results page a possible liability for Google? | | Absolutely. Google previously had a direct link to the | full-size image, but it has removed this due to potential | legal issues. See [0]. | | > Is that a violation if the bakery didn't advertise it? | | According to Disney, it is. See [1]. | | > Any privately commissioned art? | | Not _any_ art, no. Only that which uses IP /material they | do not have a license to. | | [0]: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/02/12/say-goodbye-to-the- | view-im... | | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cake_copyright#Copyright | _of_ar... | taeric wrote: | I started to go down the rabbit hole of commissioned fan | art. To say that that is a quagmire is an understatement. | :( | Macha wrote: | I mean, isn't most of that "It's trademark infringement, | but it is both financially tedious and a PR disaster to | go after any but the most prominent cases" | | Which is why e.g. Bethesda is not going to slap you for | your Mr House or Pip-Boy fanart, but will slap the | projects that recreate Fallout 3 in engine X. | wongarsu wrote: | The right to citation is already part of the 1886 Berne | Convention, a precedent that enables services like Google | images. | | The matters of the baker and the privately comissioned art | are more complicated. The artist and baker hold copyrigh | for their creation, but their products are also derived | from copyrighted work, so Disney also has rights here [1]. | This is just usually not enforced by copyright holders | because who in their right mind would punish free | marketing. | | 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work | sigmoid10 wrote: | >is the results page a possible liability for Google? | | That's actually a tricky question and lengthy court battles | were held over this in both the US and Europe. In the end, | all courts decided that the image result page is | questionable when it comes to copyright, but generally | covered by fair use. The question is how far fair use goes | when people are using the data in derivative work. Google | specifically added licensing info about images to further | cover their back, but this whole fair use stuff gets really | murky when you have automatic scrapers using google images | to train AIs who in turn create art for sale eventually. | There's a lot of actors in that process that profit | indirectly from the provided images. This will probably | once again fall back to the courts sooner or later. | red_trumpet wrote: | Europe has no concept of Fair Use. How did the courts | argue there? | sigmoid10 wrote: | Fair use is just a limitation of copyright in case of | public interest. Europe has very similar exclusions, even | though they are spelled out more concretely. But they | don't make this particular issue any less opaque. | FinnKuhn wrote: | Not a lawyer, but from how I understand it the German | courts argued that if you don't use any technology to | prevent web crawlers from accessing the pictures on your | website you need to accept that they are used for preview | images (what the Google picture search technically is) as | this is a usual use case. | | -> here is the actual judgement though: | https://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi- | bin/rechtsprechung/do... | logifail wrote: | > Search Google images for Mickey Mouse, is the results | page a possible liability for Google? | | In 2018[0], didn't Getty force Google to change how Google | Images presented results, following a lawsuit in 2016[1]? | | [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/internet-rages- | after... [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech- | policy/2016/04/google-eu-antitr... | jameshart wrote: | There's nothing wrong with the model knowing what Mickey | Mouse looks like. | | There are noninfringing usecases for generating images | containing Mickey Mouse - not least, Disney themselves | produce thousands of images containing the mouse's likeness | every year; but also parody usecases exist. | | But even if you are just using SD to generate images, if we | want to make sure to avoid treading on Disney's toes, the AI | would need to know what Mickey Mouse looks like in order to | _avoid_ infringing trademark, too. You can feed it negative | weights already if you want to get 'cartoon mouse' but not | have it look like Mickey. | | The AI draws what you tell it to draw. You get to choose | whether or not to publish the result (the AI doesn't | automatically share its results with the world). You have the | ultimate liability and credit for any images so produced. | xg15 wrote: | Not a lawyer (and certainly no disney lawyer), but my | understanding was that copyright is specifically concerned | with _how_ an image is created, less so _that_ it is | created. Which is why you can copyright certain recordings | that only consist of silence. It just prevents you from | using _this_ record to base your own record of silence on, | it doesn 't generally block you from recording silence. | | In the same way, making the model deliberately unable to | generate Micky Mouse images would be much more far-reaching | than just removing Micky imagery from the trainset. | jameshart wrote: | Most Mickey Mouse image usage problems will be trademark | infringement not copyright. | | Copyright infringement does generally require you to have | been _aware_ of the work you were copying. So for sure | there 's an issue with using AI to generate art where you | could use the tool to generate you an image, which you | think looks original, because you are unaware of a | similar original work, so _you_ could not be guilty of | copyright infringement - but if the AI model was trained | on a dataset that includes an original copyrighted work | that is similar, obviously it seems like someone has | infringed something there. | | But that's not what we're talking about in the case of | mickey mouse imagery, is it? You're not asking for images | of 'utterly original uncopyrighted untrademarked cartoon | mouse with big ears' and then unknowingly publishing a | mouse picture that the evil AI copied from Disney without | your knowledge. | xg15 wrote: | > _But that 's not what we're talking about in the case | of mickey mouse imagery, is it? You're not asking for | images of 'utterly original uncopyrighted untrademarked | cartoon mouse with big ears' and then unknowingly | publishing a mouse picture that the evil AI copied from | Disney without your knowledge._ | | I think this is exactly the problem that many artists | have with imagine generators. Yes, we could all easily | identify if a generated artwork contained popular Disney | characters - but that's because it's Disney, owners of | some of the most well-known IP in the world. The same | isn't true for small artists: There is a real risk that a | model reproduces parts of a lesser known copyrighted work | and the user doesn't realise it. | | I think this is what artists are protesting: Their works | have been used as training data and will now be parts of | countless generated images, all with no permission and no | compensation. | TchoBeer wrote: | This already happens all the time in the current status | quo with no need for AI. | jameshart wrote: | Right. | | So Disney don't need to worry about AI art tools - so | 'attacking' them with such tools does nothing. | palata wrote: | Well Disney would probably sue Blender if there was a "generate | Mickey Mouse model" button in it. It's not a totally fair | comparison. | poulpy123 wrote: | But you can already make mickey mouse models, and people do | it all the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqVXoGCTfuk&a | b_channel=Ashle... | subw00f wrote: | I'm sure it's easy to write an addon for that. | gl-prod wrote: | Then the author of that addon would be liable. Not blender. | SiempreViernes wrote: | Try it and see if it is blender or you as the addon creator | that gets sued. | idlehand wrote: | These AI models are closer to Google in that regard, yes, you | can instruct them to generate a Mickey Mouse image, but you | can instruct them to generate any kind of image, just like | you can search for anything on Google, including Mickey | Mouse. When using these models you are essentially performing | a search in the model weights. | thih9 wrote: | Google Image results have a note that says: "Images may be | subject to copyright". | Tepix wrote: | It boils down to this: Do you need permission if you train your | AI model with copyrighted things or not? | residualmind wrote: | I would argue if people are allowed to see your art for free, | so should AI models. | bakugo wrote: | AI models are not people. | dotancohen wrote: | Bad argument. Being allowed to see art and being allowed to | copy art are two different things. Being allowed to _copy_ | is a reserved _right_, that's the root of the word | copyright. | CuriouslyC wrote: | Bad argument. Copying art is not the crime, distributing | the copied art is the crime. The Disney Gestapo can't | send storm troopers to your house if your kid draws a | perfect rendition of Mickey, but they can if your kid | draws a bunch of perfect renditions and sells them | online. | concordDance wrote: | Except they aren't copying it, but instead drawing | inspiration from it. Which all humans have done forever. | AlexandrB wrote: | This falls apart for 2 reasons. First, I don't think | there's any technical definition of "inspiration" that | applies to a deeply nested model of numerical weights. | It's a machine. A hammer does not draw inspiration from | nails that have been hammered in before. Second an AI is | not a human under the law and there's no reason to think | that an activity that would be considered | "transformative" (e.g. learning then painting something | similar) when done by a human would still be considered | such if performed by an AI. | mejutoco wrote: | Following your logic: if AI is like humans why don't we | tax its work? | CuriouslyC wrote: | If an AI ever gets paid for the work it does, I'm sure we | will. | peoplefromibiza wrote: | people are allowed to take a walk in the park, so why cars | or tanks or bulldozers are not? | residualmind wrote: | A bulldozer destroys the park and other people's ability | to enjoy it -- active, destructive. Passively training a | model on an artwork does not change the art in the | slightest -- passive, non-destructive | | Mind you, this is not talking about the usage rights of | images generated from such a model, that's a completely | different story and a legal one. | 6P58r3MXJSLi wrote: | > A bulldozer destroys the park and other people's | ability to enjoy it | | hear hear... | | > Passively training a model on an artwork does not | change the art in the slightest | | copyright holders, I mean individual authors, people who | actually produced the content being used, disagree. | | They say AI is like a bulldozer destroying the park to | them. | | Which technically is true, it's a machine that someone | (some interested party maybe?) is trying to disguise as a | human, doing human stuff. | | But it's not. | | > passive, non-destructive | | Passive, non-destructive, in this context means | | - passive: people send the images to you, you don't go | looking for them | | - non-destructive: people authorized you, otherwise it's | destructive of their rights. | gt565k wrote: | Ehhh that's like saying an artist who studies other art | pieces and then creates something using combined techniques | and styles from those set pieces is what ???? Now liable ??? | Taywee wrote: | An AI is not a person. Automated transformation does not | remove the original copyright, otherwise decompilers would | as well. That the process is similar to a real person is | not actually important, because it's still an automated | transformation by a computer program. | | We might be able to argue that the computer program taking | art as input and automatically generating art as output is | the exact same as an artist some time after general | intelligence is reached, until then, it's still a machine | transformation and should be treated as such. | | AI shouldn't be a legal avenue for copyright laundering. | jefftk wrote: | _> Automated transformation does not remove the original | copyright_ | | Automated transformation is not guaranteed to remove the | original copyright, and for simple transformations it | won't, but it's an open question (no legal precedent, | different lawyers interpreting the law differently) | whether what these models are doing is so transformative | that their output (when used normally, not trying to | reproduce a specific input image) passes the fair use | criteria. | idlehand wrote: | Now we are in Ship of Theseus territory. If I downsample | an image and convert it into a tiny delta in the model | weights, from which the original image can never be | recovered, is that infringement? | CyanBird wrote: | Except the machine is not automatically generating an | input | | > automatically generating art as output | | The user is navigating the latent space to obtain said | output, I don't know if that's transformative or not, but | it is an important distinction | | If the program were wholy automated as in it had a random | number/words generator added to it and no navigation of | the latent space by users happened, then yeah I would | agree, but that's not the case at least so far as ml | algos like midjourney or stable diffusion are concerned | Taywee wrote: | That's still automated in the same way that a compiler is | automated. A compiler doesn't remove the copyright, | neither does a decompiler. This isn't different enough to | have different copyright rules. There are more layers to | the transformation, but it's still a program with input | and output. I'm not sure what you mean by "navigation of | latent space". It's generating a model from copyrighted | input and then using that model and more input to | generate output. It's a machine transformation in more | steps. | Retric wrote: | The output is probably irrelevant here, the model itself | is a derivative work from a copyright standpoint. | | Going painting > raw photo (derivative work), raw photo > | jpg (derivative work), jpg > model (derivative work), | model > image (derivative work). At best you can make a | fair use argument at that last step, but that falls apart | if the resulting images harm the market for the original | work. | strken wrote: | The question for me is whether "jpg > model" is | derivative or transformative. It's not clear it would be | derivative. | Retric wrote: | You seem to be confused, transformative works are still | derivative works. Being sufficiently transformative can | allow for a fair use exception but you may need a court | case to prove something is sufficiently transformative to | qualify. | strken wrote: | Sorry, yes. | PeterisP wrote: | It's not clear at all whether the model is a derivative | work from a copyright standpoint. Maybe they are, may be | they are not - it's definitely not settled, the law isn't | very explicit and as far as I know, there is no | reasonable precedent yet - and arguably _that_ would be | one of the key issues decided (and set as precedent) in | these first court battles. I also wouldn 't be surprised | if it eventually doesn't matter what current law says as | the major tech companies may lobby passing a law to | explicitly define the rules of the game; I mean if Disney | could lobby multiple copyright laws to protect their | interests, then the ML-heavy tech companies, being much | larger and more wealthy than Disney, can do it as well. | | But currently, first, there is a reasonable argument that | the model weights may be not copyrightable at all - it | doesn't really fit the criteria of what copyright law | protects, no creativity was used in making them, etc, in | which case it can't be a derivative work and is | effectively outside the scope of copyright law. Second, | there is a reasonable argument that the model is a | collection of facts about copyrighted works, equivalent | to early (pre-computer) statistical ngram language models | of copyrighted books used in e.g. lexicography - for | which we have solid old legal precedent that creating | such models are not derivative works (again, as a | collection of facts isn't copyrightable) and thus can be | done against the wishes of the authors. | | Fair use criteria comes into play as conditions when it | is permissible to violate the exclusive rights of the | authors. However, if the model is not legally considered | a derivative work according to copyright law criteria, | then fair use conditions don't matter because in that | case copyright law does not assert that making them is | somehow restricted. | | Note that in this case the resulting image might still be | considered derivative work of an original image, even if | the "tool-in-the-middle" is not derivative work. | Retric wrote: | You seem to be confused as to nomenclature, | transformative works are still derivative works. Being | sufficiently transformative can allow for a fair use | exception, the distinction is important because you can't | tell if something is sufficiently transformative without | a court case. | | Also, a jpg seemingly fits your definition as "no | creativity was used in making them, etc" but clearly they | embody the original works creativity. Similarly, a model | can't be trained on random data it needs to extract | information from it's training data to be useful. | | The specific choice of algorithm used to extract | information doesn't change if something is derivative. | jamesdwilson wrote: | finally, a good use for a blockchain, decentralized | defeating of copyright | Double_a_92 wrote: | That's still the question that it boils down to, even if | the answer is a "No". | TaupeRanger wrote: | Not at all, for many reasons. | | 1) the artist is not literally copying the copyrighted | pixel data into their "system" for training | | 2) An individual artist is not a multi billion dollar | company with a computer system that spits out art rapidly | using copyrighted pixel data. A categorical difference. | brushfoot wrote: | Those reasons don't make sense to me. | | On 1, human artists _are_ copying copyrighted pixel data | into their system for training. That system is the brain. | It 's organic RAM. | | On 2, money shouldn't make a difference. Jim Carrey | should still be allowed to paint even though he's rich. | | If Jim uses Photoshop instead of brushes, he can spit out | the style ideas he's copied and transformed in his brain | more rapidly - but he should still be allowed to do it. | AlexandrB wrote: | I think the parent's point about (2) wasn't about money, | but _category_. A human is a human and has rights, an AI | model is a tool and does not have rights. The two would | not be treated equally under the law in any other | circumstances, so why would you equate them when | discussing copyright? | astrange wrote: | > On 1, human artists are copying copyrighted pixel data | into their system for training. That system is the brain. | It's organic RAM. | | They probably aren't doing that. Studying the production | methods and WIPs is more useful for a human. (ML models | basically guess how to make images until they produce one | that "looks like" something you show it.) | Mezzie wrote: | They do sometimes, or at least they used to. I have some | (very limited) visual art training, and one of the things | I/we did in class was manually mash up already existing | works. In my case I smushed the Persistence of Memory and | the Arnolfini portrait. It was pretty clear copycat; the | work was divided into squares and I poorly replicated the | Arnolfini Portrait from square to square. | Taywee wrote: | A human can grow and learn based on their own experiences | separate from their art image input. They'll sometimes | get creative and develop their own unique style. Through | all analogies, the AI is still a program with input and | output. Point 1 doesn't fit for the same reason it | doesn't work for any compiler. Until AI can innovate | itself and hold its own copyright, it's still a machine | transformation. | endorphinbomber wrote: | Have to disagree with point 1, often this is what artists | are doing. More strictly in the music part (literally | playing others songs), less strictly in the drawing part. | But copying, incorporating and developing are some of the | core foundations of art. | astrange wrote: | Diffusion models don't copy the pixels you show them. You | cannot generally tell which training images inspired | which output images. | | (That's as opposed to a large language model, which does | memorize text.) | | Also, you can train it to imitate an artist's style just | by showing it textual descriptions of the style. It | doesn't have to see any images. | mejutoco wrote: | > Also, you can train it to imitate an artist's style | just by showing it textual descriptions of the style. It | doesn't have to see any images. | | And the weights. The weights it has learned come | originally from the images. | alt227 wrote: | Depends if the artist creates something new which looks | exactly like one of the things he has studied. | Tepix wrote: | That's like saying creating a thing that looks at one | artists artwork and then copies her unique style ad | infinitum may need permission first. | pigsty wrote: | Copying an artist's style is very much not considered | copyright infringement and is how artists learn. | | Copying a work itself can be copyright infringement if | it's very close to the original to the point people may | think they're the same work. | Gigachad wrote: | You don't need permission. Style is not an owned thing. | bakugo wrote: | No, it's not the same thing at all, in fact it's entirely | unrelated. | | Say it with me: Computer algorithms are NOT people. They | should NOT have the same rights as people. | ben_w wrote: | If you do need permission, is Page Rank a copyright | infringing AI, or just a sparkling matrix multiplication | derived entirely from everyone else's work? | peoplefromibiza wrote: | Page Rank doesn't reproduce any content claiming it's new. | | You can however disallow Google from indexing your content | using robots.txt a met tag in the HTML or an HTTP header. | | Or you can ask Google to remove it from their indexes. | | Your content will disappear from then on. | | You can't un-train what's already been trained. | | You can't disallow scraping for training. | | The damage is already done and it's irreversible. | | It's like trying to unbomb Hiroshima. | CyanBird wrote: | That's actually interesting, adding Metadata to the | images as a check for allowing or disallowing ai usage | | That might be a good way to go about it | ben_w wrote: | If you can make the metadata survive cropping, format | shifts, and screenshots. | | Can probably do all that well-enough ( _probably_ doesn | 't need to be perfect) by leaning on FAANG, with or | without legislation. | | But: opt-in by default, or opt-out by default? | Lalabadie wrote: | The output of Pagerank for a given page is not another new | page, that's curiously close in style and execution but | laundered of IP concerns. | | A tool that catalogues attributed links can't really be | evaluated the same way as pastiche machine. | | You'd be much closer using the example of Google's first | page answer snippets, that are pulled out of a site's | content with minimal attribution. | jefftk wrote: | Which is also what the GitHub co-pilot suit is about: | https://githubcopilotlitigation.com | | If you have views on whether they'll win, the prediction | market is currently at 49%: | https://manifold.markets/JeffKaufman/will-the-github- | copilot... | cardanome wrote: | As a human, I can use whatever I want for reference for my | drawings. Including copyrighted material. | | Now, as for training "AI" models, who knows. You can argue it | is the same thing a human is doing or you could argue it a | new, different quality and should be under different rules. | Regardless, the current copyright laws were written before | "AI" models were in widespread use so whatever is allowed or | not is more of a historic accident. | | So the discussion needs to be about the intention of | copyright laws and what SHOULD be. | vgatherps wrote: | This would be a fairly novel law as it would legislate not | just the release of an AI but the training as well? That | would imply legislating what linear algebra is legal and | illegal to do, no? | | And practically speaking, putting aside whether a | government should even be able to legislate such things, | enforcing such a law would be near impossible without wild | privacy violations. | CyanBird wrote: | > That would imply legislating what linear algebra is | legal and illegal to do, no? | | No, it would just legislate what images are and which | ones are not on the training data to be parsed, artists | want a copyright which makes their images unusable for | machine learning derivative works. | | The trick here is that eventually the algorithms will get | good enough that it won't be necessary for said images to | even be on the training data in the first place, but we | can imagine that artists would be OK with that | astrange wrote: | > The trick here is that eventually the algorithms will | get good enough that it won't be necessary for said | images to even be on the training data in the first | place, but we can imagine that artists would be OK with | that | | They shouldn't be OK with that and they probably aren't. | That's a much worse problem for them! | | The reason they're complaining about copyright is most | likely coping because this is what they're actually | concerned about. | stale2002 wrote: | > but we can imagine that artists would be OK with that | | No they won't. If AI art was just as good as it is today, | but didn't use copyrighted images in the training set, | people would absolutely still be finding some other thing | to complain about. | | Artists just don't want the tech to exist entirely. | manimino wrote: | I am not allowed to print $100 bills with my general- | purpose printer. Many printing and copy machines come | with built-in safeguards to prevent users from even | trying. | | It's quite possible to apply the same kind of protections | to generative models. (I hope this does not happen, but | it is fully possible.) | bootsmann wrote: | Entirely different scales apply here. You can hardcode a | printer the 7 different bills each country puts out no | problem, but you cannot hardcode the billions of | "original" art pieces that the model is supposed to check | against during training, its just infeasible. | CuriouslyC wrote: | Not exactly true. Given an image, you can find the | closest point in the latent space that image corresponds | to. It is totally feasible to do this with every image in | the training set, and if that point in the latent space | is too close to the training image, just add it to a set | of "disallowed" latent points. This wouldn't fly for | local generation, as the process would take a long time | and generate a multi gigabyte (maybe even terabyte) | "disallowed" database, but for online image generators | it's not insane. | peoplefromibiza wrote: | > As a human | | you have rights. | | AIs don't. | | Because they don't have will. | | It's like arresting a gun for killing people. | | So, as a human, the individual(s) training the AI or using | the AI to reproduce copyrighted material, are responsible | for the copyright infringement, unless explicitly | authorized by the author(s). | dredmorbius wrote: | Among the goals seems to be a bit of well-poisoning. Artists | have done this previously by creating art saying, say, "This | site sells STOLEN artwork, do NOT by from them", and | encouraging followers to reply with "I want this on a t-shirt", | which had previously been used by rip-off sites to pirate | artwork. See: | | <https://waxy.org/2019/12/how-artists-on-twitter-tricked- | spam...> | | If art streams are tree-spiked with copyrighted or trademarked | works, then AI generators might be a bit more gun-shy about | training with abandon on such threads. | | It's a form of monkeywrenching. | | <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_spiking> | | <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage#As_environmental_acti.. | .> | gwd wrote: | Not sure about Stable Diffusion / Metawhatsit, but OpenAI's | training set is already curated to make sure it avoids | violence and pornography; and in any case, the whole thing | relies on humans to come up with descriptions. Not clear how | this sort of thing would "spike the well" in that sense. | wokwokwok wrote: | Are you being deliberately obtuse? | | It's blatantly obvious that regardless of if it will _work_ or | not, they're trying to get companies with enough money to file | law suits to make a move and do so. | | > I don't see the point. | | ...or you don't agree with the intent? | | I'm fine with that, if so, but you'd to be deliberately trying | very hard not to understand what they're trying to do. | | Quite obviously they're hoping, similar to software that lets | you download videos from YouTube, that tools that enable things | are bad, not neutral. | | Agree / disagree? Who cares. I can't believe anyone who | "doesn't get it" is being earnest in their response. | | Will it make any difference? Well, it may or may not, but | there's a fair precedent of it happening, and bluntly, no one | is immune to law suits. | dredmorbius wrote: | _When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of | calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be | shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."_ | | <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> | yellow_lead wrote: | > I don't get why the AI companies would be effected in any | way. | | It doesn't necessarily matter if they're affected. My thought | when seeing this is that they want some _legal precedent_ to be | set which determines that this is not fair use. | seydor wrote: | The problem is copyright laws , not the models (which are | inevitable and impossible to stop anyway). The sketch of a mouse | should not be protected more than the artistic style of any guy. | IP laws are ancient concept and it s a mystery why people still | cling to them so tightly | rangersanger wrote: | They aren't. the first battles were fought by victims of | deepfakes. | jelliclesfarm wrote: | Art is now low value. It has no value addition. Technology in the | palm of our hands and higher quality of life is also the reason. | | Let's not forget the very impressive population explosion in the | past century. Every 'job' is a skill that has been out streamed | so the needs of the population are satisfied by skills of the | population so resources are distributed evenly. | | Art is no longer a need and there are way too many artists simply | proportional to the population. | | Further, a lot of 'art' taught is technique. It's not creativity. | Can creativity be taught? I don't think so. | | Culture played a part in preserving artists and honoring their | skills. But as 'culture' becomes global, mainstream is adopted | more as it's more accessible. And mainstream is subject to the | vagaries of market as well as vulnerable to market manipulation. | | Contrary to population notions, our world is very homogenous. | Somehow the promotion of diversity has ended up with the tyranny | of conformity. How did this happen? This is the biggest puzzle of | this past few decades. | Der_Einzige wrote: | This is the kind of post that I come on HN to read. | mattdesl wrote: | Challenging to navigate. These demonstrations are technically | copyright infringement if done for financial gain (selling a | T-shirt with Mickey Mouse icon). The same would be true if you | were to draw by hand Mickey Mouse with a gun and sold it on a | T-shirt. The only exception would be if it is a clear derivative, | or satire, or parody, or personal use of course. | | The challenging part is that these artists are protesting the use | of 'style' in AI synthesized media. That is, an artist's style is | being targeted (or, even, multiple artist's styles are combined | in a prompt to create a new AI-original work). This is not | protected by copyright--if you draw a new scene in another | artist's style, it would be perhaps unethical, but legally | derivative work. | | If the artists who are challenging these AI systems do get there | way, and they are able to legally copy-protect their "style" | (like a certain way of brush strokes), this would inevitably | backfire against them. To give an example: any artist whose work | now too closely resembles the "style" of Studio Ghibli might be | liable to copyright infringement, where before the work would be | clearly derivative, or just influenced by another work, as is the | case with most art over time. | concordDance wrote: | Trademark infringement, not copyright. | mattdesl wrote: | Technically, sure, but the artists (who are not trademarking | their work) are putting this in the context of copyright | infringement. | MetaWhirledPeas wrote: | Challenging legally, and challenging philosophically. I would | think an artist doing it _for the art_ would embrace the | fleeting nature of all things, including art. Some artists | demonstrate this by creating temporary art, or even throwing | their own art away after making it. The desire to make money | from art is certainly reasonable, but accepting a world where | all art styles are immediately mimicked, where art is | trivialized and commoditized, and where there 's no recognition | to be had let alone money... that's going to be a tough | philosophical pill to swallow. | meebob wrote: | I've been finding that the strangest part of discussions around | art AI among technical people is the complete lack of | identification or empathy: it seems to me that most computer | programmers should be just as afraid as artists, in the face of | technology like this!!! I am a failed artist (read, I studied | painting in school and tried to make a go at being a commercial | artist in animation and couldn't make the cut), and so I decided | to do something easier and became a computer programmer, working | for FAANG and other large companies and making absurd (to me!!) | amounts of cash. In my humble estimation, making art is _vastly_ | more difficult than the huge majority of computer programming | that is done. Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a | living- and, if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult | things, why shouldn 't it, with some finagling, also be able to | do the dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs? | | The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing... | rightbyte wrote: | "The cut" for artists is just way closer to 100% than for | programmers. It is that simple. | mrbombastic wrote: | I feel like I am missing something or holding it wrong, I would | personally love if we had a tool that i could describe problems | at a high level and out comes a high quality fully functional | app. Most software is shit and if we are honest with ourselves | there is a huge amount of inessential complexity in this field | built up over the years. I would gladly never spend weeks | building something someone else already built in a slightly | different way because it doesn't meet requirements, I would | gladly not end up in rabbit holes wrestling with some | dependency compatibility issue when I am just trying to create | value for the business. If the tools get better the software | gets better and the compexity we can manage gets larger. That | said while these tools are incredibly impressive, having messed | with this for a few days to try to even do basic stuff, what am | I missing here? It is a nice starting point and can be a | productivity boost but the code produced is often wrong and it | feels a long way away from automating my day to day work. | kypro wrote: | > I would personally love if we had a tool that i could | describe problems at a high level and out comes a high | quality fully functional app. | | I'm sure your employer would love that more than you. That's | the issue here. | | > That said while these tools are incredibly impressive, | having messed with this for a few days to try to even do | basic stuff, what am I missing here? It is a nice starting | point and can be a productivity boost but the code produced | is often wrong and it feels a long way away from automating | my day to day work. | | This is the first irritation of such a tool and it's already | very competent. I'm not even sure I'm better at writing code | than GPT, the only thing I can do that it can't is compile | and test the code I produce. If you asked me to create a | React app from a two sentence prompt and didn't allow me to | search the internet, compile or test it I'm sure I'd probably | make more mistakes than GPT to be honest. | alt227 wrote: | If I had the tool that did that, I would be the employer! | mrbombastic wrote: | Exactly code has always been a means to an end not the | end itself. Further our industry has been more than happy | to automate inefficiency away from other fields, feels | pretty hypocritical to want it to stop for ours. | pixl97 wrote: | I mean, then so would everyone else, and we just fall | back to a capital problem to advertise your creations. | OctopusLupid wrote: | If everyone is able to make their own app, then there is | no need to advertise their apps, because everyone will | just be using their own. | | The real battle there would be protocols; how everyone's | custom apps communicate. Here, we can fall back to | existing protocols such as email, ActivityPub, Matrix, | etc. | mrbombastic wrote: | Have you actually tried to get an app working using gpt? A | lot of shared stuff is heavily curated. It is no doubt an | extremely impressive tool but I think we always | underestimate the last 10% in AI products. We had | impressive self driving demos over a decade ago, we are all | still driving and L5 still seems a ways away. | r3trohack3r wrote: | I'm empathetic, but my empathy doesn't overcome my excitement. | | This is a moment where individual humans substantially increase | their ability to affect change in the world. I'm watching as | these tools quickly become commoditized. I'm seeing low income | first generation Americans who speak broken English using | ChatGPT to translate their messages to "upper middle class | business professional" and land contracts that were off limits | before. I'm seeing individuals rapidly iterate and explore | visual spaces on the scale of 100s to 1000s of designs using | stable diffusion, a process that was financially infeasible | even for well funded corps due to the cost of human labor this | time last year. These aren't fanciful dreams of how this tech | is going to change society - Ive observed these outcomes in | real life. | | I'm empathetic that the entire world is moving out from under | all of our feet. But the direction it's moving is unbelievably | exciting. AI isn't going to replace humans, humans using AI are | going to replace humans who don't. | | Be the human that helps other humans wield AI. | kmeisthax wrote: | Computer programmers have a general aversion to copyright, for | a few reasons: | | 1. Proprietary software is harmful and immoral in ways that | proprietary books or movies are _not_. | | 2. The creative industry has historically used copyright as a | tool to tell computer programmers to stop having fun. | | So the lack of empathy is actually pretty predictable. Artists | - or at least, the people who claim to represent their economic | interests - have consistently used copyright as a cudgel to | smack programmers about. If you've been marinading in Free | Software culture and Cory Doctorow-grade ressentiment for half | a century, you're going to be more interested in taking revenge | against the people who have been telling you "No, shut up, | that's communism" than mere first-order self-preservation[1]. | | This isn't just "programmers don't have fucks to give", though. | In fact, your actual statements about computer programmers are | wrong, because there's already an active lawsuit against OpenAI | and Microsoft over GitHub Copilot and it's use of FOSS code. | | You see, AI actually breaks the copyright and ethical norms of | programmers, too. Most public code happens to be licensed under | terms that permit reuse (we hate copyright), but only if | derivatives and modifications are also shared in the same | manner (because we _really hate copyright_ ). Artists are | worried about being paid, but programmers are worried about | keeping the commons open. The former is easy: OpenAI can offer | a rev share for people whose images were in the training set. | The latter is far harder, because OpenAI's business model is | _charging people for access to the AI_. We don 't want to be | paid, we want OpenAI to not be paid. | | Also, the assumption that "art is more difficult than computer | programming" is also hilariously devoid of empathy. For every | junior programmer crudly duck-taping code together you have a | person drawing MS Paint fanart on their DeviantART page. The | two fields test different skills and you cannot just say one is | harder than the other. Furthermore, the consequences are | different here. If art is bad, it's bad[0] and people | potentially lose money; but if code is bad it gets hacked or | kills people. | | [0] I am intentionally not going to mention the concerns | Stability AI has with people generating CSAM with AI art | generators. That's an entirely different can of worms. | | [1] Revenge can itself be thought of as a second-order self- | preservation strategy (i.e. you hurt me, so I'd better hurt you | so that you can't hurt me twice). | tshaddox wrote: | My (admittedly totally non-rigorous) intuition is that the | advances in AI might "grow the pot" of the software | engineering, IT, and related industries at roughly the same | rate that they can "replace professionals" in those industries. | If that's the case, then there wouldn't be some existential | threat to the industry. Of course, that doesn't mean that | certain individuals and entire companies aren't at risk, and I | don't want to minimize the potential hardship, but it doesn't | seem like a unique or new problem. | | As a crude analogy, there are a lot of great free or low-cost | tools to create websites that didn't exist 15 years ago and can | easily replace what would be a much more expensive web | developer contract 15 years ago. And yet, in those last 15 | years, the "size of the web pot" has increased enough that I | don't think many professional web developers are worried about | site builder tools threatening the entire industry. There seem | to be a lot more web developers now then there were 15 years | ago, and they seem to be paid as well or better than they were | 15 years. And again, that doesn't mean that certain individuals | or firms didn't on occasion experience financial hardship due | to pressure from cheaper alternatives, and I don't want to | minimize that. It just seems like the industry is still | thriving. | | To be clear, I really have no idea if this will turn out to be | true. I also have no idea if this same thing might happen in | other fields like art, music, writing, etc. | mtrower wrote: | Consider the compiler. | | There's an awful lot of analogy there, if you think about it. | odessacubbage wrote: | it's been very frustrating to see how much ignorance and | incuriosity is held by what i assume to be otherwise very | worldly, intelligent and technical people in regards to what | working artists actually _do_. | toldyouso2022 wrote: | The arithmetic a computer can do instantly is much more | difficult to me that writing this sentence. Point being: we | can't compare human and computer skills. As if I'm worried, I'm | not because, if there is no government intervention to ruin | things, even if I lose my job as a programmer society becomes | richer and I can always move to do another thing while having | access to cheaper goods | | People should stop giving work all this meaning and also they | should study economics so they chill. | | Learn and chill. | chii wrote: | The empathy you imply might also require that the artists (or | programmer's) jobs be preserved, for the sake of giving them | purpose and a way to make a living. | | I dont think that is absolutely something a society must | guarantee. People are made obsolete all the time. | | What needs to be done is to produce new needs that currently | cannot be serviced by the new AI's. I'm sure it will come - as | it has for the past hundred years when technology supplanted an | existing corpus of workers. A society can make this transition | smoother - such as a nice social safety-net, and low-cost/free | education for retraining into a different field. | | In fact, these things are all sorely needed today, without | having the AIs' disruptions. | [deleted] | mattr47 wrote: | Art is not harder than coding. What is hard is for an artist to | make a living because the market for artwork is very, very low. | ben_w wrote: | I'm mostly seeing software developers looking at the textual | equivalent, GPT-3, and giving a spectrum of responses from | "This is fantastic! Take my money so I can use it to help me | with my work!" to "Meh, buggy code, worse than dealing with a | junior dev." | | I think the two biggest differences between art AI and code AI | are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just wrong, whereas | art can be very wrong before a client even notices [0]; and (b) | we've been expecting this for ages already, to the extent that | many of us are cynical and jaded about what the newest AI can | do. | | [0] for example, I was recently in the Cambridge University | Press Bookshop, and they sell gift maps of the city. The | background of the poster advertising these is pixelated and has | JPEG artefacts. | | It's highly regarded, and the shop has existed since 1581, and | yet they have what I think is an amateur-hour advert on their | walls. | edanm wrote: | > code that's only 95% right is just wrong, | | I know what you mean, but thinking about it critically, this | is just wrong. _All_ software has bugs in it. Small bugs, big | bugs, critical bugs, security bugs, everything. No code is | immune. The largest software used by millions every day has | bugs. Library code that has existed and been in use for 30 | years has bugs. | | I don't think you were actually thinking of this in your | comparison, but I think it's actually a great analogy - code, | like art, can be 95% complete, and that's usually enough. | (For art, looks good and is what I wanted is enough, for | code, does what I want right now, nevermind edge cases is | enough.) | CuriouslyC wrote: | Two issues. First, when a human gets something 5% wrong, | it's more likely to be a corner case or similar "right most | of the time" scenario, whereas when AI gets something 5% | wrong, it's likely to look almost right but never produce | correct output. Second, when a human writes something wrong | they have familiarity with the code and can more easily | identify the problem and fix it, whereas fixing AI code | (either via human or AI) is more likely to be fraught. | edanm wrote: | You (and everyone else) seem to be making the classic | "mistake" of looking at an early version and not | appreciating that _things improve_. Ten years ago, AI- | generated art was at 50%. 2 years ago, 80%. Now it 's at | 95% and winning competitions. | | I have no idea if the AI that's getting code 80% right | today will get it 95% right in two years, but given | current progress, I wouldn't bet against it. I don't | think there's any _fundamental_ reason it can 't produce | better code than I can, at least not at the "write a | function that does X" level. | | Whole systems are a _way_ harder problem that I wouldn 't | even think of making guesses about. | idontpost wrote: | yamtaddle wrote: | _To be fair_ to those assumptions, there 've been a lot | of cases of machine-learning (among other tech) looking | very promising, and advancing so quickly that a huge | revolution seems imminent--then stalling out at a local | maximum for a really long time. | ben_w wrote: | It might improve like Go AI and shock everyone by beating | the world expert at everything, or it might improve like | Tesla FSD which is annoyingly harder than "make creative | artwork". | | There's no fundamental reason it can't be the world | expert at everything, but that's not a reason to assume | we know how to get there from here. | namelessoracle wrote: | What scares me is a death of progress situation. Maybe it | cant be an expert, but it can be good enough, and now the | supply pipeline of people who could be experts basically | gets shut off, because to become an expert you needed to | do the work and gain the experiences that are now | completely owned by AI. | tintor wrote: | But it could also make it easier to train experts, by | acting as a coach and teacher. | nonrandomstring wrote: | Exactly this. | | The problem of a vengeful god who demands the slaughter | of infidels lies not in his existence or nonexistence, | but peoples' belief in such a god. | | Similarly, it does not matter whether AI works or it | doesn't. It's irrelevant how good it actually is. What | matters is whether people "believe" in it. | | AI is not a technology, it's an ideology. | | Given time it will fulfil it's own prophecy as "we who | believe" steer the world toward that. | | That's what's changing now. It's in the air. | | The ruling classes (those who own capital and industry) | are looking at this. The workers are looking too. Both of | them see a new world approaching, and actually everyone | is worried. What is under attack is not the jobs of the | current generation, but the value of human skill itself, | for all generations to come. And, yes, it's the tail of a | trajectory we have been on for a long time. | | It isn't the only way computers can be. There is IA | instead of AI. But intelligence amplification goes | against the principles of capital at this stage. Our | trajectory has been to make people dumber in service of | profit. | CadmiumYellow wrote: | > What is under attack is not the jobs of the current | generation, but the value of human skill itself, for all | generations to come. And, yes, it's the tail of a | trajectory we have been on for a long time. | | Wow, yes. This is exactly what I've been thinking but you | summed it up more eloquently. | snickerbockers wrote: | Maybe for certain domains it's okay to fail 5% of the time | but a lot of code really does need to be _perfect_. You | wouldn 't be able to work with a filesystem that loses 5% | of your files. | mecsred wrote: | Or a filesystem that loses all of your files 5% of the | time. | scarmig wrote: | No need to rag on btrfs. | GoblinSlayer wrote: | And GPT can't fix a bug, it can only generate new text that | will have a different collection of bugs. The catch is that | programming isn't text generation. But AI should be able to | make good actually intelligent fuzzers, that should be | realistic and useful. | alar44 wrote: | Yes it can, I've been using it for exactly that. "This | code is supposed to do X but does Y or haz Z error fix | the code." | | Sure you can't stick an entire project in there, but if | you know the problem is in class Baz, just toss in the | relevant code and it does a pretty damn good job. | UnpossibleJim wrote: | sure but now you only need testers and one coder to fix | bugs, where you used to need testers and 20 coders. AI | code generators are force multipliers, maybe not strict | replacements. And the level of creativity to fix a bug | relative to programming something wholly original is days | apart. | Ajedi32 wrote: | > GPT can't fix a bug | | It can't? I could've sworn I've seen (cherry-picked) | examples of it doing exactly that, when prompted. It even | explains what the bug is and why the fix works. | ipaddr wrote: | Which examples the ones where they were right or wrong. | It goes back to trusting the source not to introduce new | ever evolving bugs. | soerxpso wrote: | Those are cherry picked, and most importantly, all of the | examples where it can fix a bug are examples where it's | working with a stack trace, or with an extremely small | section of code (<200 lines). At what point will it be | able to fix a bug in a 20,000 line codebase, with only | "When the user does X, Y unintended consequence happens" | to go off of? | | It's obvious how an expert at regurgitating StackOverflow | would be able to correct an NPE or an off-by-one error | when given the exact line of code that error is on. Going | any deeper, and actually being able to _find_ a bug, | requires understanding of the codebase as a whole and the | ability to map the code to what the code actually _does_ | in real life. GPT has shown none of this. | | "But it will get better over time" arguments fail for | this because the thing that's needed is a fundamentally | new ability, not just "the same but better." | Understanding a codebase is a different thing from | regurgitating StackOverflow. It's the same thing as | saying in 1980, "We have bipedal robots that can hobble, | so if we just improve on that enough we'll eventually | have bipedal robots that beat humans at football." | tintor wrote: | It can, in some cases. Have you tried it? | mlboss wrote: | It is only a matter of time. It can understand error | stacktrace and suggest a fix. Somebody has to plug it to | IDE then it will start converting requirements to code. | mr_toad wrote: | When AI can debug its own code I'll start looking for | another career. | CapmCrackaWaka wrote: | This depends entirely on _how_ the code is wrong. I asked | chatGPT to write me code in python that would calculate | SHAP values when given a sklearn model the other day. It | returned code that ran, and even _looked_ like it did the | right thing at a cursory glance. But I've written SHAP a | package before, and there were several manipulations it got | wrong. I mean completely wrong. You would never have known | the code was wrong unless you knew how to write the code in | the first place. | | To me, code that is 95% correct will either fail | catastrophically or give very wrong results. Imagine if the | code you wrote was off 5% for every number it was supposed | to generate. Code that is 99.99% correct will introduce | subtle bugs. | | * No shade to chatGPT, writing a function that calculates | shap values is tough lol, I just wanted to see what it | could do. I do think that, given time, it'll be able to | write a days worth of high quality code in a few seconds. | KIFulgore wrote: | I experienced ChatGPT confidently giving incorrect | answers about the Schwarzchild radius of the black hole | at the center of our galaxy, Saggitarius A-star. Both | when asked about "the Scharzchild radius of a black hole | with 4 million solar masses" (a calculation) and "the | Scharzchild radius of Saggitarius A-star" (a simple | lookup). | | Both answers were orders of magnitude wrong, and vastly | different from each other. | | JS code suggested for a simple database connection had | glaring SQL injection vulnerabilities. | | I think it's an ok tool for discovering new libraries and | getting oriented quickly to languages and coding domains | you're unfamiliar with. But it's more like a forum post | from a novice who read a tutorial and otherwise has | little experience. | mcguire wrote: | My understanding is that ChatGPT (and similar things) are | purely _language models_ ; they do not have any kind of | "understanding" of anything like reality. Basically, they | have a complex statistical model of how words are | related. | | I'm a bit surprised that it got a lookup wrong, but for | any other domain, describing it as a "novice" is | understating the situation a lot. | nmfisher wrote: | Over the weekend I tried to tease out a sed command that | would fix an uber simple compiler error from ChatGPT [0]. | I gave up after 4 or 5 tries - while it got the root | cause correct ("." instead of "->" because the property | was a pointer), it just couldn't figure out the right sed | command. That's such a simple task, its failure doesn't | inspire confidence in getting more complicated things | correct. | | This is the main reason I haven't actually incorporated | any AI tools into my daily programming yet - I'm mindful | that I might end up spending more time tracking down | issues in the auto-generated code than I saved using it | in the first place. | | [0] You can see the results here https://twitter.com/Nick | FisherAU/status/1601838829882986496 | malandrew wrote: | Who is going to debug this code when it is wrong? | | Whether 95% or 99.9% correct, when there is a serious | bug, you're still going to need people that can fix the | gap between almost correct and actually correct. | cool_dude85 wrote: | Sure, but how much of the total work time in software | development is writing relatively straightforward, | boilerplate type code that could reasonably be copied | from the top answer from stackoverflow with variable | names changed? Now maybe instead of 5 FTE equivalents | doing that work, you just need the 1 guy to debug the | AI's shot at it. Now 4 people are out of work, or | applying to be the 1 guy at some other company. | woah wrote: | Or the company just delivers features when they are | estimated to be done, instead of it taking 5 times longer | than expected | mcguire wrote: | Does anyone remember the old maxim, "Don't write code as | cleverly as you can because it's harder to debug than it | is to write and you won't be clever enough"? | Workaccount2 wrote: | The thing about ChatGPT is that it warning shot. And all | these people I see talking about it, laughing about how | the shooter missed them. | | Clearly ChatGPT is going to improve, and AI development | is moving at a breakneck pace and accelerating. Dinging | it for totally fumbling 5% or 10% of written code is | completely missing the forest for the trees. | jhbadger wrote: | Sure, it will improve, but I think a lot of people think | "Hey, it almost looks human quality now! Just a bit more | tweaking and it will be human quality or better!". But a | more likely case is that the relatively simple | statistical modeling tools (which are very different from | how our brains work, not that we fully understand how our | brains work) that chatGPT uses have a limit to how well | they work and they will hit a plateau (and are probably | near it now). I'm not one of those people who believe | strong AI is impossible, but I have a feeling that strong | AI will take more than that just manipulating a text | corpus. | ben_w wrote: | I'd be surprised if it did only take text (or even | language in general), but if it does only need that, then | given how few parameters even big GPT-3 models have | compared to humans, it will strongly imply that PETA was | right all along. | woeirua wrote: | Yeah, but people were also saying this about self-driving | cars, and guess what that long tail is super long, and | its also far fatter than we expected. 10 years ago people | were saying AI was coming for taxi drivers, and as far as | I can tell we're still 10 years away. | | I'm nonplussed by ChatGPT because the hype around it is | largely the same as was for Github Copilot and Copilot | fizzled badly. (Full disclosure: I pay for Copilot | because it is somewhat useful). | pleb_nz wrote: | I wonder if some of this is the 80 20 rule. We're seeing | the easy 80 percent of the solutions which has taken 20% | of the time. We still have the hard 80% (or most of) to | go for some of these new techs | rightbyte wrote: | Replacing 80% of a truck driver's skill would suck but | replacing 80% of our skill would be an OK programmer. | lostmsu wrote: | Considering the deep conv nets that melted the last AI | winter happened in 2012, you are basically giving it 40 | years till 100%. | kerkeslager wrote: | Tesla makes self-driving cars that drive better than | humans. The reason you have to touch the steering wheel | periodically is political/social, not technical. An | acquaintance of mine read books while he commutes 90 | minutes from Chattanooga to work in Atlanta once or twice | a week. He's sitting in the driver's seat but he's | certainly not driving. | | The political/social factors which apply to the life-and- | death decisions made driving a car, don't apply to | whether one of the websites I work on works perfectly. | | I'm 35, and I've paid to write code for about 15 years. | To be honest, ChatGPT probably writes better code than I | did at my first paid internship. It's got a ways to go to | catch up with even a junior developer in my opinion. | | The expectation in the US is that my career will last | until I'm 65ish. That's 30 years from now. Tesla has only | been around 19 years and now makes self-driving cars. | | So yeah, I'm not immediately worried that I'm going to | lose my job to ChatGPT in the next year, but I am quite | confident that my role will either cease existing or | drastically change because of AI before the end of my | career. | tarranoth wrote: | The thing is though, it's trained on human text. And most | humans are per difinition, very fallible. Unless someone | made it so that it can never get trained on subtly wrong | code, how will it ever improve? Imho AI can be great for | suggestions as for which method to use (visual studio has | this, and I think there is an extension for visual studio | code for a couple of languages). I think fine grained | things like this are very useful, but I think code | snippets are just too coarse to actually be helpful. | tintor wrote: | Improve itself through experimentation with reinforcement | learning. This is how humans improve too. AlphaZero does | it. | lostmsu wrote: | The amount of work in that area of research is | substantial. You will see world shattering results in a | few years. | | Current SOTA: https://openai.com/blog/vpt/ | throwaway82388 wrote: | Anyone who has doubts has to look at the price. It's free | for now, and will be cheap enough when openai starts | monetizing. Price wins over quality. It's demonstrated | time and time again. | ben_w wrote: | Depends on the details. Skip all the boring health and | safety steps, you can make very cheap skyscrapers. They | might fall down in a strong wind, but they'll be cheap. | pixl97 wrote: | After watching lots of videos from 3rd world countries | where skyscrapers are built and then tore down a few | years later, I think I know exactly how this is going to | go. | idontpost wrote: | This is magical thinking, no different than a cult. | | The fundamental design of transformer architecture isn't | capable of what you think it is. | | There are still radical, fundamental breakthroughs | needed. It's not a matter of incremental improvement over | time. | mejutoco wrote: | I agree with you. Even software that had no bugs today (if | that is possible) could start having bugs tomorrow, as the | environment changes (new law, new hardware, etc.) | tablespoon wrote: | >> code that's only 95% right is just wrong, | | > I know what you mean, but thinking about it critically, | this is just wrong. All software has bugs in it. Small | bugs, big bugs, critical bugs, security bugs, everything. | No code is immune. The largest software used by millions | every day has bugs. Library code that has existed and been | in use for 30 years has bugs. | | All software has bugs, but it's usually _far_ better that | "95% right." Code that's only 95% right probably wouldn't | pass half-ass testing or a couple of days of actual use. | toomanydoubts wrote: | The other day I copied a question from leetcode and asked GPT | to solve it. The solution had the correct structure to be | interpreted by leetcode(Solution class, with the correct | method name and signature, and with the same implementation | of a linked list that leetcode would use). It made me feel | like GPT was not implementing the solution for anything. Just | copying and pasting some code it has read on the internet. | edanm wrote: | EDIT: I posted this comment twice by accident! This comment | has more details but the other more answers, so please check | the other one! | | > code that's only 95% right is just wrong, | | I know what you mean, but thinking about it critically, this | is just wrong. _All_ software has bugs in it. Small bugs, big | bugs, critical bugs, security bugs, everything. No code is | immune. The largest software used by millions every day has | bugs. Library code that has existed and been in use for 30 | years has bugs. | | I don't think you were actually thinking of this in your | comparison, but I think it's actually a great analogy - code, | like art, can be 95% complete, and that's usually enough. | (For art, looks good and is what I wanted is enough, for | code, does what I want right now, nevermind edge cases is | enough.) | | The reason ChatGPT isn't threatening programmers is for other | reasons. Firstly, it's code isn't 95% good, it's like 80% | good. | | Secondly, we do a lot more than write one-off pieces of code. | We write much, much larger systems, and the connections | between different pieces of code, even on a function-to- | function level, are very complex. | yourapostasy wrote: | _> The reason ChatGPT isn 't threatening programmers is for | other reasons. Firstly, it's code isn't 95% good, it's like | 80% good._ | | The role that is possibly highly streamlined with a near- | future ChatGPT/CoPilot are requirements-gathering business | analysts, but developers at Staff level on up sits closer | to requiring AGI to even become 30% good. We'll likely see | a bifurcation/barbell: Moravec's Paradox on one end, AGI on | the other. | | An LLM that can transcribe a verbal discussion directly | with a domain expert for a particular business process with | high fidelity, give a precis of domain jargon to a | developer in a sidebar, extracts out further jargon created | by the conversation, summarize the discussion into | documentation, and extract how the how's and why's like a | judicious editor might at 80% fidelity, then put out semi- | working code at even 50% fidelity, that works 24x7x365 and | automatically incorporates everything from GitHub it | created for you before and that your team polished into | working code and final documentation? | | I have clients who would pay for an initial deployment of | that for an appliance/container head end of that which | transits the processing through the vendor SaaS' GPU farm | but holds the model data at rest within their network / | cloud account boundary. Being able to condense weeks or | even months of work by a team into several hours that | requires say a team to tighten and polish it up by a | handful of developers would be interesting to explore as a | new way to work. | Kye wrote: | >> _" I think the two biggest differences between art AI and | code AI are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just | wrong, whereas art can be very wrong before a client even | notices [0];"_ | | Art can also be extremely wrong in a way everyone notices and | still be highly successful. For example: Rob Liefeld. | jhbadger wrote: | And in the same way as Liefeld has a problem drawing hands! | Maybe he was actually ahead of us all and had an AI art | tool before the rest of us. | itronitron wrote: | >> whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices | | No actually, that's not how that works. You're demonstrating | the lack of empathy that the parent comment brings up as | alarming. | | Regarding programming, code that's only 95% right can just be | run through code assist to fix everything. | meebob wrote: | I do appreciate that the way in which a piece of code "works" | and the way in which an piece of art "works" is in some ways | totally different- but, I also think that in many cases, | notably automated systems that create reports or dashboards, | they aren't so far apart. In the end, the result just has to | seem right. Even in computer programming, amateur hour level | correctness isn't so uncommon, I would say. | | I would personally be astonished if any of the distributed | systems I've worked on in my career were even close to 95% | correct, haha. | azornathogron wrote: | A misleading dashboard is a really really bad. This is | absolutely not something where I would be happy to give it | to an AI to do just because "no one will notice". The fact | that no one will notice errors until it's too late is why | dashboards need _extra_ effort by their author to actually | test the thing. | | If you want to give programming work to an AI, give it the | things where incorrect behaviour is going to be really | obvious, so that it can be fixed. Don't give it the stuff | where everyone will just naively trust the computer without | thinking about it. | lycopodiopsida wrote: | Understanding what you are plotting and displaying in the | dashboard is the complicated part, not writing the | dashboard. Programmers are not very afraid of AI because it | is still just a glorified fronted to stackoverflow, and SO | has not destroyed the demand for programmers so far. Also, | understanding the subtle logical bugs and errors introduced | by such boilerplate AI-tools requires no less expertise | than knowing how write the code upfront. Debugging is not a | very popular activity among programmers for a reason. | | It may be that one day AI will also make their creators | obsolete. But at that point so many professions will be | replaced by it already, that we will live in a massively | changed society where talking about the "job" has no | meaning anymore. | jimmaswell wrote: | > code that's only 95% right is just wrong | | It's still worth it on the whole but I have already gotten | caught up on subtly wrong Copilot code a few times. | asdf123wtf wrote: | A lot depends what the business costs are of that wrong %5. | | If the actual business costs are less than the price of a | team of developers... welp, it was fun while it lasted. | BurningFrog wrote: | This has been going on for 250 years, and humanity still hasn't | quite grasped it. | | The steady progress of the Industrial Revolution that has made | the average person unimaginably richer and healthier several | times over, looks in the moment just like this: | | "Oh no, entire industries of people are being made obsolete, | and will have to beg on the streets now". | | And yet, as jobs and industries are automated away, we keep | getting richer and healthier. | koshnaranek wrote: | "It hasn't happened in the past, therefore it won't happen in | the future" is simply just a fallacy. | thedorkknight wrote: | Collectively, sure. How did that go for the people who's | livelihoods got replaced though? I've had family members be | forced to change careers from white-collar work after being | laid off and unable to find engineering jobs due to people | decades younger taking them all nearby. I saw firsthand the | unbelievable amount of stress and depression they went | through, and it took them years to accept that their previous | life and career were gone. | | "It'll massively suck for you, but don't worry, it'll be | better for everyone else" is little comfort for most of us | yamtaddle wrote: | Especially when promises and plans to use some of those | windfalls of progress to help those harmed by it, seem | never to see much follow-through. | | Progress is cool if you're on the side of the wheel that's | going up. It's the worst fucking thing in the world if | you're on the side that's going down and are about to get | smashed into the mud. | spitBalln wrote: | BurningFrog wrote: | Well, most of us are in the benefiting group so I'd | definitely take that gamble. | | But you're off course right that the benefits are unevenly | distributed, and for some it truly does suck. | [deleted] | beardedetim wrote: | > making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of | computer programming that is done. | | I'd reframe this to: making a living from your art is far more | difficult than making money from programming. | | > also be able to do the dumb, simple things most programmers | do for their jobs? | | I'm all for Ai automating all the boring shit for me. Just like | frameworks have. Just like libraries have. Just like DevOps | have. Take all the plumbing and make it automated! I'm all for | it! | | But. At some point. Someone needs to take business speak and | turn it into input for this machine. And wouldn't ya know it, | I'm already getting paid for that! | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | I think that programmers here have a lot riding on the naive | belief that all new tools are neutral, and there is no pile of | bodies under these advances. | unshavedyak wrote: | I think i have a fair bit of empathy in this area and, well | like you said, i think my job (software) is likely to be | displaced too. Furthermore, i think companies have data sets | regardless of if we allow public use or not. Ie if we ban | public use, then _only_ massive companies (Google /etc) will | have enough data to train these. Which.. seems worse to me. | | At the end of the day though, i think i'm an oddball in this | camp. I just don't think there's that much difference between | ML and Human Learning (HL). I believe we are nearly infinitely | more complex but as time goes on i think the gulf between ML | and HL complexity will shrink. | | I recently saw some of MKBHD's critiques of ML and my takeaway | was that he believes ML cannot possibly be creative. That it's | just inputs and outputs.. and, well, isn't that what i am? | Would the art i create (i am also trying to get into art) not | be entirely influenced by my experiences in life, the memories | i retain from it, etc? Humans also unknowingly reproduce work | all the time. "Inspiration" sits in the back of their minds and | then we regurgitate it out thinking it as original.. but often | it's not, it's derivative. | | Given that all creative work is learned, though, the line | between derivative and originality seems to just be about how | close it is to pre-existing work. We mash together ideas, and | try to distance it from other works. It doesn't matter what we | take as inspiration, or so we claim, as long as the output | doesn't overlap too much with pre-existing work. | | ML is coming for many jobs and we need to spend a lot of time | and effort thinking about how to adapt. Fighting it seems an | uphill battle. One we will lose, eventually. The question is | what will we do when that day comes? How will society function? | Will we be able to pay rent? | | What bothers me personally is just that companies get so much | free-reign in these scenarios. To me it isn't about ML vs HL. | Rather it's that companies get to use all our works for their | profit. | wnkrshm wrote: | > We mash together ideas, and try to distance it from other | works. It doesn't matter what we take as inspiration, or so | we claim, as long as the output doesn't overlap too much with | pre-existing work. | | I feel a big part what makes it okay or not okay here is | intention and capability. Early in an artistic journey things | can be highly derivative but that's due to the student's | capabilities. A beginner may not intend to be derivative but | can't do better. | | I see pages of applications of ML out there being derivative | on purpose (Edit: seemingly trying to 'outperform' given | freelance artists with glee, in their own styles). | unshavedyak wrote: | But the ML itself doesn't have intention. The author of the | ML does, and that i would think is no different than an | artist that purposefully makes copied/derived work. | | TBH given how derivative humans tend to be, with such a | deeper "Human Learning" model and years and years of | experiences.. i'm kinda shocked ML is even capable of even | appearing non-derivative. Throw a child in a room, starve | it of any interaction and somehow (lol) only feed it select | images and then ask it to draw something.. i'd expect it to | perform similarly. A contrived example, but i'm | illustrating the depth of our experiences when compared to | ML. | | I half expect that the "next generation" of ML is fed by a | larger dataset by many orders of magnitude more similarly | matching our own. A video feed of years worth of data, | simulating the complex inputs that Human Learning gets to | benefit from. If/when that day comes i can't imagine we | will seem that much more unique than ML. | | I should be clear though; i am in no way defending how | companies are using these products. I just don't agree that | we're so unique in how we think, how we create, and if | we're truly unique in any way shape or fashion. (Code, | Input) => Output is all i think we are, i guess. | MrPatan wrote: | Because we know it's not going to happen any time soon, and | when it does happen it won't matter only to devs, that's the | singularity. | | You'll find out because you're now an enlightened immortal | being, or you won't find out at all because the thermonuclear | blast (or the engineered plague, or the terminators...) killed | you and everybody else. | | Does that mean there won't be some enterprising fellas who will | hook up a chat prompt to some website thing? And that you can | demo something like "Add a banner. More to the right. Blue | button under it" and that works? Sure. And when it's time to | fiddle with the details of how the bloody button doesn't do the | right thing when clicked, it's back to hiring a professional | that knows how to talk to the machine so it does what you want. | Not a developer! No, of course not, no, no, we don't do | development here, no. We do _prompts_. | calebcannon wrote: | This has happened to developers multiple times. Frankly it's | happened so many times that it's become mundane. These programs | are tools, and after a while you realize having a new tool in | the bag doesn't displace people. What it does is make the old | job easy and new job has a higher bar for excellence. Everyone | who has been writing software longer than a few years can name | several things that used to take them a long time and a lot of | specialization, and now take any amateur 5 minutes. It might | seem scary, but it's really not. It just means that talented | artists will be able to use these tools to create even more | even cooler art, because they don't need to waste their time on | the common and mechanical portions. | cwmoore wrote: | AI art will become most valuable posthumously. | klooney wrote: | https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ | | Some programmers are upset and already filing suit. | CyanBird wrote: | Lack of empathy is because we are discussing about systems, not | feelings | | At the dawn of mechanization, these same arguments were being | used by the luddites, I'd recommend you to read them, it was | quite an interesting situation, same as now | | The reality is that advances such as these can't be stopped, | even if you forbid ml legislation in the US there are hundreds | of other countries which won't care same as it happens with | piracy | odessacubbage wrote: | the luddites may be one of the most singularly wrongly | vilified groups in human history. | jacoblambda wrote: | Remember, luddites largely weren't against technology. | | What they were however was against was companies using that | technology to slash their wages in exchange for being forced | to do significantly more dangerous jobs. | | In less than a decade, textile work went from a safe job with | respectable pay for artisans and craftsmen into one of the | most dangerous jobs of the industrialised era with often less | than a third of the pay and the workers primarily being | children. | | That's what the luddites were afraid of. And the government | response was military/police intervention, breaking of any | and all strikes, and harsh punishments such as execution for | damaging company property. | astrange wrote: | I recommend reading the part in Capital where Marx makes fun | of them for being opposed to productivity. | hippie_queen wrote: | I don't disagree, except I don't get what you mean with | "because we are discussing systems, not feelings." | | I think artists feeling like shit in this situation is | totally understandable. I'm just a dilettante painter and | amateur hentai sketcher, but some of the real artists I know | are practically in the middle of an existential crisis. | Feeling empathy for them is not the same as thinking that we | should make futile efforts to halt the progress of this | technology. | Kalium wrote: | I agree, but we should pay attention when we are asked for | empathy. In this very thread we have an excellent | demonstration of how easy it is for an appeal to feel | empathy for people's position to change into an appeal to | protect the same people's financial position. | | I'll go so far as to say that in many cases, displaying | empathy for the artists without also advocating for futile | efforts to halt the progress of this technology will be | regarded as a lack of empathy. | meroes wrote: | If the advances create catastrophic consequences there will | be a stop by definition. Death of art(ists) and coders may | not be a catastrophe, but it could be coincident with one. | From OP, "Art AI is terrifying if you want to make art for a | living". Empathize a little with that to see coding AI making | coding not a way of life. Empathize even more and see few | people having productive ways of life due to general purpose | AI. The call to empathize is not about "feelings" | necessarily, it is a cognitive exercise to imagine future | consequences that aren't obvious yet. | locopati wrote: | sacado2 wrote: | In art, you can afford a few mistakes. Like, on many photo- | realistic pictures generated by midjourney, if you look closely | you'll see a thing or two that are odd in the eyes of | characters. In an AI-generated novel, you can accept a typo | here and there, or not even notice it if it's really subtle. | | In a program, you can't really afford that. A small mistake can | have dramatic consequences. Now, maybe in the next few years | you'll only need one human supervisor fixing AI bugs where you | used to need 10 high-end developers, but you probably won't be | able to make reliable programs just by typing a prompt, the way | you can currently generate a cover for an e-book just by asking | midjourney. | | As for the political consequences of all of this, this is yet | another issue. | mullingitover wrote: | I'm not sure that humans are going to beat AI in terms of | defect rate in software, especially given that with AI you | produce code at a fast enough rate that corner cutting (like | skipping TDD) often done by human developers is off the | table. | | I don't think this is going to put developers out of work, | however. Instead, lots of small businesses that couldn't | afford to be small software companies suddenly will be able | to. They'll build 'free puppies,' new applications that are | easy to start building, but that require ongoing development | and maintenance. As the cambrian explosion of new software | happens we'll only end up with more work on our hands. | exceptione wrote: | Will you be happy to curate bot output? | | Could the bot not curate its own output? It has been shown | that back feeding into the model result in improvement. I | got the idea that better results come from increments. The | AI overlords (model owners) will make sure they learn from | all that curating you might do too, making your job even | less skilled. Read: you are more replaceable. | | Please prove me wrong! I hope I am just anxious. History | has proven that increases in productivity tend to go to | capital owners, unless workers have bargaining power. Mine | workers were paid relatively well here, back in the day. | Complete villages and cities thrived around this business. | When those workers were no longer needed the government had | to implement social programs to prevent a societal collapse | there. | | Look around, Musk wants you to work 10 hours per day | already. Don't expect an early retirement or a more relaxed | job.. | mullingitover wrote: | I don't think it's a matter of blindly curating bot | output. | | I think it's more a matter of enlarging the scope of what | one person can manage. I think moving from the pure | manual labor era, limited by how much weight a human body | could move from point A to point B, to the steam engine | era. Railroads totally wrecked the industry of people | moving things on their backs or in mule trains, and that | wasn't a bad thing. | | > Don't expect an early retirement or a more relaxed | job.. | | That's kinda my point, I don't think this is going to | make less work, it'll turbocharge productivity. When has | an industry ever found a way to increase productivity and | just said cool, now we'll keep the status quo with our | output and work less? | exceptione wrote: | Thanks for sharing your thoughts. | | You describe stuff that is harmful or boring. In an other | comment I touched upon this, as there seem to be a clear | distinction between people that love programming and | those that just want to get results. The former does not | enjoy being manager of something larger per se if the | lose what they love. | | I can see a (short term?) increase in demand of software, | but it is not infinite. So when productivity increases | and demand does not with at least the same pace, you will | see jobless people and you will face competition. | | What no one has touched yet is that the nature of | programming might change too. We try to optimize for the | dev experience now, but it is not unreasonable to expect | that we have to bend towards being AI-friendly. Maybe | human friendly becomes less of a concern (enough | desperate people out there), AI-friendly and performance | might be more important metrics to the owner. | exceptione wrote: | I have to add that software is also something that can be | copied without effort. If we can have 2000 drawing apps | instead of 20, changes that none of those 2000 will fit | the bill will get close to zero. | | Industries have traditionally solved this with planned | obsolence. Maybe JavaScript might be our saviour here for | a while. :) | | There is also a natural plateau of choice we can handle. | Of those 2000, only a few will be winners and with reach. | It might soon be that the AI model becomes more valuable | than any of those apps. Case in point: try to make a | profitable app on Android these days. | mullingitover wrote: | > You describe stuff that is harmful or boring. In an | other comment I touched upon this, as there seem to be a | clear distinction between people that love programming | and those that just want to get results. | | There's nothing stopping anyone from coding for fun, but | we get paid for delivering value, and the amount of value | that you can create is hugely increased with these new | tools. I think for a lot of people their job satisfaction | comes from having autonomy and seeing their work make an | impact, and these tools will actually provide them with | even more autonomy and satisfaction from increased impact | as they're able to take on bigger challenges than they | were able to in the past. | exceptione wrote: | "having autonomy and seeing their work make an impact" | | I think we are talking about a different job. I mentioned | it somewhere else, but strapping together piles of bot | generated code and having to debug that will feel more | like a burden for most I fear. | | If a programmer wanted to operate on a level where "value | delivering" and "impact" are the most critical criteria | for job satisfaction, one would be better of in a product | management or even project management role. A good | programmer will care a lot about his product, but she | still might derive the most joy out of having it build | mostly by herself. | | I think that most passionate programmers want to build | something by themselves. If api mashups are already not | fun enough for them, I doubt that herding a bunch of code | generators will bring that spark of joy. | spitBalln wrote: | strken wrote: | My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for everyone | else's future, and losing. | | It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly | available data illegal. I think that would be a very bad thing | because it would legally enshrine a difference between human | learning and machine learning in a broader sense, and I think | machine learning has huge potential to improve everyone's | lives. | | Artists are in a similar position to grooms and farriers | demanding the combustion engine be banned from the roads for | spooking horses. They have a good point, but could easily screw | everyone else over and halt technological progress for decades. | I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more. | allturtles wrote: | > My empathy for artists is fighting with my concern for | everyone else's future, and losing. | | My empathy for artists is aligned with my concern for | everyone else's future. | | > I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more. | | But progress towards what end? The ML future looks very bleak | to me, the world of "The Machine Stops," with humans perhaps | reduced to organic effectors for the few remaining tasks that | the machine cannot perform economically on its own: carrying | packages upstairs, fixing pipes, etc. | | We used to imagine that machines would take up the burden our | physical labor, freeing our minds for more creative and | interesting pursuits: art, science, the study of history, the | study of human society, etc. Now it seems the opposite will | happen. | dangond wrote: | Work like this helps us work towards new approaches for the | more difficult issues involved with replacing physical | labor. The diffusion techniques that have gained popularity | recently will surely enable new ways for machines to learn | things that simply weren't possible before. Art is getting | a lot of attention first because many people (including the | developers working on making this possible) want to be able | to create their own artwork and don't have the talent to | put their mental images down on paper (or tablet). You | worry that this prevents us from following more creative | and interesting pursuits, but I feel that this enables us | to follow those pursuits without the massive time | investment needed to practice a skill. The future you | describe is very bleak indeed, but I highly doubt those | things won't be automated as well. | BudaDude wrote: | I don't get this argument. Artists will not be replaced by | AI. AI will become a tool like Photoshop for artists. AI | will not replace creativity. | yamtaddle wrote: | I see two realistic possibilities: | | 1) It'll no longer be possible to work as an artist | without being _incredibly_ productive. Output, output, | output. The value of each individual thing will be so low | that you have to be both excellent at what you do (which | will largely be curating and tweaking AI-generated art) | and extremely prolific. There will be a very few | exceptions to this, but even fewer than today. | | 2) Art becomes another thing lots of people in the office | are expected to do simply as a part of their non-artist | job, like a whole bunch of other things that used to be | specialized roles but become a little part of everyone's | job thanks to computers. It'll be like being semi-OK at | using Excel. | | I expect a mix of both to happen. It's not gonna be a | good thing for artists, in general. | yunwal wrote: | 3) The scope and scale of "art" that gets made gets | bigger and we still have plenty of pro artists, | designers. AKA art eats the world | yamtaddle wrote: | Maybe. But art was already so cheap, and talent so | abundant, that it was notoriously difficult to make | serious money doing it, so I doubt it'll have that effect | in general. | | It might in a few areas, though. I think film making is | poised to get _really weird_ , for instance, possibly in | some interesting and not-terrible ways, compared with | what we're used to. That's mostly because automation | might replace entire teams that had to spend thousands of | hours before anyone could see the finished work or pay | for it, not just a few hours of one or two artists' time | on a more-incremental basis. And even that's not quite a | revolution--we _used to_ have very-small-crew films, | including tons that were big hits, and films with credits | lists like the average Summer blockbuster these days were | unheard of, so that 's more a return to how things were | _before_ computer graphics entered the picture (even 70s | and 80s films, after the advent of the spectacle- and FX- | heavy Summer blockbuster, had crews so small that it 's | almost hard to believe, when you're used to seeing the | list of hundreds of people who work on, say, a Marvel | film) | wnkrshm wrote: | It does just that though? Don't tell me nobody is | surpised sometimes while prompting a diffusion model, | that can only happen if a significant portion of creation | happens, in a non-intuitive way for the user - what you | could describe as 'coming up with something'. | lovehashbrowns wrote: | > We used to imagine that machines would take up the burden | our physical labor, freeing our minds for more creative and | interesting pursuits: art, science, the study of history, | the study of human society, etc. | | You're like half a step away from the realization that | almost everything you do today is done better if not by AI | then someone that can do it better than you but you still | do it because you enjoy it. | | Now just flip those two, almost everything you do in the | future will be done better by AI if not another human. | | But that doesn't remove the fact that you enjoy it. | | For example, today I want to spend my day taking | photographs and trying to do stupid graphic design in After | Effects. I can promise you that there are thousands of | humans and even AI that can do a far better job than me at | both these things. Yet I have over a terabyte of | photographs and failed After Effects experiments. Do I stop | enjoying it because I can't make money from these hobbies? | Do I stop enjoying it because there's some digital artist | at corporation X that can take everything I have and do it | better, faster, and get paid while doing it? | | No. So why would this change things if instead of a human | at corporation X, it's an AI? | kevingadd wrote: | > It would be very easy to make training ML models on | publicly available data illegal | | This isn't the only option though? You could restrict it to | data where permission has been acquired, and many people | would probably grant permission for free or for a small fee. | Lots of stuff already exists in the public domain. | | What ML people seem to want is the ability to just scoop up a | billion images off the net with a spider and then feed it | into their network, utilizing the unpaid labor of thousands- | to-millions for free and turning it into profit. That is | transparently unfair, I think. If you're going to enrich | yourself, you should also enrich the people who made your | success possible. | yamtaddle wrote: | Everyone else's future? | | I see this as another step toward having a smaller and | smaller space in which to find our own meaning or "point" to | life, which is the only option left after the march of | secularization. Recording and mass media / reproduction | already curtailed that really badly on the "art" side of | things. Work is staring at glowing rectangles and tapping | clacky plastic boards--almost nobody finds it satisfying or | fulfilling or engaging, which is why so many take pills to be | able to tolerate it. Work, art... if this tech fulfills its | promise and makes major cuts to the role for people in those | areas, what's left? | | The space in which to find human meaning seems to shrink by | the day, the circle in which we can provide personal value | and joy to others without it becoming a question of cold | economics shrinks by the day, et c. | | I don't think that's great for everyone's future. Though | admittedly we've already done so much harm to that, that this | may hardly matter in the scheme of things. | | I'm not sure the direction we're going looks like success, | even if it happens to also mean medicine gets really good or | whatever. | | Then again I'm a bit of a technological-determinist and | almost nobody agrees with this take anyway, so it's not like | there's anything to be done about it. If we don't do [bad but | economically-advantageous-on-a-state-level thing], someone | else will, then we'll _also_ have to, because fucking Moloch. | It 'll turn out how it turns out, and no meaningful part in | determining that direction is whether it'll put us somewhere | _good_ , except "good" as blind-ass Moloch judges it. | lovehashbrowns wrote: | What role exactly is it going to take? The role we | currently have, where the vast majority of people do work | not because they particularly enjoy it but because they're | forced to in order to survive? | | That's really what we're protecting here? | | I'd rather live in the future where automation does | practically everything not for the benefit of some | billionaire born into wealth but because the automation is | supposed to. Similar to the economy in Factorio. | | Then people can derive meaning from themselves rather that | whatever this dystopian nightmare we're currently living | in. | | It's absurdly depressing that some people want to stifle | this progress only because it's going to remove this god | awful and completely made up idea that work is freedom or | work is what life is about. | stcroixx wrote: | Every other living thing on the planet spends most of | it's time just fighting to survive. I think that's | evidence it's not a 'made up idea' and likely may be what | life is actually about. | deathgripsss wrote: | This is the dictionary definition of appeal to nature | fallacy. | lovehashbrowns wrote: | What're you doing on the internet? No other living thing | on this planet spends time on the internet. Or maybe we | shouldn't be copying things from nature just because. | | Also kinda curious how you deal with people that have | disabilities and can't exactly fight to survive. Me, I'm | practically blind without glasses/contacts, so I'll not | be taking life lessons from the local mountain lion, | thanks. | exceptione wrote: | I am happy to write code for a hobby. Who is going to pay | for that? The oligarchs of our time pay their tax to | their own 'charities'. Companies with insane profits buy | their own shares. | | AI powered surveillance and the ongoing destruction of | public institutions will make it hard to stand up for the | collective interest. | | We are not in hell, but the road to it has not been | closed. | lovehashbrowns wrote: | The ideal situation is that nobody pays for it. Picture a | scenario where the vast majority of resource gathering, | manufacturing, and production are all automated. | Programmers are out of a job, factory workers are out of | a job, miners are out of a job, etc. | | Basically the current argument of artists being out of a | job but taken to its extreme. | | Why would these robots get paid? They wouldn't. They'd | just mine, manufacture, and produce on request. | | Imagine a world where chatgpt version 3000 is connected | to that swarm of robots and you can type "produce a 7 | inch phone with an OLED screen, removable battery, 5 | physical buttons, a physical shutter, and removable | storage" and X days later arrives that phone, delivered | by automation, of course. | | Same would work with food, where automation plants the | seeds, waters the crops, removes pests, harvests the | food, and delivers it to your home. | | All of these are simply artists going out of a job, | except it's not artists it's practically every job humans | are forced to do today. | | There'd be very little need to work for almost every | human on earth. Then I could happily spend all day taking | shitty photographs that AI can easily replicate today far | better than I could photograph in real life but I don't | have to feel like a waste of life because I enjoy doing | it for fun and not because I'm forced to in order to | survive. | exceptione wrote: | Look, I like the paradise you created. You only forgot | about who we are. | | > There'd be very little need to work for almost every | human on earth. | | When mankind made a pact with the devil, the burden we | got was that we had to earn our bread though sweat and | hard labor. This story has survived millennia, there is | something to it. | | Why is the bottom layer in society not automated by | robots? No need to if they are cheaper than robots. If | you don't care about humans, you can get quite some labor | for a little bit of sugar. If you can work one job to pay | your rent, you can possibly do two or three even. If you | don't have those social hobbies like universal healthcare | and public education, people will be competitive for a | very long time with robots. If people are less valuable, | they will be treated as such. | | Hell is nearer than paradise. | lovehashbrowns wrote: | Humans have existed for close to 200,000 years. Who we | 'are' is nothing close to what we have today. What humans | actually are is an invasive species capable of | subjugating nature to fit its needs. I want to just push | that further and subjugate nature with automation that | can feed us and manufacture worthless plastic and metal | media consumption devices for us. | | Your diatribe about not caring about humans is ironic. I | don't know where you got all that from, but it certainly | wasn't my previous comment. | | I also don't know what pact you're on about. The idea of | working for survival is used to exploit people for their | labor. I guess people with disabilities that aren't able | to work just aren't human? Should we let them starve to | death since they can't work a 9-5 and work for their | food? | exceptione wrote: | > Who we 'are' is nothing close to what we have today. | | I am wondering why you define being in terms of having. | Is that a slip, or is that related to this: | | > I want to just push that further and subjugate nature | with automation that can feed us and manufacture | worthless plastic and metal media consumption devices for | us. | | Because I can hear sadness in these words. I think we can | feel thankful for having the opportunity to observe | beauty and the universe and feel belonging to where we | are and with who we are. Those free smartphones are not | going to substitute that. | | I do not mean we have to work because it is our fate or | something like that. | | > Your diatribe about not caring about humans is ironic. | | A pity you feel that way. Maybe you interpreted "If you | don't care about humans" as literally you, whereas I | meant is as "If one doesn't care". | | What I meant was is the assumption you seem to make that | when a few have plenty of production means without | needing the other 'human resources' anymore, those few | will not spontaneously share their wealth with the world, | so the others can have free smart phones and a life of | consumption. Instead, those others will have to double | down and start to compete with increasingly cheaper | robots. | | ---- | | The pact in that old story I was talking about deals with | the idea that we as humans know how to be evil. In the | story, the consequence is that those first people had to | leave paradise and from then on have to work for their | survival. | | I just mentioned it because the fact that we exploit not | only nature, but other humans too if we are evil enough. | People that end up controlling the largest amounts of | wealth are usually the most ruthless. That's why we need | rules. | | ---- | | > I guess people with disabilities that aren't able to | work just aren't human? Should we let them starve to | death since they can't work a 9-5 and work for their | food? | | On the contrary, I think I have been misunderstood.:) | lovehashbrowns wrote: | I hear more sadness in your words that are stuck on the | idea of having to compete. The idea is to escape that and | make exploiting people not an option. If you feel evil | and competition for survival is what defines humans, | that's truly sad. | | I like my ideal world a lot better. | exceptione wrote: | > The idea is to escape that and make exploiting people | not an option. | | I am in, but just wanted to let you know many had this | idea before. People thought in the past we would barely | work these days anymore. What they got wrong is that | productivity gains didn't reach the common man. It was | partly lost through mass consumption, fueled by | advertising, and wealth concentration. Instead, people at | the bottom of the pyramid have to work harder. | | > I like my ideal world a lot better. | | Me too, without being consumption oriented though. | Nonetheless, people that take a blind eye to the | weaknesses of humankind often runs into unpleasant | surprises. It requires work, lots of work. | antonvs wrote: | > The space in which to find human meaning seems to shrink | by the day | | I don't understand this. It reminds me of the Go player who | announced he was giving up the game after AlphaGo's | success. To me that's exactly the same as saying you're | going to give up running, hiking, or walking because horses | or cars are faster. That has nothing to do with human | meaning, and thinking it does is making a really obvious | category error. | yamtaddle wrote: | A lot of human meaning comes from providing value to | others. | | The more computers and machines and institutions take | that over, the fewer opportunities there are to do that, | and the more doing that kind of thing feels forced, or | even like an _indulgence_ of the person providing the | "service" and an _imposition_ on those served. | | Vonnegut wrote quite a bit about this phenomenon in the | arts--how recording, broadcast, and mechanical | reproduction vastly diminished the social and even | economic value of small-time artistic talent. Uncle Bob's | storytelling can't compete with Walt Disney Corporation. | Grandma's piano playing stopped mattering much when we | began turning on the radio instead of having sing-alongs | around the upright. Nobody wants your cousin's quite good | (but not _excellent_ ) sketches of them, or of any other | subject--you're doing _him_ a favor if you sit for him, | and when you pretend to give a shit about the results. | Aunt Gertrude 's quilt-making is still kinda cool and you | don't mind receiving a quilt from her, but you always | feel kinda bad that she spent dozens of hours making | something when you could have had a functional equivalent | for perhaps $20. It's a nice gesture, and you may | appreciate it, but she needed to give it more than you | needed to receive it. | | Meanwhile, social shifts shrink the set of people for | whom any of this might even apply, for most of us. I | dunno, maybe online spaces partially replace that, but | most of that, especially the creative spaces, seem full | of fake-feeling positivity and obligatory engagement, not | the same thing at all as meeting another person you | know's _actual_ needs or desires. | | That's the kind of thing I mean. | | The areas where this isn't true are mostly ones that | machines and markets are having trouble automating, so | they're still expensive relative to the effort to do it | yourself. Cooking's a notable one. The last part of our | pre-industrial social animal to go extinct may well be | meal-focused major holidays. | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: | > I think that would be a very bad thing because it would | legally enshrine a difference between human learning and | machine learning in a broader sense, and I think machine | learning has huge potential to improve everyone's lives. | | How about we legally enshrine a difference between human | learning and corporate product learning? If you want to use | things others made for free, you should give back for free. | Otherwise if you're profiting off of it, you have to come to | some agreement with the people whose work you're profiting | off of. | Negitivefrags wrote: | Well Stable Diffusion did give back. | | This doesn't seem to satisfy the artists. | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: | I'm thinking about the people who use SD commercially. | There's a transitive aspect to this that upsets people. | If it's unacceptable for a company to profit off your | work without compensating you or asking for your | permission, then it doesn't become suddenly acceptable if | some third party hands your work to the company. | | Ideally we'd see something opt-in to decide exactly how | much you have to give back, and how much you have to | constrain your own downstream users. And in fact we do | see that. We have copyleft licenses for tons of code and | media released to the public (e.g. GPL, CC-BY-SA NC, | etc). It lets you define how someone can use your stuff | without talking to you, and lays out the parameters for | exactly how/whether you have to give back. | kevingadd wrote: | "Giving back" is cute but it doesn't make up for taking | without permission in the first place. Taking someone's | stuff for your own use and saying "here's some | compensation I decided was appropriate" is called Eminent | Domain when the government does it and it's not popular. | | Many people would probably happily allow use of their | work for this _if asked first_ , or would grant it for a | small fee. Lots of stuff is in the public domain. But you | have to actually go through the trouble of getting | permission/verifying PD status, and that's apparently Too | Hard | spitBalln wrote: | [deleted] | conviencefee999 wrote: | Its not that terrifying the way the these models work they | aren't really creating new works, just taking other ones and | basically copying them. Honestly, new laws for copyright have | to be made I wonder when it will happen. And how the judical | systems in the world will deal with it. Or if big tech has | enough in the pockets to pretend it isn't an issue. | lxe wrote: | > In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult | than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. | | You're comparing apples to oranges. Digging a trench by hand is | also vastly more difficult than art or programming. | | There's just as much AI hype around code generation, and some | programmers are also complaining | (https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft- | openai...). | | Overall though the sentiment is that AI tools are useful and | are a sign of progress. The fact that they are stirring so much | contention and controversy is just a sign of how revolutionary | they are. | segmondy wrote: | Tools happen, folks get automated away and need to retool to | make themselves useful. It will happen in computing, as a | matter of fact, it has happened in computing. | | What do you think cloud computing did? A lot of sysadmins, | networking, backups, ops went the way of dinosaurs. A lot of | programmers have also fallen on the side by being replaced with | tech and need to catch up. | | Wallowing in pity is not going to make help, we saw a glimpse | of this with github-copilot. Some people built the hardware, | the software behind these AIs, some others are constructing the | models, applying it to distinct domains. There's work to be | done for those who wish to find their place in the new world. | spinach wrote: | But people aren't being automated away - their work is input, | and for the AI generated art to remain fresh and relevant | instead of rehashing old stuff it would need artists to | continue creating new art. It's not a tool that exists | independently of people's creative work (although this is | true of most AI, though it seems particularly terrible with | art). | davidguetta wrote: | Or its a big non event.. tech change, culture change, people | hange #shrug | | What about the horse-powered carrioles devastated by cars !! | eiiot wrote: | > making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of | computer programming that is done | | Creating art is not that much harder than programming, creating | good art is much harder than programming. That's the reason | that a large majority of art isn't very good, and why a large | majority of Artists don't make a living by creating art. | | Just like the camera didn't kill the artist, neither will AI. | For as long as art is about the ideas behind the piece as | opposed to the technical skills required to make it (which I | would argue has been true since the rise of impressionism) then | AI doesn't change much. The good ideas are still required, AI | only makes creating art (especially bad art) more accessible. | CamperBob2 wrote: | _The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing..._ | | You're projecting your own fears on everyone else. I'm a | programmer, too, among other things. I write code in order to | get other things done. (Don't you?) It's fucking _awesome_ if | this thing can do that part of my job. It means I can spend my | time doing something even more interesting. | | What we call "programming" isn't defined as "writing code," as | you seem to think. It's defined as "getting a machine to do | what we (or our bosses/customers) want." That part will never | change. But if you expect the tools and methodologies to remain | the same, it's time to start thinking about a third career, | because this one was never a good fit for you. | | This argument has come up many times in history, and your | perspective has never come out on top. Not once. What do you | expect to be different this time? | xwdv wrote: | I have zero empathy for "artists". Art produced for commercial | purposes is no art at all, a more apt title for such a job is | "asset creator", and these people are by no means banned from | using AI generation tools to make their work easier. Already | artists will generate some logo off a prompt that takes a few | minutes and charge full price for it. Why cry about it? | | I would argue because most AI imagery right now is made for fun | and not monetary gains, so it is actually a purer form of art. | nonameiguess wrote: | The entire history of computer programming is using code | generation tools to increase the level of abstraction most | programmers work at. Having yet another one of those doesn't | seem to present any realistic chance of replacing all of the | development, testing, maintenance, and refinement of that | entire stack. If your job is literally just being handed over a | paragraph or so written requirement for a single function or | short script, giving back that function/script, and you're | done, then sure, worry. | | But at least every job I've had so far also entailed | understanding the entire system, the surrounding ecosystem, | upstream and downstream dependencies and interactions, the | overall goal being worked toward, and playing some role in | coming up with the requirements in the first place. | | ChatGPT can't even currently update its fixed-in-time knowledge | state, which is entirely based on public information. That | means it can't even write a conforming component of a software | system that relies on any internal APIs! It won't know your | codebase if it wasn't in its training set. You can include the | API in the prompt, but then that is still a job for a human | with some understanding of how software works, isn't it? | golemotron wrote: | > The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing... | | The thing is, empathy doesn't really do anything. Pandora's Box | is open and there's no effective way of shutting it that is | more than a hopeful dream. Stopping technology is like every | doomed effort that has existed to stop capitalism. | nitwit005 wrote: | It's a bit tiresome having people demand you demonstrate | empathy in every single post. Do you truly want everyone typing | up a paragraph of how sad they are in every comment? It won't | actually help anything. | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: | I don't think there is no empathy here, but there are clear | divisions on whether this tech will help advance humankind or | further destabilize the society as a whole. | | To be perfectly honest, I absolutely love that particular | attempt by artists, because it will likely force 'some' | restrictions on how AI is used and maybe even limit that amount | 'blackboxiness' it entails ( disclosure of model, data set | used, parameters -- I might be dreaming though ). | | I disagree with your statement in general. HN has empathy and | not just because it could affect their future world. It is a | relatively big shift in tech and we should weigh it carefully. | CuriouslyC wrote: | If you were transported back to the 19th century, would you | have empathy for the loom operators smashing mechanical looms? | | Art currently requires two skills - technical rendering | ability, and creative vision/composition. AI tools have | basically destroyed the former, but the latter is still | necessary. Professional artists will have to adjust their | skillset, much like they had to adjust their skillset when | photography killed portrait painting as a profession. | yunwal wrote: | > AI tools have basically destroyed the former | | Do you people think art is relegated to digital images only? | No video? No paintings, sculptures, mixed media, performance | art, lighting, woodwork, etc etc. How is it possible that | everyone seems to ignore that we still have massive leaps | required in AI and robotics to match the technical ability of | 99% of artists. | LarryMullins wrote: | > _The lack of empathy_ | | Probably has something to do with years of artists trash | talking engineers. | meroes wrote: | Forgive me but I would be lucky to have artists saying | anything, positive or negative, about my way of life. Being | knowledgeable in something critically studied is very | rewarding. You are forsaking opportunity if I dare say so. | LarryMullins wrote: | I don't understand your response, maybe I should clarify my | comment. What I'm saying is there has historically been a | fair amount of animosity and mean hearted banter between | engineer types and artistic types. Particularly, artists | sharing and promoting negative stereotypes about engineers. | Claims that engineers are antisocial, can't design | interfaces for 'real people', etc. Now that the fruit of | engineering labor has threatened artists, it doesn't | surprise me that engineers have little sympathy for the | artists. | dr-detroit wrote: | elektrontamer wrote: | There's nothing to be depressed about. It's not a lack of | empathy it's recognition of the inevitable. Developers realize | that there is no going back. AI art is here to stay. You can't | ban or regulate it. It would be extremely hard to police. All | there is left to do is adapt to the market like you did, even | if it's extremely difficult. It's not like AI made it | significantly harder anyway. The supply for artists far | surpassed the demand for them before the advent of AI art. | | Edit: Typo | FamosoRandom wrote: | being afraid is the best way to run away from what's coming. If | a computer can easily do some work, simply use that work to | your advantage, and do something more complicated. If a | computer can generate art, use what's generated to your | advantage and do something better. | | As long as the world is not entirely made of AI, there will | always be some expertise to add, so instead of being afraid, | you should just evolve with your time | telesilla wrote: | Exactly! Didn't the rise of abstract art coincide with the | ubiquity of photography? Realism in painting was no longer | needed by the populace to the previous extent. | | Artists will survive through innovation. | ImHereToVote wrote: | What if everything more complicated can have a neural tool | that is equivalent in some respects? | amelius wrote: | You are assuming that AI will always be "open" and accessible | to anyone. | FamosoRandom wrote: | I do, because I don't see why it wouldn't be. If it's | revolutionary and a lot of people need it, or if it change | completely the way people work/live/are entertained, it | will certainly evolve to be as much accessible as possible. | A succesful product is a product used by many. | | If it's not, why worry about it ? | pixl97 wrote: | I mean, nuclear bombs are not free and available to | anyone, yet quite a few people on this planet are | involved in worrying about them. | koshnaranek wrote: | If the demand is high, so will the price. And for AI, | data is everything. And data is the domain of the biggest | companies. | amelius wrote: | > I do, because I don't see why it wouldn't be. | | Because of how capitalism works and people always try to | corner markets, extract value from other people, etc. | etc.? | | > If it's not, why worry about it ? | | Because we can choose different professions that are less | susceptible to automation? Or we can study DL to | implement our own AI. | ajmurmann wrote: | > we can choose different professions that are less | susceptible to automation | | What are those? It seems it's low-margin, physical work | that's seeing the least AI progress. Like berry picking. | Maybe also work that will be kept AI-free longer by | regulators like being a judge? | amelius wrote: | Perhaps surgery. Or cooking. | TchoBeer wrote: | idk about cooking, but surgery is already seeing AI-aid. | boredemployee wrote: | >> making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority | of computer programming that is done. | | I completely agree with it. Take a contemporary pianist for | example, the amount of dedication to both theory and practice, | posture, mastering the instrument and what not, networking | skills, technology skills, video recording, music recording, | social media management, etc. | drinfinity wrote: | You think music theory is more demanding than CS? I've | dedicated decades and probably 75% of my youth to mastering | this instrument called a computing device. It has numerous | layers, each completely different and each significant enough | to build a standalone career out of (OS, networking, etc). I | feel insulted if you think playing and mastering a piano is | the same thing. | | Extreme specialists are found everywhere. Mastering | skateboarding at world level will eat your life too, but it's | not "harder" than programming. At least, for any | commonsensical interpretation of "harder". | | All the rest, we do too. Except I don't record videos and I'm | sure it is not childishly easy, but it will not eat my life. | odo1242 wrote: | have done (doing?) both, music theory is several times | harder at least | quonn wrote: | Again, it depends on the level. Maybe you took trivial CS | courses. Many parts of CS are indistinguishable from | mathematics, is that so easy as well? What about the | various open problems that have remained unsolved for | decades now in theoretical CS? You think these are | simpler than music? Really? | boredemployee wrote: | >> You think music theory is more demanding than CS? | | Of course it is. | quonn wrote: | Can't you see that your statement is just as silly or | even more? | | Have you actually looked into CS deeply? Obviously not. | (I'm not saying this cannot also be true for music, which | I don't know.) | boredemployee wrote: | try to study both and then come back :) | quonn wrote: | I couldn't, but I could also not study many other things | and not because of what you call difficulty. Quite simply | different people are good at some things and less good at | others. | | Maybe you are better at CS than music and therefore | perceive it as easy and the other one as hard. | boredemployee wrote: | ok man | CatWChainsaw wrote: | Speaking as one of the outsiders that the other commenters | warned you made SV/programmers look bad... yeah, you do | look bad. | CadmiumYellow wrote: | This comment is so arrogant I have to laugh. This kind of | attitude is exactly why people outside of our industry | don't think highly of Silicon Valley. | boredemployee wrote: | I think today he/she learned an important lesson for | his/her career: there are things more difficult than the | epitome, the apogee, the quintessence of professions, | called computer science. | monsterbasher wrote: | I'm literally speechless. What an arrogant and egotistical | comment. This is why us tech workers have a such a bad rep | as culturally ignorant/bubbled community. Do a bit of | research into jazz theory and counterpoint theory before | you make this kind of blatant over generalization. | dbfx wrote: | Thanks for the copypasta | meroes wrote: | This is why I come to HN! Thank you! | dangond wrote: | This exact comment could be made by a jazz soloist with a | few words changed and be just as valid. I think you're | underestimating how deep other fields, including artistic | fields, are. Anything as competitive as an artistic field | will always result in amounts of mastery needed at the top | level that are barely noticeable to outside observers. | CuriouslyC wrote: | It isn't harder to be an artist or pianist, it's just that | the cutoff of employability for these professions is much | higher. It's like saying playing baseball is harder than | programming because only a few thousand people are good | enough to play baseball for a living. | Der_Einzige wrote: | A lot of coders have radical open source beliefs. | | Basically, the argument is that you should not have ever | charged for your art, since its viewing and utility is | increased when more people see it. | | The lack of empathy comes from our love of open source. That's | why. These engineers have been pirating books, movies, games | for a long time. Artists crying for copyright has the same | sound as the MPAA sueing grandma 20 years ago. | meroes wrote: | This could easily be flipped on it's head. Artists wanting | more control over their creations ensures bad actors can't | use/misuse as easily. Freely creating tools for any bad | actors to use/misuse appears incredibly naive in this light. | | Now was Aaron Schwartz (what I view as on ultimate example of | this open source idea you cite) naive, no. Maybe he knew in | his heart the greater good would outweigh anything. | | But I don't think we should judge too harshly merely falling | on one side of this issue or not. Perhaps it's down to a | debate about what creation/truth/knowledge actually are. | Maybe some creators (of which aritsts and computer scientists | are) view creations as something they bring into the world, | not reveal about the world. | AlexandrB wrote: | Setting aside questions of whether there is copyright | infringement going on, I think this is an unprecedented case in | the history of automation replacing human labor. | | Jobs have been automated since the industrial revolution, but | this usually takes the form of someone inventing a widget that | makes human labor unnecessary. From a worker's perspective, the | automation is coming from "the outside". What's novel with AI | models is that the workers' own work is used to create the | thing that replaces them. It's one thing to be automated away, | it's another to have your own work used against you like this, | and I'm sure it feels extra-shitty as a result. | gottebp wrote: | We need a better way to reward the contributing artists | making the diffusion models possible. Might we be able to | come up with a royalty model, where the artist that made the | original source content used in training the diffusion model, | gets a fractional royalty based on how heavily it is used | when generating the prompted art piece? We want to | incentivize artists to feed their works, and original styles, | into future AI models. | Archelaos wrote: | > From a worker's perspective, the automation is coming from | "the outside". | | Not, if the worker is an engineer or similar. Some engineers | built tools that improved building tools. | | And this started even earlier than the industrial revolution. | Think for example of Johannes Gutenberg. His real important | invention was not the printing press (this already existed) | and not even moveable types, but a process by which a printer | could mold his own set of identical moveable types. | | I see a certain analogy between what Gutenberg's invention | meant for scribes then and what Stable Diffusion means for | artists today. | | Another thought: In engineering we do not have extremly long | lasting copyright, but a lot shorter protection periods via | patents. I have never understood why software has to be | protected for such long copyright periods and not for much | shorter patent-like periods. Perhaps we should look for | something similar for AI and artists: An artist as copyright | as usual for close reproductions, but after 20 years after | publication it may be used without her or his consent for | training AI models. | wwweston wrote: | Absolutely this -- and in many (maybe most cases), there was | no consent for the use of the work in training the model, and | quite possibly no notice or compensation at all. | | That's a huge ethical issue whether or not it's explicitly | addressed in copyright/ip law. | api wrote: | I really think there's likely to be gigantic class action | lawsuits in the near future, and I support them. People did | not consent for their data and work to be used in this way. | In many cases people have already demonstrated using custom | tailored prompts that these models have been trained on | copyrighted works that are not public domain. | archontes wrote: | Consent isn't required if they're making their work | available for public viewing. | granshaw wrote: | For VIEWING. This is like blatantly taking your gpl | licensed code and using it for commercial purposes | archontes wrote: | A thing that can be viewed can be learned from. | | I can't copy your GPL code. I might be able to write my | own code that does the same thing. | | I'm going to defend this statement in advance. A lot of | software developers white knight more than they strictly | have to; they claim that learning from GPL code | unavoidably results in infringing reproduction of that | code. | | Courts, however, apply a test [1], in an attempt to | determine the degree to which the idea is separable from | the expression of that idea. Copyright protects | particular expression, not idea, and in the case that the | idea cannot be separated from the expression, the | expression _cannot be copyrighted_. So either I 'm able | to produce a non-infringing expression of the idea, or | the expression cannot be copyrighted, and the GPL license | is redundant. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration- | Compari... | OctopusLupid wrote: | It's already explicitly legal to train AI using | copyrighted data in many countries. You can ignore opt- | outs too, especially if you're training AI for non- | commercial purposes. Search up TDM exceptions. | archontes wrote: | It is not a huge ethical issue. The artists have _always_ | been at risk of someone learning their style if they make | their work available for public viewing. | | We've just made "learning style" easier, so a thing that | was always a risk is now happening. | ilammy wrote: | This is like saying that continuously surveilling people | when they are outside of their private property and live- | reporting it to the internet is not a huge ethical issue. | For you are always at risk of being seen when in public | and the rest is merely exercising freedom of speech. | | Something being currently legal and possible doesn't mean | being morally right. | | Technology enables things and sometimes the change is | qualitatively different. | wwweston wrote: | Let's shift your risk of immediate assault and death up | by a few orders of magnitude. I'm sure that you'll see | that as "just" something that was always a risk, pretty | much status quo, right right? | | Oh, life & death is different? Don't be so sure; there's | good reasons to believe that livelihood (not to mention | social credit) and life are closely related -- and also, | the fundamental point doesn't depend on the specific | example: you can't point to an orders-of-magnitude change | and then claim we're dealing with a situation that's | qualitatively like it's "always" been. | | "Easier" doesn't begin to honestly represent what's | happened here: we've crossed a threshold where we have | technology for production by automated imitation at | scale. And where that tech works primarily because of | imitation, the work of those imitated has been a crucial | part of that. Where that work has a reasonable claim of | ownership, those who own it deserve to be recognized & | compensated. | archontes wrote: | The 'reasonable claim of ownership' extends to | restricting transmission, not use after transmission. | | Artists are poets, and they're railing against Trurl's | electronic bard. | | [https://electricliterature.com/wp- | content/uploads/2017/11/Tr...] | wwweston wrote: | > The 'reasonable claim of ownership' extends to | restricting transmission, not use after transmission. | | It's not even clear you're correct by the apparent (if | limited) support of your own argument. "Transmission" of | _some_ sort is certainly occurring when the work is given | as input. It 's probably even tenable to argue that a | copy is created in the representation of the model. | | You _probably_ mean to argue something to the effect that | dissemination by the model is the key threshold by which | we 'd recognize something like the current copyright law | might fail to apply, the transformative nature of output | being a key distinction. But some people have already | shown that some outputs are much less transformative than | others -- and even that's not the overall point, which is | that this is a qualitative change much like those that | gave birth to industrial-revolution copyright itself, and | calls for a similar kind of renegotiation to protect the | underlying ethics. | | People should have a say in how the fruits of their labor | are bargained for and used. Including into how machines | and models that drive them are used. That's part of | intentionally creating a society that's built for humans, | including artists and poets. | archontes wrote: | I wasn't speaking about dissemination by the model at | all. It's possible for an AI to create an infringing | work. | | It's not possible for _training_ an AI using data that | was obtained legally to be copyright infringement. This | is what I was talking about regarding transmission. | Copyright provides a legal means for a rights holder to | limit the creation of a copy of their image in order to | be transmitted to me. If a rights holder has placed their | image on the internet for me to view, then copyright does | not provide them a means to restrict how I choose to | consume that image. | | The AI may or may not create outputs that can be | considered derivative works, or contain characters | protected by copyright. | | You seem to be making an argument that we should be | changing this somehow. I suppose I'll say "maybe". But it | is apparent to me that many people don't know how | intellectual property works. | myrryr wrote: | That is a hard fight to have, since it is the same for | people. An artist will have watched some Disney movie, and | that could influence their art in some small way. Does | Disney have a right to take a small amount from every bit | of art which they produce from then on? Obviously not. | | The real answer is AI are not people, and it is ok to have | different rules for them, and that is where the fight would | need to be. | MSFT_Edging wrote: | I don't know why we keep framing artists like they're textile | workers or machinists. | | The whole point of art is human expression. The idea that | artists can be "automated away" is just sad and disgusting | and the amount of people who want art but don't want to pay | the artist is astounding. | | Why are we so eager to rid ourselves of what makes us human | to save a buck? This isn't innovation, its self destruction. | eikenberry wrote: | The idea that artists can be automated away is really just | kind of dumb, not because people like AI created art and | can get it cheap, but because it has no real impact on the | "whole point" of the art... for the creation of the art. | Pure art, as human expression, has no dependency on money. | Anecdotally I very much enjoy painting and music (and | coding) as art forms but have never sold a painting nor a | song in my life. Just because someone won't pay you for | something doesn't mean it has no value. | | As far as money goes... long run artists will still make | money fine as people will value the people generated | (artisanal) works. Just as people like hand-made stuff | today, even though you can get machine-made stuff way | cheaper. You may not have the generic jobs of cranking out | stuff for advertisements (and such) but you'll still have | artists. | krapp wrote: | The conversation isn't about you or your hobby, it's | about _professional_ artists and illustrators, who are | already being automated away by AI. | astrange wrote: | Professional artists have no chance of being automated | away. They need all the productivity tools they can get. | | The ones at risk (and complaining the most) are semipro | online artists who sell one image at a time, like fanart | commissions. | hunter2_ wrote: | > The whole point of art is human expression. | | For someone seeking sound/imagery/etc. resulting from human | expression (i.e., art), it makes sense that it can't be | automated away. | | For someone seeking sound/imagery/etc. without caring | whether it's the result of human expression (e.g., AI | artifacts that aren't art), it can be automated away. | lolinder wrote: | Most art consumed today isn't about human expression, and | it hasn't been for a very long time. Most art is produced | for commercial reasons with the intent of making as much | profit as possible. | | Art-as-human-expression isn't going anywhere because it's | intrinsically motivated. It's what people do because they | love doing it. Just like people still do woodworking even | though it's cheaper to buy a chair from Walmart, people | will still paint and draw. | | What _is_ going to go away is design work for low-end | advertising agencies or for publishers of cheap novels or | any of the other dozens of jobs that were never bastions of | human creativity to begin with. | PhasmaFelis wrote: | I think fine artists and others who make and sell | individual art pieces for a living will probably be fine, | yeah. (Or at least won't be struggling much worse than | they are already.) | | There are a _lot_ of working commercial artists in | between the fine art world and the "cheap novels and | low-end advertising agencies" you dismiss, and there's no | reason to think AI art won't eat a lot of their | employment. | lolinder wrote: | Just like AI can't replace programmers completely because | most people are terrible at defining their own software | requirements, AI won't replace middle-tier commercial | artists because most people have no design sense. | | Commercial art needs to be eye catching and on brand if | it's going to be worth anything, and a random intern | isn't going to be able to generate anything with an AI | that matches the vision of stakeholders. Artists will | still be needed in that middle zone to create things that | are on brand, that match stakeholder expectations, and | that stand out from every other AI generated piece. These | artists will likely start using AI tools, but they're | unlikely to be replaced completely any time soon. | | That's why I only mentioned the bottom tier of commercial | art as being in danger. The only jobs that can be | replaced by AI with the technology that we're seeing | right now are in the cases where it really doesn't matter | exactly what the art looks like, there just has to be | _something_. | archontes wrote: | Of course it will. Their employment isn't sacred. They | have a skill, we're teaching that skill to computers, and | their skill will be worth less. | | I don't pay someone to run calculations for me, either, | also a difficult and sometimes creative process. I use a | computer. And when the computer can't, _then_ I either | employ my creativity, or hire a creative. | nescioquid wrote: | It's an important distinction you make and hard to talk | about without a vocabulary. The terms I've seen music | historians use for this concept were: | | - generic expression: commercial/pop/entertainment; | audience makes demands on the art | | - autonomous expression: artist's vision is paramount; | art makes demands on the audience | | Obviously these are idealized antipodes. The question | about whether it is the art making the demands on the | audience or the audience making demands on the art is | especially insightful in my opinion. Given this rubric, | I'd say AI-generated art must necessarily belong to | "generic expression" simply because it's output has to | meet fitness criteria. | soerxpso wrote: | You're defining the word "art" in one sentence and then | using a completely different definition in the next | sentence. Where are these people who want art, as you've | defined it, but don't want to pay? Most of the people | you're referring to want visual representations of their | fursonas, or D&D characters, or want marketing material for | their product. They're not trying to get human expression. | | In the sense that art is a 2D visual representation of | something, or a marketing tool that evokes a biological | response in the viewer, art is easy to automate away. This | is no different than when the camera replaced portraitists. | We've just invented a camera that shows us things that | don't exist. | | In the sense that art is human expression, nobody has even | tried to automate that yet and I've seen no evidence that | expressionary artists are threatened. | BoiledCabbage wrote: | Because when people discuss "art" they are really | discussing two things. | | Static 2D images that usually serve a commercial purpose. | Ex logos, clip art, game sprites, web page design and the | like. | | And the second is pure art whose purpose is more for the | enjoyment of the creator or the viewer. | | Business wants to fully automate the first case and must | people view it has nothing to do with the essence of | humanity. It's simply dollars for products - but it's also | one of the very few ways that artists can actually have | paying careers for their skills. | | The second will still exist, although almost nobody in the | world can pay bills off of it. And I wouldn't be shocked it | ML models start encroaching there as well. | | So a lot of what's being referred to is more like textile | workers. And anyone who can type a few sentences can now | make "art" significantly lowering barriers to entry. Maybe | a designer comes and touches it up. | | The short sighted part, is people thinking that this will | somehow stay specific to Art and that their cherished field | is immune. | | Programming will soon follow. Any PM "soon enough" will be | able to write text to generate a fully working app. And | maybe a coder comes in to touch it up. | andrepew wrote: | I wouldn't say saying it came from the inside is unique to AI | art. You very much need a welder's understanding of welding | in order to be able to automate it for example. | | I'd just say the scale is different. Old school automation | just required one expert to guide the development of an | automation. AI art requires the expertise of thousands. | fckgnad wrote: | drinfinity wrote: | Making art is not "vastly more difficult" or at least it is | (IMO) highly debatable. Some parts of it require decades of | experience to do with any kind of excellence, yes. That's also | the case with powerlifting, figure skating and raising children | and indeed programming. It's just that your boss made a money | printer that takes in bullshit and outputs bullshit which gives | you your cosy job. | | But that is not "programming". That is glueing together | bullshit until it works and the results of that "work" are | "blessing" us everyday. The gift that keeps on giving. You | FAANG people are indeed astronomically, immorally, overpaid and | actively harm the world. | | But, luckily, the world has more layers than that. Programming | for Facebook is not the same as programming for a small | chemical startup or programming in any resource-restricted | environment where you can't just spin up 1000 AWS instances at | your leisure and you actually have to know what you're doing | with the metal. | lordfrito wrote: | I want to apologize in advance if my response here seems | callous considering your personal experience as an artist. I'm | trying to talk about AI and labor in general here, and don't | mean to minimize your personal experience. | | That said, I don't think AIs ability to generate art is a major | milestone in the progress of things, I think it's more of the | same, automating low value-add processes. | | I agree that AI is/will-be an incredibly disruptive technology. | And that automation in general is putting more and more people | out of jobs, and extrapolated forward you end up in a world | where most humans don't have any practical work to do other | than breed and consume resources at ever increasing rates. | | As much as I'm impressed by AI art (it's gorgeous), at the end | of the day it's mainly just copying/pasting/smoothing out | objects it's seen before (training set). We don't think of it | as clipart, but that's essentially what it is underneath it | all, just a new form of clipart. Amazing in it's ability to | reposition, adjust, smooth images, have some sense of artistic | placement, etc. It's lightyears beyond where clipart started | (small vector and bitmap libraries). But at the end of the day | it's just automating the creation of images using clipart. Re- | arranging images you've seen before so is not going to make | anyone big $$$. End of the day the quality of the output is | entirely subjective, just about anything reasonable will do. | | This reminds me a lot of GPT-3... looks like it has substance | but not really. GPT-3 is great at making low value clickbait | articles of cut-and-paste information on your favorite band or | celebrity. GPT-3 will never be able to do the job of a real | journalist, pulling pieces together to identify and expose | deeper truths, to say, uncover the Theranos fraud. It's just | Eliza [1] on steroids. | | The AI parlor tricks started with Eliza, and have gotten quite | elaborate as of late. But they're still just parlor tricks. | | Comparing it to the challenges of programming, well yes I agree | AI will automate portions of it, but with major caveats. | | A lot of what people call "programming" today is really just | plumbing. I'm a career embedded real-time firmware engineer, | and it continues to astonish me that there's an entire | generation of young "programmers" who don't understand basic | computing principles, stacks, interrupts, I/O operations.. at | the end of the day their knowledge base seems comprised of | knowing which tool to use where in orchestration, and how to | plumb it together. And if they don't know the answer they | simply google and stack overflow will tell them. Low code, no | code, etc. (python is perfect for quickly plumbing two systems | together). This skill set is very limited and wouldn't even get | you a junior dev position when I started out. I'm not suprised | it's easy to automate, as it will generally have the same | quality code (and make the same mistakes) as a human dev that | simply copies/pastes Stack Overflow solutions. | | This is in stark contrast to the types of problems that most | programmers used to solve in the old days (and a smaller number | still do). Stuff that needed an engineering degree and complex | problem solving skills. But when I started out 30 years ago, | "programmers" and "software engineers" were essentially the | same thing. They aren't now, there is a world of difference | between your average programmer and a true software engineer | today. | | Not saying plumbers aren't valuable.. they absolutely are as | more and more of the modern world is built on plumbing things | together. Highly skilled software engineers are needed less and | less, and that's a net-good thing for humanity. No one needs to | write operating systems anymore, lets add value building on top | of them. Those are the people making the big $$$, their | skillset is quite valuable. We're in the middle of a bi- | furcation of software engineering careers. More and more | positions will only require limited skills, and fewer and fewer | (as a percentage) will continue to be highly skilled. | | So is AI going to come in and help automate the plumbing? Heck | yes, and rightly so... They've automated call centers, | warehouse logistics, click-bait article writing, carry-out | order taking, the list goes on and on. I'd love to have an AI | plumber I could trust to do most of the low-level work right | (and in CI/CD world you can just push out a fix if you missed | something). | | I don't believe for a second that today's latest and greatest | "cutting edge" AI will ever be able to solve the hard problems | that keep highly skilled people employed. New breakthroughs are | needed, but I'm extremely skeptical. Like fusion promises, | general purpose AI always seems just a decade or two away. | Skilled labor is safe, for now.. maybe for a while yet. | | The real problem as I see it, is that AI automation is on | course to eliminate most low skilled jobs in the next century, | which puts it on a collision course with the fact that most | humans aren't capable of performing highly skilled work (half | are below average by definition). Single parent workig the GM | line in the 50's was enough afford an average family a decent | life. Not so much where technology is going. At the end of the | day the average human will have little to contribute to | civilization, but still expects to eat and breed. | | Universal basic income has been touted as a solution to the | coming crisis, but all that does is kick the can down the road. | It leads to a world of too much idle time (and the devil will | find work for idle hands) and ever growing resource | consumption. A perfect storm.... at the end of the day what's | the point of existing when all you do is consume everything | around you and don't add any value? Maybe that's someone's idea | of utopia, but not mine. | | This has been coming for a long time, AI art is just a small | step on the current journey, not a big breakthrough but a new | application in automation. | | /rant | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA | unity1001 wrote: | > entire generation of young "programmers" who don't | understand basic computing principles, stacks, interrupts, | I/O operations | | Why would software engineers who work on web apps, | kubernetes, and the internet in general need to understand | interrupts. Not only they will never ever deal with any of | that, but also they are supposed not to. All of those have | been automated away so that what we call the Internet can be | possible. | | All of those stuff turned into specializations as the tech | world progressed and the ecosystem grew. A software engineer | specialized in hardware would need to know interrupts while | he wouldnt need to know how to do devops. For the software | engineer who works on Internet apps, its the opposite. | lordfrito wrote: | I'm not dissing cloud engineering. I've learned enough to | really repesct the architects behind these large scale | systems. | | My point was about skill level, not specialization. | Specialization is great.. we can build bigger and bigger | things not having to engineer/understand what's beneath | everything. We stand on the shoulders of giants as they | say. | | And I agree, there is no one job specialization that's more | valuable than the other. It's contextual. If you have a | legal problem, a specialized lawyer is more valuable than a | specialized doctor. So yeah I agree that if you have a | cloud problem, you want a cloud engineer and not a firmware | engineer. Although I should add that things like | interrupts/events/synchronization and I/O operations are | fairly universal computing concepts even in the cloud | world. If you're a cloud programmer and you don't know how | long an operation takes / its big-O complexity, how much | storage it uses / it's persistence etc. you're probably | going to have some explaining to do when your company gets | next months AWS bill. | | And yes plumbing is useful! Someone has to hook stuff up | that needs hooking up! But which task requires more skill; | the person that designs a good water flow valve, or the | person hooking one up? I'd argue the person designing the | valve needs to be more skilled (they certainly need more | schooling). The average plumber can't design a good flow | valve, while the average non-plumber can fix a leaky sink. | | AI is eating unskilled / low-skill work. In the 80's | production line workers were afraid of robots. Well, here | we are. No more pools of typists, automated call centers | handling huge volumes of people, dark factories. | | It's a terrible time to be an artist if AI can clipart | compose images of the same quality much faster than you can | draw by hand. | | Back to original comment: I'm merely suggesting that some | programming jobs require a lot more skill than others. If | software plumbing is easy, then it can and will be | automated. If those were the only skill I posessed, I'd be | worried about my job. | | Like fusion, I just don't see general purpose AI being a | thing in my lifetime. For highly skilled programmers, it's | going to be a lot longer before they're replaced. | | Welcome to our digital future. It's very stressful for the | average skilled human. | rhn_mk1 wrote: | Not being afraid of AI is not necessarily due to the lack of | empathy. It could be due to acceptance: perhaps AI will make | programmers obsolete. That is fine, programming is really | boring most of the time, when it's just cobbling things | together. Even if it will be to the short term disadvantage of | some people (including the speaker), AI taking over tedious | programming tasks will make humanity richer. | | It's up to us to distribute those gains back. | alxlu wrote: | I think the issue is that our laws and economy are not | structured in a way that makes it likely for those gains to | be distributed back to anyone other than the ultra wealthy. | Not that I expect AI to take over most programming jobs | anytime soon (or ever), but if it does, it would almost | certainly happen long before society manages to agree on a | system to distribute those gains back in a way that benefits | the average person. | rhn_mk1 wrote: | I believe that was the concern of the Luddite movement. | While they failed, we can learn from them this time. | imgabe wrote: | I've played around a bit with Stable Diffusion and as far as I | can tell, it's just a new tool, like a much better paintbrush. | | It still needs a human to tell it what to paint, and the best | outputs generally require hours of refinement and then possibly | touch-up in photoshop. It's not generating art on its own. | | Artists still have a job in deciding what to make and using | their taste to make it look good, that hasn't changed. Maybe | the fine-motor skills and hand-eye coordination are not as | necessary as they were, but that's it. | kecupochren wrote: | > require hours of refinement | | Not disagreeing with your comment but this is not the case | with Midjourney. Very little is needed to produce stunning | images. But afaik they modify/enhance the prompts behind the | screen | mtrower wrote: | There's a big difference though between "a stunning image" | and "the stunning image you wanted". | kecupochren wrote: | That's very true, I stand corrected. I see people tuning | their prompts for hours on public MJ channels | yamtaddle wrote: | A key difference is someone with some prompt-writing | skills and a tiny amount of aesthetic taste can now | compete with trained artists who actually know how to | create such images from scratch. Sally in Sales and Tom | in Accounting can also do art as part of their job, | whenever it calls for art. And copy-writing, et c. Or | will be able to in the near future. Fewer dedicated | artists, fewer dedicated writers, and so on. One artist | can do the work of ten, and almost anyone in the office | can pinch-hit to do a little art or writing here and | there (by which I mean, tell a computer to make some art, | then select which of that art is best). | nikanj wrote: | Coders have been using "AI" for ages. You used to write | assembly by hand, then got a compiler that you could just | instruct to generate the code for you. I don't worry about my | job, even though a single prompt to REPL can now replace | thousands of hand-crafted machine instructions | eddiewithzato wrote: | yea no, the difficulty in programming as a career is | interaction with other humans. I would like AI to reach the | stage where it can comprehend solutions that stakeholders don't | know themselves. | | Because in my time the stakeholders in companies have never | actually been decisive when scoping features. | | Co-pilot is indeed the endgame for AI assisted programming. So | I would say for art, someone mindful could train an AI on their | own dataset and use that to accelerate their workflow. Imagine | it drawing outlines instead of the full picture. | mysterydip wrote: | > the difficulty in programming as a career is interaction | with other humans | | It would be great if there was an AI that could be a liaison | between developers and stakeholders, translating the | languages of each side for mutual understanding. | imknewhere wrote: | What I find interesting is how people literally cannot see any | alternative besides, "This is just the way capitalism works", | which implicitly acknowledges "capitalism is the only way it | can work". | mallvinegar wrote: | Reminds me of this quote from Mark Fisher: | | " _Observing humans under capitalism and concluding it 's | only in our nature to be greedy is like observing humans | under water and concluding it's only in our nature to | drown._" | exceptione wrote: | Spot on. Our thinking on these matters is more adherence to | faith than reason. We are stuck in a collective meme. | | A belief system that centers around human well being sounds | more reasonable than *unbounded* capitalism. We know it, we | don't know what to do with it. | mypastself wrote: | Tangentially, this is something I think about from time to | time: in tech, you can be mediocre and live a very comfortable | life. In art (and many other areas), you often have to be | extraordinary just to make ends meet. | | So I don't think art is "harder". It's just harder for the | average practitioner/professional to find "success" (however | you like to define it). | ajmurmann wrote: | I wonder if this is due to existing forms of automation in | art. Artists have been competing with reproductions of art in | the form of recordings and prints for a long time now. That | creates a really high floor. How many people who play an | instrument have people around them genuinely want to listen | to them play rather than a recording? How much lower would | the bar be if recordings didn't exist? | | Of course software gets copied all the time, but we have jobs | because so much bespoke software is needed. Looking at some | of what AI can do now, I wouldn't need surprised if our floor | gets raised a lot in the next few years as well. | anticristi wrote: | I think about this too and I wonder why? | | Are artists really "doomed"? Or are they just worse at | redistribution? | MomoXenosaga wrote: | Artists will exist as long as they can entertain the elite | with their clown antics. | | Be entertaining. Be outrageous. Be endearing. An AI can't | cut off their ear. | eulers_secret wrote: | IMO, the 'why' is due to how mature the industry is - it'll | absolutely be the future for every profession, given enough | time. It's the natural distribution of wealth in our | society: Few have too much, most have not enough. | | We're all "doomed" if this is the case. | VoodooJuJu wrote: | Oh don't worry, they'll learn empathy real fast when Co-pilot | becomes just Pilot and they have to take a passenger seat. | CuriouslyC wrote: | Except engineers won't become passengers, they will become | air traffic controllers. | dumbaccount123 wrote: | aaroninsf wrote: | These are society-wide problems, not a failure of empathy on | the part of "technical people." | | The lack you find depressing is natural defensiveness in the | face of hostility rooted in the fear, and in most cases, broad | ignorance of both the legal and technical context and operation | of these systems. | | We might look at this and say, "there should have been a roll | out with education and appropriate framing, they should have | managed this better." | | This may be true but of course, there is no "they"; so here we | are. | | I understand the fear, but my own empathy is blocked by | hostility in specific interactions. | ReptileMan wrote: | I think that programmers are safe for now - because of the law | of leaky abstractions. And there is hardly bigger and leakier | abstraction than AI generated code. | jhbadger wrote: | I think it's more a lack of historical perspective on the part | of artists. I remember when Photoshop and other digital art | tools became available and many artists were of the opinion | "Feh! Digital art isn't really art. Real artists work with | pens, brushes, and paper!". Fast forward a couple of decades | and you won't find many artists still saying that. Instead | they've embraced the tools. I expect the future won't be AI art | vs human art but rather a hybrid as art tools incorporate the | technique and artists won't think it is any less art than using | other digital tools. | odessacubbage wrote: | the issue at hand has nothing to do with gatekeeping, elitism | or any kind of psued debate about what constitutes real art. | | people are mad because job & portfolio sites are being | flooded with aishit which is making them unusable for both | artists and clients . | | people are mad because their copyright is being scraped and | resold for profit by third parties without their consent. | | whether ai is _the future_ is an utterly meaningless | distraction until these concerns are addressed. as an aside, | ai evangelists telling working professionals that they | 'simply don't get' their field of expertise has been an | incredibly poor tact for generating goodwill towards this | technology or the operations attempting to extract massive | profit from it's implementation. | broast wrote: | I'm both a digital artist and programmer. I never thought it | would happen before, but I accept that this technology can | easily replace some aspects of my professional value. But i | don't let it take away from my experience and capacity to be | creative, so I still think I have an advantage when leveraging | these tools- and I've started to use them every day. | | Rendering was only ever a small part of the visual arts process | anyway. And you can still manually add pixel perfect details to | these images by hand that you wouldn't know how to create an AI | prompt for. And further, you can mash together AI outputs in | beautifully unique and highly controlled ways to produce | original compositions that still take work to reproduce. | | To me, these AI's are just a tool for increased speed, like | copy and paste. | threatofrain wrote: | One of the things that I find problematic is that we enjoy so | many conveniences or efficiencies where taking a step back | feels unimaginable. We used to have human computers. Going back | on this to rescue an old profession would seem unimaginable. | Paying individual taxes is very easy for many nations. Going to | what the US has just to rescue many accounting jobs seems | absurd. | | Now imagine a future where AI can assist in law. Or should we | not have that because lawyers pay so much for education and | they work so bitterly? Should we do away with farm equipment as | well? Should we destroy musical synths so that we can have more | musicians? | | It's one thing to say we should have a government program to | ease transitions in industry. It's something else to say that | we should hold back technological progress because jobs will be | destroyed. | | How do we develop a coherent moral framework to address this | matter? | majani wrote: | It's quite typical of devs in my experience. I remember during | the MegaUpload/Pirate Bay arrests, devs were quite up in arms | about big media going after pirates, but when it came to devs | going after app pirates with everything they've got, they were | real quiet | themagician wrote: | I never thought leopards would eat MY face! | | Creative professionals might take the first hit in professional | services, but AI is going to come for engineers at a much | faster and more furious pace. I would even go so far as to say | that some (probably a small amount) of the people who have | recently gotten laid off at big tech companies may never see a | paycheck as high as they previously had. | | The vast majority of software engineering hours that are | actually paid are for maintenance, and this is where AI is | likely to come in like a tornado. Once AI hits upgrade and | migration tools it's going to eliminate entire teams | permanently. | willsmith72 wrote: | > The vast majority of software engineering hours that are | actually paid are for maintenance | | Do you have a source for that? Doesn't match my experience | unless your definition of maintenance is really broad | themagician wrote: | Just experience, but my definition is pretty broad. Once | you get out of the valley most of what pays well (banking, | finance, telecom, analytics, industrial, etc.) is | maintenance code IMO. Basically anything that doesn't come | out real R&D budget, even if it is a "new feature", is | maintenance to me at this point. | itronitron wrote: | The caveat there is 'paid hours'. The current working model | for the industry is that all software engineers | _leetcodeuberhack_ on open source repos at night and by day | have paying jobs maintaining companies ' systems that use | open source. | SkyPuncher wrote: | > The vast majority of software engineering hours that are | actually paid are for maintenance, and this is where AI is | likely to come in like a tornado. | | I have the exact, almost completely opposite opinion. | Greenfield is where AI going to shine. | | Maintenance is riddled with "gotcha's", business context, and | legacy issues that were all handled and negotiated over | outside of the development workflow. | | By contrast, AI can pretty easily generate a new file based | on some form of input. | grandmczeb wrote: | > The vast majority of software engineering hours that are | actually paid are for maintenance, and this is where AI is | likely to come in like a tornado. Once AI hits upgrade and | migration tools it's going to eliminate entire teams | permanently. | | There's been huge improvements in automating maintenance, and | yet I've never once heard someone blame a layoff on e.g. | clang-rename (which has probably made me 100x more productive | at refactoring compared to doing it manually.) | | I'd even say your conclusion is exactly backwards. The | implicit assumption is that there's a fixed amount of | engineering work to do, so any automation means fewer | engineers. In reality there is no such constraint. Firms hire | when the marginal benefit of an engineer is larger than the | cost. Automation increases productivity, causing firms to | hire _more_ , not less. | scj wrote: | I believe the current generation of AI would be better suited | to augmenting human understanding of code (through static | analysis tools and the like), rather than generating it. | | On an infinite timeline humans will no longer be needed in | the generation of code (we hopefully will still study and | appreciate it for leisure), but I doubt we're there yet. | bryanrasmussen wrote: | Much of the history of programming has been programmers making | other jobs obsolete, and indeed there is a saying that a good | programmer makes themselves obsolete. | dumbaccount123 wrote: | If tech that makes programmers obsolete comes then we are | living in a new era. Pretty much every single job will | obselete by then | dlkf wrote: | > why shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the | dumb, simple things most programmers do for their jobs? | | Because those things, while dumb and simple, are not continuous | in the way that visual art is. Subtle perturbations to a piece | of visual art stay subtle. There is room for error. By | contrast, subtle changes to source code can have drastic | implications for the output of a program. In some domains this | might be tolerable, but in any domain where you're dealing | significant sums of money it won't be. | cardanome wrote: | I mean sure things will get harder for some artists but what is | to be done about it? What will feeling sorry for them | accomplish? | | The job market will always keep on changing, you have to adept | to it to a certain degree. | | Now we can talk about supporting art as a public good and I am | all for that but I don't see how artists are owed a corporate | job. Many of my current programming skill will be obsolete one | day, that's part of the game. | gus_massa wrote: | I think the correct way to get empathy is to use an equivalent | that technical people understand, like Copilot: | | * Can a Copilot-like generator be trained with the GPL code of | RMS? What is the license of the output? | | * Can a Copilot-like generator be trained with the leaked | source code of MS Windows? What is the license of the output? | Terretta wrote: | Your example is like saying we should have empathy for people | who can whittle when a 3D printer can now extrude the same | design in bulk. Or like empathy for London cabbies having to | learn roads when "anyone" can A-to-B now with a phone. | | Code should not need to be done by humans at all. There's no | reason coding as it exists today should exist as a job in the | future. | | Any time I or a colleague are "debugging" something, I'm just | sad we are so "dark ages" that the IDE isn't saying "THERE, | humans, the bug is THERE!" in flashing red. The IDE has the | potential to have perfect information, so where is the bug is | solvable. | | The job of coding today should continue to rise up the stack | tomorrow to where modules and libraries and frameworks are | just things machines generate in response to a dialog about | _"the job to be done"_. | | The primary problem space of software is in the business | domain, today requiring people who speak barely abstracted | machine language to implement -- still such painfully early | days. | | We're cavemen chipping at rocks to make fire still amazed at | the trick. No empathy, just, self-awareness sufficient to | provoke us into researching fusion. | Kalium wrote: | We can and should have empathy for all those people. | | The question is perhaps not if we should have empathy for | them. The question is what we should do with it once we | have it. I have empathy for the cabbies with the Knowledge | of London, but I don't think making any policy based on or | around that empathy is wise. | | This is tricky in practice. A surprising number of people | regard prioritizing the internal emotional experience of | empathy in policy as experiencing empathy. | PeterisP wrote: | I don't think that's a road to empathy, because if we're | talking about the matter of empathy i.e. "emotional should's" | instead of nuances of current legal policy, then I'd expect a | nontrivial part of technical people to say that a morally | reasonable answer to both these scenarios could (or should) | be "Yes, and whatever you want - not treated as derivative | work bound by the license of the training data", which | probably is the opposite of what artists would want. | | While technically both artists and developers make their | living by producing copyrighted works, our relationship to | copyright is very different; while artists rely on copyright | and overwhelmingly support its enforcement as-is, many | developers (including myself) would argue for a significant | reduction of its length or scale. | | For tech workers (tech company owners could have a different | perspective) copyright is just an accidental fact of life, | and since most of paid development work is done as work-for- | hire for custom stuff needed by one company, that model would | work just as well even if copyright didn't exist or didn't | extend to software. While in many cases copyright benefits | our profession, in many other cases it harms our profession, | and while things like GPL rely on copyright, they are also in | large part a reaction to copyright that wouldn't be needed if | copyright for code didn't exist or was significantly | restricted. | gus_massa wrote: | It depends a lot of the type of software you are making. If | it's custom software for a single client, then probably | copyright is not important. (Anyway, I think a lot of | custom software is send without the source code or with | obfuscated code, so they have to hire the developer again.) | | Part of my job is something like that. I make custom | programs for my department in the university. I don't care | how long is the copyright. Anyway, I like to milk the work | for a few years. There are some programs I made 5 or 10 | years ago that we are still using and saving time of my | coworkers and I like to use that leverage to get more | freedom with my time. (How many 20% projects can I have?) | Anyway, most of them need some updating because the | requirements change of the environment changes, so it's not | zero work on them. | | There are very few projects that have a long term value. | Games sell a lot of copies in a short time. MS Office gets | an update every other year (Hello Clippy! Bye Clippy!) , | and the online version is eating them. I think it's very | hard to think programs that will have a lot of value in 50 | years, but I'm still running some code in Classic VB6. | imgabe wrote: | If a human learns to program by reading GPL code, what is the | license of future code they write? | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: | Why's this matter? Corporations aren't people. | zorked wrote: | A language model is not a human. You at least have the | possiblity that the human learned something. The language | model is a parrot with a large memory. | | That said Microsoft didn't allow their kernel developers to | look at Linux code for a reason. | ben_w wrote: | What definition of learning are you using that makes | humans _not_ parrots and a deep learning system _not_ | learning? | | I know current AI is very different from an organic brain | at many levels, but I don't know if any of those | differences really matters. | NateEag wrote: | And since you don't know if they matter, you should not | presume that they don't. | zorked wrote: | Go to a judge in a copyright case and argue that humans | are parrots. Then tell me how it went. | AlexandrB wrote: | Humans have rights, machines don't. Copyright is a system | for protecting human intellectual property rights. You | can't copyright things created by a monkey[1] for example. | Thus it's not a contradiction to say that an action | performed by a human is "transformative" while the same | action performed by a machine is not. | | But that is giving AI too much credit. As advanced as | modern AI models are, they are not AGIs comparable to human | cognition. I don't get the impulse to elevate/equate the | output of trained AI models to that of human beings. | | [1] https://thecopyrightdetective.com/animal-copyrights/ | imgabe wrote: | The AI did not create anything. It responded to a prompt | given by a human to generate an output. Just like | photoshop responds to someone moving the mouse and | clicking or a paintbrush responds to being dragged across | a canvas. | | So any transformativity of the action should be | attributed to the human and the same copyright laws would | apply. | AlexandrB wrote: | But under this model, the comparisons to human learning | don't apply either. What matters is whether the output is | transformative - so it's fair to compare the outputs of | AI systems to one of the many inputs and say "these are | too similar, therefore infringement occurred". It doesn't | matter what kind of mixing happened between inputs and | outputs, just like it doesn't matter how many Photoshop | filters I apply to an image if the result resembles what | I started with "too much". | amanaplanacanal wrote: | I believe that _you_ can copyright the image, it 's the | monkey that can't copyright it. | gus_massa wrote: | It's more complicated, even if humans are involved. From | https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Copyright_Issues | | > _Who can 't contribute to Wine?_ | | > _Some people cannot contribute to Wine because of | potential copyright violation. This would be anyone who has | seen Microsoft Windows source code (stolen, under an NDA, | disassembled, or otherwise). There are some exceptions for | the source code of add-on components (ATL, MFC, msvcrt); | see the next question._ | | I've seen a few MIT/BSD projects that ask people not to | contribute if they have seen the equivalent GPL project. | It's a problem because Copilot has seen "all" GPL projects. | [deleted] | Mountain_Skies wrote: | While it was far from all of them, lots of the people who are | decrying AI art were recently gleefully cheering the | destruction of blue-collar jobs held by people with what they | view as unacceptable value systems. "Learn to code" was a | middle finger both to the people losing their jobs and to those | who already code and don't want to see the value of their | skills diluted. There's been plenty of "lack of empathy" going | around lately, mostly because of ideological fault lines. | Perhaps this will be a wake-up call that monsters rarely obey | their masters for very long before turning on them. | thedorkknight wrote: | >lots of the people who are decrying AI art were recently | gleefully cheering the destruction of blue-collar job | | I hear these sorts of statements a lot, and always wonder how | people come to the conclusion that "people who said A were | the ones who were saying B". Barring survey data, how would | you know that it isn't just the case that it seems that way? | | The idea that people who would tell someone else to learn to | code are now luddites seems super counter-intuitive to me. | Wouldn't people opposing automation now likely be the same | ones opposing it in the past? Why would you assume they're | the same group without data showing it? | | I know a bunch of artists personally and none of them seem to | oppose blue-collar work | knighthack wrote: | If _" making art is vastly more difficult than the huge | majority of computer programming that is done"_ - then I'm | sorry, you must not be doing very difficult computer | programming. | odo1242 wrote: | the vast majority of computer programming is "not very | difficult" computer programming | quonn wrote: | Right and why is that? Because there is often no budget to | solve the interesting parts and because of a lack of skills | and because of terrible management - all of these mutually | reinforcing. | | Same if true by the way for writing. So? Doesn't mean | writing well is easy. | NateEag wrote: | what's the most difficult art project you've produced? | | Comparing these is very "apples and oranges", but I think | you'd better have a strong background in both if you're gonna | try. | CadmiumYellow wrote: | I have a strong background in both and I think creating | good art is worlds more difficult than writing good code. | It's both technically difficult and intellectually | challenging to create something that people actually want | to look at. Learning technical skills like draughtsmanship | is harder than learning programming because you can't just | log onto a free website and start getting instant & | accurate feedback on your work. I do agree that it's very | apples and oranges though - creating art requires a level | of intuition and emotion that's mostly absent from | technical pursuits like programming, and this very | distinction is both the reason technical people can be so | dismissive of the arts AND the reason why I think making | art is ultimately more difficult. | quonn wrote: | This is a very strange thing to say since great art is | often not technically difficult at all. Much of modern | and contemporary art is like that, nevertheless the art | is superb. | | > Learning technical skills like draughtsmanship is | harder than learning programming because you can't just | log onto a free website and start getting instant & | accurate feedback on your work. | | Really? I sometimes wonder what people think programming | really is. Not what you describe, obviously. | CadmiumYellow wrote: | I actually think a lot of modern and contemporary art is | more technically difficult than it appears (though | certainly not as technically difficult as making a marble | sculpture or something). But fair point. | | Not sure I fully understand your second point: are you | implying that I don't really know what programming is? | quonn wrote: | I'm not judging since I don't know you. I see programming | as the profession, grounded in CS and with coding being | usually not the problem (instead designing the solution | is the problem). | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: | It's especially absurd that they have no empathy for this | exploiting artists' work, and then get upset when it spits out | GPL code. | | The people who generated the training data should have a say in | how their work is used. Opt-in, not opt-out. | exceptione wrote: | You have my sympathy. | | I think you need to see there are 2 types of people: | | - those who want to generate results ("get the job done, | quickly"), and | | - those who enjoy programming because of it. | | The first one are the ones who can't see what is getting lost. | They see programming as an obstacle. Strangely, some of them | believe that on the one hand that many more people can produce | lots more of software because of AI, and simultaneously expect | to keep being in demand. | | They might think your job is producing pictures, which is just | a burden. | | I am from the second group. I never choose this profession | because of the money, or dreaming about big business I could | create. I dread pasting generated code all over the place. The | only one being happy would be the owner of that software. And | the AI model overlord of course. | | I hope that technical and artistic skill will gain appreciation | again and that you will have a happy live in doing what you | like the most. | astrange wrote: | If you think code generating AI will take your job, you | should also never hire junior engineers because one of them | might take your job. | | Nevertheless, having more engineers around actually causes | you to be more valuable, not less. "Taking your job" isn't a | thing; the Fed chairman is the only thing in our economy that | can do that. | exceptione wrote: | > If you think code generating AI will take your job, | | It might take away the joy of programming, feeling of | ownership and accomplishment. | | People today complain about having to program a bunch of | api calls might be in for a rude awakening, tending and | debugging the piles of chatbot output that got mashed | together. Or do we expect that in the future we will | suddenly value quality over speed or #features? | | I love coaching juniors. These are humans, I can help them | with their struggles and teach them. I try to understand | them, we share experiences in life. We laugh. We find | meaning by being with each other on this lonely, beautiful | planet in the universe. | | --- | | Please do not take offense: observe the language in which | we are already conflating human beings with bots. If we do | it already now, we will collectively do it in the future. | | We are not prepared. | shadowgovt wrote: | Software engineers are in the business of self-replacement. The | idea they could be replaced by an AI doesn't engender fear; it | marks a success. | XorNot wrote: | No one is in programming to "do programming". They're in it to | get things done. I didn't learn C++ in high school to learn | C++, I learned it to make games (then C++ changed and became | new and scary to me and so I no longer say I know C++, possibly | I never did). | | If an AI will take care of most of the finicky details for me | and let me focus on defining what I want and how I want it to | work, then that is nothing but an improvement for everyone. | meebob wrote: | I would point out that many (most?) people are in programming | to make money, rather than get things done per se. | | If an AI were to make it impossible to make a living doing | programming, would that be an improvement for most readers of | this site? | ZetaZero wrote: | It _should_ be an improvement for people to get a career in | something they enjoy, instead of what pays the most money. | ajmurmann wrote: | Yes, and there will be much fewer of those jobs and they | might not pay. | | Ultimately though this isn't a technical problem but an | economic one about how we as a society decide to share | our resources. AI growth the pie, but removes leverage | from some to claim their slice. Automation is why we'll | inevitably need UBI at some point | meebob wrote: | What we're talking about here is the immanent arrival of | it being impossible for a very large number of people to | get a career in something they enjoy (making images by | hand). | | It's fair to suppose (albeit based on a _very_ small | sample size, i.e., the last couple hundred, abnormal | years of history) that all sorts of new jobs will arise | as a result of these changes- but it seems to me | unreasonable to suppose that these new jobs of the future | will necessarily be more interesting or enjoyable than | the ones they destroyed. I think it 's easy to imagine a | case in which the jobs are all much less pleasant (even | supposing we all are wealthier, which also isn't | necessarily going to be true)- imagine a future where the | remaining jobs are either managerial/ownership based in | nature or manual labor. To me at least, it's a bleak | prospect. | Kalium wrote: | At the risk of demonstrating a total lack of empathy and | failure to identify, we long ago passed the arrival of it | being impossible for a very large number of people to get | a career in something they enjoy (making images by hand). | Art has been a famously difficult career path for quite a | long time now. This does not really seem like a dramatic | shift in the character of the market. | | Now, I have empathy. I paused a moment before writing | this comment to identify with artists, art students, and | those who have been unable to reach their dreams for | financial reasons. I emphatically empathize with them. I | understand their emotional experiences and the pain of | having their dreams crushed by cold and unfeeling | machines and the engineers who ignore who they crush. | | Yet I must confess I am uncertain how this is supposed to | change things for me. I have no doubt that there used to | be a lot of people who deeply enjoyed making carriages, | too. | anothernewdude wrote: | I don't care. After decades of having no TV, film, books or | video games aimed at me, they might finally be generated | instead of the bullshit written by committees. | yunwal wrote: | Oh yeah I'm sure the AI that was trained on decades of tv, | movies, and books that didn't appeal to you will do a great | job of creating things that appeal to you. | Mezzie wrote: | I find it weird that they're considered separate talents. | Programming is a creative task for me, and one reason I never | took it up as a full time job is that I learned I hate trying | to do creative work on demand. (I've been paid for both fiction | writing and dev work and they produce very similar feelings in | me.) | | Programming is definitely easier to make a _living_ from. I 'm | a very mediocre artist _and_ developer and I 'm never making | enough off of art to live on, but I could get a programming job | at a boring company and it would pay a living wage. In that | sense, it's definitely 'easier'. | sciclaw wrote: | The thing with programming is that it either works or does not | work, but there is a huge window of what can be called art. | | With no training, I, or even a 1 year old, could make something | and call it art. I wouldn't claim it's very good but I think | most people would accept it as art. The same cannot be said for | programming. | helsinkiandrew wrote: | > making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of | computer programming that is done | | Art and programming are hard for different reasons. | | The difference in the AI context is that a computer program has | to do just about exactly whats asked of it to be useful, | whereas a piece of art can go many ways and still be a piece of | art. If you know what you want its quite hard to get DALL-E to | produce that exactly (or it has been for me), but it still | generates something that is very good looking. | pkdpic wrote: | Sidenote, you don't sound like a failed artist to me man. You | sound like someone who survived the art machine and worked hard | to make a smart career transition capable of supporting | whatever kind of art you want to make. PS I did the same thing, | painting MFA --> software development. Wish I was making FAANG | money tho... | furyofantares wrote: | > it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just | as afraid as artists, in the face of technology like this!!! | | I'm just as excited for myself as I am for artists. The current | crop of these tools look like they could be powerful enablers | for productivity and new creativity in their respective spaces. | | I happen to also welcome being fully replaced, which is another | conversation and isn't really where I see these current tools | going, though it's hard to extrapolate. | orbital-decay wrote: | Artists have all my sympathy. I'm also a hobbyist painter. But | I have very little sympathy _for those perpetuating this | tiresome moral panic_ (a small amount of actual artists, | whatever the word "artist" means), because I think that: | | a) the panic is entirely misguided and based on two wrong | assumptions. The first is that textual input and treating the | model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient | for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give | artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive | models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy; the field will | just become more and more complex and technically involved, | just like 3D CGI did, because if you don't use every trick | available, you're missing out. The second wrong assumption is | that it's going to _replace_ anyone, instead of making many | people re-learn a new tool and produce what was previously | unfeasible due to the amount of mechanistic work involved. This | second assumption stems from the fundamental misunderstanding | of the value artists provide, which is conceptualization, even | in a seemingly routine job. | | b) the panic is entirely blown out of proportion by the social | media. Most people have neither time nor desire to actually | dive into this tech and find out what works and what doesn't. | They just believe that a magical machine steals their works to | replace them, because that's what everyone reposts on Twitter | endlessly. | dtn wrote: | > But I have very little sympathy for those perpetuating this | tiresome moral panic (a small amount of actual artists, | whatever the word "artist" means) | | > A small amount of actual artists | | It's extremely funny that you say this, because taking a look | at the _Trending on Artstation_ page tells a different story. | | https://www.artstation.com/?sort_by=trending | thordenmark wrote: | You are demonstrating that lack of empathy. Artist's works | are being stolen and used to train AI, that then produces | work that will affect that artist's career. The advancement | of this tech in the past 6 months, if it maintains this | trajectory, demonstrates this. | Permit wrote: | > Artist's works are being stolen | | It has been fascinating to watch "copyright infringement is | not theft" morph into "actually yes it's stealing" over the | last few years. | | It used to be incredibly rare to find copyright maximalists | on HackerNews, but with GitHub Co-pilot and StableDiffusion | it seems to have created a new generation of them. | wahnfrieden wrote: | Copyright should not exist, but artists do need support | somehow and doing away with copyright without other | radical changes to economy/society leaves them high and | dry. Copyright not existing should pair with other forms | of support such as UBI or worker councilization, instead | of ridding it while clutching capitalist pearls and | ultimately only accelerating capitalism at their expense | kevingadd wrote: | "copyright infringement is not theft" is not an | especially common view among artists or musicians, since | copyright infringement threatens their livelihood. I | don't think there's anything inconsistent about this. | Yes, techies tend to hold the opposite view. | | Personally, I think "copyright infringement is not theft" | but I also think that using artists' work without their | permission for profit is never OK, and that's what's | happening here. | blamestross wrote: | Individual humans copying corporate products vs | corporations copying the work of individual humans they | didn't pay. | | The confusion is that "copyright infringement is not | theft" really was about being against corporate abuse of | individuals. It's still the same situation here. | [deleted] | pfisch wrote: | So I employ quite a few artists, and I don't see the | problem. This whole thing basically seems more like a | filter on photoshop then something that will take a persons | job. | | If artists I employ want to incorporate this stuff into | their workflow, that sounds great. They can get more done. | There won't be less artists on payroll, just more and | better art will be produced. I don't even think it is at | the point of incorporating it into a workflow yet though, | so this really seems like a nothing burger to me. | | At least github copilot is useful. This stuff is really not | useful in a professional context, and the idea that it is | going to take artists jobs really doesn't make any sense to | me. I mean, if there aren't any artists then who exactly do | I have that is using these AI tools to make new designs? If | you think the answer to that is just some intern, then you | really don't know what you're talking about. | kevingadd wrote: | With respect, you need to pay more attention to how and | why these networks are used. People write complex prompts | containing things like "trending on artstation" or | "<skilled artist's name>" then use unmodified AI output | in places like blog articles, profile headers, etc where | you normally would have put art made by an artist. | | Yes, artists _can_ also utilize AI as a photoshop filter, | and some artists have started using it to fill in | backgrounds in drawings, etc. Inpainting can also be used | to do unimportant textures for 3d models. But that doesn | 't mean that AI art is no threat to artists' livelihoods, | especially for scenarios like "I need a dozen | illustrations to go with these articles" where quality | isn't so important to the commissioner that they are | willing to spend an extra few hundred bucks instead of | spending 15 minutes in midjourney or stable diffusion. | | As long as these networks continue being trained on | artists' work without permission or compensation, they | will continue to improve in output quality and muscle the | actual artists out of work. | pfisch wrote: | If you are looking for a bunch of low quality art there | are tons of free sources for that already. If this is | what you mean when you say "putting artists out of work" | you are really talking about less than 1% of where artist | money is spent. | _0ffh wrote: | So who's that mythical artist that hasn't seen and learned | from the works of other artists? After all, these works | will have left an imprint in their neural connections, so | by the same argument their works are just as derivative, or | "stolen". | blincoln wrote: | As someone who's shifted careers twice because disruptive | technologies made some other options impractical, I can | definitely appreciate that some artists are very upset | about the idea of maybe having to change their plans for | the future (or maybe not, depending on the kind of art they | make), but all art is built on art that came before. | | How is training AI on imagery from the internet without | permission different than decades of film and game artists | borrowing H. R. Giger's style for alien technology?[1] | | How is it different from decades of professional and | amateur artists using the characteristic big-eyed | manga/anime look without getting permission from Osamu | Tezuka? | | Copyright law doesn't cover general "style". Try to imagine | the minefield that would exist if it were changed to work | that way. | | [1] No, I don't mean Alien, or other works that actually | involved Giger himself. | idiotsecant wrote: | Is 'looking at something' equivalent to stealing it? The | use by all these diffusion networks is pretty much the | definition of transformative. If a person was doing this it | wouldn't even be interesting enough to talk about it. When | a machine does it somehow that is morally distinct? | berniedurfee wrote: | Existing art trains the neural nets in human artists as | well. All art is derivative. No art is wholly unique. | | Will human artists be able to compete with artificial | artists commercially? If not, is that bad or is it | progress, like Photoshop or Autotune? | lolinder wrote: | Making money through art is already not a feasible career, as | you yourself learned. If you want a job that _millions_ of | people do for fun in their free time, you can expect that job | to be extremely hard to get and to pay very little. | | The solution isn't to halt technological progress to try to | defend the few jobs that are actually available in that sector, | the solution is to fight forward to a future where _no one_ has | to do dull and boring things just to put food on the table. | Fight for future where people can pursue what they want | regardless of whether it 's profitable. | | Most of that fight is social and political, but progress in ML | is an important precursor. We can't free _everyone_ from the | dull and repetitive until we have automated _all_ of it. | stemlord wrote: | >The solution isn't to halt technological progress | | Technological progress is not a linear deterministic | progression. We _decide_ _how_ to progress every step of the | way. The problem is that we are making dogshit decisions for | some reason | | Maybe we lack the creativity to envision alternative futures. | How does a society become so uncreative I wonder | [deleted] | MSFT_Edging wrote: | You'll find its nearly impossible to imagine a world | without capitalism. | | Capitalism is particularly good at weaponizing our own | ideas against us. See large corporations co-opting anti- | capitalist movements for sales and PR. | | Pepsi-co was probably mad that they couldn't co-op "defund | the police", "fuck 12", and "ACAB" like they could with | "black lives matter". | | Anything near and dear to us will be manipulated into a | scientific formula to make a profit, and anything that | cannot is rejected by any kind of mainstream media. | | See: Capitalist Realism and Manufactured Consent(for how | advertising effects freedom of speech in any media | platform). | CatWChainsaw wrote: | Perhaps it would be better to say you can't imagine "the | future" without capitalism, as history prior to maybe the | 1600s offers a less technologically advanced | illustration. | astrange wrote: | It's pretty easy to imagine a world without capitalism. | It's the one where the government declares you a | counterrevolutionary hedonist for wanting to do art and | forces you to work for the state owned lithium mine. | | Mixed social-democratic economies are nice and better | than plutocracies, but they have capitalism; they just | have other economic forms alongside it. | | (Needing to profit isn't exclusive to capitalism either. | Socialist societies also need productivity and profit, | because they need to reinvest.) | godelski wrote: | But do you know what reducing the progress of generative | modeling will do? Because there seems to be this confusion | that generative modeling is about art/music/text. | visarga wrote: | > We decide how to progress every step of the way. | | I think the wheels are turning. It's just a resultant | movement from thousands of small movements, but nobody is | controlling it. If you take a look not even wars dent the | steady progress of science and technology. | kevingadd wrote: | If it's so important, we could at least pay the people who | create the training set. Otherwise, we're relying on unpaid | labor for this important progress and if the unpaid labor | disappears, we're screwed. How does it seem sensible to | construct a business this way? | gitfan86 wrote: | Most of us in technology have had to learn new skills. I used | to rack up and wire servers in a lab as part of my dev work. I | don't do that anymore and instead had to learn aws and | terraform. Personally I don't expect any empathy due to my lab | racking skills no longer being as relevant to many jobs. | medellin wrote: | The lack of empathy in general on online forums is incredible. | I don't think NH is any worse than other places but it would be | nice if we could be a little better as it would lead to some | more interesting and nuanced topics. | | As a developer/manager i am not yet scared of AI because i have | had to already correct multiple people this week who tried to | use chatGPT to figure something out. | | It's actually pretty good but when it's wrong it seems to be | really wrong and when you don't have the background to figure | that out a ton of time is wasted. It's just a better | Stackoverflow at the end of the day imo. | eatsyourtacos wrote: | >it seems to me that most computer programmers should be just | as afraid as artists | | That is absurd. Sure some basic AI tools have been helpful like | co-pilot and it's sometimes really impressive how it can help | me autofill some code instead of typing it out... but come on, | there is no way we are anywhere close to AI replacing 99.99% of | developers. | | >making art is vastly more difficult than the huge majority of | computer programming that is done | | I don't know.. art is "easy" in the sense that we all know what | art looks like. You want a picture of a man holding a cup with | a baby raven in it? I can picture that in my head to some | degree right away, and then it's just "doing the process" to | draw it in some way using shapes we know. | | How in the heck can you correlate that to 99% of business | applications? Most of the time no one even knows exactly what | they want out of a project.. so first there is the massive | amount of constant changes just from using stuff. Then there is | the actual way the code is created itself. Let's even say you | could tell it "Make me an angular website with two pages and a | live chat functionality" and it worked. Well, ok great it got | you a starting template.. but first, maybe the code is so weird | or unintuitive that it's almost impossible to really keep | building upon- not helpful. Now let's say it is "descent | enough", well fine.. then it's almost like an advanced co-pilot | at this point. It helps with boilerplate boring template. | | But comparing this all to art is still just ridiculous. Again, | everyone can look at a picture and say "this is what I wanted" | or "this is not what I wanted at all". Development is so crazy | intricate that it's nothing like art.. I could look at two | websites (similar to art) and say "these look the same", but | under the hood it could be a million times different in | functionality, how it works, how well it's structured to evolve | over time.. etc etc. But if I look at two pictures that look | exactly the same, I don't _care_ how it got there or how it was | created- it 's done and exactly the same. Not true of | development for 99% of cases. | quonn wrote: | This comment is downvoted, but it makes an important point. | AI systems that produce an outcome that can be easily | verified by non-experts are far more practical. If my mom can | get an illustration out of the AI that she wants, she is | done. Not so for software, where she cannot really verify | it's that going to reliably do what was specified. | | This is especially true for complex pieces. | | If an AI could produce a world-class totally amazing | illustration or even a book I will afterwards easily see or | read it. | | On the other hand real-world software systems consist of | hundreds of thousands or lines in distributed services. How | would a layman really judge if they work? | | Nevertheless I also expect AI to have a big impact since less | engineers can do much more. | Kalium wrote: | What's going to happen if technologists collectively come to | the table and engaging in sincere discussion rooted in | kindness, compassion, and empathy? | | I fully expect there will be zero reciprocation. There will, | instead, be a strong expectation that that empathy turns into | centering of _fear_ and a resulting series of economic choices. | AI systems are now threatening the ability of some artists to | get paid and those artists would like that to stop. | | I think we're seeing it right now. You shift effortlessly from | talking about empathy to talking about the money. You consider | the one the way to get the other, so you deplore the horrifying | lack of empathy. | | Let me put it another way. Would you be happy if you saw an | outpouring of empathy, sympathy, and identification with | artists coupled with exactly the same decisions about machine | learning systems? | Mezzie wrote: | I do find it funny that artists are complaining about things | like AI generated art clogging up art sites/reducing | commissions/etc. because my particular artistic outlet of | choice is _writing_ and visual art has completely overtaken | text based content online, particularly for anything fandom | or nerd adjacent. The visual artists are also responsible for | the monetization of fandom to begin with which I 'm still | pretty salty about. We moved from discussions and fanfic to | 500+ 'commission me to draw your OTP!' and 'Look at this | skimpy character art!' daily posts. | | Shoe's on the other foot now and they don't like it. | lilactown wrote: | Yes, an outpouring of sympathy, empathy, etc combined with | the same unilateral decision making that technologists make | would be terrible. I would call continuing to do that | unempathetic. | | Technologists acting like technocrats and expecting everyone | to give them sympathy, empathy and identification is | laughably rude and insulting. | syntheweave wrote: | I have crossed over the other direction from coding to drawing | and suspect that neither side understands their craft well | enough to assess what'll happen. | | Most of coding is routine patterns that are only perceived as | complex because of the presence of other coders and the need to | "talk" with them, which creates a need for reference | materials(common protocols, documentation, etc.) | | Likewise, most of painting is routine patterns complicated by a | mix of human intent(what's actually communicated) and the need | for reference materials to make the image representational. | | Advancements in Western painting between the Renaissance and | the invention of photography track with developments in optics; | the Hockney-Falco thesis is the "strong" version of this, | asserting that specific elements in historical paintings had to | have come through the use of optical projections, not through | the artist's eyes. A weaker form of this would say that the | optics were tools for study and development of the artist's | eye, but not always the go-to tool, especially not early on | when their quality was not good. | | Coding has been around for a much shorter time, but mostly | operates on the assumptions of bureaucracy: that which is | information is information that can be modelled, sorted, | searched. And the need for more code exists relative to having | more categories of modelled data. | | Art already faced its first crisis of purpose with the | combination of photography and mass reproduction. Photos | produced a high level of realism, and as it became cheaper to | copy and print them, the artist moved from a necessary role | towards a specialist one - an "illustrator" or "fine artist". | | What an AI can do - given appropriate training, prompt | interfaces and supplementary ability to test and validate its | output - is produce a routine result in a fraction of the time. | And this means that it can sidestep the bureaucratic mode | entirely in many circumstances and be instructed "more of this, | less of that" - which produces features like spam filters and | engagement-based algorithms, but also means that entire | protocols are reduced to output data if the AI is a | sufficiently good compiler; if you can tell the AI what you | want the layout to look like and it produces the necessary CSS, | then CSS is more of a commodity. You can just draw a thing, | possibly add some tagging structure, and use that as the | compiler's input. Visual coding. | | But that makes the role a specialized one; nobody needs a "code | monkey" for such a task, they need a graphic designer...which | is an arts job. | | That is, the counterpoint to "structured, symbolic prompts | generating visual data" is "visual prompts generating | structured, symbolic data". ML can be structured in either | direction, it just takes thoughtful engineering. And if the | result is a slightly glitchy web site, it's an acceptable | tradeoff. | | Either way, we've got a pile of old careers on their way out | and new careers replacing them. | incrudible wrote: | > In my humble estimation, making art is vastly more difficult | than the huge majority of computer programming that is done. | | The value of work is not measured by its difficulty. There's a | small amount of people who make a living doing contract work | that may be replaced by an AI, but these people were in a | precarious position in the first place. The well-to-do artists | are not threatened by AI art. The value of their work is | derived from _them_ having put their name on it. | | If you assume that most programming work could be done by an AI | "soon", then we really have to question what sort of dumb | programming work people are doing today and whether that | wouldn't disappeared anyway, once funding runs dry. Mindlessly | assembling snippets from Stackoverflow may well be threatened | by AI very soon, so if that's your job, consider the | alternatives. | runald wrote: | Sorry, I have no reason to be afraid of AI taking my job, not | now, not ever. You seem to have a condescending idea of what | programming is, given how you describe it as simple and dumb, | but I can assure you, programming would be one of the last jobs | to be deprecated by AI. If you think ChatGPT is enough to put | programmers on the street, I would question what kind of | programming you do. | | I would turn this around to you: if a braindead AI can do these | astonishingly difficult art, maybe art was never difficult to | begin with, and that artists are merely finagling dumb, simple | things to their work. Sounds annoying and condescending right? | If you disagree what I said about art, maybe you ought to be | more aware of your own lack of empathy. | [deleted] | akiselev wrote: | It's not about empathy but about the fundamental nature of the | job. | | Developers will be fine because software engineering is an arms | race - a rather unique position to be in as a professional. I | saw this play out during the 2000s offshoring scare when many | of us thought we'd get outsourced to India. Instead of getting | outsourced, the industry exploded in size globally and | everything that made engineers more productive also made them a | bigger threat to competitors, forcing everyone to hire or die. | | Businesses only need so much copy or graphic design, but the | second a competitors gains a competitive advantage via software | they have to respond in kind - even if it's a marginal | advantage - because software costs so little to scale out. As | the tech debt and the revenue that depends on it grows, the | baseline number of staff required for maintenance and upkeep | grows because our job is to manage the complexity. | | I think software is going to continue eating the world at an | accelerated pace because AI opens up the uncanny valley: | software that is too difficult to implement using human | developers writing heuristics but not so difficult it requires | artificial general intelligence. Unlike with artists, | improvements in AI don't threaten us, they instead open up | entire classes of problems for us to tackle | oldstrangers wrote: | Technically I'd imagine AI threatens developers | (https://singularityhub.com/2022/12/13/deepminds-alphacode- | co...) a lot more than artists because there's a tangible (or | 'objectively correct') problem being solved by the AI. | Whereas art is an entirely subjective endeavor, and | ultimately the success of what is being made is left up to | how someone is feeling. I also imagine humans will begin to | look at AI generated art very cynically. Maybe we all | collectively agree we hate AI art, and it becomes as cliche | as terrible stock photography. Or, we just choose not to | appreciate anything that doesn't come with a 'Made By Humans' | authentication... Pretty simple solution for the artists. | | Obviously a lot of money will be lost for artists in a | variety of commercial fields, but the ultimate "success of | art" will be unapproachable by AI given its subjective | nature. | | Developers though will be struggling to compete from both a | speed and technical point of view, and those hurdles can't be | simply overcome with a shift in how someone feels. And you're | right about the arms race, it just won't be happening with | humans. It'll be computing power, AIs and the people capable | of programming those AIs. | akiselev wrote: | If there's a "tangible problem" people solve it with a SaaS | subscription. That's not new. | | We developers are hired because our coworkers _can't | express what they really want._ No one pays six figures to | solve glorified advent of code prompts. The prompts are | much more complex, ever changing as more information comes | in, and in someone's head to be coaxed out by another human | and iterated on together. They are no more going to be | prompt engineers than they were backend engineeers. | | I say this as someone who used TabNine for over a year | before CoPilot came out and now use ChatGPT for | architectural explorations and code scaffolding/testing. | I'm bullish on AI but I just don't see the threat. | oldstrangers wrote: | I'm just arguing that its a lot easier for AI to replace | something that has objectively or technically correct | solutions vs something as subjective as art (where we can | just decide we don't like it on a whim). | akiselev wrote: | I'm arguing that there is no objectively or technically | correct solutions to the work engineers are hired to do. | You don't "solve" a startup CEO or corp VP who changes | their mind about the direction of the business every | week. Ditto for consumers and whatever the latest fad | they're chasing is. They are agents of chaos and we are | the ones stuck trying to wrangle technology to do their | bidding. As long as they are _human_ , we'll need the | general intelligence of humans (or equivalent) to figure | out what to code or prompt or install. | oldstrangers wrote: | In the sense that someone asks "I need a program that | takes x and does y" and the AI is able to solve that | problem satisfactorily, it's an objectively correct | solution. There will be nuance to that problem, and how | its solved, but the end results are always objectively | correct answers of "it either works, or it doesn't." | akiselev wrote: | Case in point, I guess :-) | Lichtso wrote: | I think in both domains there are parts which are purely | technical (wrong or right) and others which are well ... | an art. | | In art these parts are often overlooked, but they are | significant none the less. E.g. getting the proportions | right is an objective metric and really off putting if it | is wrong. | | And in programming the "art" parts are often overlooked | and precisely the reason why I feel that most software of | today is horrible. It is just made to barely "work" and | get the technical parts right up to spec and that's it. | Beyond that nobody cares about resource efficiency, | performance, security, maintainability or yet alone | elegance. | cyborgx7 wrote: | To be honest, I have been forced to choose a side during all | those debates about copyright and advertising/adblocking. And | it was artists who forced me to make that choice. It's hard not | to see this as just another way in which artist are trying to | limit how people use their own computing devices in a way that | provides the most value to them. | | All these talking points about lack of empathy for poor | suffering artists have already been made a million times in | those other debates. They just don't pack much of a punch | anymore. | netheril96 wrote: | > if AI is able to do these astonishingly difficult things, why | shouldn't it, with some finagling, also be able to do the dumb, | simple things most programmers do for their jobs? | | Art is more difficult than programming for people with talents | in programming but not in arts. Art is easier than programming | for people with talents in arts but not in programming. | Granted, those two sentences are tautology, but nonetheless a | reminder that the difficulty of art and programming does not | form a total order. | turpialito wrote: | Luddites hopping on the bandwagon for reasons unclear to | themselves. | | EDIT: Would Andy Warhol be sued by Campbell or Brillo? | crote wrote: | No, but his estate _was_ sued by Lynn Goldsmith over his use of | a photo of Prince - and lost. | | Warhol himself said that art "is anything you can get away | with." He was clearly very much aware of the dubious legality | of some of his work. | dredmorbius wrote: | Context, too long to fit into the HN title: "In order to protest | AI image generators stealing artists work to train AI models, the | artists are deliberately generating AI art based on the IP of | corporations that are most sensitive to protecting it." | yreg wrote: | Interesting approach, but is drawing fan art illegal? | | I would think that generating those images is okay by Disney, | the same as if I painted them. The moment Disney would object | is when I start selling them on merch, at which point it is | irrelevant how they were created. | | Am I mistaken? | onetrickwolf wrote: | Fan art is pretty much illegal or infringement actually it's | just not really enforced by most companies. There are some | caveats for fair use but generally most fan art could be | successfully taken down if a company was motivated enough in | my opinion. Nintendo is pretty notorious for this but it has | rarely gone to court as most people are too scared to fight | takedown requests. | Taywee wrote: | Copyright isn't level legal vs illegal, it's infringing vs | non-infringing. Fan art very often could be argued to be | infringing, but no company has any reason to pursue it in the | vast majority of cases, so they just don't. | | It's very confusing, especially when you have to consider | trademark as related but separate. | jefftk wrote: | I don't get your distinction: copyright infringement is | illegal, so "infringing" implies "illegal" | Taywee wrote: | It's civil vs criminal law. Illegal usually implies | breaking a law and committing a crime. Copyright | infringement is a civil matter, not criminal. | dredmorbius wrote: | False. | | <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999561> | dredmorbius wrote: | Infringement carries both civil (noncriminal) and | criminal proscriptions and liabilities under much law, | e.g., under US law, 17 USC Chapter 5: | | <https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/chapter-5> | Taywee wrote: | From that link, criminal copyright infringement depends | on specific circumstances that don't directly apply here: | https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506 | dredmorbius wrote: | It's unclear whether "here" refers to the artists | spoofing Disney, or other actors pirating / duplicating | artists' work for commercial use. | | In the former case, I'd agree. | | In the second, there's a clear violation of 17 USC | 506(a)(1)(A). | astrange wrote: | Artists have a complicated ethical system where 1. | reposting/tracing a solo artist's images without "citing the | artist" is "stealing" (copyright violation) 2. imitating | their style is also "stealing" but 3. drawing fanart of any | series without asking is fine and 4. any amount of copyright | violation is not only fine but encouraged as long as it's | from a corporation. | | The punishment for breaking any of these rules is a lot of | people yell at you on Twitter. Unfortunately, they've been at | it so long that they now think these are actual laws of the | universe, although of course they have pretty much nothing to | do with the actual copyright law. | | That actual law doesn't care if you're selling it or not | either, at least not as a bright line test. | | (Japanese fanartists have a lot more rules, like they won't | produce fan merch of a series if there is official merch | that's the same kind of object, or they'll only sell fan | comics once on a specific weekend, and the really legally | iffy ones have text in the back telling you to burn after | reading or at least not resell it. Some more popular series | like Touhou have explicit copyright grants for making fanart | as long as you follow a few rules. Western fanartists don't | read or respect any of these rules.) | dotnet00 wrote: | Japan doesn't have fair use, so the only thing ensuring | that copyright owners don't go after fanartists is that | fanart is generally either beneficial to them or is not | worth going after. However that would change if the artist | were attempting to directly interfere with their revenue, | which is why they won't do things like producing imitations | of merch. | | Copying an artist's style isn't in and of itself looked | down upon, any artist will tell you that doing so is an | important part of figuring out what aspects of it one likes | for their own style. The problem with AI copying it is that | the way the vast majority of users are using it isn't in | artistic expression. The majority of them are simply | spamming images out in an attempt to gain a popularity | "high" from social media, without regard for any of the | features of typical creative pursuits (an enjoyment of the | process, an appreciation for other's effort, a desire to | express something through their creativity, having some | unique intentional and unintentional identifying features). | | Honestly maybe the West messed up having such broad fair | use protections since it seems people really have no | respect for any creative effort, judging by all the AI art | spam and all the shortsighted people acting smug about it | despite the questions around it being pretty important to | have a serious conversation about, especially for pro-AI | folk. | | The AI art issue has several difficult problems that we are | seemingly too immature to deal with, it makes it clear how | screwed we'd be as a society if anything approaching true | AGI happened to be stumbled upon anytime soon. | BeFlatXIII wrote: | > the West messed up having such broad fair use | protections since it seems people really have no respect | for any creative effort | | That is based on the fallacy that derivative creativity | is somehow lesser than so-called "original" creativity. | dotnet00 wrote: | I'm not saying that because I think all derivative | creativity is lesser than 'original' creativity. Rather, | we've gotten so used to such broad protections on all | creativity that a good chunk of us genuinely think that | their dozens of minor variations on a popular prompt | entirely spat out by a tool and published to a site every | hour are at the same level of creativity as something | even just partially drawn by a person (eg characters | drawn into an AI generated background or AI generated | character designs then further fixed up). | | The vast majority of AI art I've seen on sites like Pixiv | has been 'generic' to the level of the 'artist' being | completely indistinguishable from any other AI-using | 'artist'. There has been very little of the sort where | the AI seemed to truly just be a tool and there was | enough uniqueness to the result that it was easy to guess | who the creator was. The former is definitely less | creative than the latter. | gwd wrote: | But the premise is just bad law. Disney does, in fact, hold a | copyright on the Mickey Mouse character (at least until the end | of 2023) [1]. It doesn't matter where the art comes from. | Anyone making copies of something with Mickey Mouse in it -- | whether drawn by a Disney artist, or drawn by someone else, or | "drawn" by an AI -- is violating their copyright (at least for | another year). | | On the other hand, nobody owns a copyright on a specific style. | If I go study how to make art in the style of my favorite | artist, that artist has no standing to sue me for making art in | their style. So why would they have standing to sue for art | generated by an AI which is capable of making art in their | style? | | [1] https://fishstewip.com/mickey-mouse-copyright-expires-at- | the... | dredmorbius wrote: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999491 | hectorlorenzo wrote: | I'm still organising my thoughts on the subject so please feel | free to push back. | | This ongoing discussion feels classist. I've never seen such | strong emotions about AI (and automation) taking blue-collar | jobs, some shrugs at most. It's considered an unavoidable given, | even though it has been happening for decades. The only | difference now is that AI is threatening middle-upper class jobs, | which nobody saw coming. | | I do not see the difference between both. Can somebody that does | explain to me why now is "critical" and not so much before? | nbzso wrote: | As an artist, I already realized that the war is lost, without a | fight. There is no way to stop the removal of human labor. At | first, A.I. tools will need supervision and optimization, but | soon they will do this by themselves. I moved all of my art | related work into a real medium. If someone in the future finds | value of owning an actual art, I will provide. | | If people are happy with metaverse A.I. generated images, | projected in their minds, so be it. It is over. The rest is just | an echo of human civilization. Transhumanistic clones are coming | to town:) | wnkrshm wrote: | I'm thinking the same way, plein air painting is a nice | activity. You get something nothing can take away from you, any | kind of mark you make with your own body is yours. At least at | the moment, using prompt- or inpainting-based tools feels like | talking through Microsoft Sam (voice synth). | Taywee wrote: | The war is not lost. The goal isn't to try to force people to | never be able to use AI to generate art, but to force them to | only use input that they gave permission to use. | | AI replacing artists functionally is just the surface fear. The | real problem is using AI as an automated method of copyright | laundering. There's only so much hand waving one can do to | excuse dumping tons of art that you didn't make into a program | and transform it into similar art and pretend like you own it. | People like to pretend that it's like a person learning and | replicating a style, but it's not. It's a computer program and | it's automated. That the process is similar is immaterial. | [deleted] | marmetio wrote: | My memory of this is really fuzzy, so I'm probably getting the | details wrong. | | I watched a documentary in roughly the early oughts about AI. The | presenter might have been Alan Alda. | | In one segment, he visited some military researchers who were | trying to get a vehicle to drive itself. It would move only a few | inches or feet at a time as it had to stop to recalculate. | | In another segment, he visited some university researchers who | set up a large plotter printer to make AI-generated art. It was | decent. He saw it could depict things like a person and a pot, so | he asked if it would ever do something silly to us like put a | person in a pot. The professor said not to be silly. | | To jokingly answer the title question: everyone who saw that one | specific documentary 20 years ago knew that AI art was way ahead | of AI machines. | | Art is useful when someone subjectively finds it enjoyable or | meaningful. While it might not achieve all of what humans can, | the barrier to entry is relatively lower. | fullshark wrote: | If it was Alan Alda it was probably a Scientific American | Frontiers episode | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_American_Frontier... | | Edit: confused SAF with Nova! | avereveard wrote: | "images trascend copyright" | https://cdn.vmst.io/media_attachments/files/109/512/541/929/... | | you can still copyright characters separatedly. he's feigning | ignorance of how copyright work to make a sensationalistic point, | which pretty much invalidate and poison what is otherwise an | interesting argument at the boundary between derivative work and | generative art. | namelessoracle wrote: | The slice Im curious about is what happens, when you let loose | your AI art generator and start copy/trademarking everything it | creates to basically make sure all kinds of art that could have | been created is potentially infringing for you? | | The art equivalent of patent trolling or domain squatting | basically. Is that possible legally? | alexfromapex wrote: | It seems like the least-regulated professions will be the front | lines, due of course to the friction created by getting AI | operating in regulated environments. | cobertos wrote: | I hope that AI companies don't end up implementing another system | like Youtube's DMCA system. Right holders and trolls alike can | scrub these "black boxes" of whatever content they want, adding | more garbage and uncertainty to their output. | | Then again, there should be some sort of solution so this can | coexist with artists, and not replace them | sdiupIGPWEfh wrote: | So they're protesting alleged _copyright_ violations in the form | of AI copying artistic styles (presuming an artistic style alone | rises to the level of copyright protection) by committing | _trademark_ violations? Yeah, I don 't get it. | | I can appreciate that there are all kinds of potential | "intellectual property" issues with the current glut of AI | models, but the level of misunderstanding in some affected | communities is concerning. | sidlls wrote: | Outside of lawyers, what communities do you think should have | an "understanding" of intellectual property law, and to what | degree? Or, maybe the fact that it takes a lawyer to truly | understand it indicates that the complexity of applicable laws | and regulations isn't beneficial to the communities they're | ostensibly meant to protect? | avereveard wrote: | I fully expect self called artist to know the law that | protect their own means of living | Double_a_92 wrote: | People that complain very vocally about some issue, should at | least bother to research what they are talking about... | Karawebnetwork wrote: | When I took my graphic design class in college, there was a | big chunk about copyright and trademark. We had to be very | cautious about images we were using and the difference | between the two was drilled into our heads. | sdiupIGPWEfh wrote: | Communities that generate and/or profit off of "intellectual | property" ought to have a rudimentary understanding of the | laws involved. Doubly so if they're protesting what they see | as violations of those laws. It honestly does not take a | lawyer to understand the distinctions at play here. | Tao3300 wrote: | ITT everyone similarly conflating multiple types of IP law and | calling it all copyright. Palm to the face. | mensetmanusman wrote: | AI enables fast-fashion-like competition. There will still be | winners and losers. | | Use these tools to 10x your own output and create new markets | that arise due to the 10x modifier. | cwkoss wrote: | If a human wrote the prompt, how is AI different from a | paintbrush or any other tool of the trade? | | Every tool makes some of the 'decisions' about how the artwork | results by adding constraints and unexpected results. If anything | I'd argue that AI art allows for more direct human expression: | going from mental image to a sharable manifestation has the | potential to be less lossy with art than with paint. | | This feels like a bunch of misplaced ludditism. We need to | implement a UBI because 99.9% of human labor is going to be | valued below the cost of survival in the next 50-100 years. | Always fun to see people thumbing their nose at Disney though. | rperez333 wrote: | I think it is different because you don't need any pictures to | create a paintbrush or a pencil. You can still have the AI code | as tool, but without the dataset (images), it won't go | anywhere. | 4bpp wrote: | Surely, if the next Stable Diffusion had to be trained from a | dataset that has been purged of images that were not under a | permissive license, this would at most be a minor setback on AI's | road to obsoleting painting that is more craft than art. Do | artists not realise this (perhaps because they have some kind of | conceit along the lines of "it only can produce good-looking | images because it is rearranging pieces of some Real Artists' | works it was trained on"), are they hoping to inspire overshoot | legislation (perhaps something following the music industry model | in several countries: AI-generated images assumed pirated until | proven otherwise, with protection money to be paid to an artists' | guild?), or is this just a desperate rearguard action? | wruza wrote: | There's only one way to figure it out - train on a properly | licensed content and show them that. | | Your line of reasoning sounds like "ah, we already won so your | protest doesn't matter anyway", but did you already win | actually? Do you really _not_ need all their development to | draw on the same level? Just show that. | 4bpp wrote: | I'm not in AI and my GPU barely runs games from 10 years ago, | so I'll pass. To be more precise, though, I think that it | _seems_ that their protest won't matter, but the one way in | which I see that it may (the second out of three options) | leads to an outcome that I would just consider bad in the | short term (for society, and for artists that are not | established enough to benefit from any emerging | redistribution system; we observe cases in Germany every so | often where pseudonymous musicians are essentially forced to | charge for their own performances and redirect proceeds to | rent-seekers and musicians that are not them, because they | can't prove ownership of their own work to GEMA's | satisfaction). | chrisco255 wrote: | But human beings themselves are influenced by licensed | content. And remix it just the same as AI. | gedy wrote: | But they're _Artists_ and makes the same approach all | better | | /s | wruza wrote: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33998736 | gpderetta wrote: | Also if a theoretical purged-dataset SD were released, it would | still be easy and cheap for users to extend it to imitate any | art style the want. As they wouldn't be redistributing the | model and presumably they would use art they have already | licensed the copyright issue would be further muddled. | | I think attempting to prevent this is a losing battle. | Gigachad wrote: | I'm not too sure how it works but someone commented that you | can take the model and "resume training" it on the extra | dataset you want to add. | | Given most of the heavy lifting is already done, this seems | like a pretty easy thing for anyone to do. | mejutoco wrote: | It is called fine-tuning or transfer learning, and you | usually train the last layer. | | Here is an example for keras (a popular ML framework). | https://keras.io/guides/transfer_learning/ | gpderetta wrote: | https://dreambooth.github.io/ | | edit: the examples are all about objects, but my | understanding is that it is capable of style transfers as | well. | nwoli wrote: | I'm sure artists realise that. They also realise the power of | these things and I see this more as a fight against survival. | They're up against the wall and they know it, and they're | incredibly well connected and have invested their lives up to | now into this so they won't just lie down without a fight | (trying anything). | Tepix wrote: | Imagine you are an artist and you have developed your unique | style. | | Would you mind if AI starts creating art like yours? | | What if your clients tell you they bought the AI generated art | instead of yours? | FeepingCreature wrote: | Would you mind if there was another person who copied your | style? What if your clients...? | | Yeah, sure you'd mind. However, we have decided as a society | that "style" is not protected. | wruza wrote: | "We" decide on today's issues, not on all future | possibilities. The reason for that decision in the past was | to allow many creators to create without being too held | back by "private property" signs everywhere. The current | situation allows AI to create but demotivates creators. Now | it's time to think what will we do when AI wouldn't pick a | new style and there are not enough creators anymore who can | or want to do that, whether it is a near future problem or | maybe not a problem at all, and what should we decide | again. | | Simply hiding in an obsolete technicality is sure a wrong | way to handle it. | concordDance wrote: | By the time we're tired of the existing styles I suspect | we'll have AGI and the entire question will be moot. | oneoff786 wrote: | Style is entirely subjective and impossible to define. | Van Gogh had a style. Are we going to say that we would | want a society where only Van Gogh is allowed to make | Impressionist paintings? Who decides if your painting is | similar enough to Van Gogh that it's illegal? What if | your style is simplistic. Are you going to need to | compare your art to all published art to make sure a | court couldn't find it "too similar"? What if we make a | painting with AI that is a mix of Picasso and Van Gogh? | Style? | | It's a stupid concept. It would never work. Even the | visualizations we see that are explicitly attempting to | copy another artist's style are often still clearly not | exactly the same. | wruza wrote: | I don't think style will be a subject here at all. Maybe | we'll settle on that AI user must take an exicit | permission before training on someone's content and | humans must not. | Nadya wrote: | I still don't see how this isn't the "Realistic | Portrait/Scenic Painters vs Photography" argument rehashed. | | Imagine you are a painter and you have developed your | expertise in photorealistic painting over your entire | lifetime. | | Would you mind if someone snaps a photograph of the same | subject you just painted? | | What if your commissioners tell you they decided to buy a | photograph instead of your painting because it looked more | realistic? | | Every argument I've seen against AI art is an appeal to | (human) ego or an appeal to humanity. I don't find either | argument compelling. Take this video [0] for example and half | of the counterarguments are an appeal to ego - and one | argument tries to paint the "capped profit" as a shady | dealing of circumventing laws without realizing (1) it's been | done before, OpenAI just tried slapping a label on it and (2) | nonprofits owning for-profit subdivisions is commonplace. | Mozilla is both a nonprofit organization (the Foundation) and | a for-profit company (the Corporation). | | E: | | I'm going to start a series of photographs that are | intentionally bad and poorly taken. Poor framing, poor | lighting, poor composition. Boring to look at, poor white | balance, and undersaturated photos like the kind taken on | overcast days. With no discernable subjects or points of | interest. I will call the photos art - things captured solely | with the press of a button by pointing my camera in a | direction seemingly at random. I'm afraid many won't | understand the point I am making but if I am making a point | it does make the photographs art - does it not? I'm pretty | sure that is how modern art works. I will call the collection | "Hypocrisy". | | E2: | | The first photo of the collection to set the mood - a picture | of the curtain in my office: | https://kimiwo.aishitei.ru/i/mUjQ5jTdeqrY3Vn0.jpg | | Chosen because it is grey and boring. The light is not | captured by the fabric in any sort of interesting manner - | the fabric itself is quite boring. There is no pattern or | design - just a bland color. There is nothing to frame - a | section of the curtain was taken at random. The photo isn't | even aligned with the curtain - being tilted some 40 odd | degrees. Nor is the curtain ever properly in focus. A perfect | start for a collection of boring, bland photos. | | [0] | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjSxFAGP9Ss&feature=youtu.be | mtrower wrote: | Your art is fascinating; how can I donate to the cause? | Nadya wrote: | A second photo has been added to the collection - for | anyone who thought I might be joking about doing this. | | Photos will periodically be added to the collection - not | that I expect anyone whatsoever to ever be interested in | following a collection of photos that is meant to be boring | and uninspired. However - feel free to use this collection | of photos as a counterargument to the argument that "art | requires some effort". I promise that I will put far less | thought and effort into the photos of this collection than | I have in any writing of prompts for AI generated art that | I've done. | | Art is little more than a statement and sometimes a small | statement can carry a large message. | | https://imgur.com/a/Oez2w64 | | Tomorrow I will work on setting up a domain and gallery for | the images - to facilitate easier discussion and sharing. | Is the real artistic statement the story behind the | collection and not the collection itself? How can the two | be separated? Can one exist without the other? | Brushfire wrote: | Imagine you are a startup business owner and you have | developed a unique product or service. | | And then someone comes along and competes with you? | | -- | | No one is bothered by competition in markets. | | Why do we have more or less empathy of this type for some | professions? | MomoXenosaga wrote: | The appeal of art is the artist. Unless computers gain | sentience they cannot replace the humanity and ego of | artists. | | Ever wondered why artists have to show up at gallery | parties to sell their stuff? | mtrower wrote: | No, the appeal of the artist is the artist. The art does | offer a means to connect with the artist. It does not | follow that the art may not offer its own appeal besides. | BeFlatXIII wrote: | > The appeal of art is the artist. | | To some. To others, the artistic object is all that all | that matters. | MomoXenosaga wrote: | That must be why every piece of painting is signed. | Artists are selling a brand- Rembrandt already understood | that 400 years ago. | Taywee wrote: | If they competed with me by throwing my product through a | decompiler, fed it into an AI model, and selling the | generated output, I'd be pretty upset about it. | | Which is pretty close to the actual issue here, that | artists did not give their permission to use their own work | to generate their competition. | mtrower wrote: | Wouldn't that say more about the client than the | competitor? | [deleted] | onetrickwolf wrote: | To quote another comment but "Instead of replacing crappy | jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we're | actually automating enjoyable pursuits." | | I think this isn't just a simple discussion on competition | and copyright, I think it's a much larger question on | humanity. It just seems like potentially a bleak future if | enjoyable and creative pursuits are buried and even | surpassed by automation. | BeFlatXIII wrote: | Some people enjoy looking at images more than creating | them. | onetrickwolf wrote: | Yeah maybe, but I think we also already have a problem | with overconsumption of media though. I am not sure this | is helping. | | It seems inevitable and I don't think we can stop it, but | I just am kind of worried about the collective mental | health of humanity. What does a world look like where | people have no jobs and even creative outlets are | dominated by AI? Are people really just happy only | consuming? What even is the point of humanity existing at | that point? | mtrower wrote: | If the pursuit is enjoyable, it should continue to be | enjoyable as a hobby, no? | | Meanwhile, where is my levy of custom artists willing to | do free commission work for me? It's enjoyable, right? | | I see a lot of discussion about money and copyright, and | little to no discussion about the individual whose life | is enriched by access to these tools and technologies. | | As for your bleak future... will that even come to pass? | I don't know. Maybe it depends on your notion of | "surpass", and what that looks like. | onetrickwolf wrote: | > If the pursuit is enjoyable, it should continue to be | enjoyable as a hobby, no? | | I think for most people the enjoyable and fulfilling part | of life is feeling useful or having some expression and | connection through their work. There's definitely some | people who can create in a vacuum with no witness and be | fulfilled, but I think there's a deep need for human | appreciation for most people. | | > As for your bleak future... will that even come to | pass? I don't know. Maybe it depends on your notion of | "surpass", and what that looks like. | | I don't know either, maybe it will be fine. Maybe this | will pass like the transition from traditional to | digital. But something about this feels different...like | it's actually stealing the creative process rather than | just a paradigm shift. | bigbacaloa wrote: | In most markets everyone is bothered by competition and | tries to eliminate it. | [deleted] | astrange wrote: | Sure, artists don't like having competition, but that doesn't | mean their competitors should listen to them. | PurpleRamen wrote: | Would they mind if another artist would create the same art- | style independent of them? Or something 99% alike? 95%? How | many art-styles are even possible without overlapping too | much? | CyanBird wrote: | The big issue is precisely this, yeah, living* artists are | upset that an ai can take their own names as input and output | their artistic styles, that's the big thorn with these ml | systems | | There is a secondary issue on that there is other people | being able to craft high quality images with strong | compositions without spending the "effort/training" that | artists had to use over years to produce them, so they are | bitter about that too, but that's generally a minor cross- | section of the publicvoutcry tho they are quite vitriolic | | Photobashing, tracing, etc there have always been a layer of | purists whom look down on anyone that doesn't "put the effort | in" yet get great results in a timely manner, these purists | will always exist, just like how it was when digital painting | was starting, people were looked down by oil painters for not | putting the effort in, even when oil painters themselves used | tricks like projectors to the empty blank canvas to get | perspective perfect images, but that's just human nature to a | degree, trying to put down other people while yourself doing | tricks to speed up processes | sdiupIGPWEfh wrote: | > Would you mind if AI starts creating art like yours? | | The law isn't there to protect my feelings, so whether I mind | or not is irrelevant. Artists have had to deal with shifting | art markets for as long as art has been a profession. | | > What if your clients tell you they bought the AI generated | art instead of yours? | | I'd be sad and out of a source of income. Much the same way I | would be if my clients hired another similar but cheaper | artist. The law doesn't guarantee me a livelihood. | 4bpp wrote: | The idea that the AI will compete with you by copying your | unique style seems like exactly the sort of short-sighted | conceit that I alluded to in my post above. As an artist, | would you be much happier if, rather than the AI copying your | style, the AI generated infinitudes of pictures in a style | that the overwhelming majority of humans prefers to yours, so | that you couldn't hope to ever create anything that people | outside of a handful of hipsters and personal friends will | value? | deelly wrote: | > The idea that the AI will compete with you by copying | your unique style seems like exactly the sort of short- | sighted | | Could you please elaborate, why its "short-sighted"? | | > As an artist, would you be much happier if, rather than | the AI copying your style, the AI generated infinitudes of | pictures in a style that the overwhelming majority of | humans prefers to yours, so that you couldn't hope to ever | create anything that people outside of a handful of | hipsters and personal friends will value? | | You mean that any artist should be just happy that his work | is used by other people / rich corporation / AI without | consent? Cool, cool. | 4bpp wrote: | > Could you please elaborate, why its "short-sighted"? | | Because it's barely been a year since we've gone from | people confidently asserting that AI won't be able to | produce visual art on the level of human professionals at | all to the current situation. Predictions on ways in | which AI performance will not catch up to or overtake | human performance have a bad track record at the moment, | and it has not been long enough to even suspect that the | current increase in performance might be plateauing. | Cutting-edge image generation AI appears to often imitate | human artists in obvious ways _now_ , but it seems quite | plausible that the gap between this and being | "original"/as non-obvious in your imitation of other | humans as those high-performing human artists that are | considered to be original is merely quantitative and will | be closed soon enough. | | > You mean that any artist should be just happy that his | work is used by other people / rich corporation / AI | without consent? Cool, cool. | | I don't know how you get that out of what I said. Rather, | I'm claiming that artists will have enough to be unhappy | about being obsoleted, and the current direction of their | ire at being "copied" by AI may be a misdirection of | effort, much as if makers of horse-drawn carriages had | tried to forestall the demise of their profession by | complaining that the design of the Ford Model T was | ripped off of theirs (instead of, I don't know, lobbying | to ban combustion engines altogether, or sponsoring Amish | proselytism). | chrisco255 wrote: | Many skilled and talented programmers work on open source | software for the explicit purpose of allowing it to be copied | and extended in any fashion. | mejutoco wrote: | > in any fashion. | | Several open source licenses do not agree with this (they | enforce restrictions on how it is to be shared). | mtrower wrote: | This is true, and many bitter wars are fought over ISS | licensing. I'm not sure it derails his point - there's an | awful lot of BSD, MIT etc licensed code out there. | orbifold wrote: | I think this drastically overestimates what current AI | algorithms are actually capable of, there is little to no hint | of genuine creativity in them. They are currently severely | limited by the amount of high quality training data not the | model size. They are really mostly copying whatever they were | trained on, but on a scale that it appears indistinguishable | from intelligent creation. As humans we don't have to agree | that our collective creative output can be harvested and used | to train our replacements. The benefits of allowing this will | be had by a very small group of corporations and individuals, | while everyone else will lose out if this continues as is. This | will and can turn into an existential threat to humanity, so it | is different from workers destroying mechanical looms during | the industrial revolution. Our existence is at stake here. | XorNot wrote: | > They are really mostly copying whatever they were trained | on | | People keep saying this without defining what _exactly_ they | mean. This is a technical topic, and it requires technical | explanations. What do _you_ think "mostly copying" means | when you say it? | | Because there isn't a shred of original pixel data reproduced | from training data through to output data by any of the | diffusion models. In fact there isn't enough data in the | model weights to reproduce any images at all, without adding | a random noise field. | | > The benefits of allowing this will be had by a very small | group of corporations and individuals | | You are also grossly mistaken here. The benefits of heavily | restricting this, will be had by a very small group of | corporations and individuals. See, everyone currently comes | around to "you should be able to copyright a style" as the | solution to the "problem". | | Okay - let's game this out. US Copyright lasts for the life | of author plus 70 years. No copyright work today will enter | public domain until I am dead, my children are dead, and | probably my grandchildren as well. But copyright can be | traded and sold. And unlike individuals, who do die, | corporations as legal entities do not. And corporations can | own copyright. | | What is the probability that any particular artistic "style" | - however you might define that (whole other topic really) - | is truly unique? I mean, people don't generally invent a | style on their own - they build it up from studying other | sources, and come up with a mix. Whatever originality is in | there is more a function of mutation of their ability to | imitate styles then anything else - art students, for | example, regularly will do studies of famous artists and | intentionally try to copy their style as best they can. A | huge amount of content tagged "Van Gough" in Stable Diffusion | is actually Van Gough look-alikes, or content literally | labelled "X in the style of Van Gough". It had nothing to do | with them original man at all. | | I mean, zero - by example - it's zero. There are no truly | original art styles. Which means in a world with | copyrightable art styles, _all_ art styles eventually end up | as a part of corporate owned styles. Or the opposite is also | possible - maybe they _all_ end up as public domain. But in | both cases the answer is the same: if "style" becomes a | copyrightable term, and AIs can reproduce it in some way | which you can prove, then literal "prior art" of any | particular style will invariably be an existing part of an AI | dataset. Any new artist with a unique style will invariably | be found to simply be 95% a blend of other known styles from | an AI which has existed for centuries and been producing | output constantly. | | In the public domain world, we wind up approximately where we | are now: every few decades old styles get new words keyed | into them as people want to keep up with the times of some | new rising artist who's captured a unique blend in the | zeitgeist. In the corporate world though, the more likely | one, Disney turns up with it's lawyers and says "we're taking | 70% or we're taking it all". | alan-crowe wrote: | Trying to be _exact_ about "mostly copying", I want to | contrast Large Language Models (LLM) with Alpha Go learning | to play super human Go through self play. | | When Alpha Go adds one of its own self-vs-self games to its | training database, it is adding a genuine game. The rules | are followed. One side wins. The winning side did something | right. | | Perhaps the standard of play is low. One side makes some | bad moves, the other side makes a fatal blunder, the first | side pounces and wins. I was surprised that they got | training through self play to work; in the earlier stages | the player who wins is only playing a little better than | the player who loses and it is hard to work out what to | learn. But the truth of Go is present in the games and not | diluted beyond recovery. | | But a LLM is playing a post-modern game of intertextuality. | It doesn't know that there is a world beyond language to | which language sometimes refers. Is what a LLM writes true | or false? It is unaware of either possibility. If its own | output is added to the training data, that creates a | fascinating dynamic. But where does it go? Without Alpha | Go's crutch of the "truth" of which player won the game | according to the hard coded rules, I think the dynamics | have no anchorage in reality and would drift, first into | surrealism and then psychosis. | | One sees that AlphaGo is copying the moves that it was | trained on and a LLM is also copying the moves that is was | trained on and that these two things are not the same. | orbifold wrote: | Ok, let me try to be technical. These models fundamentally | can be understood as containing a parametrised model of an | intractable probability distribution ("human created | images", "human created text"), which can be conditioned on | a user provided input ("show me three cats doing a tango", | "give me a summary of the main achievements of Richard | Feynman") and sampled from. The way they achieve their | impressive performance is by being exposed to as much of | human created content as possible, once that has happened | they have limited to no ways of self-improvement. | | I disagree that there is no originality in art styles, | human creativity amounts to more than just copying other | people. There is no way a current gen AI model would be | able to create truly original mathematics or physics, it is | just able to reproduce facsimile and convincing bullshit | that looks like it. Before long the models will probably | able to do formal reasoning in a system like Lean 4, but | that is a long way of from truly inventive mathematics or | physics. | | Art is more subtle, but what these models produce is mostly | "kitsch". It is telling that their idea of "aesthetics" | involves anime fan art and other commercial work. Anyways, | I don't like the commercial aspects of copyright all that | much, but what I like is humans over machines. I believe in | freely reusing and building on the work of others, but not | on machines doing the same. Our interests are simply not | aligned at this point. | idlehand wrote: | This has been a line of argument from every Luddite since the | start of the industrial revolution. But it is not true. | Almost all the productivity gains of the last 250 years have | been dispersed into the population. A few early movers have | managed to capture some fraction of the value created by new | technology, the vast majority has gone to improve people's | quality of life, which is why we live longer and richer lives | than any generation before us. Some will lose their jobs and | that is fine because human demand for goods and services is | infinite, there will always be jobs to do. | | I really doubt that AI will somehow be our successors. | Machines and AI need microprocessors so complex that it took | us 70 years of exponential growth and multiple trillion- | dollar tech companies to train even these frankly quite | unimpressive models. These AI are entirely dependent on our | globalized value chains with capital costs so high that there | are multiple points of failure. | | A human needs just food, clean water, a warm environment and | some books to carry civilization forward. | orbifold wrote: | There is a significant contingent of influential people | that disagree. "Why the future doesn't need us" | (https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/), Ray Kurzweil etc. | This is qualitatively different than what the Luddites | faced, it concerns all of us and touches the essence of | what makes us human. This isn't the kind of technology that | has the potential to make our lives better in the long run, | it will almost surely be used for more harm than good. Not | only are these models trained on the collectively created | output of humanity, the key application areas are to | subjugate, control and manipulate us. I agree with you that | this will not happen immediately, because of the very real | complexities of physical manufacturing, but if this part of | the process isn't stopped in its tracks, the resulting | progress is unlikely to be curtailed. I at least | fundamentally think that the use of all of our data and | output to train these models is unethical, especially if | the output is not freely shared and made available. | yeknoda wrote: | It seems we are running out of ways to reinvent ourselves | as machines and automation replace us. At some point, | perhaps approaching, the stated goal of improving quality | of life and reduce human suffering ring false. What is | human being if we have nothing to do? Where are the vast | majority of people supposed to find meaning? | yeknoda wrote: | I've been lucky enough to build and make things and work | in jobs where I can see the product of my work - real, | tangible, creative, and extremely satisfying. I can only | do this work as long people want and need the work to be | done. | ChadNauseam wrote: | I don't see why machines automatically producing art | takes away the meaning of making art. There's already a | million people much better at art than you or I will ever | be producing it for free online. Now computers can do it | too. Is that supposed to take away my desire to make art? | snordgren wrote: | Where do you find meaning in life today? What do you do | on weekends and vacations? | | Another place to look is the financially independent. | What are they doing with their time? | rperez333 wrote: | Exactly this, and it was clear based on the backlash got SD | 2.0 after they removing artist labels and getting 'less | creative'. Most people are not interested on the creative | aspect, just looking for a easy way to copy art from people | they admire. | netheril96 wrote: | > They are really mostly copying whatever they were trained | on, but on a scale that it appears indistinguishable from | intelligent creation. | | Which is what most humans do, and what most humans need. | Tao3300 wrote: | None of the above. They don't like it being trained on and | occasionally regurgitating their work. | 1auralynn wrote: | To me, it's an art vs. craft issue and there are many shades of | gray to the discussion, because the root is really based in the | question that every first-year art student is tasked with | answering for themselves "What is art?" | | If art for you is primarily centered on fidelity of | implementation (i.e. "craft") then you will be very threatened by | AI, particularly if you've made it your livelihood. However, if | your art is more about communication/concepts, then you might | even feel empowered by having such a toolset and not having to | slog through a bunch of rote implementation when developing your | ideas/projects. Not to mention that a single person will be able | to achieve much much more. | | I feel like it's possibly a good thing for art/humanity overall | to stop conflating craft with art, because new ideas will rise | above all of the AI-generated images. i.e. splashiness alone will | no longer be rewarded. | | In an ideal future when we all live in the Star Trek universe, | none of it will matter and whoever loves crafting stuff can do it | all day long. Until then of course, it's tragic and lots of | people will be out of jobs. | 1auralynn wrote: | Not to mention it also may spur innovations in different | mediums: More time-based art, installations, video games, etc. | mwigdahl wrote: | We already have a great example of a group that has fought | technological development of a synthetic alternative to their | product -- the diamond industry. | | For years DeBeers and other diamond moguls have run extensive | propaganda campaigns to try to convince people that lab-grown | diamonds are physically, emotionally, and morally inferior. They | had a lot of success at first. Based on lobbying, the US FTC | banned referring to lab-grown diamonds as "real", "genuine", or | even "stone". It required the word "diamond" be prefixed with | "lab-grown" or "synthetic" in any marketing materials. | | Technology kept improving, economies of scale applied, and | consumer demand eventually changed the balance. The FTC reversed | its rulings and in 2022 demand for lab-grown stones (at small | fractions of equivalent natural prices) is at an all-time high. | | Artists (and writers, and programmers) can fight against this all | they like, and may win battles in the short term. In the end the | economic benefits accruing to humankind as a result of these | technologies is inexorably going to normalize them. | WanderPanda wrote: | I think what these generative models reveal is that the vast | majority of art is just interpolation. | crote wrote: | Was there ever any doubt about that? There are _literally_ | entire graduate studies on it. | | However, art isn't _solely_ interpolation. The critical part is | that art styles shift around due to innovations or new | viewpoints, often caused by societal development. AI might be | able to make a new Mondriaan when trained on pre-existing | Mondriaans but it won 't suddenly generate a Mondriaan out of a | Van Gogh training set - and yet that's still roughly what | happened historically. | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: | Lots of people in these comments trying to reduce art in a | way that is pretty hilarious. You hit the nail on the head. | Art is only interpolation if you....remove the human that | created it, in which case you would not call the image art. | AI "art" is computational output, to imply otherwise is to | mistakenly imply a family resemblance to human (and uniquely | human I would argue) creation. | dymk wrote: | The human brain is just a model with weights and a lifelong | training step. Seems like a distinction without a | difference - even more so as ML models advance further. | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: | > Seems like a distinction without a difference | | This is giving ML models, more credit than they are due. | They are unable to be imagine, they might convincingly | seem to produce novel outputs, but their outputs are | ultimately proscribed by their inputs and datasets and | programming. They're machines. Humans can learn like | machines, but humans are also able to imagine as agents. | "AI" "art" is just neither of its namesakes. That doesn't | mean it isn't impressive, but implying they are the same | is granting ML more powers and abilities than it is | capable of. | dymk wrote: | Humans imagine by mostly by interpolating things they've | seen before. Add in some randomness and you get novel | output (creativity). | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: | You're oversimplifying imagination. It _could_ be related | to something they 've seen before, or it could _not_ be. | It could be entirely invented and novel in a way that has | no antecedent to senses. Nor is it mere randomness added | in. Imagining is something an agent _does_ and is capable | of. The fly in the ointment is still that ML models | simply do not have agency in a fundamental way; they are | programmed and they 're are limited by that programming, | that's what makes them and computers so effective as | tools: they do _exactly_ as they are programmed, which | can 't be said for humans. _We_ , as humans, might find | the output imaginative or novel or even surprising, but | the ML model hasn't done anything more than follow | through on its programming. The ML programmer simply | didn't expect (or can't explain the programming) the | output and is anthropomorphizing their own creation as a | means of explanation. | mtrower wrote: | But you know. Everything you said can easily be imagined | to apply to humans as well. You can't see your own | programming, and so can't fully understand it, and so you | imagine it to be something more than what it is. | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: | The problem you run into with that is that saying "humans | are programmed" in the _identical sense_ as "computers | are programmed" is nonsensical. We have powers that | computers simply do not, like agency, imagination, we are | capable of understanding, etc. So, the concept of | programming a computer and "programming a human" would | mean different things, which they do in our language. You | run into either fundamentally redefining what programming | means, placing sentient, agential, humans on the same | plane as non sentient, non agential, machines; or you run | into a situation where it makes no sense to say "Humans | are programmed identically to computers." | | But if you say "humans are programmed" in a metaphorical | sense, then yeah sure that's an interesting thought | experiment. But it's still a thought experiment. | xikrib wrote: | The human experience is an embodied one, it is not just | information processing | dymk wrote: | Do we know for a fact that a sufficiently stateful and | complex ML model won't experience subjective | consciousness? | kmeisthax wrote: | Vaguely related: Mickey Mouse will actually be hitting the public | domain in 2024. That's a year and a few weeks away. | fallingfrog wrote: | To be honest: I'm not generally a luddite, but in this case- I | think we should nip this in the bud. I can see where this is | going. You can argue back and forth about whether this will make | the economy grow, but that's not the point. The profits from | increased productivity do not accrue to the workforce but to the | owners of the capital, in the absence of concerted, organized | resistance, so I would not expect the quality of life for the | majority of people to improve because of this. | | The question is: do you _like_ human beings? Because there is | really no job that can 't be replaced, if the technology goes far | enough. And then the majority of the population, or _all_ of the | population, becomes dead weight. I 'm a musician; how long before | an AI can write better songs than I can in a few seconds? | | This is fundamentally different than past instances of technology | replacing human labor, because in the past, there was always | something else that humans could do that the machines still could | not. Now- that may not be the case. | | There is only one choice: I think we should outlaw all machine | learning software, worldwide. | throwawayoaky wrote: | See you guys in five years! | Tycho wrote: | What about an AI that can write unit tests for any codebase... | seems like the overall benefit of that would be huge. | spikeagally wrote: | Does anybody else find the whole AI art generation thing both | amazing and incredibly depressing at the same time? I've played | around with it and it's lots of fun. But I can also see a deluge | of mediocre "content" taking over the internet in the near | future. "Real art" will become a niche underground discipline. | Most popular music will be AI generated and will have fake | performers also generated to go along with it. And most people | will be fine with that. | | I don't think "real art" will disappear. People will always want | to create (although monetising that will now be exceedingly more | difficult). | | It feels like we are ripping the humanity out of life on a | greater and greater scale with tech. Instead of replacing crappy | jobs and freeing up peoples time to enjoy their life, we're | actually automating enjoyable pursuits. | | NB: when I'm referring to art I mean of all types as that's where | we are heading. | rco8786 wrote: | > But I can also see a deluge of mediocre "content" | | Have you been to the internet? | | In all seriousness, the cream will rise to the top. The | mediocre "content" will get generated and we will get better at | filtering it out which will decrease the value in generating | mediocre content, etc etc. The tools being produced just | further level the playing field for humanity and allow more | people to get "in the arena" more easily. | | Humans are still the final judge of the value being produced, | and the world/internet will respond accordingly. | | For a thought exercise, take your argument and apply it to the | internet as a whole, from the perspective of a book or | newspaper publisher in the 1990s. | crote wrote: | Have _you_ been to the internet? | | High-quality content rarely rises to the top. The internet as | of 2022 optimizes for mediocrity: the most popular content is | the one which is best psychological manipulation using things | like shock value and sexuality. Just take a look at Twitter, | Facebook, or Reddit: it is _extremely_ rare to see genuine | masterpieces on there. Everything is just posted to farm as | many shares and likes as possible. | | If anything, this will result in the cream getting drowned in | shit. Not to mention that artists do not get the space to | develop from mediocre to excellent - as the mediocre market | will have been replaced with practically free AI. | rco8786 wrote: | This is a truly cynical take - but by your own account the | problem already exists and is widespread before AI even | came along. | moron4hire wrote: | Not to distract too much from your point, because I agree that | the obviously imminent explosion of AI generated work will | probably lead to a generation of stylistic stagnation, but... | | We already live in a time of artistic stagnation. With how much | audio engineers manipulate pop music in Pro Tools, "fake" | singers have been a practical reality for 20 years. Look at | Marvel movies. Go to any craft fair on a warm day, or any | artists' co-op, in a major city and try, try to find one booth | that is not exactly like 5 other booths on display. | | People have been arguing about what is "real art" for | centuries. Rap music wasn't real because it didn't follow | traditional, European modes and patterns. Photography wasn't | real because it didn't take the skill of a painter. Digital | photography wasn't real because it didn't take laboring in a | dark room. 3D rendering wasn't real. Digital painting wasn't | real. Fractal imagery wasn't real. Hell, anything sold to the | mass market instead of one-off to a collector still isn't "real | art" to a lot of people. | | Marcel Duchamp would like to have a word. | | If anything, I think AI tools are one of the only chances we | have of seeing anything interesting break out. I mean, 99% of | the time it's just going to be used to make some flat-ui, | corporate-memphis, milquetoast creative for a cheap-ass startup | in a second rate co-working space funded by a podunk city's | delusions they could ever compete with Silicon Valley. | | But if even just one person uses the tool to stick out their | neck and try to question norms, how can that not be art? | netheril96 wrote: | If these generated arts just replace human created arts, then | it can be construed as depressing. | | But what if AI generates arts where humans do not scale? | | For example, what if the AAA game you are expecting gets done | in half of the time, or has ten times the size of explorable | area, because it is cheap and fast to generate many of the arts | needed by AI? | | Or if some people excellent at story telling but mediocre at | drawing can now produce world class manga due to the assistance | of AI? | adamhp wrote: | I've been complaining about this with AI generated content in | general as well, especially Twitter and blog posts. I worry | that we're in a sort of downward spiral, creating a feedback | loop of bad content. Eventually models will get trained on this | badly generated content, and it will reduce the overall | vocabulary of the Internet. Take this to the extreme, and we'll | keep going until everything is just regurgitated nonsense. | Essentially sucking the soul out of humanity (not that tweets | and blog posts are high art or anything). I know that sounds a | little drastic but I really think there's a lurking evil that | we don't have our eye on here, in terms of humanity and AI. | We've already seen glimpses of it even with basic ad targeting | and various social media "algorithms". | CadmiumYellow wrote: | I've been thinking the same thing. I wonder if this might | give rise to some kind of analog renaissance as people get | sick of all the digitally regurgitated garbage. There has to | be a point of diminishing returns for this kind of content, | right? Maybe there will be some kind of Made By Humans | verification that will make certain content much more | valuable again simply by differentiating it from all the AI- | generated simulacra. | carlmr wrote: | >we'll keep going until everything is just regurgitated | nonsense. | | I feel like this about the mostly-human-created fashion. In | my not so long lifetime I've seen everything from the 90s | making a comeback. Ultimately I guess in terms of clothing | that is practical with the materials that are available, | we've already cycled through every style there is, such that | the cycle time is now <30years. | jeremyjh wrote: | Considering the level of discourse in almost any Twitter | thread on any popular topic, it's hard to be sure it hasn't | already happened. | Workaccount2 wrote: | To me it's terrifying and gives me a bit of panic playing with | it. This is still early stuff, like dial-up or 100Mhz | processors. We all know the trajectory tech takes nowadays, and | the writing on the wall here is an event horizon where it's | impossible to see the full scope of how this tech will change | the world. | | We're like people getting the very first electric light bulbs | in their home, trying to speculate how electricity will change | the world. The pace of change however will be orders of | magnitude faster than that. | lemoncookiechip wrote: | > But I can also see a deluge of mediocre "content" taking over | the internet in the near future. | | This has always been the case. Most entertainment regardless of | form (music, art, tv, games...) is mediocre or below mediocre, | with the occasional good or even rarer exceptional that we all | buzz about. | | AI image gen is only allowing a wider range of people to | express their creativity. Just like every other tools that came | before it lowered the bar of entry for new people to get in on | the medium (computer graphics for example allowed those who had | no talent for pen and paper to flourish). | | Yes, there will be a lot of bad content, but that's nothing out | of the ordinary. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law | [deleted] | nonbirithm wrote: | > Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time | to enjoy their life, we're actually automating enjoyable | pursuits. | | But in my case, I don't happen to find drawing or painting | enjoyable. I simply don't, for nature- or nurture-based | reasons. I also don't believe that everyone can become a | trained manual artist, because not everyone is _interested_ in | doing so, even if they still (rightly or wrongly) cling to the | idea of having instant creative output and gratification. | | I think this lack of interest is what makes me and many other | people a prime target for addiction to AI-generated art. Due to | my interest in programming I can tweak the experience using my | skills without worrying about the baggage people of three years | ago _had_ to deal with if they wanted a similar result. | | So without any sort of generation, how does one solve the | problem of not wanting to draw, but still wanting one's own | high-quality visual product to enjoy? I guess it would be | learning to be interested in something one is not. And that | probably requires virtuosity and integrity, a willingness to | move past mistakes, and a positive mindset. The sorts of things | that have little to do with the specific mechanics of writing | code in an IDE to provoke a dopamine response. Also, the | ability to stop focusing so hard on the end result, a detriment | to creativity that so many (manual) art classes have pointed | out for decades. | | I sometimes feel I lack some of those kinds of qualities, and | yet I can somehow still generate interesting results with | Stable Diffusion. It feels like a contradiction, or an | invalidation of a set of ideas many people have held as sacred | for so long, a path to the advancement of one's own inner | being. | | I will relish the day when an AI is capable of convincing me | that drawing with my own two hands is more interesting than | using its own ability to generate a finished piece in seconds. | | So I agree that, on a bigger scale beyond the improvement of | automated art, this line of thinking will do more harm to | humanity than good. An AI can take the fall for people who | can't or don't want to fight the difficult battles needed to | grow into better people, and that in turn validates that kind | of mindset. It gives even the people who detest the artistic | process a way to have the end result, and a _decent_ one at | that. | | I think this is part of the reason why the anti-AI-art movement | has pushed back so loudly. AI art teaches us the wrong lessons | of what it means to be human. People could become convinced to | not want to go outside and walk amongst the trees and | experience the world if an AI can hallucinate a convincing | replacement from the comfort of their own rooms. | AlexandrB wrote: | > Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time | to enjoy their life, we're actually automating enjoyable | pursuits. | | This feels like the natural outcome of Moravec's paradox[1]. I | can imagine a grim future where most intellectually stimulating | activities are done by machines and most of the work that's | left for humans is building, cleaning, and maintaining the | physical infrastructure that keeps these machines running. | Basically all the physical grunt work that has proven hard to | find a general technological solution for. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox | woeirua wrote: | We've seen this before when CGI first came out, then with the | proliferation of Photoshop and other cheap editors. Now fake | garbage is everywhere on the internet. Did that make human life | substantially different? Nope. Everyone just ignores most of it | and only believes stuff that comes from "reputable sources." | That will be the end game here too. A flight to quality. | nonbirithm wrote: | But also, the explosion in interest means there had been a | latent interest in instantly generating pictures to begin with. | | I think this situation says a lot about the nature of human | desire, not just the fact that a few people were ingenious to | come up with the idea of diffusion models. A lot of ingenious | inventions are relatively boring when exposed to the broader | populace, and don't hit on such an appealing latent desire. | | What will this say about the limitless yet-to-be-invented ideas | that humanity is just raring to give itself, if only someone | would hit on the correct chain of breakthroughs? Would even a | single person today be interested in building a backyard | nuclear warhead in an afternoon, and would attempt to if the | barrier of difficulty in doing so was solved? | onetrickwolf wrote: | Yeah I agree. I was generally pretty pro AI art and agree with | a lot of the pro AI sentiments here on a logical basis still, | but as the tech develops I drift more and more towards thinking | this may be a bleak path for humanity. | | > Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time | to enjoy their life, we're actually automating enjoyable | pursuits. | | Yeah really hit the nail on the head here. I thought a lot of | backlash against AI was due to workers not really reaping the | benefits of automation and that's a solvable problem. But I've | seen a lot of artists who are retired or don't need to work | dive into despair over this still. It's taking their passion | away, not just their job. | | I don't really know how we could stop it though without doing | some sweeping Dune-level "Thou shalt not make a machine in the | likeness of the human mind" type laws. | sidlls wrote: | Near future? The internet is cesspool of mediocre and terrible | content already. AI is going to have an impact on art and | everything else in general. Artists may (and likely will be | forced) to adapt to/adopt its use. | karmakurtisaani wrote: | If you think about how much content we're already getting from | mediocre artists and writers, how many tv shows are complete | garbage, how much governments and corporations are promoting | and trolling in online discussions, how many search results are | already ruined by lazy copied content, it's difficult to see | things getting orders of magnitude worse. | | Good stuff will still be good stuff, and it will keep being | rare. The biggest change will be that producing mediocre | content will be cheaper and more accessible, but we're already | drowning in it, so .. meh? | | > Instead of replacing crappy jobs and freeing up peoples time | to enjoy their life, we're actually automating enjoyable | pursuits. | | That's an interesting observation. | dredmorbius wrote: | Fair assessment, and I agree with much of your premise, | though regards "it's difficult to see things getting orders | of magnitude worse": Please _don 't challenge them_. | Lichtso wrote: | I totally agree that there is a lot of low effort and | consequentially low quality stuff out there in the world | already. However, it still costs to make that. With this form | of automation getting better it will simply become a lot | cheaper to produce and is thus going to happen a lot more. | So, I expect the ratio to become worse, maybe even "orders of | magnitude" worse. | astrange wrote: | If you find everything incredibly depressing, that may simply | mean you have depression, not that it's actually objectively | bad. | MomoXenosaga wrote: | Musea already have basements filled with thousands of art | pieces nobody has seen in decades. There's already too much | content. | kmlx wrote: | > But I can also see a deluge of mediocre "content" taking over | the internet | | i've noticed this mediocrity decades ago when artists started | using computers to create art. for me that's when it went | downhill. | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: | I will say, the kind of art intended for corporate needs | (much of which in the last decade in particular has been a | deluge of bland vector art with weird blob people) is not the | same as the art that many artists make in their own time, or | would regard as good. | | The through line for a lot of mediocre stuff is the intention | of the artist/creator to appeal to as broad a | demographic/audience as possible so as to dissolve away | anything that makes the art interesting, challenging, and | good. | PurpleRamen wrote: | Majority of everything is always mediocre at best. There is no | absolute value in those things, they always get pitched against | each other. Something mediocre today, could have been a | masterpiece some decades ago. A masterpiece from decades ago | could be hot garbage today. Those things are a constantly | moving target and will always shift. People will just adapt | their taste and figure out some new random rules to say why | something was yesterday a masterpiece and became today mediocre | and so on. | fleddr wrote: | I sympathize with artists on this matter, but they're really bad | at protesting. | | AI Mickey Mouse is a possible copyright as well as trademark | violation which would likely be enforced in the exact same way if | you were to hand draw it. This type of violation is not AI | specific. | | The main threat that AI poses is not that it outputs copyrighted | characters, instead brand new works that are either totally new | (idea is never drawn before but the style is derived) or | different enough from a known character to be considered a | derived work. | | Another way to put it: artists' current job is not to draw | mickey. It is to draw new works, which is the part AI is | threatening to replace. Sure, Disney may chase the AI companies | to remove Mickey from the training set, and then we lost AI | Mickey. That doesn't solve any problem because there are no | artist jobs that draw Mickey. | | Even in the case of extreme success where it becomes illegal to | train a copyrighted image without explicit consent, the AI | problem doesn't go away. They'll just use public domain images. | Or sneak in consent without you knowing it. As was the case with | your "free and unlimited" Google Photos. | | Finally, if there's any player interested in AI art, it has to be | Disney. Imagine the insane productivity gains they can make. It's | not reasonable to expect that they would fight AI art very hard. | Maybe a little, for the optics. | itronitron wrote: | I think you are giving the AI too much credit in being able to | pull out the trademarked bits. Artists can introduce trademark | iconography into their work as a poision pill. Sort of like GPL | but with more powerful allies. | fleddr wrote: | I don't really believe that. An example: "Robot owl in the | style of van Gogh". | | This will closely mimic van Gogh's style but nobody cares | because style cannot be copyrighted in itself. So it draws a | robot owl, which for the sake of this example, is a new | character. | | Zero copyright violations. | | My point remains that AI users aren't going to aim for output | that directly looks like an existing character. These artists | are now intentionally doing that for the sake of the protest | but this is not how AI is used. It's used to create new works | or far-derived works. | rini17 wrote: | LOL. I am on midjourney discord and this really is how it's | being used half of the time, users asking for existing | characters. | 29athrowaway wrote: | The previous generation of illustrators got disrupted by digital | illustration. | | The number of people required to publish a magazine, or to create | an ad, went down significantly with digital tools. | ur-whale wrote: | Art has historically always been about copy and improve. | | This whole copyright / intellectual property idea is something | that unfortunately cropped up in the 20th century, and the fact | that it was codified into law is certainly not something 20th | century humanity should be proud of or regard as progress. | Juliate wrote: | Nope. | | Intellectual property concepts in their current form started to | appear as soon as prints, so about the 15th century. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright#Early_dev... | Valmar wrote: | > Intellectual property concepts in their current form | started to appear as soon as prints, so about the 15th | century. | | Copyright is not the same as intellectual property. | | Copyright is not an intellectual property concept. | | They're very different things, though often conflated. | Juliate wrote: | Perhaps not on your side of the planet, but in Europe, | copyright is a part of intellectual property legislation. | OctopusLupid wrote: | I find it weird how I don't see any mention of the TDM exceptions | ("Text and Data Mining") that already explicitly allows AI | companies to train on copyrighted data, in some cases even | allowing them to ignore opt-outs (such as in research | institutions). This is already implemented in the UK, EU, Japan | and Singapore. | | It seems to me that the online discourse is very US-centric, | thinking that the AI regulatory battles are in the future, when | in some other countries it's already over. | standardly wrote: | It is pretty ironic. | | "AI will outdo us at repetitve, mindless tasks, but it will NEVER | be able to compete with humans at, like, ART, and stuff" | anonyfox wrote: | Abolish copyrights. At all. Unrestricted exchange boosts learning | curves of societies and benefits everyone in the long run, except | a few won't become too rich in the process. There are several | downsides attached to that, but I am willing to accept that. | nwoli wrote: | People should be rewarded for finding a unique artistic | innovation that lots of people enjoy I'd think | someNameIG wrote: | Yes, people, not AI. | | I wonder if that could be a solution to this. Anything AI | generated is public domain, no one can own the IP to it. It | would allow it to be used for research and education, | hobbyists, but hinder how large corporations could use it. | | Maybe even have it like GNU license, anything using AI | generated stuff must also be public domain. | JetAlone wrote: | quonn wrote: | It's amusing how so many on this thread assume to be able know | what will happen to this or that profession. | | We don't know. We just don't. | | It's too difficult to predict what, say, software developers will | do in a few years and how demand or salary or competition will | be. | | Look at this final video of the 2012 Deep Learning course by | Hinton that I still remember from a long time ago: | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FOqMeBM3EIE | | What I do know however is this: | | - Short term nothing special will happen. | | - In the actually interesting projects that I worked on I always | ran out of time. So much more could be imagined that could have | been done but there was no time or budget to do it. Looking | forward to AI making a dent in this a bit. | rafaelero wrote: | Chill out, people. Humans are still great generalists. We are | pretty capable of leveraging these tools to amplify our | productivity. It's only the specialists between us that are going | to suffer a lot with these new developments. All these AI | innovation is truly showing us how pathetic our ability to deeply | understand and specialize at something is. We are always going to | lose to computers, be it in chess, go or art. Therefore, we | should cultivate our generalist skills and stop fighting AI | progress. | mdrzn wrote: | This should have (2019) in the title | dredmorbius wrote: | Um, why? (As submitter.) | | The linked item was posted within the past 24 hours. The | referenced images also appear to be current so far as I can | tell. | | (I'd looked for a more substantial post or article without luck | when submitting this.) | mdrzn wrote: | My bad, the mastodon thread is actually fresh, I got it mixed | up with the article linked in the 3rd reply to it, which is a | 2019 story: | | https://waxy.org/2019/12/how-artists-on-twitter-tricked- | spam... | dredmorbius wrote: | Thanks. | silent_cal wrote: | The way these image generating neural nets are trained is | illegal. They copy and use other artists' work without asking | them or paying them. There's a lot of legal exposure here - why | hasn't anyone taken advantage of that yet? | OctopusLupid wrote: | What makes you say it's illegal? | | In the EU, UK, Japan and Singapore, it is explicitly legal to | train AI on copyrighted work. I saw another comment say that AI | companies train in those countries. | ChadNauseam wrote: | In the US we have fair use, and it's not clear at all to me | that this wouldn't count. If I took every image on artstation | and averaged all of them (creating a muddy mess), I think I | would be legally able to distribute the result without | compensating or crediting the original artists. | benreesman wrote: | I'm going to be a broken record here: both of the words | "artificial" and "intelligent are hellaciously difficult to | define, put them together and you've got a real epistemological | quantum on your hands. | | What we're actually always talking about is "applied | computational statistics", otherwise known as ML. | | And if an artist wants to sample from the distribution of | beautiful images and painting and photographs as a source of | inspiration, why not? We do it in other fields. | | But using a computer to sample from that same distribution and | adding nothing will be rightly rewarded by nothing. | BurningFrog wrote: | A fascinating angle I heard recently is that when the new tech of | photography swept the world, it made tons of painters unemployed. | | And that was the main reason for "modern art". A camera can do a | portrait or landscape instantly and more precise than a painter, | but it can't compete on abstract or imagined pictures. | | Will something analogous happen when AIs takes over other | industries? I have no clue, but it will, as always, be | interesting to see what happens. | dredmorbius wrote: | Any references you can recall on the emergence of modern art as | a response to photography? | BurningFrog wrote: | Not really. Don't remember where I read it. It was a few | months ago. | | I like the explanation a lot, and I think the timelines line | up pretty well. | | But sure, it could be one of those stories that _sound_ true, | but isn 't. | dredmorbius wrote: | Thanks. | Karawebnetwork wrote: | If someone builds an AI self-driving car and feeds it images of | Honda cars. Should the company be required, under threat of legal | action, to remove the Honda from the model? What if this makes | the model less accurate and causes more accidents? | | In other words, I am wondering if the current issue here is the | model being trained or the model being able to generate images. | | Coming back to my example, if the car displayed the closest | vehicle on the HUD. Would Honda ask the car company to replace | the likeness of their car with a generic car icon or would they | ask for the model to be scrubbed? | anothernewdude wrote: | So either they are hypocrites, or art can be made by AI. Probably | both. | sircastor wrote: | I feel for artists who feel like they're losing their livelihood. | Art has always been a tough profession, and this doesn't help | because late-stage capitalism all but guarantees that a lot of | potential customers will just skip the human-made article in | favor of the "good-enough" mechanical production. | | That said, automation is coming for all of us. The problem is not | "we Need to stop these AIs/robots from replacing humans." It's | "We need to figure out the rules for taking care of the humans | when their work is automated" | agomez314 wrote: | Probably because they disdain the use of AI being used to copy | their IP and distribute it at "machine" scale? Not an artist | myself but can imagine I'd be pissed off that a bot is | replicating my art with random changes. | | HOWEVER, if a person were to ask for permission to use my | pictures to feed into an AI to generate a number of images, and | that person _selected_ a few and decided to sell them, I wouldn't | have a problem with that. Something to do with the permission | provided to the artist and an editing/filtering criteria being | used by a human makes me feel ok with such use. | alxlaz wrote: | What you're describing is basically copyright, which is exactly | what artists are demanding: the legal protection to which they | are entitled to. | | Edit: Silicon Valley exceptionalism seems to preclude some | thought leaders in the field to remember the full definition of | copyright: it's an artist's exclusive right to copy, | distribute, _adapt, display, and perform a creative work_. | | A number of additional provisions, like fair use, are meant to | balance artists' rights against _public_ interest. Private | _commercial_ interest is not meant to be covered by fair use. | | No one is disputing that everyone, including companies in the | private sector, is entitled to using artists' images for AI | research. But things like e.g. using AI-generated images for | promotional purposes are not research, and not covered by fair | use. You want to use the images for that, great -- ask for | permission, and pay royalties. Don't mooch. | phpisthebest wrote: | Copyright (in the US) also includes fair use provisions of | which education and research is a fair use of copyrighted | work for which no permission from the artist is needed | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: | > fair use provisions of which education and research is a | fair use | | I don't think people are debating fair use for education | and research. It's the obvious corporate and for profit use | which many see coming that is the issue. Typically, | licensing structures were a solution for artists, but "AI" | images seem to enable for-profit use by skirting around who | created the image by implying the "AI" did, a willful | ignorance of the way that the image was | generated/outputted. | phpisthebest wrote: | >>I don't think people are debating fair use for | education and research. It's the obvious corporate and | for profit use | | Sounds like you are, because in copyright law there is | not carve out for only non-profit education / research. | Research and Education can be both profit and non-profit, | copyright law does not distinguish between the 2, but it | sounds like you claim is research can only ever be non- | profit but given the entire computing sector in large | part owes itself to commercial research (i.e Bell Labs) I | find that a bit odd | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: | Doesn't fair use make a distinction in the _use_ though? | Fair use in terms of commentary on something for instance | is not the same as a company presenting marketing images, | for example, as _theirs_ in the selling of a product. If | someone has legally protected their artwork, you can 't | just apply a photoshop layer to it and claim it is | _yours_ as fair use though, right? The issue seems to | become almost more about provenance. | phpisthebest wrote: | >If someone has legally protected their artwork, you | can't just apply a photoshop layer to it and claim it is | yours as fair use though, right? | | That depends on what the layer was, and there is current | cases heading to supreme court that have something | similar to that so we may see | | however commentary is just one type of fair use and would | not be a factor here, nor is anyone claiming the AI is | reselling the original work. The claim is that copyright | law prevents unauthorized use of a work in the training | of AI, AI training could (and likely would) be treated as | research, and the result of the research is a derivative | work wholly separate from the original and created under | fair use | Double_a_92 wrote: | The copyright to what exactly though? Imagine you're an | artist that draws abstract paintings of trees. If an AI uses | those, the results it produces will be generic abstract trees | _in your style_. And since I doubt that you can copyright | trees, you would have to copyright your specific style. But | is that possible? | astrange wrote: | It is not possible. And EU law (which is where these models | were trained) has explicit allowances for machine learning | anyway. | yreg wrote: | Copyright doesn't protect your art against being copied (heh) | by other artists. | | Artists have always been inspired by each other and copied | each other's styles and ideas. | patientplatypus wrote: | amelius wrote: | Not just artists, also product designers like Jony Ive. | esotericsean wrote: | This will be a losing battle for artists. Anyone can train any | data they want. It's the equivalent of a human learning to draw | someone else's art style or take photos the same as a famous | photographer. There is no stopping it now and it's only going to | get better and easier. Video is getting close to being just as | accessible as image or text generation. Regardless of how you | feel about all this, there's no stopping it. It's the future. | vgatherps wrote: | As a thought experiment, let's say that the next version of | stable diffusion is able to integrate large text datasets into | the training set and can generate an accurate Mickey Mouse | without ever having to be trained on an image of Mickey Mouse | since it's integrated enough information from the text. | | What then? Certainly an individual artist can't go and sell | images of Mickey Mouse since it's still copyright infringement, | but what claim would Disney have against the AI company? | | I wrote in another comment that if you make the training of such | models illegal regardless of distribution, it's essentially | making certain mathematics illegal. That poses some very | interesting questions around rights, whether others will do it | anyways, and the practicality of enforcing such a rule in the | first place. | crote wrote: | Would an SVG image count as text? How about an SVG | automatically transformed into human-readable language? | [deleted] | adenozine wrote: | Nobody because these aren't the first. Aviation, gaming, finance, | logistics, etc... there's huge industries that are already | inundated with AI tools. | smrtinsert wrote: | This is like monks fighting the printing press. Sorry guys, this | is only going one direction. | rozgo wrote: | In our game studio, engineers are creating lots of developer art | on their own. But the real productivity booster is coming from | artists using language models to generate entire art pipeline | scripts. Several Python scripts to automate Blender3D and offline | asset post-processing. Many artists are also changing shaders by | asking language models to modify existing code. | jmyeet wrote: | One bone to pick: this says "artists" are fighting this and | mentions Disney, Nintendo and Marvel. "Corporations" would be | more accurate than "artists". | | Training a model with artists' work seems completely fine to me. | If something is out in the world and you can see it, you can't | really control how that affects a person or a model or whatever. | | The actual issue is reproduction of trademarked and copyrighted | material. There are already restrictions on how you can use | Mickey Mouse's likeness in any derivative work. That's not an AI | issue. It's an IP issue. The derivative works are no different | than if I, a person, produced the same derivative work. | | It would be funny to me that we had to turn our attention to | training AIs in IP laws. | yeknoda wrote: | If regulation is found to be necessary, here are some options | | - government could treat open ai like an electricity utility, | with regulated profits | | - open ai could be forced to come up with compensation schemes | for the human source images. The more the weights get used, the | higher the payout | | - the users of the system could be licensed to ensure proper use | and that royalties are paid to the source creators. We issue | driving licenses, gun licenses, factory permits etc. Licenses are | for potentially dangerous activities and powers. This could be | one of those. | | - special taxation class for industries like this that are more | parasitic and less egalitarian than small businesses or | manufacturing | | - outright ban on using copyrighted work in ai training | | - outright ban on what can be considered an existential | technology. This has been the case for some of the most important | technologies in the last 100 years including nuclear weapons. | charlescearl wrote: | The title is an erasure of the minoritized workers who've been | exploited in labeling and curation and moderation who've been | raising concerns; it's an erasure of the many who've been raising | concerns about the misogyny and predation involved in the | construction of the data sets (e.g. https://www.image-net.org/) | which make these models possible | https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.16923. | | Marx makes the case in Grundisse | https://thenewobjectivity.com/pdf/marx.pdf that the automation of | work could improve the lives of workers -- to "free everyone's | time for their own development". Ruth Gilmore Wilson observes | that capital's answer is to build complexes of mass incarceration | & policing to deal with the workers rendered jobless by | automation https://inquest.org/ruth-wilson-gilmore-the-problem- | with-inn... -- that is, those who have too much "free" time. In | such a world, Marx speculates that "Wealth is not command over | surplus labour time' (real wealth), 'but rather, disposable time | outside that needed in direct production", but Wilson reminds us | that capital's apparent answer to date has been fascism. | Imnimo wrote: | If you create a trademark-violating image using an AI model does | that demonstrate anything more than that that particular image is | violating? Like it's also violating if I hand draw those images, | the fact that they're AI-generated doesn't enter into it. | residualmind wrote: | You don't need AI to create these, you just have to be a d*ck. | Juliate wrote: | Lawyers. | | Lawyers are going to have a lot of fun$$ with the | copyright/trademark violation flood that is coming (and not only | for high profiles). | bigbacaloa wrote: | One traditional way of learning to make art was to go to the | museum and copy the works of masters ... What's the difference in | principle if one trains AI on them? | dredmorbius wrote: | Work-factor, most obviously. | | Targeting and distribution as well. AI has the edge on | individual creators here. | rvz wrote: | People who are not techies and have a clue about Stable Diffusion | and DALL-E being trained on copyrighted images without their | permission or attribution / credit knew this? This was absolutely | unsurprising [0] [1]. | | Stability AI knew they would be sued to the ground if they | trained their AI generating music equivalent called 'Dance | Diffusion' model on thousands of musicians without their | permission and used public domain music instead. | | So of course they think it is fine to do it to artists | copyrighted images without their permission or attribution, as | many AI grifters continue to drive everything digital to zero. | That also includes Copilot being trained on AGPL code. | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33902341 | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33005559 | phpisthebest wrote: | Anything that weakens copyright is something that should be | supported. Copyright has expanded well beyond its original | goals to in fact be a harm to those goals | | Copyright (in the US) was NOT in fact created to protect | creators, it was to encourage creation and advance science. | Today copyright is being used to curb and monopolize creation | and prevent advancement (case in point this very story) | crote wrote: | On the other hand, copyleft licenses _are_ being used to | protect creators. Without copyright protection, what is | stopping companies from blatantly violating even more open- | source licenses? | phpisthebest wrote: | note I never said anything about elimination of copyright | completely, I said weaken it. | | The original copyright term was for 14 years, not for Life. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-15 23:01 UTC)