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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Strongly disagree.
If artists don't want their data, their art being scraped by giant machines without any human oversight for profit they should be within their right to opt out. If they cannot opt out, why not poison the ill-gotten gains.
If the corporations behind these Machine Learning Algorithms were altruistic or open source, like Wikipedia is, perhaps I'd see your point. But not wanting your art to be sucked into a black hole to then be sold to others without credit or compensation I find more than fair.
Being someone with a foot in both worlds gives me a slightly robust viewpoint on this topic, so I try to chime in whenever I see this argument pop up. For reference, I have an MA in Visual Effects and a BS in Applied Mathematics, and work closely with artists and technologists in my job. I say this to support my credibility.
All in all, I advise to avoid blaming the AI engineers (most of whom are altruistic in their motives) and the users (most of whom just want to have fun and play) and focus on the politicians and profiteers. They are the real villains in the story, and also the ones who seem to manage to stay under the radar.
With the opt-out bit I was trying to get at consent, I should've worded that better.
I don't know what exact argument to use, but a machine using art to "learn" feels very different from a human doing the same.
This comment deserved to be separated from the other discussion. I am studying some LLM stuff as a side project for myself and the author of the book I am reading was discussing the history of AI training a bit in the chapter I was reading. I personally did not realize that LLM models dated back to the very early 200X years. The whole "training on works of art" dates all the way back to the earliest days using non-licensed books and manuscripts in addition to emails, text messages, blog posts, news articles, etc. Scraping whatever content is needed to train an AI from the internet without really worrying about permission is very much so nothing new. It is just something that came to the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist with the release of SD and the clamor of attention it got.
I think the reason it was never really worried about is precisely how destructive the whole process is. The "Vectorization" step that is common to most if not all AI training algorithms fundamentally disassembles whatever the input is and applies statistical methods to make it something a computer can understand. How many times was each word used, what are the odds of two colors being next to each other, how many times did person A tap their foot? Once this is done, the original work is gone. There are no discernable features of the source material save for perhaps words that are unique to that, but most of the time those are filtered out, so even those are gone. That vector is what the AI is actually trained on, not the original work. All the sources are are chaos to derive statistics from. Nothing more, nothing less.
Does an author get to request consent before you read their book? Or is consent implied because they published it?
Consent is granted by your purchase/borrowing of the book, that's how that works.
If you acquired the text through unintended means I doubt the author would (generally) consent to your reading of it.
So if I have legal access to view it, I have consent to lend that capacity to someone else?
It is a humanist perspective. We feel uneasy about it because it is something that we thought was ours and maybe a couple of other animals.
In abstraction (boiling the idea down to the most basic form it can be stated), something that is not a human learned from our art to do it as well as we can. What the something is is borderline immaterial.
(being really careful not to strawman with this) If we select a description of something else that is doing the learning and see if it leaves an uneasy feeling. Maybe a bacterial colony was genetically engineered to have a sort of memory that allowed them to remember images that the colony had been on in the past and when exposed to a disorganized pigment environment, they would redistribute the pigment into a pattern similar to the images they had experienced previously. So scientists culture billions of bacteria and print off tens of thousands of images then expose the colony en mass to them. Now the colony can recreate many many art forms.
Is that the same, better, or worse than a computer? On one hand, the computer method gives access to everyone. There are profiteers, but there are also FOSS solutions that do not harvest data or transmit your personal info home. With the bacteria example, the spread may be smaller and slower, but you better believe that every major publisher and marketing firm would be lining up to purchase the Bactereo-5000 printer that could replace their entire art department the same as many are doing with Stable Diffusion.
Just as they did when they replaced sketch artists with photographers, and traditional artists with digital artists, pen and paper for Photoshop. We print advertising now, not paint it. Stable Diffusion won't kill Photoshop, I use both. Just like Photoshop didn't kill traditional art, and just like photography didn't kill sketch artistry. But for the purposes of mass production the practicality of producing higher quality products faster will never not be sought after because time is finite.
The art doesn't go away, but the tools available to the artist change.
Of course. Very few positions have ever outright been eliminated by new technology. They have been morphed and, over time, require a fundamentally different skill set. What is ubiquitous with new productivity-enhancing equipment being added to the job market is that there are fewer and fewer of those jobs available. Perfect "for instance", executive assistants. For decades nearly every middle manager and up at anywhere doing large amounts of business needed an executive assistant to manage calendars, screen communication, filter incoming mail, and gatekeep access to the manager. With the advent of email, the mail filtering role became less and less prevalent, and now with AI/3rd party answering services, Calendly, and several other tools, most of the classic roles that executive assistants filled are automated away, meaning that either single assistants are being used for serve several managers in the remaining duties, or only high-level executives get them. Has the executive assistant job been eliminated, no. Has the number of available positions been truncated by a non-trivial number, absolutely.
The same has happened with the VFX industry. Rotoscoping (the process of cutting actors from the backgrounds for compositing) used to be the primary entry point to the industry for people wanting a compositing career. Big VFX houses needed on the order of 30 or 40 of them at any given time. A few years back Adobe and others started getting automated algorithms down for the process and now only a handful of artists are needed to check shots and clean up problem shots, and usually the task falls to the compositors themselves rather than an entry-level employee. Roto jobs still exist, but are much less in demand and an entire entry-level rung to the industry's ladder has been made inaccessible to incoming artists.
The AI addition to the toolset for graphic artists, environment artists, and others is not going to eliminate the job, instead, it will make it so companies can get more done with fewer staff.
That's a capitalism problem. In a socialised system we'd all be getting paid UBI and able to contribute our free time to learning these skill sets and contributing to the development of related products out of sheer interest alone without needing to append the yoke of exploitation required to rustle up a profit for someone else so we can have crumbs to eat instead of recieving fair value for our work. Or since we cant magic society into social advancement... we can make use of these FOSS tools that utilise these systems to give the power to create back to the normal person who can now use these tools (as I do) to enhance their already existing workflows to improve their capacity to earn value from their own merit and ability without taking anything from those who have contributed. It's a shift in dynamic and people are naturally resistant to change, I don't hold such adamant perceptions of ownership of knowledge even if one can have ownership of a product.
Capitalist structures will always under every single circumstance try to maximise efficiency, maximise output, and minimise cost. Be that labour cost or materials cost or production cost. This is why Capitalism is unsustainable, the one directional flow of wealth and value from all of the technological contributions of everyone in humanity into the hands of the few. And don't even try to tell me "Oh but people need to get paid their fair share for their contributions" yes, yes they damn well do, but that can't happen under a corporation because for a profit margin to exist the worker must be exploited to create something of more value than they are offered in return, so expecting fairness in an unfair system is barking up the wrong tree and has no bearing on the value given back to the artist by FOSS tools that fools would fight against and burn to the ground only to the benefit of the very corporate slave owners who prevent their artistic capacity from being viable for income generation. Guess who can afford to pay the artists when the pool of data gets poisoned? Not the people, not the producers, not the individual artist. Nope. But the Corporation can, and when they have to they will. Fuck the rest of us. These people in the article are capitalist cyber terrorists, but fear of "AI" blinds the ignorant, and the masses will suffer for it, and their art will gain no more value because it has not gained any more practical merit, except to those willing to pay enough to exploit them some more, just to gatekeep their own perceived position in their perceived hierarchy of value.
I wholeheartedly agree. I don't use self-checkout lanes, I don't deal with AI customer support, and I don't tolerate corporations that view labor as an expense to eliminate. I'm not afraid of AI or automation, in fact, I do both as two of my favorite hobbies. Unfortunately, that gives me a very real and salient perspective on the future of this world and it does not look good for the base majority of us. There is basically not an I industry that won't be directly affected by this wave of technology. Essentially all of the "poor people jobs" are going to evaporate in the next 10 to 15 years. Amazon will be eliminating the staff as a whole from their distribution centers on the next 5 years, and that is something like half a million people out of the job. The trucking industry is moving ever faster towards fully autonomous vehicles for long-haul trucking. That's another ~2.2 million jobs according to the DoL. Toss in the call centers, fast food industry, and sectors of retail and you are talking about an easy 5M people out of work because jobs vanish. That is >1% of the US population, and that isn't even scratching the surface.
A UBI is literally the only way forward at this point. And I mean a true UBI which all individuals can actually live off of without supplemental income.
I live in Australia where we thankfully have better democratic voting systems and as a result lean far further into social benefit and developed social services, but we're already struggling with underemployment where efficiency is outstripping the demand for bodies. The one benefit we have is one of the best unemployment support systems in the world, but we still have issues where the capitalists that are exploiting us for all their profit don't want to use that money to pay for those social services that keep the society that supports them healthy, and I dare say they'll want to pay even less when they have less employees doing the same work. I agree that UBI needs to be implemented, and some of the Nordic countries have already successfully trialled both UBI and further reduced working hours for same pay with the 4 day work week and the 32 hour full time week. The only real issue is that the one entity that needs to be aware that these things exist and are beneficial is the social consciousness, and it's stupid, we don't spend enough on education even here to make the social consciousness cognizant enough to act. People like to think they are individual and I fear American individuality has been weaponised against the populace for so long that the tide can't turn without blood. The strikes are starting, the people are unionising, we'll see how far the people can push before the corporations kick back and make them bleed, then we'll see if the American social consciousness is resilient enough to fight back and start claiming significant workers rights or whether they'll reel back covering their bloody mouth with their shackled hands. I fear they will fight for more than they have but not for what they deserve.
We are definitely trying. Unfortunately, we have had a concerted effort for about the last 80 years to systematically disassemble the populace's capacity for cognition and critical thought. Couple that with obvious disinformation and a group who have mastered attacking people's fear, emotion, and blind patriotism to manipulate them into acting against their best interests.
When you contribute to society you don't get to opt out of having your contribution used.
Someone writes a book or makes a piece of art there's nothing in the world stopping a human from using that inspiration to create. Why would I want to limit the tools that make my work flow easier from making my work flow easier?
If you want to keep your ideas to yourself then keep them in your head.
Someone else using my work as inspiration is different from ripping my works off.
A machine learning algorithm falls in the latter category in my opinion.
Then perhaps you should look at using them so you can waylay your fears with knowledge.
I should look into using said algorithms?
I know what they can do, but if that's through ripping off the work of others I'm not sure I like it.
Would you pay an artist if you knew their work was traced?
Here, first you need tools, these are FOSS:
https://www.dexerto.com/tech/how-to-install-stable-diffusion-2124809/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBpD-RbglPw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYNd0vAt5jk
Then you'll need to know the basics of using Stable Diffusion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBpD-RbglPw
You'll want access to community resources:
https://civitai.com
That'll get you started. Should see you sorted for the next month of learning. Once you've got the basics of using Stable Diffusion (one of many image gen software) and you have the software under control you can start looking at using custom training models for getting the styles you want and learn how to start getting the results similar to what you want, they won't be good, most will be trash, then you'll need to learn about ControlNet, this will get you introduced to wireframe posing, depth maps, softedge, canny, and a dozen other pre-processing tools, once you start getting things that look kinda close to what you want you'll learn about multi-pass processing, img2img generation, full and selective inpainting, and you'll start using tools like ADetailer to help try generate better looking hands faces and eyes, and then you'll need to get into learning how to use Latent-Couple and ComposableLora so you can start making accurate scene placements and style divisions. Don't worry about the plethora of other more complex tools, you won't need those at the start.
I know how to get my hands on things. Just because I haven't used it doesn't mean I can't form an opinion on the ethics behind it.
Oh but it does. Until you understand the practical and real world usage and application of the technology, and it's limitations, you're talking out your ass. Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one and most are full of shit. I prefer objective reality over the imaginings of perpetually offended but wilfully ignorant people.
So I challenge you to recreate a traditional masterpiece with AI that is of the quality that traditional artists would respect in a style so accurate to be indiscernable for the real thing. I'll see you in undefined years, then congratulate you on accomplishing your task and respect the amount of knowledge and skill it would take to accomplish such a feat.
What the fuck are you on about. Do you have some sort of superiority complex?
I don't need to prove my knowledge to you just because I haven't generated any images myself. I can be aware of all the other applications and limitations of such a tool. I'm not arguing that it isn't useful.
I'm arguing artists should have a say in whether their work gets absorbed into the black box or not. And if they don't get that choice, fair on them for trying to poison the system. Shouldn't have taken without asking if you didn't want that to happen.
And I'm saying you're wrong. Terrorists don't get to blow up social infrastructure because they don't get what they want. And you seem to miss the part where I'm one of those artists.
You're the sort to tear down babylon or burn the library of alexandria because they stored a copy of your work for the posterity and benefit of humanity.
I didn't miss that part. You're free to do with your art whatever you want.
But just because you are okay with your art getting repurposed for whatever doesn't mean others have to be.
And if the library were to store a copy of my book it'd come with royalties and credit, unlike whatever is going on with image generators.
Now if libraries were to stock an illegal copy of my book, I'd get pretty pissed about that. If they did that to all of the other writers as well I wouldn't even have to burn it down because the lawyers would do it for me.
But lone artists on the internet don't have a massive publisher to back them up.
Why do you hate libraries? Does DaVinci get royalties when I replicate his engineering work?
Please quote me the part where I said or implied I hate libraries.
You've been defending people's right to burn them down all thread.
I have, at no point, implied legitimate businesses/organizations should be burned down.
No you implied that other structures of communal data storage should be burned down; but for some reason you disingenuously disassociate those to others because of some self-perceived definition over what is legitimate knowledge.
AI is a librarian, datasets are the library. You want to set fire to the stacks, fuck everyone else's hard work.
If AI were a librarian I'd be able to go there and find the works of whatever artists they kept copies of. Last I checked, that is not the case. Are you sure you know how these machine learning algorithms work?
If the AI is set fire to, all of the artists still keep their individual works or art on whatever websites they were before they got scraped.
If you can't define their individual works are they really there?
I can read and absorb Nietzsche, yet you won't find his books in my head.
And no, DaVinci doesn't. That's why copyright expires and items go into the public domain after a set amount of years.
A "set" amount of years massive corporations have been all too happy to push back, but that's another conversation.
So you're OK with burning down libraries as long as it's for Capitalism, makes more sense...
I'm OK with libraries getting sued for ripping off writers/artists.
You don't know how libraries work, just like you don't understand AI.
Nah I think you're the one who doesn't know
Don't conflate your ignorance with other people's knowledge. You think, because you don't know.
You know nothing on the subject and it shows.
I absolutely know much on the topic. Please read my comments elsewhere in this thread for a strong break down of the issues and how AI actually works. Btw, the source of my authority on all of it is having a Master's degree in art, working in a professional art field, having a BS in Applied Mathematics, and building AI's as a hobby. I live in literally every aspect of this debate.
TL:DR - AI models are never trained directly on source material. Sources are fed into statistical analysis algorithms that utterly destroy the sources and derive info that computers can understand in a process called Vectorization. The AI is then trained on those vectors. Then, when a prompt is given, the algorithm takes it apart as an input in a process called Tokenization. From the input, in an algorithm that goes beyond the scope of this, an output is given that statistically satisfies the model. So even in the usage process, the AI never actually directly works on human inputs.
Cool, so do I. I've been a software developer and digital artist for 25 years. I now use AI tools to assist my work flow for both.
Fun. Apologies for misinterpreting your comment.
They shouldn't post their art online then. I draw digitally and on other mediums. I have used AI as a base when I have an idea but need a visual representation that matches what I see in my head and work off of that. That is what AI tools are meant for. You do have lazy hacks who just pump out ainart and don't alter it or barely alter it and sell it.
There's no point in complaining about AI. Adapt and learn to use the tool. Just like trad artists bitched when digital artists began being recognized as artist like they should have been. Different medium same outcome.
Same energy "oh you don't like capitalism? Then why do you participate in it".
Just because someone wants to share their work with others online doesn't mean others should be allowed to indiscriminately absorb it into their black box.
Isn't that what you do when you use your eyes to view the image? Indiscriminately absorb it into your black box? Consent was provided through publishing.