cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3613920
Get fuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked
“This isn’t going to stop,” Allen told the New York Times. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”
“But I still want to get paid for it.”
It’s probably a safe bet that this AI artist was also a NFT artist or procurer a few years ago.
This article is annoyingly one-sided. The tool performs an act of synthesis just like an art student looking at a bunch of art might. Sure, like an art student, it could copy someone’s style or even an exact image if asked (though those asking may be better served by torrent sites). But that’s not how most people use these tools. People create novel things with these tools and should be protected under the law.
So what you’re saying is that the AI is the artist, not the prompter. The AI is performing the labor of creating the work, at the request of the prompter, like the hypothetical art student you mentioned did, and the prompter is not the creator any more than I would be if I kindly asked an art student to paint me a picture.
In which case, the AI is the thing that gets the authorial credit, not the prompter. And since AI is not a person, anything it authors cannot be subjected to copyright, just like when that monkey took a selfie.
It should be as copyrightable as the prompt. If the prompt is something super generic, then there’s no real work done by the human. If the prompt is as long and unique as other copyrightable writing (which includes short works like poems) then why shouldn’t it be copyrightable?
Because it wasn’t created by a human being.
If I ask an artist to create a work, the artist owns authorship of that work, no matter how long I spent discussing the particulars of the work with them. Hours? Days? Months? Doesn’t matter. They may choose to share or reassign some or all of the rights that go with that, but initial authorship resides with them. Why should that change if that discussion is happening not with an artist, but with an AI?
The only change is that, not being a human being, an AI cannot hold copyright. Which means a work created by an AI is not copyrightable. The prompter owns the prompt, not the final result.
You’re assigning agency to the program, which seems wrong to me. I think of AI like an advanced Photoshop filter, not like a rudimentary person. It’s an artistic tool that artists can use to create art. It does not in and of itself create art any more than Photoshop creates graphics or a synthesizer creates music.
How do the actions of the prompter differ from the actions of someone who commissions an artist to create a work of art?
I don’t think commissioning a work is ever as hands-on as using a program to create a work.
I suspect the hangup here is that people assume that using these tools requires no creative effort. And to be fair, that can be true. I could go into Dall-E, spend three seconds typing “fantasy temple with sun rays”, and get something that might look passable for, like, a powerpoint presentation. In that case, I would not claim to have done any artistic work. Similarly, when I was a kid I used to scribble in paint programs, and they were already advanced enough that the result of a couple minutes of paint-bucketing with gradients might look similar to something that would have required serious work and artistic vision 20 years prior.
In both cases, these worst-case examples should not be taken as an indictment of the medium or the tools. In both cases, the tools are as good as the artist.
If I spend many hours experimenting with prompts, systematically manipulating it to create something that matches my vision, then the artistic work is in the imagination. MOST artistic work is in the imagination. That is the difference between an artist and craftsman. It’s also why photography is art, and not just “telling the camera to capture light”. AI is changing the craft, but it is not changing the art.
Similarly, if I write music in a MIDI app (or whatever the modern equivalent is; my knowledge of music production is frozen in the 90s), the computer will play it. I never touch an instrument, I never create any sound. The art is not the sound; it is the composition.
I think the real problem is economic, and has very little to do with art. Artists need to get paid, and we have a system that kinda-sorta allows that to happen (sometimes) within the confines of a system that absolutely does not value artists or art, and never has. That’s a real problem, but it is only tangentially related to art.
should a camera also own the copyright to the pictures it takes? (I seriously hate photographers)
Ah, but there is a fundamental difference there. A photographer takes a picture, they do not tell the camera to take a picture for them.
It is the difference between speech and action.
If the prompt is as long and unique as other copyrightable writing (which includes short works like poems) then why shouldn’t it be copyrightable?
Okay, so the prompt can be that. But we’re talking about the output, no? My hello-world source code is copyrighted, but the output “hello world” on your machine isn’t really, no?
Does it require any creative thought for the user to get it to write “hello world”? No. Literally everyone launching the app gets that output, so obviously they didn’t create it.
A better example would be a text editor. I can write a poem in Notepad, but nobody would claim that “Notepad wrote the poem”.
It’s wild to me how much people anthropomorphize AI while simultaneously trying to delegitimize it.
The tool performs an act of synthesis just like an art student looking at a bunch of art might.
Lol, no. A student still incorporates their own personality in their work. Art by humans always communicates something. LLMs can’t communicate.
People create novel things with these tools and should be protected under the law.
I thought it’s “the tool” the “performs an act of synthesis”. Do people create things, or the LLM?
the machine learning model creates the picture, and does have a “style”, the “style” has been at least partially removed from most commercial models but still exist.
It doesn’t have a “style”. It stores a statistical correlation of art styles.
different models will have been trained on different ratios of art styles, one may have been trained on a large number of oil paintings and another pencil sketches, these models would provide different outputs to the same inputs.
You’re not stating anything different than my “correlation” statement.
No no, he created the prompt. That’s the artistic value /s
It’s deterministic. I can exactly duplicate your “art” by typing in the same sentence. You’re not creative, you’re just playing with toys.
That’s actually fundamentally untrue, like independent of your opinion, I promise that when people generate an image with a phrase it will be different and is not deterministic ( not in the way you mean ) .
You and I cannot type the same prompt into the same AI generative model and receive the same result, no system works with that level of specificity, by design.
They pretty much all use some form of entropy / noise.
It’s literally as true as it can possibly be. Given the same inputs (including the same seed), a diffusion model will produce exactly the same output every time. It’s deterministic in the most fundamental meaning of the word. That’s why when you share an image on CivitAI people like it when you share your input parameters, so they can duplicate the image. I have recreated the exact same images using models from there.
Humans are not deterministic (at least as far as we know). If I give two people exactly the same prompt, and exactly the same “training data” (show them the same references, I guess), they will never produce the same output. Even if I give the same person the same prompt, they won’t be able to reproduce the same image again.
I do actually believe that everything, including human behavior is deterministic. I also believe there is nothing special about human consciousness or creation tbh
Try it out and show us the result.
Ok, here’s an image I generated with a random seed:
Here’s the UI showing it as a result:
Then I reused the exact same input parameters. Here you can see it in the middle of generating the image:
Then it finished, and you can see it generated the exact same image:
Here’s the second image, so you can see for yourself compared to the first:
You can download Flux Dev, the model I used for this image, and input the exact same parameters yourself, and you’ll get the same image.
But you’re using the same seed. Isn’t the default behaviour to use random seed?
And obviously, you’re using the same model for each of these, while these people would probably have a custom trained model that they use which you have no access to.
That’s not really proof that you can replicate their art by typing the same sentence like you claimed.
If you didn’t understand that I clearly meant with the same model and seed from the context of talking about it being deterministic, that’s a you problem.
Bro, it’s you who said type the same sentence. Why are you saying the wrong things and then try to change your claims later?
The problem is that you couldn’t be bothered to try and say the correct thing, and then have the gall to blame other people for your own mistake.
And in what kind of context does using the same seed even makes sense? Do people determine the seed first before creating their prompt? This is a genuine question, btw. I’ve always thought that people generally use a random seed when generating an image until they find one they like, then use that seed to modify the prompt to fine tune it.
In the context that I’m explaining that the thing is deterministic. Do you disagree? Because that was my point. Diffusion models are deterministic.
Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.
He made the art shown below. It’s not even good lmao, why the fuck would you declare something like that if you make the shittiest looking AI art. What a fucking clown.
Looks like a psychedalic dream and not in a good way.
It looks cool from a distance, but it really falls apart when you look closer
He didn’t make shit.
A computer made it. He provided some guidance.
Well in a way all Art is being done indirectly by some sort of instrument. Only the degree of sophistication or degree of separation of this instrument is different. A pencil drawing is in principle also done by the pencil, but I provided a lot of guidance through my hand. A pencil - almost no sophistication - is on one side of the spectrum and Midjourney/Stable Diffusion etc is on the other side of the spectrum.
I don’t want to judge AI “art” in general - there’s so many awful traditional artworks that AI art doesn’t really stand out.
What rubs me the wrong way is that it is a tool that no human can understand reasonably well. Everybody can understand a pencil. It’s possible to understand a computer renderer that renders digital art. But no one can understand the totality of an LLM which was trained on terabytes of images. It’s a lot of trial and error, because what the tool does generate random images even with precise directions. It’s throwing dice until one likes the result.
The one thing I give this “artist” credit for: he was very early (maye even the first?) that entered AI art into a contest and fooled the jury. Being the first is often enough historically to make “great art”. Where art is more measured n the impact it has on a societal discussion. So I give him that.
But a court already decided you can’t copyright AI art, because it’s trained on other art without permission. So he can get fucked.
The pencil does not make the art.
There’s a fundamental difference between AI image generation and an artist creating something that is both inherent and obvious.
If you can’t see that then I’m not sure there’s much help for you.
More than that, art being created by an artist has a style and a feeling behind it. There’s a nostalgia present in every painting. An artist saw something, and recreated it in a way that spoke to them.
An algorithm can recreate images that look similar but with no understanding. It’s just an image and lacks all the things that makes art what it is. By removing humanity from art you literally remove the reason for it to exist.
Flatly, it isn’t art. It’s slightly better than random. But as it happens, humans are better at that too.
Of course he didn’t, but it just makes it worse that the image that’s “ending human art” is distorted and glitchy.
It annoys me that whatever the big yellow circle is isn’t centered in the image.
That doesn’t bother me as much as when you actually zoom in on the people
Normally you paint somebody, you do so in a recognizable pose standing or caught in a frame stance that implies their motion.
Here you have someone presumably looking at the orb, But they look more like a weeble wobble. Is that their tiny little arm holding there ear? They’re not balanced, I don’t not even sure the head is connected to the neck there should be meat back there right? The raw proportions are just wrong.
The overall feeling the piece conveys is pretty impressive but the actual details are bullshit.
Think he’ll try to use a llm as his lawyer?
Lol.
“”“Artist”“”
“Famous” A"I" “Artist”
I like the comment that said the AI is the artist and he’s just a commissioner, makes perfect sense.
Drag thinks profits from AI art should automatically go to funding an AI Advocacy Commission established by the government to explore questions of AI consciousness and AI rights. The AAC should be devoting resources to solving the hard problem of consciousness and improving working conditions for AIs, in whatever way experts believe is most beneficial to AI welfare.
This is how you stop The Matrix from happening, people!
Poe’s law in full swing in this comment.
Drag is being entirely serious. Drag believes AI is a vegan issue until the hard problem of consciousness is solved in a way that conclusively proves AIs are not capable of experience. We have as much trouble telling if animals like fish are capable of feeling pain as we do with AIs. Drag does not eat fish, and drag does not believe it is right to use AI until we have an answer. Drag thinks the answer might be that using AI is fine, but drag is not a gambler and drag would certainly not gamble with another being’s life.
Then “drag” (whoever that is) anthropomorphises a statistical model, which is stupid.
He’s talking about himself in the third person. Drag is not as funny or as intriguing as Drag thinks he is.
I checked out their other comments and yes: it is quite cringe.
@[email protected] if you claim that you’re not speaking in the third person of yourself, you should stop conbugating your verbs in the third person.
Elliot Page uses he/they pronouns. They were the lead actor in the movie Juno.
Drag wonders if you think drag has just conjugated that verb as if Elliot were more than one person.
Drag does not use he/him pronouns. Drag doesn’t like it when you misgender drag. Drag is a trans AMAB person who has trauma from being he/himed most of drag’s life. Drag asks that if you cannot respect drag’s nonbinary identity, you could at least respect drag’s trans identity at the most basic level.
how about this?
They’re talking about themselves in the third person. They are not as funny or as intriguing as they think they are.
Talking in the third person seems to just be a from of tolling for fun, and it’s all well and good, but in that context I garner doubts about the veracity of your claims as you seem to go about roleplaying a caricature style built around your username.
I didn’t intentionally mis-gender you, I have a tendency default to the fewest letters to refer to a random person online not knowing biological gender or preferred pronoun and gendering without any intent to insult or distress.
[He = less typing, and only requires 2 bytes of data vs 4 bytes to be stored and sent/resent for every view of a message. I continue to argue like a nerd that he/her is by far the best all-around option to adopt as the universal ‘generic’ pronouns, as they/them is a plural usage that typically implies more than one. When you have one person with a they/them pronoun in the same discussion with a group of people that are de-facto referred to as they/them due to the representation of a plurality, it creates a definitive lack of precise communication on the subject of reference. They/them only works in a singular pronoun when you don’t have multiple subjects to represent in and out of the context of a discussion. Exactness of language to discern intent and meaning is exactly what preferred pronouns are useful for, but they/them introduces it’s own complexities of structure and content for an individual’s preferred identification, IMO. This admittedly doesn’t take personal traumas into account, but traumas are something to be dealt with through positive mental health therapy, be it self directed or from outside help, to overcome it them.]
I’ll gladly use your preferred pronoun and gendering once I’m aware you have such request, but you shouldn’t use it as a whip to distract/dismiss criticism entirely unrelated to pronouns, that sort of self service can be diminishing of your own trauma.
I certainly don’t know the reality of living trans AMAB and experiencing trauma from a lifetime of perceived mis-gendering, but I do wish you well, and hope you have a support structure around you of friends and family that are understanding and supportive.
Drag has some things to work out, as we all do in different ways, but I hope their life works out for the best on their own terms. Maybe in time people will get used to Drag talking in the third person, but the comedic styling needs some practice to level it up.
Cheers.
/Thank you for coming to my TEDragon talk.
Drag does not anthropomorphise anything! Drag resents that accusation. Drag has spoken with many otherkin who are entirely inhuman and still deserving of love and respect. Drag treats AI like those. Not like a human.
it’s still antropomorphisation.
Cool for drag. Mind if other people don’t give a crap about what drag thinks?
Drag thinks that if your opinion is that treating things like otherkin is anthropomorphisation, then you must be anthropomorphising otherkin.
He needs to take a photograph of it and then copyright the photograph. Easy!
Not the Onion. This was unexpected…
I’m pretty sure there’s a misspelling. It’s spelled “douchebag” not “artist”.
😭
Same link without tracker
The layers to irony in this case is almost too delicious.
I’m hoping someone with actual talent paints the AI picture and then copyrights it
I don’t think someone painting a physically copy of the image will gain ownership of the copyright.
Bit melodramatic. Even the real artists that midjourney actually stole from don’t claim to have lost millions individually as a result.
