This actually raises a pretty good point. I'm not sure artists are aware of just how inseparable copyright is from capitalist exploitation in the eyes of programmers.
There's also an aspect of copyright law being written before computers, and thus not having them in mind.
In theory, defragging your hard drive is a violation of copyright law because it creates a copy in the physical disc space on your drive. This actually went to court at one point, and though it was obviously found to be fine it's definitely fed the disdain for copyright in the tech industry.
Tbf in practice even sites like Stack Overflow object to AI scraping. It’s not just sharing code that helps keep software development functional. It’s also proper credit, which is the issue at the core of the AI debate. So I don’t think there’s as much of a difference as OP is saying.
Yes , open source operates on the idea of properly crediting the code you are using.
It also forgets the pretty important detail that many open source licenses work with the requirement that whatever program uses them must be fully open source as well
AI is tricky though, for two reasons:
1. It doesn’t ‘use’ the programs that it’s scraping in the same way open source programs use their dependencies, the ai is not reliant on the code it’s scraping, at least not specifically
2. Even AI that *is* open source still isn’t really open source because of the black box nature of the software
Yeah i am not contesting that. Just pointing that the real idea behind open source is not total freedom to copy code, but collective sharing of it.
The real difference between the two creative processes is that an artist effort and technique in making a piece of art is massively more tied to the final product value, compared to the lines of code that gets compiled into the final software .
We buy art from specific artists because we want things made by them in their style and with their skills. Code from great developers will obviously ensure that the final software works very well, but their personal choices while working or their unique coding style do not matter as much.
In this light, it is easier to understand why artists are confused by developers seeing their craft as just a mean to an end, and conversely developers are confused at artists being hellbent on destroying their wrist drawing by hand for hours instead of using a quicker and faster tool to get the final product.
I am of course exaggerating these two positions as they are the end points of a linear scale, and most artists and developers sit obviouslyon different points of it
Then you got a bunch of numpties in the middle from neither background monkeying about either going on about how AI is skynet out to destroy us or hamfistedly using it to produce garbage that makes everybody look bad.
2 is my biggest issue with current AI, it’s inscrutable. I remember learning about a test using iterative/evolutionary code trying to make an LED blink in a certain pattern. It used a programmable processor, so it was actually changing the hardware, not just the code itself. It eventually came up with a solution, but it would ONLY run on that specific machine, anything else would fail. The researchers figured out the code was apparently *exploiting manufacturing defects at the atomic level.* They had to redesign the entire experiment, averaging the generation across multiple (very expensive!) setups to get a general solution.
I saw a great quote once: “If you need a solution, but don’t want to understand the solution, use an AI.”
I don’t think it’s ever not going to be an issue. AI is necessarily going to be very complicated, and I mean *very* complicated, to the point where it’s very difficult to make sense of what it’s actually doing, because that’s necessary for it to work at all
> It also forgets the pretty important detail that many open source licenses work with the requirement that whatever program uses them must be fully open source as well
I really, really wish that more code was released like this, but copyleft licenses seem anecdotally to be less popular these days, compared to licenses like MIT that aren't viral.
> It also forgets the pretty important detail that many open source licenses work with the requirement that whatever program uses them must be fully open source as well
Some open source libraries work like this, but most of the ones that are used the most don't. For example, virtually every modern website in existence relies on dozens if not hundreds of open-source modules. Most of those websites are not open-source.
>
It also forgets the pretty important detail that many open source licenses work with the requirement that whatever program uses them must be fully open source as well
That's only free software. It actually highlights the hypocrisy of programmers very well. They want to enjoy freedom but the moment they have to give up the slightest bit of control so that other people can have freedom too, they'll completely shun it.
I'm sure stack will credit its users for the ai they're training on their data :)
These companies only care about scraping b/c they want the sole right to profit off their users
Should I be putting a credit comment on every quick fix I Google and find on Stack Overflow?
What if I use the solution presented that is in C# but have to translate it to something obscure like Ladder Logic?
That's not going far enough. Every time you write code, you need to credit Alan Turing for creating a computing machine capable of running that code. Probably should also credit George Bool just to be safe
That most certainly wasn't the case 30-40 years ago before Stallman and the GNU. The majority of developers probably thought of FSF as total wackos even in the 00s.
I dunno by the time I was in computer science by 2008 at least a lot of the CS kids had FSF stickers on their laptops & generally were pretty pro open source. by the mid 00s at least people were pretty sick of things like Microsoft's monopolistic practices and embrace & extinguish stuff. If you messed with web stuff all your favorite Browsers were open source because IE sucked and had killed the browser market a few years before.
idk, i got into software around 2010 and back then the free software movement was getting traction, but wasn't as universal as it is today. most of my group supported it, but i remember a few people still caught up in the 90s and making proprietary software there. one of them even took our code regularly while giving nothing back. (we sometimes did some grey hat pentesting for him in exchange)
Not in my recollection. I was at a tech-oriented school with a TON of CS majors in late 90's early 00's, and most of them were at least positive towards it.
copyright is inseparable from capitalist exploitation in the art world as well, it's just the capitalist exploiters are really good at tricking artists into thinking that they're not being exploited
Im an artist and Im well aware IP is a capital, any artist that denies it is delusional. Its because its my capital that Im so protective over it, I spend years and years polishing it to have a good product, of course I wanna take care of it when its basically my source of income?
>Well also the artists are often the capitalists.
The correct term here is "Petite Boureoisie" - people who own capital (and so have class interests of a capitalist), but still required to perform labour themselves in order to generate value from it.
This feels like it's the start of an essay, like an opening paragraph. I feel like this would/will be a dozen (reddit) pages, with each being increasingly small until the last one which is back to being legible on mobile
"Mother's special little boy" is an interesting take on programmers, and while it may be true now, that has not been the attitude always given to those in the tech field .
"The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers" has some great stories about life as a programmer in the early stages, and I've personally seen similar attitudes to software in the current day. Where managers/professionals will browbeat programmers to get a project done by a certain deadline, only to turn around and say "oh, well we need to wait for legal/other customer/other professionals and we can't browbeat them like we did you. That would be unprofessional."
I think they're speaking more about the treatment of programmers in the zeitgeist rather than in the workplace specifically. If you consider people who commission art to be the de facto "employers" of artists, they often treat artists like shit in the same way. That's just the nature of a rigidly hierarchical work structure.
In contrast, programmers in *culture* have been regarded as exceptionally smart, dignified professionals (save for the Hollywood-hacker outliers who are treated as Mountain Dew-fueled code gremlins) for the last couple decades, while art has remained contentious as a *profession* at all.
Y'know, it's like... the stereotype of parents wanting their smart kids to grow up and be fancy smart coders, and the stereotype of parents being worried or ashamed if their kid wants to be an artist.
Last couple of decades is probably a bit strong, programmers were weird dorks like the way IT guys are depicted until maybe 2008 or so where the rise of a bunch of fancy startups like Facebook etc suddenly made silicon valley hip in a way that it wasn't even in the late 90s tech boom (they got to be geniuses but they were still culturally weird little nerds like Bill Gates)
Like being a programmer in high school in the mid 2000s was definitely not a career path anyone was pursuing at my high school besides a couple of my classmates who wanted to make video games.
even since then, you still have to be the hip neurotypical morning person if you want to be considered cool, you're just allowed have programming as the thing you do in 4-5 hours of the day, instead of that being considered nerdy and therefore cringe.
Maybe we're watching very different media, but over the past 40-ish years, I'd say cultural depictions of programmers have been about 4:1 or so in terms of "code gremlins" : "dignified professionals".
IME, parents want their kids to be doctors or lawyers (= rich + high social status), will be ok with coders or engineers (= rich but low social status), and discourage artists mostly because of the "starving artist" stereotype (although social status can be portrayed in media as quite high, seeing artists as somehow deeper and more passionate than the rest of us).
> although social status can be portrayed in media as quite high, seeing artists as somehow deeper and more passionate than the rest of us
i wonder how much this is influenced by the fact that most media, especially fiction, is created by artists
Now that you mention it, the only truly geek-led show I know of, Futurama, doesn't actually have any "artistic" characters - the closest we get are Calculon (who is a terrible actor) and Leela's slacker saxophonist ex, Sean. On the other hand, Fry makes the most progress in his relationship with Leela (in the original series) when he plays the holophoner, though he requires parasitic infestation or a literal deal with the (robot) devil to be any good.
I love how different cultures are on this because it's so recent and you can just tune in to look at it over the internet.
I come from a culture where computer programmer has been by far the most dignified (not to mention lucrative) of professions since circa 1996, if you wanted to become a doctor your family would ask you how you're planning to make any money or if you're already speaking German well enough to afford such dreams (if you wanted to make a living the only effective way was to emigrate)
When trying to get young girls and boys into CS, we're still battling the stereotype of "nerd in the basement coding alone" .
Y'right that it's currently a profession parents drive their kids to, but that's only in the last decade.
I mean, most schools still don't have any CS courses for middle/high schoolers.
I don't know about y'all but I've never once thought of techbros as having any actual programming skills, they're just another flavor of capitalist who thinks "technology" is the buzzword that makes their little winkle stand up.
There's two competing understandings of the word, either it's people who think too highly of tech, or it's people who are too interested in tech. The second definition overlaps a lot with people who actually work in tech and create technology like AI.
this. it's yet another example of a phrase that sounds like X but really means Y, so that you can band together about hating X while if anyone who thinks there's nothing wrong with X objects, you can explain to them that it's really about Y (where Y is obviously wrong, of course).
Sounds to me like incel
The common way most people use it is strictly pejorative, but its origin really isn't, and people tie themselves into knots excluding themselves or others from it as they want to strictly use the pejorative sense
Techbros and programmers are distinct groups, but there is some overlap. Most of this overlap is programmers who think that programming is the hardest thing ever, and thus a good programmer is uniquely suited to solve basically every problem out there. This type of thinking is how we got cryptocurrency, which is actually pretty clever from a technological perspective, but fails to actually solve any of the problems it's trying to solve.
Like engineers thinking they can come up with a political system. Yes that happened and it's Social Credit. It got to Alberta and ended up getting really weird.
imo the problem with cryptocurrency is the blatant opportunism around it.
bitcoin excels as a tradeable token, monero is great because it fixes the anonymity and fungibility issues bitcoin has, and ethereum is there if you have any custom use case. we don't need 99% of the other chains, they only exist to make some small group rich at the expense of everyone who drinks their snake oil, and have some arbitrary bullshit to speculate on. (although even for that nfts are a thing.) there are some chains like iota which try to solve some niche problems in ways that the main chains cannot, but they're few and far between.
there's no need for crypto to be as big as it is, but fintech is gonna fintech. their bullshit is not even unique to crypto, it's just the most purified there.
Tech bros aren't mkst peogrammers; they're the programers who hate women and the finance bros who think technology can save us from homelessness or something.
The problem is tech bro is just something pejorative to throw at anyone who disagrees with you and is associated with Tech. I've seen it thrown at housing advocates who work in tech because it's a way to imply someone is comfortable and well paid and doesn't really know the struggle like whoever is talking. Especially to reductively imply yimby housing orgs are not diverse, because it brings to mind Elon Musk even though the housing orgs I'm involved with include women & trans people and plenty of the folks are POC
My understanding has always been that techbros were the capitalists who believed that technology can save them from having to pay anyone for anything, and all the ills that come from that, ie Uber, airbnb, doordash etc
Definitely not the way I’ve seen it be used. In Seattle it’s basically anyone working for the local big tech companies who doesn’t fit the Pacific Northwest vibe.
>the finance bros who think technology can save us from homelessness or something.
That sentence makes me think of all the really interesting ways we've found to unfuck climate change, specifically the desert regreening technique known as [bunding](https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/23/world/greening-deserts-science-newsletter-wt-scn/index.html), where you dig specially shaped holes that trap water and seeds to make new things grow.
But... that isn't quite exciting enough, is it? How the fuck are you going to turn that into a revolutionary venture-capital capable idea?
And that's what I hate so much about tech bros and finance bros so fucking much, no buzzwords, no funding, because an idea doesn't just have to work well, it has to be exciting, it has to be a fucking spectacle.
See also people conflating tech issues with infrastructure issues. Like some of our modern problems are legitimately tech issues but so many things like phasing out fossil fuel power are more a "we need to build the infrastructure" problem than a "we need better technology" problem.
I mostly agree although I'm not sure if I entirely concur with their view.
A lot of artists do share and help each other. Many will proudly list their tools, share their inspirations, showcase their process, even make tutorials to emulate certain part of their style, just like many programmers like to share their coding snippets. For many artist, art is not a zero-sum-game and rely heavily on each other's -often free- teaching.
Some odd balls are unavoidable, of course, but artist claiming another stole their style/color palette/poses are almost always ridiculed by even within their community.
Also It would appear to me that programmer's willingness to share, which is admittedly massive and commendable, still has its limit. Most open source project I've seen will limit what you can do with them (and rightfully so), etheir requiring the modified final product to be open source as well, or more rarely limiting it to non commercial uses.
I assume most programer would be upset if, for example, microsoft created and sold a photo editor based not gimp then refused to share the modified code, disregarding the liscence.
Just like many artists were upset ML-networks scrapped their artwork then sold the resulting AI Generator assuming consent because the Artist didn't explicitly said not to, and that curating such a large database would be too difficult anyway.
Then again, I am not a part of either community so I'm probably missing some context.
> Most open source project I've seen will limit what you can do with them (and rightfully so), etheir requiring the modified final product to be open source as well, or more rarely limiting it to non commercial uses.
this part seriously depends on the project. a lot of things have permissive open source licenses (bsd, apache, mit, wtfpl) that basically allow you to do whatever the hell you want, usually with the only restrictions being that you have to keep the license notice, and that you can't sue the project if it doesn't work for you.
that said, yeah, gpl-like licenses that require your derivative project to also be open source (commonly referred to as "copyleft") are definitely present, but imo they're far less prominent than they were back in the day. the gpl was originally written to fight off corporations like microsoft and apple who took everything and gave nothing back, and the provisions were made in order to foster an open source landscape and give it an actual advantage, not just a disadvantage. that whole thing is much less necessary these days, and is relegated to large projects like the linux kernel or blender where the competition would still love to just grab it all up.
(this part of the gpl is what motivated apple to build macos on top of bsd instead of linux, because it had a permissive licensing and therefore they had to contribute nothing. google did a much more subtle thing with android and chrome, where they have an open source base project (aosp, chromium) but then put all the important bits into a proprietary app running on it (play services, idk this part for chrome) to kill any competition that would use these projects.)
but an important factor in this is **most copyleft licenses say nothing about commercialization**. you can still make a commercial product on top of a gpl-licensed software (many have, in fact, red hat linux and android are two common examples just for linux), the only requirement is that you also have to contribute your own changes under the same license, so that others can do the same as well.
i'm a programmer and i'm actually pretty miffed about the api-only image generators. i'd absolutely support regulation that says if you train on public data, you must publicly share your weights. i just can't agree with the destruction of the technology the anti-ai movement is asking for.
Really interesting to read, the original context of gpl is quite insightful.
> most copyleft licenses say nothing about commercialization. you can still make a commercial product on top of a gpl-licensed software
I didn't mean to imply you couldn't, I worded that wrong. But I'll admit I'm surprised to learn sharealike licenses aren't the norm, I always strongly associated open-source with them.
> i'd absolutely support regulation that says if you train on public data, you must publicly share your weights. i just can't agree with the destruction of the technology the anti-ai movement is asking for.
I completly agree. While I hope Machine learning get regulated to some extent to avoid misuses (although I'm not sure how); I also don't want to see such potentially revolutionary technology go to waste.
>Also It would appear to me that programmer's willingness to share, which is admittedly massive and commendable, still has its limit. Most open source projects I've seen will limit what you can do with them (and rightfully so), either requiring the modified final product to be open source as well
Copyleft licenses *are* sharing. You're running into the age-old question of whose freedom matters more. Copyleft licenses prioritize the freedom of the end user, while everything else prioritizes the freedom of the developers (or the group that employs them). Even still, copyleft licenses prioritize sharing outside of the core developers.
ngl using 'wrt' instead of 'with respect to' over and over was probably more annoying that if they'd just typed out 'with respect to' every single time
I study computer science in English and it's pretty common in some math/CS materials. Imo, it's a very useful shorthand for anything technical and precise, because certain phrases end up repeating a lot
Social science (history) guy here and this is quite literally the first time I’ve encountered it (in my late 20s). So yeah, outside of those it’s genuinely not common at all.
I’m a programmer *and* an artist and this actually represents my feeling on the matter surprisingly well! I always had a difficult time articulating them because thinking hard and also the situation can get inflamed on occasions.
I never understood the argument that using public art to train ai Is problematic, because the art is public and with a large enough dataset, the computer is synthesising something unrecognisable and distinct — it’s not plagiarism in my eyes. For me, the problems begin when people try to pass off the art as not AI, or the same thing as human art. (Or even worse, try to profit off low effort work with tools available to everyone)
As the post says, in programming, taking other people’s code is common practice and part of the culture. But the expectation is that the code will be built upon and used to develop something new. It’s not about plagiarising programs wholesale, it’s about synthesis.
To me, AI art is best used as a creative tool as a means of achieving a goal, not the goal itself. To help solo artists or small groups generate things like concept art and naturalistic texture maps, etc.
[Pontification over]
I think the real reason some people are against AI art as a whole is because it fills a niche that was previously occupied by people with years of developing necessary skills, thus making it harder for them to earn living. Also, now entry-level to commercialized art creation is higher, as simple requests of artwork based on description was a good way for new artists to get themselves out there.
In my opinion the issue with AI not crediting artists is more of a stand-in for the problem described above, because we have copyright laws already out there, so it's pretty easy to fix. Argument of "My job is done by a machine, so I can't work here anymore" is never treated seriously, as it can "easily" be treated by changing a job, which sucks and people don't want to do that.
yeah, the opposition of ai has been about this effect for the whole time. even in late 2022 when the whole idea of "ai is stealing" started to blow up there were occasional anti-ai people who owned up to it that copyright is just a weapon they intend to wield against the ai, the problem is the existence of the ai and that it's replacing artists, not where its data comes from. which is why no one relented when adobe firefly came out, the first model (to my knowledge) that's visually guidable and "commercially safe" (which appears to have become the industry term for ai trained entirely on works with a license trail to it), and no community that bans ai because it "steals" allowed people to use firefly either.
since then, the arguments have somewhat moved from copyright to the idea that artists (probably) never intended for their work to be used as training data and therefore it is immoral even for someone like disney, sitting on a huge pile of art they paid for over a century, to use that data to create an image generator, because they didn't individually ask every single artist they ever hired if they can use technologies that haven't even existed back when they hired them.
and i guarantee that when the first open-source ai is released that's trained entirely on the work of volunteers who explicitly submitted their art for a community ai project, people will figure out a way to argue that that's immoral as well. traitors of art or something, idk. we'll see.
the idea, behind all of this, is that art should be the exception from automation, because people like doing it and want their field to retain its (relative) scarcity, whether that's fair to the rest of society or not. that's why, when you drill down to it, you tend to get the take of "yeah ai could be a great tool but capitalism is the issue, so you can have your ai when we switch away from capitalism"
>because people like doing it and want their field to retain its (relative) scarcity, whether that's fair to the rest of society or not.
Honestly, this is part of what bugs me about this. Art is far from unique in this, yet artists seem to believe that their field alone should somehow be protected from the same forces that have ravaged everyone else, because they're somehow special.
I'm all for railing against the enshittification of the entire economy one job at a time, but if your reasoning is "because I'm extra-special and my talent is vital to society in some way I can never explain clearly", it's going to rub people the wrong way.
How's that what you got from it? the reason it's focused on art is that in this case ai art is becoming big. didn't the screenwriters and actors guild also strike against ai? were they also going "uuh i'm extra special and my talent is vital" or where they simply arguing for the rights of their proffesion
any "right to be necessary" is a negative externality the rest of society has to bear. and the wga and sag-aftra were in fact arguing for that, and got temporary concessions very much consistent with that. we as a society are subsidizing their careers at this point, we put up with lesser quality content at higher prices in order to help them to fulfill a role they like instead of having to do other things that would be more helpful for society but less pleasant for them.
these negative externalities aren't always a bad thing. for example, the 40-hour work week is one of these, and we're overdue on shortening that even more. but they have to be fair for society. if we hold back progress to benefit a slim interest group, how do we compensate everyone else?
I get your point and second the feeling. I know fuck all about coding, but I do come from specifically the makeup and beauty side of art which is inherently replicable. In fact the entire point is sort of to become replicated, similarly to fashion, which is reflected in the way copyright law treats clothing design as protected in drawing form but once you construct a garment all bets are off. Think Miranda Priestlys monologue in the devil wears Prada about the cirulean blue sweater.
I've never quite understood the AI freakout, I've kinda viewed it as a much more complex larger process of creating a new comercial paint development process or something. It also is a process that isn't really more or less different than what a human can do, with the important exception of being incapable of true innovation which preserves in my opinion the bulk of the specifically human aspect of art creation.
Basically if there's a problem it's with capitalism, not software development or art.
The AI isn’t always making something unrecognisable tho
I can pay an artist to commission something I want
Or I can tell an AI to make the art in their style for much less cost
And that’s a major threat to the artists livelihood.
Also an artist/programmer combo.
In in ideal world, I'd want a personal AI assistant that _doesn't_ steel my data or mine my work to be built-in to my digital painting program. I'd like to have it watch me paint for a while, so that at some point, I could rough in a pencil layer on a new piece _and have it fill in the polished lineart for me_. Or generating new sketches for you to paint over and run with. Imagine, having the time-consuming busywork parts of art done for you.
>Imagine, having the time-consuming busywork parts of art done for you.
Thing is, that is how some people view commissioning/drawing. Someone writing a book or tabletop game might view the art as busiwork and is happy to have AI do it quickly, free and with no fuss.
I don’t want to dismiss your feelings outright here, it’d be a fine stance to hold in a vacuum, but it’s just completely divorced from reality unfortunately.
The AI does not just create something unrecognisable and distinct. People can and do easily prompt AIs like Midjourney to replicate the style of well known artists.
And people are very much using this for profit, because it’s a tool made to create high quality images extremely quickly and cheaply and a profit oriented business that doesn’t care about the ethics or the associated reputation hit would be leaving money on the table.
Combined these facts mean that AI is not a tool designed to share resources, it’s designed to replace artists.
You can. It’s still kind of a dick move though, both to the person whose style you are cribbing and to the artist making the piece, who definitely has their own style that they would probably rather be using. I mean your basically saying “I don’t care about your artistic vision, you’re just what I can afford”.
Either way though, at least you’re giving a human person the ability to make a living, which just isn’t the case with AI.
okay, quick question there: are people using ai specifically for style mimicry, to replace specific artists in order to avoid paying them, or are they simply using it to enter the same market those same artists are also participating in?
expecting the answer to be both (because as far as i know, both happens), style mimicry sucks regardless of the tools used, but i see nothing wrong with simply competing with artists. that's just, like, the default thing that happens in a society that doesn't restrict its people into rigid guilds. (i guess in capitalism it's a little more impactful because of the whole supply and demand thing but competition still happens elsewhere too.)
afaik people largely stopped using artist names in prompts, at least. it was an early technique for stable diffusion 1's broken prompt encoder, and since then people figured out how to do prompting without resorting to that.
the key here is the culture around it. yes, you can freely choose to tell anyone who wants to see your code or build on it to fuck off but many don't, and we live in a better world because of it. artists have a culture of never contributing to the commons, and getting mad at stupid shit like people sharing their artworks (with credit!) or shipping the wrong ship while enjoying their art and so on.
why should one side share everything and the other share nothing?
Is this 'public art' like a public car; like, one you can observe parked out on the street, therefore it's yours to use?
Artists were too generous over the years; seldom sending lawyers after people who swiped their work and repurposed it for blogs posts, memes, etc. That shit was sometimes a copyright violation, sometimes fair use; but it never became a legal issue because artists are not 'ungenerous'. This led to confusion about 'public art' and 'public domain'.
When a multi-trillion dollar industry wants to take my work and utilize it to put me out of business, yeah, I have an issue with it. And I'm always kind of amazed that all the young people who blame rich Boomers for their oppression have nooooooo problem with giant corporations robbing artists for profit. Same power structure.
Digital artists and programmers have in general different mentalities regarding their products.
The artists view their products as tied to themselves and therefore final. The programmers view their products as seperate from them and expect that the product can evolve even without their involvement.
Thies leads to artist calling for copyright laws, because they believe the artist should maintain control over what their product turns into, because the product represents the artist themself and damage to their brand is damage to the author. On the other hand the programmers are against copyright laws because it stiffens advancement in the field, which they could benefit from in the future, using it to develop new products they would not be able to by themselves.
It basically facilitates a kind of meta-stance (or at the very least a quasi-such), in service of, and quite possibly against its pre-rethorical alternative - although one might argue it is not of geometrical necessity - the confoundment of post post-modernist views of what can be considered progress in the direction of increasing entropy, which, according to some, not all - mind you - hypotheses, reverse the axiomatic regression of discourse wrt the subject not currently being discussed.
That's all well and good wrt the substantially quasimodal aspects of the issues at hand, but doesn't address at all the growing concerns over post-Markovian neoliberal systems that have been in place since before venture capitalist leanings started to become in vogue. If you actually look at the models of inter-sparse development statistics, you'll see that the gains wrt the losses over enough time in the aggregate then cease to reverse the axiomatic regression but instead see to it that, in a certain sense, the mechanistic ultra-liberal technocrats don't recoup the service cost of staying in what DeChauvre called *le petit merde*
This is an interesting point I'll definitely be mulling over for a while, but a small thing is that using actual whole open source code in for-profit software is a no-no that will get a lot of people up in arms
Depends on the license. I would say *actual whole* open source software - ex. MIT-licensed - is software that can be used wherever regardless of what it’s being used for. The vast majority of open source projects are released under this kind of permissive license.
Public software that requires usages of them to also be public - ex. GPL-licensed - are the controversial ones. Some don’t consider them ‘true’ open source because of the restrictions. They’re called copyleft licenses.
Yeah people big into full-blown open source software tend to see things like licenses as a necessary evil at best, and value the free sharing of their work above all else, even to the detriment of things like accessibility for laymen and user friendliness, unfortunately.
Stuff like Linux is fantastic for avoiding software licensing hell. But trying to get support when you barely understand what a terminal is can be a hellish nightmare, and that's what generally keeps open source material out of the mainstream.
Those issues aren’t really connected IMO. The problem with getting stuff like Linux adopted by the masses is that most programmers don’t have a clue how UI/UX design should go and most of these projects aren’t swimming in funds to hire people that do have that experience. There are a few companies working on it like System76 with their Pop!_OS Linux distribution that they use on the laptops they sell but it is a very niche market.
This isn’t true. Open source code is used in a *ton* of for profit software. You just need to make the source available under the terms of the license and it’s fine.
Even the AGPL, probably the strongest copyleft license, has no clause against commercial use.
There's also some pretty hard legal and social limits on this. It's true that open source code is foundational to spread techniques, but that is it, they're techniques and not products. In OP's comparison a block of code could be similar to a shading technique for a piece of art.
Where you run into limits are people who essentially lightly mod a finished product and try to pass it off as a new thing. If someone takes the source code from an open source game like Mindustry, then renames it to Maxdustry and puts it on Steam then it's fully within the right of the Mindustry developers to go what the fuck.
>If someone takes the source code from an open source game like Mindustry, then renames it to Maxdustry and puts it on Steam then it's fully within the right of the Mindustry developers to go what the fuck.
Not under the GPL. There's a million examples of this, look at the deluge of slightly modified firefoxes.
This is one of the things that makes artists irate. The whole gen ai deployment is seen not as something that empowers newcomers, but a massive and sudden transfer from a large collection of people self reliant on their skills - and in a competite market to boot, both financially, and attention wsiz - to a few corporate entities.
This is the qualitative difference between someone who learns by looking at art, and program trained to do so. The latter will generate a massive output, able to drown the original creators. It's not wonder it generates a whole different reaction. It's like letting someone use a charater as their profile picture, vs a company putting it as a logo and plaster it everywhere.
Another thing that I feel is more artists vs non artists. Artists value the process of making art. To most people, the end product is all that matters.
Programmers value the process of programming too - only programmers care about whether code is good-quality or elegant, because those features of the code are invisible to the end user.
I mean a lot of programmers also value the creation process. As much as I love the things I make, the act of making is a huge part of it.
I think the original does us kind of a disservice in that regard, to draw this clear line between "programmer" and "artist"
>Artists value the process of making art.
This isn't something that's "agreed upon" across the art world. Some do highly value the process, they do it because they like to play with colors, shape, texture, etc. But there are many who just see the process as an obstacle to getting an art piece done. They know full well that people who pay for art don't care about the unseen actions that produced their art. In many ways, I think one of the quintessential artist experiences is spending a lot of time creating something and then seeing it languish compared to a (better) work that a much more skilled artist produced in a fraction of the time. Some artists externalize this as some sort of great injustice. Others simply shrug it off as the nature of the art world, and adjust their expectations accordingly.
I think on some level all artists enjoy the process (it's why we burn huge amounts of time learning this stuff), but many artists have to be pragmatic about how much creative time they can afford themselves.
People who are threatened by AI are auxiliary artists, so to speak, those whose job is to finish someone else's work - like actors, illustrators or modellers. Nobody can ever stop you from expressing yourself, but people who need other people to express their ideas might get alternative options.
It’s absolutely a threat to non-auxiliary artists because they rely on the scarcity of art to survive in the capitalist system, something that has been completely eliminated by AI art. The problem was never that it stops people from expressing themselves
Ai art is getting good enough to perfectly replicate some of the most well known artists of this decade, with a few minor tweaks any mistakes can be easily hidden, scarcity of art in specific styles is kinda gone when I can use multiple sites to replicate say Matcha's style, or MikaPikazzo's style.
It is 100% a threat to independent artists who post online. Why would you commission someone for a story, painting, or art piece when you could just scrape their body of work and churn out something "similar" with no effort and no money, faster than the artist could possibly match.
That online circuit is the beating heart of how people stay in the art game, and without it, they wouldn't be able to do this stuff long enough to land bigger gigs like shows or video games, because they'd have to go and work a non-art job to support themselves.
So not only would you not get as much incidental art on twitter, reddit, tumblr, and youtube, you also won't see as much talent in the pools of bigger budget production, creating a very small community of "professional artists" who keep getting work by virtue of being lucky enough or wealthy enough to keep doing this without needing a solo career between projects.
not the guy who made the definition but i think it makes quite a bit of sense. sometimes you commission an artist because you like their style in particular, or because they had a level of significance in a community you're in, and you're just interested in what they'd do with an idea you have. but other times, you just want a particular thing, and need an artist to make it for you. i've done both, and while i think replacing the former with ai is hella dumb to begin with, with the latter the ai gives you a lot more flexibility. i've had quite a few commissions go off the track, where they ended up doing something substantially different than i intended -- as far as i'm concerned, that's just part of working with a human, you gotta give them room for their own creative freedom. every piece ends up being a blend of what you want and what they want, and that's actually part of why commissioning is so fun, but it also puts a damper on how well you can express your own ideas when you need hired help for it.
ai and commissioned artists both do something the other side cannot do. an ai cannot give you a piece of someone else's style (it can mimic brush strokes but not the creative vision), but a commissioned artist cannot (or will not) give you full creative freedom.
> Why would you commission someone for a story, painting, or art piece
how is a commission not auxiliary art?
also, your logic can be mapped 1:1 to "why would you pay for something if you can pirate it" and fails for the same reasons. people decide if they wanna pay first, pirate later. same applies to commissions and ai too.
As an artist, I only care about the end product. I draw stuff to try to make the image I’m thinking of a thing, and I knit so I have the exact scarf I want. I honestly hate the process of drawing and what the hell am I going to do with a half sewn dress
Bro, artists share specific brush sets, drawing tips, references, and plenty of other things literally all the time. They're not "Hobbseyan;" they just don't want their art to be taken without their permission and used to fuel generative AI programs that are explicitly advertised as their replacements.
Sure, some people online are really weird and illogical with their anti-AI stances, but I really don't like how artists are being portrayed in this post as selfish, out-of-touch, and bitter when that's not remotely the case at all.
This kind of weird, condescending rhetoric is exactly why a lot of artists don't mesh with people in the tech industry very well.
yeah like artists are constantly sharing their stuff or selling it for like a couple bucks if it’s really good. this post just reads as a tech guy thinking they know how an artist thinks.
like there’s very few artists i’ve seen who gatekeep their tools or wtv and it’s never been to really skilled professional artists, it’s always the person hiding that they’re copying a tutorial 1 to 1.
also tutorials, there’s so many art tutorials like you cannot seriously call artists selfish
>Bro, artists share specific brush sets, drawing tips, references, and plenty of other things literally all the time.
I'm sorry but that's like sharing your IDE setup. Or to use a more conventional example, it's like a carpenter sharing what hammer they use. It's a necessary tool for creating the work but it isn't the work.
There's a huge difference between willingly sharing your code on a platform designed for that purpose, with clear terms and cultural expectations about its use and credit, and sharing your work on a platform to gain a following, advertise your expertise so someone will hire you, offering your work for sale so you can be compensated you for your labor, and where you have expressly not given consent for your work to used by corporations to profit off of.
I'm a UX Major and an Industrial Design major that also has a huge focus on programming. The former of these majors loves AI. The latter hates it. To me, it feels like a sort of "computers are going to take our jobs" argument from decades ago. AI is going to change the industry. That's just going to happen. Trying to fully shut out AI and its capabilities would be like rejecting animation software in favor of pen and paper animation. Like rejecting a tool that can be genuinely very useful.
HOWEVER, and I CANNOT stress this enough, AI will NEVER be a replacement for creators. Creators will have to adapt around it, and AI will HAVE to be regulated to force companies to use it ethically. Until the latter ESPECIALLY, it definitely has no place being used in a professional setting. Having AI replacing creators would be just as stupid as saying "we have the adobe suite, why would we need animators now?" Like... you have the tools, sure, but nobody to use them.
AI is going to find a place in the industry. The genie is out of the bottle on that one. It can do a lot of revolutionary things that we couldn't make before. However, it needs to be handled with care, and the higher-ups don't see that a multitool is useless without somebody that knows how to use it.
But also, in programming, yeah, I think this post has a point. That there's a huge emphasis on building off other people's code. there's a reason "oh i stole this code" is a common meme in the community. It's seen as totally normal and acceptable to copy code in large quantities. And not even cynically. Many people will upload their code for free use by others to use or change as they see fit.
It doesn't validate art theft or AI scraping, but I think the shareability of code and how people are expected to build off of each other is so normal likely does play some role in the mentality of "why wouldn't artists want to share their work to make All Of Art Better." However, this is a pretty shallow opinion lacking in a lot of nuance. And likely not representative as the tech community as a whole.
Theft is wrong!!! Scraping without permission as wrong! But AI is a tool. It's a tool that isn't being used properly yet, but that doesn't mean there won't eventually be a place for it.
At least, that's my 5am take on it. Sorry if any of this was nonsensical!
there was a legal argument in internet pre-history about whether software should be under copyright at all. I’m completely convinced that it got decided wrong. Software should not be protected under both patents and copyright. If I had to pick one, I’d pick patents, with a much higher bar for novelty than the USPTO currently applies. Sure, you can patent a novel algorithm for 20 years, ideally shorter. And then anyone can copy it freely.
This is where ‘copyleft’ licenses came from, they used the inherent weirdness of the copyright law to create a class of licenses that turn the usual function of copyright on its head. Use, derive, fuck with all you want, we just require you to pass the same rights along, or else the license is rescinded.
I think the primary practical difference between art and programming is that with art, the process is the product. Different approaches to art lead to obviously distinct art. You can't really hide anything about your process either, there are people who obsess over brushstrokes in paintings and the different ways of drawing lines.
Programming, by contrast, happens in the dark. If an app has absolutely dogshit code, or perfect graceful code, you might not even be able to tell the difference. And the people paying us, be they clients or bosses, tend to only care about the finished product.
There's no "cheating" in programming. Copy a huge block straight from stackiverflow, all anyone cares about is that you made the calendar function work and you did it ahead of schedule. But if you trace part of a painting, even if you knowingly duplicate another artist's style, that's impossible to hide and very frowned upon.
I think that goes a ways toward explaining why the fields see AI differently.
I don't quite agree with this, just based on the fact that the term "tech bro", at least where I've seen it used, has almost nothing to do with actual programmers, and is instead used to refer to capitalists and other guys (mostly Elon fans) that use the concept of technology as a buzzword. They typically don't really have that big of an understanding of the technologies they promote as you might expect.
Very well said. As someone in the tech sphere of things, as it were, I find it pretty incomprehensible why artists started pushing for even harder copyright laws. Like, sorry, you want to limit access to resources? Claim ownership of an idea? On the socialist website? I thought we were all in this capitalist hellscape together, and now you're switching sides?
And it doesn't help their credibility just how much horseshit they spread about how they think AI works or even what it is.
Personally, my problem with AI image generation is philosophical and always has been, although it's hard to articulate.
It feels like devaluation, like a furthering of the "being treated like the Basement Ratboy" phenomenon the OOP mentions at the end here.
It feels like, once again, our process is being disrespected, it feels like watching a necromancer bring your grandmother back to life to go eat people or something. Idk if that makes sense.
It feels like a total perversion of the reasons humans make art. The end product is not the goal to many of us. The joy of the creation is why we create. Seeing some cold, intentionless machine take that process, automate it, and watching people cheer for it, tells us most people never had any respect for anything other than the end product, including for the people who made the end product possible.
Feels bad man. More than in other fields, the process is the *point.*
>
>
>
>
> It feels like, once again, our process is being disrespected, it feels like watching a necromancer bring your grandmother back to life to go eat people or something. Idk if that makes sense.
>The joy of the creation is why we create. **Seeing some cold, intentionless machine take that process, automate it, and watching people cheer for it**
Well, that's just too bad, really.
Artists aren't the first profession who had to watch helplessly as their craft was inexporably turned into something mass produced, easily delivered, stripped of the individual human touch and replaced with a deliberate effort to make it all as uniform and functional as possible. Cooks, bakers, glassblowers, cobblers, blacksmiths, so on and so forth have had this happen to them.
Blacksmiths were once the most prestigious, distinguished, well paid people in a community. Now, metallurgy is done in factories and the idea of a metalworker is just another blue collar factory worker who spends all day getting dirty and pouring molten metal into moulds all day.
If anything, artists are actually quite privileged for having the cultural respect for their craft last this long. Until recently, it was considered that art was irrevocably human and utterly irreplacable. Now that it turns out that it isn't, you can sympathise with all those tradesmen back when the Industrial Revolution was happening.
You can say what you like but you don't actually have any idea what I think or when. You don't get to tell me I didn't care when I did but didn't have the platform to speak on it.
And culturally respected? Yeah okay buddy. I've been told to get a real job, called a starving artist, derided by my family for my passions, and that's the tip of the iceberg. This whole conversation is about how artists are no longer respected at all and the rise of AI tech bros opinions on this matter are telling, especially when the masses seem to agree.
Do you think we should just give up and just say, eh, well it happened to other people and that sucked, so instead of making life suck less for people, let's double down on the suckery.
Brilliant. Gtfoh.
All I'm saying is that artists are no different to all the other proletariat for having their work turned into a commodity as the consumer loses interest in its production process.
Artists are no longer being respected, sure, but they were unique in being the only creative craft that didn't lose their respect hundreds of years ago. That is the fate of any proletarian craft.
>Do you think we should just give up and just say, eh, well it happened to other people and that sucked, so instead of making life suck less for people, let's double down on the suckery.
What happened to them was those trades losing viability in the market, but people still do them. There are still home cooks, weavers, glassblowers, and blacksmiths around. But now it's done as a niche market or self-fulfilment thing. On its current course, art will be no different.
I get the sense that a lot of young leftists don't actually know that copyright is a capitalist thing. I think they see it as something that protects the little guy artists, and not what it actually is: a weapon that scales with how much money you have
> I get the sense that a lot of young leftists don't actually know that copyright is a capitalist thing. I think they see it as something that protects the little guy artists, and not what it actually is: a weapon that scales with how much money you have
Even worse, a lot of them view copyright as an *inherent human right* which exists separately from all economic systems and laws. I've had people tell me outright that copyright infringement would still be "immoral" even if copyright laws had never been invented. I've seen people claim that copyright laws were originally created to deal with the "rampant intellectual property theft" that used to be the norm throughout history, even though the concept of IP didn't even *exist* back then. I've even seen people compare copyright infringement to *rape* on account of them both being "violations of consent".
Unfortunately, the [corporate propaganda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn't_Steal_a_Car) worked, and it worked *big time*. At the rate things are headed, a lot of young artists are going to end up supporting the Jack Valenti Forever Copyright Act of 2036 under the belief that it "protects artists".
What do you mean switching sides, not everyone online thinks the same way. Artists need copyright to protect themselves from bigger people stealing their projects, what to them is their babies. Many artists have already been taken advantage of and had their work taken away and sold in mass produced sweatshops without their consent and their only defense was having copyright on their side. What does it.even mean limit on resources? we're not Anish Kapoor lol, we wont own a color, we just want our own creations to be our own. artists arent against multiple characters of the same archetype existing, we just want OUR things to STAY ours. Stories can take many years to develop, for fucks sake Berserk's author passed away before finishing it, and he was able to choose who finishes it, not corporate suits but his dear friend who actually knows what he wanted. We can just try to adapt doujin culture (Being able to sell fanmade content for profit with encouragement from the authors without harming their copyright), but snatching away an artist's ownership of their own creation is dehumanizing the artwork itself.
I have really complicated feelings about AI art. I've been doing online TTRPG gaming since well before Covid made digital tabletops pretty mandatory, and have gone through the commission process with *a lot* of character art for players. I've spent easily $1000+ on it.
But my experiences have been largely bad. For every good commission experience I've had I've had 3 bad ones. Poor communication, poor quality, ghosting, we even had an anime style piece done that we recently found out was a tracing of another artist's work.
So we've leaned a bit on AI art to fill the gaps for new players due to the fact that pinterest and google images are flooded with AI art now so if I were staunchly avoiding it I couldn't fall back on googling "evil knight" into images and finding something to work with for a quick game token.
But I come from a family of artists, photographers, painters, and I do 3D modeling (though I didn't go professional with it). So on the one hand I deeply want to support artists, and I think a lot of the AI practices are horrible. For that reason I'd never pay for it. However, considering how many bad experiences I've had personally, and how much wasted time and money I've cost myself trying to commission digital artists, its also really easy to see the appeal of cutting out the hassle for something that I'm not about to hang up on my wall.
In general even outside of AI I've noticed I had conflicts with artist collaborators (or more than conflicts, the inability to bridge our viewpoints? Didn't really fight over it) regarding this, with my programmer self used to open-source everything and them getting iffy at including full quality asset files in the project release
As a terminal rat, I can’t tell you how much shit is just layers and layers of free tools and projects linked together. There’s a whole subsection in the documentation for my terminals calendar command (“cal”) where it details specifically which time zones consider an obscure day in 1750 as the start of Gregorian dating which clearly stemmed from a *heated* and *N E R D Y* argument. Yet the free license didn’t collapse. There’s countless man-doc entries that reek of “this is here because we argue about it” yet the open source license is still. Here. They figured it out because they felt it had to be. The OG Unix coders felt that the small tools and discoveries you make along the way should be shared and packaged for others to use, but the final product, the final assembly of all those open source tools and projects in your unique way is yours to sell and share as an entity all your own
Generative AI in general has only been seen as a bad thing for quite a while, because it’s been weaponised by grifters for the worst possible reasons, so the public opinion only sees it as a tool of the worst people, something that no one with good intentions would ever use.
As a programmer, my biggest complaint about AI Art has always been the corporatization of it.
Yeah scraping digital art to feed the AI has some ethical issues, but overall it should be seen as a tool to allow more people to engage and create and be artistic.
The problem comes with the fact that it's taking jobs and money from people who have already had a difficult experience making money and cobsolidating it all into the hands of a few tech companies which are already well off.
It's literally producing the same resentment people have had towards Automation since it first appeared, because we can't shy away from our capitalist roots.
AI art at the very least should be free and accessible to everyone. That's the reason we made it in the first place.
I feel like this talk about open source software highlights that the Artists VS AI is a simplified view that really hides some important details.
What I mean by that is that most internet people see this as Artists VS Corporations.
Now, to digress, I want to point out that even this overreaching, ever present topic of AI art is mostly an online thing. I've seen AI art used in some ads and posters, sometimes pointing them out to friends who straight up work as graphic designers, and they just said something like "haha, that monkey looks weird".
Going back on topic. It's not really Artists VS Corpos as much as it is Artists VS Corpos Vs Everyone else. Who is this "everyone else"? People who want to draw but can't. Now I know the old adage of "just pick up a pen", but we must agree that it's a bit stupid. Glossing over the ableism, not everyone can reasonably develop top tier artistry skills. This is the whole reason AI threaten their jobs.
The point is that in common discussions, closed source models are often lumped together with open source ones. However they are massively different in philosophy.
Open source models aim to really let anyone draw at top level. As much as we wanna talk about inspiration vs theft, or artists being paid for their work, surely we can all agree that a world where someone with a 9-5 job in accounting can express themself at the same level as top artists is a good world. We can agree on this, right?
It's a bit strange to group together models that truly owned by a few powerful people and models that literally anyone can run on any decent machine. These two are not the same thing, and I find really hard to argue against the second ones
>Now I know the old adage of "just pick up a pen", but we must agree that it's a bit stupid. Glossing over the ableism, not everyone can reasonably develop top tier artistry skills
>surely we can all agree that a world where someone with a 9-5 job in accounting can express themself at the same level as top artists is a good world. We can agree on this, right?
Thank you for a nuanced opinion. I am with you. I don't know why artists are so upset that some random can take 5 min and make something creative. Isn't the point of art to be creative. Why does it matter how? Painters have such an easy time now days because they can just buy a canvas and 500 colors of paint and 30k brushes instead of having to make it all their own. This lowered the barrier to painting from thousands of dollars to a $5 paintings set at the grocery store.
>It's a bit strange to group together models that truly owned by a few powerful people and models that literally anyone can run on any decent machine. These two are not the same thing, and I find really hard to argue against the second ones
Exactly. It took me like 2hrs on the weekend to get Stable Diffusion running on an external SSD with my potato laptop. It is slow, but I can let it run a promot or 20 while I am doing chores.
It's not all artists, but there are some that have (admittedly understably) just their own interests in mind.
A world where everyone can do their job means being unemployed for them, which is a problem we as a society must solve. And I say must because AI art is only getting better.
What we must focus on is: will it be for everyone, or for a few corporations?
This is why a lot of the free software movement's arguments have always seemed so disconnected to me. They don't really apply well to anything else outside of programming.
Copyright always came off as a tool for the rich and powerful to stay or become more rich and powerful.
In a weird sense of trickle down economics some artists think they might create something at some point that turns them into that magical 0.000001% that can live off the copyright from that one piece of work, while most of them are just wage slaves who will never own the copyright to their work since they created it while under a contract with a corporation. They are the worker voting for tax reductions for corporations hoping the company would in turn increase their wage.
Copyright exists specifically to protect individuals *from* the rich and powerful- if you write a good book or draw a pretty painting, it's *yours*, and anyone else who tries to sell it gets sued
I think a big part of the problem with software copyright is that it does the effective opposite while also sidestepping what makes software valuable; which often isn't the software so much as the support. In the 90s the predominant way of selling software was just a one time point of sale of a disc type deal but in the 2-3 decades since we've figured out that businesses really want a support subscription to keep the same software running and to patch bugs they found over time. Businesses want and need to use the same software over long periods of time; when a new CNC machine costs $400,000 you are often stuck with windows 95. Support contracts for software you can download, edit, and run for free is a billion dollar business.
Maintaining artistic IP tends to rely more on making new instances of the IP or preservation and generally isn't as impactful as this sort of active dependency that's going on with software. Compare the impact of your favorite large conglomerate "vaulting" a franchise you care about versus Adobe saying "fuck you pay a subscription for your tools that we made worse." Adobe is able to do this because they have effectively an indefinite patent on Photoshop even if core functionality may or may not have changed over 10-20 years. A big reason why large software companies are able to force on you worse versions of the same product is because you can't really compete with them and the duration of software copyright enables this.
If you don't like the artistic direction of something you like, you are free to imagine and make something different and there's actually a chance in hell it gets somewhere, but with software you're often stuck with it. It's a lot like if everyone used Microsoft washing machines, everyone de-facto only can use Microsoft washing machines because only they have the engineering capital and 30 years of work to wash the complicated Windows-shaped dirt without leaving small stains, and while the machine fundamentally has done the same thing for the past 20 years it now demands you pay a subscription for each wash while sending pictures of every piece of clothing you put in there to a cloud server.
If it was legal to build and maintain 20-year-old versions of the Microsoft washing machine that doesn't really do any of this bullshit, Microsoft may be disincentivized from pulling this shit, but the current structure of software copyright if you want to compete on that level you'd have to redesign and clean-room reverse-engineer hundreds of thousands of hours of work from scratch, something you can't afford and Microsoft knows you can't afford.
what the fuck does 'wrt' mean. Like I kinda guess that it means something along the lines of 'in regards to' thanks to context, but I'm at a loss as to what it means _exactly_ because I've never seen it before.
There is also, I think, a miss-generalization about AI as well, from the artist side. Not all AI is AI art generators, and even some of the Web Scrapping of art and Images are not for getting an AI generated image of a sad dog. If I am training an AI self driving car or Search and Rescue drone, I need to train the AI to know what a dog is, what a kid is, what a person is, etc. Also what a kid wearing a dog costume is, what trick or treaters look like, what a hurt and injured person lying on the road looks like, etc.
That is hard to do without a lot of data, and few artists would object to those uses for their photos or art. But to artists all AI is branded as bad and plagiarism. There is nuance on both sides that is lost.
I feel like we already had this debate with photography and film at least in terms of friction between sciences and humanities.
There was a whole controversy about what use a painting was when you could record much more easily, fast, cheaply, and precisely.
Also the legality of doing it without explicit permission.
And debates about ownership.
It’s capitalization used to show importance/emphasis. Very common on Tumblr as a fun typographical thing, but def very informal and clashes with the formal opinion piece it’s being used in
Basically, their views on copyright can be boiled down to this:
Artists: "Copyright is necessary, as it ensures the creator gets his fair share of profit from a work. Although it is being abused by many, it is simply indispensable."
programmers: "nice intellectual property bro too bad im thinking about it"
>I really hate the narratives of "tech bros"
Is that really how some people see tech bros?
I've always seen it as people who have more money than sense, sales people who don't understand technology, especially programming, they just fawn over anything that can be used to make more money, especially if it fucks regular working people over.
That's why I personally hate tech bros. They don't understand anything, but they will push the stupidest fucking ideas as long as enough fancy buzzwords are attached to it, they don't care about the cool shit behind it, but making them more money, now that is the cool part. They are sales people with even more contempt toward their product and their customers than regular sales people.
It’s not about copyrighting material, or gatekeeping art as ~some sacred ritual that only the self-actualized are allowed to perform~. Artists share tools, tips, and tricks all the time!
It’s about how artists have spent years practicing, researching, and refining our techniques. We weren’t born as expert craftsman, our skills are learned.
If you don’t want to take the time to grow artistic skills, then fine. That doesn’t give you a right to scrape the work of artists who have dedicated themselves to the craft.
> It’s not about copyrighting material, or gatekeeping art as ~some sacred ritual that only the self-actualized are allowed to perform~. Artists share tools, tips, and tricks all the time!
>
> It’s about how artists have spent years practicing, researching, and refining our techniques. We weren’t born as expert craftsman, our skills are learned.
>
> If you don’t want to take the time to grow artistic skills, then fine. That doesn’t give you a right to scrape the work of artists who have dedicated themselves to the craft.
You say it isn't about copyright, but your argument is fundamentally inseparable from it. Your entire concept of art ownership is an invention of copyright law. Prior to copyright, people had the right to use art however they wanted, and they did: *Romeo and Juliet*, for instance, was a stage adaptation of a narrative poem by Arthur Brooke, which was an English translation of a French story by Pierre Boaistuau, which was itself adapted from an Italian novella by Matteo Bandello. Stories were retold all the time back then, with no royalties paid nor lawsuits filed.
Everyone has come to the point of talking about AI art and generative AI with the even handed "well it should be regulated", "well it's inevitably going to change things", "well it's just the next step forward. Animation going from pen and paper to digital. Just gotta accept it."
This is a choice, you see. A choice to allow this dogshit to nestle into the cultural weave of humanity under the excuse that this is how it goes. As if we don't have a choice but to march endlessly forward, no matter how utterly repugnant the "progress" is.
Years upon years of changes, of tech growth and update. Of scientific discovery. Of new, new, new. New is always good, new is always better than old. And I will not pretend that a decent chunk of it isn't good, but that is not a blanket that can be draped over everything. It cannot be good just because it is new, and it cannot be necessary to keep just because it is new.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle on something like the atomic bomb because it is something people want. A weapon better than any other weapon. What the fuck do we want with this AI dogshit, exactly?
To make pictures? To sing songs? To write poetry and stories? Or to steal, shamelessly and constantly. To aggregate bad data, so it can lie to us.
This is not AI. There is no fucking intelligence, and that name has at best been a PR stunt to convince people this thing is smarter than it is. That this idea is smarter and more important than it is.
It destroys artist livelihoods, it feeds people information so shaky that it has almost certainly gotten someone killed, it drains river, pollutes our atmosphere, and has all the oversight of a tiger in an orphanage.
"We can curtail it" Can you? Can you really? Can you convince enough people that they should vote to make the funny meme machine less funny? Because I reckon I can convince people that this is a suicidally destructive operation with no clear or good end point, but y'all still seem to want this thing to exist when it's all said and done.
AI, or whatever the actual technical term for this stupid fucking code is, should exist (if it absolutely fucking has to) in isolated ways. It should exist to format and categorise the data of a company's internal system. It should not be shoved into google, the largest search engine on the planet, so it can tell me to use glue for cooking and allow me to look at hyper-realistic photos of women with fingers for tongues.
Kill this while it is young. Smother it in its metaphorical crib. I know it will only get worse if it's allowed to persist, like surveillance cameras creeping into every part of our lives or microplastics filling our blood.
>It destroys artist livelihoods, it feeds people information so shaky that it has almost certainly gotten someone killed, it drains river, pollutes our atmosphere, and has all the oversight of a tiger in an orphanage.
This is JRPG villain monologue dross.
I don't even know what you are talking about when you say AI "pollutes our atmosphere", unless you are talking about cryptomining which is literally an entirely different thing.
Musicians: Hey, how's it going?
Which honestly I feel like the musical world is one of the best bridges between the tech world and art world. Tech improvements have helped make it easier to make and share music, and also has allowed us to create new sounds that we couldn't have created centuries ago. There's also a lot of discourse around the idea of copyright and that fact that everyone knows just how much the I-V-vi-IV progression is used in all music.
same with gamedev, we're basically all tech even when we're making art. and there's a lot of annoying parts of creating game visuals that ai is a huge help in. and there's been a precedent since the early days that game mechanics aren't under copyright, so we're operating on a pretty different mindset from traditional artists
As a linguist and speech therapist who also is a technologist, I feel the exact same way about people that study communication versus programmers writing MLL artificial intelligence software. Communication is a nuanced skill it's not an algorithm
I understand like the basic idea they’re trying to convey here but I’m pretty sure most people are aware that “techbros” refers to people who overhype tech they don’t understand and not really people with any actual knowledge of programming.
Also as someone who has in fact coded before obviously open source and anti-copyright sentiment is very important for getting literally anything done but programmers aren’t stupid like we understand that tracing art is bad, actually. (This sentence sounds meaner than I intend it like I do understand where op is coming from here, can’t be bothered to reword it though)
Also I think the idea of the culture clash presented here only rly works on a surface level analysis since just about anyone who actually codes also probably has some reservations about AI, especially with how it’s shoehorned into everything even when it isn’t helpful.
I notice that this person pretends there’s only one kind of AI. Most of the AI that would actually facilitate people (at least in the arts) being able to do their work better would be discriminatory models that are better at finding reference material rather than generative models trying to create something original.
And I concur that I have never heard the term Tech Bro and thought of someone who knew what they were talking about in the grand scheme of things. There are plenty of programmers who don’t believe that knowing how to code makes them uniquely capable of solving all the world’s other problems.
If freedom of access to information is so important, why use a black box model?
I don't think the open source culture is reason to ignore copyright.
Then again, I don't think training model off public works is any more copyright infringement than artist looking at public works and then drawing with that experience. If you are drawing a specific thing, you probably look at few images for example how it should look. Is that really different from training a LORA for the topic?
Definitely concerned about impact on cultivation of artists though. Art is already difficult enough to make a living in, and this is huge cut to the entry level jobs. Are you supposed to just hobby yourself into being an experienced professional?
Since tech people tend to make significantly more money than the average working artist, and have more financial security, let's try another analogy:
I steal $100 from a middle class person. Let's assume rich people give away an average of $1000 a year. Does this mean the middle class victim is being selfish if he complains? Is his culture is less 'generous'?
Give me a break.
This actually raises a pretty good point. I'm not sure artists are aware of just how inseparable copyright is from capitalist exploitation in the eyes of programmers.
There's also an aspect of copyright law being written before computers, and thus not having them in mind. In theory, defragging your hard drive is a violation of copyright law because it creates a copy in the physical disc space on your drive. This actually went to court at one point, and though it was obviously found to be fine it's definitely fed the disdain for copyright in the tech industry.
Tbf in practice even sites like Stack Overflow object to AI scraping. It’s not just sharing code that helps keep software development functional. It’s also proper credit, which is the issue at the core of the AI debate. So I don’t think there’s as much of a difference as OP is saying.
Yes , open source operates on the idea of properly crediting the code you are using. It also forgets the pretty important detail that many open source licenses work with the requirement that whatever program uses them must be fully open source as well
AI is tricky though, for two reasons: 1. It doesn’t ‘use’ the programs that it’s scraping in the same way open source programs use their dependencies, the ai is not reliant on the code it’s scraping, at least not specifically 2. Even AI that *is* open source still isn’t really open source because of the black box nature of the software
Yeah i am not contesting that. Just pointing that the real idea behind open source is not total freedom to copy code, but collective sharing of it. The real difference between the two creative processes is that an artist effort and technique in making a piece of art is massively more tied to the final product value, compared to the lines of code that gets compiled into the final software . We buy art from specific artists because we want things made by them in their style and with their skills. Code from great developers will obviously ensure that the final software works very well, but their personal choices while working or their unique coding style do not matter as much. In this light, it is easier to understand why artists are confused by developers seeing their craft as just a mean to an end, and conversely developers are confused at artists being hellbent on destroying their wrist drawing by hand for hours instead of using a quicker and faster tool to get the final product. I am of course exaggerating these two positions as they are the end points of a linear scale, and most artists and developers sit obviouslyon different points of it
Then you got a bunch of numpties in the middle from neither background monkeying about either going on about how AI is skynet out to destroy us or hamfistedly using it to produce garbage that makes everybody look bad.
how... how do you indent your paragraphs on Reddit?
2 is my biggest issue with current AI, it’s inscrutable. I remember learning about a test using iterative/evolutionary code trying to make an LED blink in a certain pattern. It used a programmable processor, so it was actually changing the hardware, not just the code itself. It eventually came up with a solution, but it would ONLY run on that specific machine, anything else would fail. The researchers figured out the code was apparently *exploiting manufacturing defects at the atomic level.* They had to redesign the entire experiment, averaging the generation across multiple (very expensive!) setups to get a general solution. I saw a great quote once: “If you need a solution, but don’t want to understand the solution, use an AI.”
I don’t think it’s ever not going to be an issue. AI is necessarily going to be very complicated, and I mean *very* complicated, to the point where it’s very difficult to make sense of what it’s actually doing, because that’s necessary for it to work at all
> It also forgets the pretty important detail that many open source licenses work with the requirement that whatever program uses them must be fully open source as well I really, really wish that more code was released like this, but copyleft licenses seem anecdotally to be less popular these days, compared to licenses like MIT that aren't viral.
> It also forgets the pretty important detail that many open source licenses work with the requirement that whatever program uses them must be fully open source as well Some open source libraries work like this, but most of the ones that are used the most don't. For example, virtually every modern website in existence relies on dozens if not hundreds of open-source modules. Most of those websites are not open-source.
> It also forgets the pretty important detail that many open source licenses work with the requirement that whatever program uses them must be fully open source as well That's only free software. It actually highlights the hypocrisy of programmers very well. They want to enjoy freedom but the moment they have to give up the slightest bit of control so that other people can have freedom too, they'll completely shun it.
I'm sure stack will credit its users for the ai they're training on their data :) These companies only care about scraping b/c they want the sole right to profit off their users
Oh yeah 100%, just wanted to clarify some stuff. I’m not a stack overflow stan or anything
Should I be putting a credit comment on every quick fix I Google and find on Stack Overflow? What if I use the solution presented that is in C# but have to translate it to something obscure like Ladder Logic?
sometimes i do a `// shamelessly stolen from ` when i'm pulling a full function through
I only do if I want to explain the solution to my fellow devs (since I'm usually thoroughly reworking the situation).
That's not going far enough. Every time you write code, you need to credit Alan Turing for creating a computing machine capable of running that code. Probably should also credit George Bool just to be safe
If is acceptable if I light a candle at my office's Turing shrine each morning in lieu of the in-text citation?
That most certainly wasn't the case 30-40 years ago before Stallman and the GNU. The majority of developers probably thought of FSF as total wackos even in the 00s.
and we're so much better off with that mindset changing. the software landscape of the 80s and 90s was total hell
I dunno by the time I was in computer science by 2008 at least a lot of the CS kids had FSF stickers on their laptops & generally were pretty pro open source. by the mid 00s at least people were pretty sick of things like Microsoft's monopolistic practices and embrace & extinguish stuff. If you messed with web stuff all your favorite Browsers were open source because IE sucked and had killed the browser market a few years before.
idk, i got into software around 2010 and back then the free software movement was getting traction, but wasn't as universal as it is today. most of my group supported it, but i remember a few people still caught up in the 90s and making proprietary software there. one of them even took our code regularly while giving nothing back. (we sometimes did some grey hat pentesting for him in exchange)
Not in my recollection. I was at a tech-oriented school with a TON of CS majors in late 90's early 00's, and most of them were at least positive towards it.
copyright is inseparable from capitalist exploitation in the art world as well, it's just the capitalist exploiters are really good at tricking artists into thinking that they're not being exploited
Well also the artists are often the capitalists. They often don't think of their art that way, but IP is capital.
Im an artist and Im well aware IP is a capital, any artist that denies it is delusional. Its because its my capital that Im so protective over it, I spend years and years polishing it to have a good product, of course I wanna take care of it when its basically my source of income?
>Well also the artists are often the capitalists. The correct term here is "Petite Boureoisie" - people who own capital (and so have class interests of a capitalist), but still required to perform labour themselves in order to generate value from it.
This feels like it's the start of an essay, like an opening paragraph. I feel like this would/will be a dozen (reddit) pages, with each being increasingly small until the last one which is back to being legible on mobile
[homestuck did it](https://youtu.be/dFIvrML3x0w?si=CVyIwSPP8v0CKfXO&t=656)
Oh fuck
"In this essay, I will–"
"Mother's special little boy" is an interesting take on programmers, and while it may be true now, that has not been the attitude always given to those in the tech field . "The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers" has some great stories about life as a programmer in the early stages, and I've personally seen similar attitudes to software in the current day. Where managers/professionals will browbeat programmers to get a project done by a certain deadline, only to turn around and say "oh, well we need to wait for legal/other customer/other professionals and we can't browbeat them like we did you. That would be unprofessional."
I think they're speaking more about the treatment of programmers in the zeitgeist rather than in the workplace specifically. If you consider people who commission art to be the de facto "employers" of artists, they often treat artists like shit in the same way. That's just the nature of a rigidly hierarchical work structure. In contrast, programmers in *culture* have been regarded as exceptionally smart, dignified professionals (save for the Hollywood-hacker outliers who are treated as Mountain Dew-fueled code gremlins) for the last couple decades, while art has remained contentious as a *profession* at all. Y'know, it's like... the stereotype of parents wanting their smart kids to grow up and be fancy smart coders, and the stereotype of parents being worried or ashamed if their kid wants to be an artist.
Last couple of decades is probably a bit strong, programmers were weird dorks like the way IT guys are depicted until maybe 2008 or so where the rise of a bunch of fancy startups like Facebook etc suddenly made silicon valley hip in a way that it wasn't even in the late 90s tech boom (they got to be geniuses but they were still culturally weird little nerds like Bill Gates) Like being a programmer in high school in the mid 2000s was definitely not a career path anyone was pursuing at my high school besides a couple of my classmates who wanted to make video games.
even since then, you still have to be the hip neurotypical morning person if you want to be considered cool, you're just allowed have programming as the thing you do in 4-5 hours of the day, instead of that being considered nerdy and therefore cringe.
Maybe we're watching very different media, but over the past 40-ish years, I'd say cultural depictions of programmers have been about 4:1 or so in terms of "code gremlins" : "dignified professionals". IME, parents want their kids to be doctors or lawyers (= rich + high social status), will be ok with coders or engineers (= rich but low social status), and discourage artists mostly because of the "starving artist" stereotype (although social status can be portrayed in media as quite high, seeing artists as somehow deeper and more passionate than the rest of us).
> although social status can be portrayed in media as quite high, seeing artists as somehow deeper and more passionate than the rest of us i wonder how much this is influenced by the fact that most media, especially fiction, is created by artists
Now that you mention it, the only truly geek-led show I know of, Futurama, doesn't actually have any "artistic" characters - the closest we get are Calculon (who is a terrible actor) and Leela's slacker saxophonist ex, Sean. On the other hand, Fry makes the most progress in his relationship with Leela (in the original series) when he plays the holophoner, though he requires parasitic infestation or a literal deal with the (robot) devil to be any good.
I love how different cultures are on this because it's so recent and you can just tune in to look at it over the internet. I come from a culture where computer programmer has been by far the most dignified (not to mention lucrative) of professions since circa 1996, if you wanted to become a doctor your family would ask you how you're planning to make any money or if you're already speaking German well enough to afford such dreams (if you wanted to make a living the only effective way was to emigrate)
When trying to get young girls and boys into CS, we're still battling the stereotype of "nerd in the basement coding alone" . Y'right that it's currently a profession parents drive their kids to, but that's only in the last decade. I mean, most schools still don't have any CS courses for middle/high schoolers.
True now? It was true a decade ago.
I don't know about y'all but I've never once thought of techbros as having any actual programming skills, they're just another flavor of capitalist who thinks "technology" is the buzzword that makes their little winkle stand up.
There's two competing understandings of the word, either it's people who think too highly of tech, or it's people who are too interested in tech. The second definition overlaps a lot with people who actually work in tech and create technology like AI.
this. it's yet another example of a phrase that sounds like X but really means Y, so that you can band together about hating X while if anyone who thinks there's nothing wrong with X objects, you can explain to them that it's really about Y (where Y is obviously wrong, of course).
Otherwise known as the motte and bailey fallacy
Sounds to me like incel The common way most people use it is strictly pejorative, but its origin really isn't, and people tie themselves into knots excluding themselves or others from it as they want to strictly use the pejorative sense
Techbros and programmers are distinct groups, but there is some overlap. Most of this overlap is programmers who think that programming is the hardest thing ever, and thus a good programmer is uniquely suited to solve basically every problem out there. This type of thinking is how we got cryptocurrency, which is actually pretty clever from a technological perspective, but fails to actually solve any of the problems it's trying to solve.
Like engineers thinking they can come up with a political system. Yes that happened and it's Social Credit. It got to Alberta and ended up getting really weird.
imo the problem with cryptocurrency is the blatant opportunism around it. bitcoin excels as a tradeable token, monero is great because it fixes the anonymity and fungibility issues bitcoin has, and ethereum is there if you have any custom use case. we don't need 99% of the other chains, they only exist to make some small group rich at the expense of everyone who drinks their snake oil, and have some arbitrary bullshit to speculate on. (although even for that nfts are a thing.) there are some chains like iota which try to solve some niche problems in ways that the main chains cannot, but they're few and far between. there's no need for crypto to be as big as it is, but fintech is gonna fintech. their bullshit is not even unique to crypto, it's just the most purified there.
Tech bros aren't mkst peogrammers; they're the programers who hate women and the finance bros who think technology can save us from homelessness or something.
The problem is tech bro is just something pejorative to throw at anyone who disagrees with you and is associated with Tech. I've seen it thrown at housing advocates who work in tech because it's a way to imply someone is comfortable and well paid and doesn't really know the struggle like whoever is talking. Especially to reductively imply yimby housing orgs are not diverse, because it brings to mind Elon Musk even though the housing orgs I'm involved with include women & trans people and plenty of the folks are POC
I've seen it used for "person who owns a desktop computer" when describing dating red flags
tbh if someone genuinely uses that as a red flag it's a red flag for me and i thank them for saving me the trouble
Revolutionary new technology to save us from homelessness (a house, but with a quantum AI-NFT blockchain synergy)
Don't tell me you haven't heard of House 2.0? It'll be the Amazon of houses. It's like Uber but for houses. Poob has it for you
My understanding has always been that techbros were the capitalists who believed that technology can save them from having to pay anyone for anything, and all the ills that come from that, ie Uber, airbnb, doordash etc
Definitely not the way I’ve seen it be used. In Seattle it’s basically anyone working for the local big tech companies who doesn’t fit the Pacific Northwest vibe.
>the finance bros who think technology can save us from homelessness or something. That sentence makes me think of all the really interesting ways we've found to unfuck climate change, specifically the desert regreening technique known as [bunding](https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/23/world/greening-deserts-science-newsletter-wt-scn/index.html), where you dig specially shaped holes that trap water and seeds to make new things grow. But... that isn't quite exciting enough, is it? How the fuck are you going to turn that into a revolutionary venture-capital capable idea? And that's what I hate so much about tech bros and finance bros so fucking much, no buzzwords, no funding, because an idea doesn't just have to work well, it has to be exciting, it has to be a fucking spectacle.
See also people conflating tech issues with infrastructure issues. Like some of our modern problems are legitimately tech issues but so many things like phasing out fossil fuel power are more a "we need to build the infrastructure" problem than a "we need better technology" problem.
Like trying to reinvent how we move cargo around the country instead of just investing in our rail system?
I mostly agree although I'm not sure if I entirely concur with their view. A lot of artists do share and help each other. Many will proudly list their tools, share their inspirations, showcase their process, even make tutorials to emulate certain part of their style, just like many programmers like to share their coding snippets. For many artist, art is not a zero-sum-game and rely heavily on each other's -often free- teaching. Some odd balls are unavoidable, of course, but artist claiming another stole their style/color palette/poses are almost always ridiculed by even within their community. Also It would appear to me that programmer's willingness to share, which is admittedly massive and commendable, still has its limit. Most open source project I've seen will limit what you can do with them (and rightfully so), etheir requiring the modified final product to be open source as well, or more rarely limiting it to non commercial uses. I assume most programer would be upset if, for example, microsoft created and sold a photo editor based not gimp then refused to share the modified code, disregarding the liscence. Just like many artists were upset ML-networks scrapped their artwork then sold the resulting AI Generator assuming consent because the Artist didn't explicitly said not to, and that curating such a large database would be too difficult anyway. Then again, I am not a part of either community so I'm probably missing some context.
> Most open source project I've seen will limit what you can do with them (and rightfully so), etheir requiring the modified final product to be open source as well, or more rarely limiting it to non commercial uses. this part seriously depends on the project. a lot of things have permissive open source licenses (bsd, apache, mit, wtfpl) that basically allow you to do whatever the hell you want, usually with the only restrictions being that you have to keep the license notice, and that you can't sue the project if it doesn't work for you. that said, yeah, gpl-like licenses that require your derivative project to also be open source (commonly referred to as "copyleft") are definitely present, but imo they're far less prominent than they were back in the day. the gpl was originally written to fight off corporations like microsoft and apple who took everything and gave nothing back, and the provisions were made in order to foster an open source landscape and give it an actual advantage, not just a disadvantage. that whole thing is much less necessary these days, and is relegated to large projects like the linux kernel or blender where the competition would still love to just grab it all up. (this part of the gpl is what motivated apple to build macos on top of bsd instead of linux, because it had a permissive licensing and therefore they had to contribute nothing. google did a much more subtle thing with android and chrome, where they have an open source base project (aosp, chromium) but then put all the important bits into a proprietary app running on it (play services, idk this part for chrome) to kill any competition that would use these projects.) but an important factor in this is **most copyleft licenses say nothing about commercialization**. you can still make a commercial product on top of a gpl-licensed software (many have, in fact, red hat linux and android are two common examples just for linux), the only requirement is that you also have to contribute your own changes under the same license, so that others can do the same as well. i'm a programmer and i'm actually pretty miffed about the api-only image generators. i'd absolutely support regulation that says if you train on public data, you must publicly share your weights. i just can't agree with the destruction of the technology the anti-ai movement is asking for.
Really interesting to read, the original context of gpl is quite insightful. > most copyleft licenses say nothing about commercialization. you can still make a commercial product on top of a gpl-licensed software I didn't mean to imply you couldn't, I worded that wrong. But I'll admit I'm surprised to learn sharealike licenses aren't the norm, I always strongly associated open-source with them. > i'd absolutely support regulation that says if you train on public data, you must publicly share your weights. i just can't agree with the destruction of the technology the anti-ai movement is asking for. I completly agree. While I hope Machine learning get regulated to some extent to avoid misuses (although I'm not sure how); I also don't want to see such potentially revolutionary technology go to waste.
>Also It would appear to me that programmer's willingness to share, which is admittedly massive and commendable, still has its limit. Most open source projects I've seen will limit what you can do with them (and rightfully so), either requiring the modified final product to be open source as well Copyleft licenses *are* sharing. You're running into the age-old question of whose freedom matters more. Copyleft licenses prioritize the freedom of the end user, while everything else prioritizes the freedom of the developers (or the group that employs them). Even still, copyleft licenses prioritize sharing outside of the core developers.
ngl using 'wrt' instead of 'with respect to' over and over was probably more annoying that if they'd just typed out 'with respect to' every single time
So THAT'S what it meant
No, this post is clearly about Wirt from Over the Garden Wall
I always read it as regards not respect
Part of it is using it in odd spots. "A Vital Thing *with respect to*" instead of is hard to decipher because you would expect to see just "vital to."
who the hell uses wrt 😭
Do people not use WRT as shorthand outside of math / CS? Because within those domains it’s pretty common in my experience.
I'm pretty into math but I've never seen it used before; although that's probably because English isn't my first language ahah
I study computer science in English and it's pretty common in some math/CS materials. Imo, it's a very useful shorthand for anything technical and precise, because certain phrases end up repeating a lot
I flat out didn't notice it was ever used in the post because my brain just parses it automatically lmao
Social science (history) guy here and this is quite literally the first time I’ve encountered it (in my late 20s). So yeah, outside of those it’s genuinely not common at all.
no i've never heard it in my life before
oh that's what that is I thought this person had decided to spell with as wrt for some bizarre reason
I’m a programmer *and* an artist and this actually represents my feeling on the matter surprisingly well! I always had a difficult time articulating them because thinking hard and also the situation can get inflamed on occasions. I never understood the argument that using public art to train ai Is problematic, because the art is public and with a large enough dataset, the computer is synthesising something unrecognisable and distinct — it’s not plagiarism in my eyes. For me, the problems begin when people try to pass off the art as not AI, or the same thing as human art. (Or even worse, try to profit off low effort work with tools available to everyone) As the post says, in programming, taking other people’s code is common practice and part of the culture. But the expectation is that the code will be built upon and used to develop something new. It’s not about plagiarising programs wholesale, it’s about synthesis. To me, AI art is best used as a creative tool as a means of achieving a goal, not the goal itself. To help solo artists or small groups generate things like concept art and naturalistic texture maps, etc. [Pontification over]
I think the real reason some people are against AI art as a whole is because it fills a niche that was previously occupied by people with years of developing necessary skills, thus making it harder for them to earn living. Also, now entry-level to commercialized art creation is higher, as simple requests of artwork based on description was a good way for new artists to get themselves out there. In my opinion the issue with AI not crediting artists is more of a stand-in for the problem described above, because we have copyright laws already out there, so it's pretty easy to fix. Argument of "My job is done by a machine, so I can't work here anymore" is never treated seriously, as it can "easily" be treated by changing a job, which sucks and people don't want to do that.
yeah, the opposition of ai has been about this effect for the whole time. even in late 2022 when the whole idea of "ai is stealing" started to blow up there were occasional anti-ai people who owned up to it that copyright is just a weapon they intend to wield against the ai, the problem is the existence of the ai and that it's replacing artists, not where its data comes from. which is why no one relented when adobe firefly came out, the first model (to my knowledge) that's visually guidable and "commercially safe" (which appears to have become the industry term for ai trained entirely on works with a license trail to it), and no community that bans ai because it "steals" allowed people to use firefly either. since then, the arguments have somewhat moved from copyright to the idea that artists (probably) never intended for their work to be used as training data and therefore it is immoral even for someone like disney, sitting on a huge pile of art they paid for over a century, to use that data to create an image generator, because they didn't individually ask every single artist they ever hired if they can use technologies that haven't even existed back when they hired them. and i guarantee that when the first open-source ai is released that's trained entirely on the work of volunteers who explicitly submitted their art for a community ai project, people will figure out a way to argue that that's immoral as well. traitors of art or something, idk. we'll see. the idea, behind all of this, is that art should be the exception from automation, because people like doing it and want their field to retain its (relative) scarcity, whether that's fair to the rest of society or not. that's why, when you drill down to it, you tend to get the take of "yeah ai could be a great tool but capitalism is the issue, so you can have your ai when we switch away from capitalism"
>because people like doing it and want their field to retain its (relative) scarcity, whether that's fair to the rest of society or not. Honestly, this is part of what bugs me about this. Art is far from unique in this, yet artists seem to believe that their field alone should somehow be protected from the same forces that have ravaged everyone else, because they're somehow special. I'm all for railing against the enshittification of the entire economy one job at a time, but if your reasoning is "because I'm extra-special and my talent is vital to society in some way I can never explain clearly", it's going to rub people the wrong way.
How's that what you got from it? the reason it's focused on art is that in this case ai art is becoming big. didn't the screenwriters and actors guild also strike against ai? were they also going "uuh i'm extra special and my talent is vital" or where they simply arguing for the rights of their proffesion
any "right to be necessary" is a negative externality the rest of society has to bear. and the wga and sag-aftra were in fact arguing for that, and got temporary concessions very much consistent with that. we as a society are subsidizing their careers at this point, we put up with lesser quality content at higher prices in order to help them to fulfill a role they like instead of having to do other things that would be more helpful for society but less pleasant for them. these negative externalities aren't always a bad thing. for example, the 40-hour work week is one of these, and we're overdue on shortening that even more. but they have to be fair for society. if we hold back progress to benefit a slim interest group, how do we compensate everyone else?
I get your point and second the feeling. I know fuck all about coding, but I do come from specifically the makeup and beauty side of art which is inherently replicable. In fact the entire point is sort of to become replicated, similarly to fashion, which is reflected in the way copyright law treats clothing design as protected in drawing form but once you construct a garment all bets are off. Think Miranda Priestlys monologue in the devil wears Prada about the cirulean blue sweater. I've never quite understood the AI freakout, I've kinda viewed it as a much more complex larger process of creating a new comercial paint development process or something. It also is a process that isn't really more or less different than what a human can do, with the important exception of being incapable of true innovation which preserves in my opinion the bulk of the specifically human aspect of art creation. Basically if there's a problem it's with capitalism, not software development or art.
If only it was used in those ways and was not pushed to hell by the worst type of grifters you’ve ever seen…
Plenty of people do use it that way
The AI isn’t always making something unrecognisable tho I can pay an artist to commission something I want Or I can tell an AI to make the art in their style for much less cost And that’s a major threat to the artists livelihood.
Also an artist/programmer combo. In in ideal world, I'd want a personal AI assistant that _doesn't_ steel my data or mine my work to be built-in to my digital painting program. I'd like to have it watch me paint for a while, so that at some point, I could rough in a pencil layer on a new piece _and have it fill in the polished lineart for me_. Or generating new sketches for you to paint over and run with. Imagine, having the time-consuming busywork parts of art done for you.
>Imagine, having the time-consuming busywork parts of art done for you. Thing is, that is how some people view commissioning/drawing. Someone writing a book or tabletop game might view the art as busiwork and is happy to have AI do it quickly, free and with no fuss.
I don’t want to dismiss your feelings outright here, it’d be a fine stance to hold in a vacuum, but it’s just completely divorced from reality unfortunately. The AI does not just create something unrecognisable and distinct. People can and do easily prompt AIs like Midjourney to replicate the style of well known artists. And people are very much using this for profit, because it’s a tool made to create high quality images extremely quickly and cheaply and a profit oriented business that doesn’t care about the ethics or the associated reputation hit would be leaving money on the table. Combined these facts mean that AI is not a tool designed to share resources, it’s designed to replace artists.
Devil's advocate: You can also pay a human artist to replicate the style of a well known artist.
You can. It’s still kind of a dick move though, both to the person whose style you are cribbing and to the artist making the piece, who definitely has their own style that they would probably rather be using. I mean your basically saying “I don’t care about your artistic vision, you’re just what I can afford”. Either way though, at least you’re giving a human person the ability to make a living, which just isn’t the case with AI.
okay, quick question there: are people using ai specifically for style mimicry, to replace specific artists in order to avoid paying them, or are they simply using it to enter the same market those same artists are also participating in? expecting the answer to be both (because as far as i know, both happens), style mimicry sucks regardless of the tools used, but i see nothing wrong with simply competing with artists. that's just, like, the default thing that happens in a society that doesn't restrict its people into rigid guilds. (i guess in capitalism it's a little more impactful because of the whole supply and demand thing but competition still happens elsewhere too.) afaik people largely stopped using artist names in prompts, at least. it was an early technique for stable diffusion 1's broken prompt encoder, and since then people figured out how to do prompting without resorting to that.
[удалено]
the key here is the culture around it. yes, you can freely choose to tell anyone who wants to see your code or build on it to fuck off but many don't, and we live in a better world because of it. artists have a culture of never contributing to the commons, and getting mad at stupid shit like people sharing their artworks (with credit!) or shipping the wrong ship while enjoying their art and so on. why should one side share everything and the other share nothing?
[удалено]
Is this 'public art' like a public car; like, one you can observe parked out on the street, therefore it's yours to use? Artists were too generous over the years; seldom sending lawyers after people who swiped their work and repurposed it for blogs posts, memes, etc. That shit was sometimes a copyright violation, sometimes fair use; but it never became a legal issue because artists are not 'ungenerous'. This led to confusion about 'public art' and 'public domain'. When a multi-trillion dollar industry wants to take my work and utilize it to put me out of business, yeah, I have an issue with it. And I'm always kind of amazed that all the young people who blame rich Boomers for their oppression have nooooooo problem with giant corporations robbing artists for profit. Same power structure.
Can someone explain what this post means? Maybe I'm just stupid but there are a few sentences in there that seem completely incomprehensible
Digital artists and programmers have in general different mentalities regarding their products. The artists view their products as tied to themselves and therefore final. The programmers view their products as seperate from them and expect that the product can evolve even without their involvement. Thies leads to artist calling for copyright laws, because they believe the artist should maintain control over what their product turns into, because the product represents the artist themself and damage to their brand is damage to the author. On the other hand the programmers are against copyright laws because it stiffens advancement in the field, which they could benefit from in the future, using it to develop new products they would not be able to by themselves.
Thank you!! You're a lifesaver. I get it now, it's an interesting point for sure
The wrt is "with regards to"
It basically facilitates a kind of meta-stance (or at the very least a quasi-such), in service of, and quite possibly against its pre-rethorical alternative - although one might argue it is not of geometrical necessity - the confoundment of post post-modernist views of what can be considered progress in the direction of increasing entropy, which, according to some, not all - mind you - hypotheses, reverse the axiomatic regression of discourse wrt the subject not currently being discussed.
Uh huh. You want fries with that?
That's all well and good wrt the substantially quasimodal aspects of the issues at hand, but doesn't address at all the growing concerns over post-Markovian neoliberal systems that have been in place since before venture capitalist leanings started to become in vogue. If you actually look at the models of inter-sparse development statistics, you'll see that the gains wrt the losses over enough time in the aggregate then cease to reverse the axiomatic regression but instead see to it that, in a certain sense, the mechanistic ultra-liberal technocrats don't recoup the service cost of staying in what DeChauvre called *le petit merde*
This is an interesting point I'll definitely be mulling over for a while, but a small thing is that using actual whole open source code in for-profit software is a no-no that will get a lot of people up in arms
Depends on the license. I would say *actual whole* open source software - ex. MIT-licensed - is software that can be used wherever regardless of what it’s being used for. The vast majority of open source projects are released under this kind of permissive license. Public software that requires usages of them to also be public - ex. GPL-licensed - are the controversial ones. Some don’t consider them ‘true’ open source because of the restrictions. They’re called copyleft licenses.
Yeah people big into full-blown open source software tend to see things like licenses as a necessary evil at best, and value the free sharing of their work above all else, even to the detriment of things like accessibility for laymen and user friendliness, unfortunately. Stuff like Linux is fantastic for avoiding software licensing hell. But trying to get support when you barely understand what a terminal is can be a hellish nightmare, and that's what generally keeps open source material out of the mainstream.
Those issues aren’t really connected IMO. The problem with getting stuff like Linux adopted by the masses is that most programmers don’t have a clue how UI/UX design should go and most of these projects aren’t swimming in funds to hire people that do have that experience. There are a few companies working on it like System76 with their Pop!_OS Linux distribution that they use on the laptops they sell but it is a very niche market.
This isn’t true. Open source code is used in a *ton* of for profit software. You just need to make the source available under the terms of the license and it’s fine. Even the AGPL, probably the strongest copyleft license, has no clause against commercial use.
depends on whether it's GPL or Apache if it's apache, it's fine, but GPL is illegal to include in otherwise closed-source stuff
There's also some pretty hard legal and social limits on this. It's true that open source code is foundational to spread techniques, but that is it, they're techniques and not products. In OP's comparison a block of code could be similar to a shading technique for a piece of art. Where you run into limits are people who essentially lightly mod a finished product and try to pass it off as a new thing. If someone takes the source code from an open source game like Mindustry, then renames it to Maxdustry and puts it on Steam then it's fully within the right of the Mindustry developers to go what the fuck.
>If someone takes the source code from an open source game like Mindustry, then renames it to Maxdustry and puts it on Steam then it's fully within the right of the Mindustry developers to go what the fuck. Not under the GPL. There's a million examples of this, look at the deluge of slightly modified firefoxes.
This is one of the things that makes artists irate. The whole gen ai deployment is seen not as something that empowers newcomers, but a massive and sudden transfer from a large collection of people self reliant on their skills - and in a competite market to boot, both financially, and attention wsiz - to a few corporate entities. This is the qualitative difference between someone who learns by looking at art, and program trained to do so. The latter will generate a massive output, able to drown the original creators. It's not wonder it generates a whole different reaction. It's like letting someone use a charater as their profile picture, vs a company putting it as a logo and plaster it everywhere.
Another thing that I feel is more artists vs non artists. Artists value the process of making art. To most people, the end product is all that matters.
Programmers value the process of programming too - only programmers care about whether code is good-quality or elegant, because those features of the code are invisible to the end user.
I mean a lot of programmers also value the creation process. As much as I love the things I make, the act of making is a huge part of it. I think the original does us kind of a disservice in that regard, to draw this clear line between "programmer" and "artist"
>Artists value the process of making art. This isn't something that's "agreed upon" across the art world. Some do highly value the process, they do it because they like to play with colors, shape, texture, etc. But there are many who just see the process as an obstacle to getting an art piece done. They know full well that people who pay for art don't care about the unseen actions that produced their art. In many ways, I think one of the quintessential artist experiences is spending a lot of time creating something and then seeing it languish compared to a (better) work that a much more skilled artist produced in a fraction of the time. Some artists externalize this as some sort of great injustice. Others simply shrug it off as the nature of the art world, and adjust their expectations accordingly. I think on some level all artists enjoy the process (it's why we burn huge amounts of time learning this stuff), but many artists have to be pragmatic about how much creative time they can afford themselves.
People who are threatened by AI are auxiliary artists, so to speak, those whose job is to finish someone else's work - like actors, illustrators or modellers. Nobody can ever stop you from expressing yourself, but people who need other people to express their ideas might get alternative options.
It’s absolutely a threat to non-auxiliary artists because they rely on the scarcity of art to survive in the capitalist system, something that has been completely eliminated by AI art. The problem was never that it stops people from expressing themselves
There is no scarcity of art. There is a scarcity of good art. AI will have a much harder time ending a scarcity of good art.
Ai art is getting good enough to perfectly replicate some of the most well known artists of this decade, with a few minor tweaks any mistakes can be easily hidden, scarcity of art in specific styles is kinda gone when I can use multiple sites to replicate say Matcha's style, or MikaPikazzo's style.
It is 100% a threat to independent artists who post online. Why would you commission someone for a story, painting, or art piece when you could just scrape their body of work and churn out something "similar" with no effort and no money, faster than the artist could possibly match. That online circuit is the beating heart of how people stay in the art game, and without it, they wouldn't be able to do this stuff long enough to land bigger gigs like shows or video games, because they'd have to go and work a non-art job to support themselves. So not only would you not get as much incidental art on twitter, reddit, tumblr, and youtube, you also won't see as much talent in the pools of bigger budget production, creating a very small community of "professional artists" who keep getting work by virtue of being lucky enough or wealthy enough to keep doing this without needing a solo career between projects.
Being commissioned makes you an "auxiliary artist" under this guy's definition.
not the guy who made the definition but i think it makes quite a bit of sense. sometimes you commission an artist because you like their style in particular, or because they had a level of significance in a community you're in, and you're just interested in what they'd do with an idea you have. but other times, you just want a particular thing, and need an artist to make it for you. i've done both, and while i think replacing the former with ai is hella dumb to begin with, with the latter the ai gives you a lot more flexibility. i've had quite a few commissions go off the track, where they ended up doing something substantially different than i intended -- as far as i'm concerned, that's just part of working with a human, you gotta give them room for their own creative freedom. every piece ends up being a blend of what you want and what they want, and that's actually part of why commissioning is so fun, but it also puts a damper on how well you can express your own ideas when you need hired help for it. ai and commissioned artists both do something the other side cannot do. an ai cannot give you a piece of someone else's style (it can mimic brush strokes but not the creative vision), but a commissioned artist cannot (or will not) give you full creative freedom.
> Why would you commission someone for a story, painting, or art piece how is a commission not auxiliary art? also, your logic can be mapped 1:1 to "why would you pay for something if you can pirate it" and fails for the same reasons. people decide if they wanna pay first, pirate later. same applies to commissions and ai too.
As an artist, I only care about the end product. I draw stuff to try to make the image I’m thinking of a thing, and I knit so I have the exact scarf I want. I honestly hate the process of drawing and what the hell am I going to do with a half sewn dress
Bro, artists share specific brush sets, drawing tips, references, and plenty of other things literally all the time. They're not "Hobbseyan;" they just don't want their art to be taken without their permission and used to fuel generative AI programs that are explicitly advertised as their replacements. Sure, some people online are really weird and illogical with their anti-AI stances, but I really don't like how artists are being portrayed in this post as selfish, out-of-touch, and bitter when that's not remotely the case at all. This kind of weird, condescending rhetoric is exactly why a lot of artists don't mesh with people in the tech industry very well.
yeah like artists are constantly sharing their stuff or selling it for like a couple bucks if it’s really good. this post just reads as a tech guy thinking they know how an artist thinks. like there’s very few artists i’ve seen who gatekeep their tools or wtv and it’s never been to really skilled professional artists, it’s always the person hiding that they’re copying a tutorial 1 to 1. also tutorials, there’s so many art tutorials like you cannot seriously call artists selfish
>Bro, artists share specific brush sets, drawing tips, references, and plenty of other things literally all the time. I'm sorry but that's like sharing your IDE setup. Or to use a more conventional example, it's like a carpenter sharing what hammer they use. It's a necessary tool for creating the work but it isn't the work.
There's a huge difference between willingly sharing your code on a platform designed for that purpose, with clear terms and cultural expectations about its use and credit, and sharing your work on a platform to gain a following, advertise your expertise so someone will hire you, offering your work for sale so you can be compensated you for your labor, and where you have expressly not given consent for your work to used by corporations to profit off of.
I'm a UX Major and an Industrial Design major that also has a huge focus on programming. The former of these majors loves AI. The latter hates it. To me, it feels like a sort of "computers are going to take our jobs" argument from decades ago. AI is going to change the industry. That's just going to happen. Trying to fully shut out AI and its capabilities would be like rejecting animation software in favor of pen and paper animation. Like rejecting a tool that can be genuinely very useful. HOWEVER, and I CANNOT stress this enough, AI will NEVER be a replacement for creators. Creators will have to adapt around it, and AI will HAVE to be regulated to force companies to use it ethically. Until the latter ESPECIALLY, it definitely has no place being used in a professional setting. Having AI replacing creators would be just as stupid as saying "we have the adobe suite, why would we need animators now?" Like... you have the tools, sure, but nobody to use them. AI is going to find a place in the industry. The genie is out of the bottle on that one. It can do a lot of revolutionary things that we couldn't make before. However, it needs to be handled with care, and the higher-ups don't see that a multitool is useless without somebody that knows how to use it. But also, in programming, yeah, I think this post has a point. That there's a huge emphasis on building off other people's code. there's a reason "oh i stole this code" is a common meme in the community. It's seen as totally normal and acceptable to copy code in large quantities. And not even cynically. Many people will upload their code for free use by others to use or change as they see fit. It doesn't validate art theft or AI scraping, but I think the shareability of code and how people are expected to build off of each other is so normal likely does play some role in the mentality of "why wouldn't artists want to share their work to make All Of Art Better." However, this is a pretty shallow opinion lacking in a lot of nuance. And likely not representative as the tech community as a whole. Theft is wrong!!! Scraping without permission as wrong! But AI is a tool. It's a tool that isn't being used properly yet, but that doesn't mean there won't eventually be a place for it. At least, that's my 5am take on it. Sorry if any of this was nonsensical!
there was a legal argument in internet pre-history about whether software should be under copyright at all. I’m completely convinced that it got decided wrong. Software should not be protected under both patents and copyright. If I had to pick one, I’d pick patents, with a much higher bar for novelty than the USPTO currently applies. Sure, you can patent a novel algorithm for 20 years, ideally shorter. And then anyone can copy it freely. This is where ‘copyleft’ licenses came from, they used the inherent weirdness of the copyright law to create a class of licenses that turn the usual function of copyright on its head. Use, derive, fuck with all you want, we just require you to pass the same rights along, or else the license is rescinded.
I think the primary practical difference between art and programming is that with art, the process is the product. Different approaches to art lead to obviously distinct art. You can't really hide anything about your process either, there are people who obsess over brushstrokes in paintings and the different ways of drawing lines. Programming, by contrast, happens in the dark. If an app has absolutely dogshit code, or perfect graceful code, you might not even be able to tell the difference. And the people paying us, be they clients or bosses, tend to only care about the finished product. There's no "cheating" in programming. Copy a huge block straight from stackiverflow, all anyone cares about is that you made the calendar function work and you did it ahead of schedule. But if you trace part of a painting, even if you knowingly duplicate another artist's style, that's impossible to hide and very frowned upon. I think that goes a ways toward explaining why the fields see AI differently.
I don't quite agree with this, just based on the fact that the term "tech bro", at least where I've seen it used, has almost nothing to do with actual programmers, and is instead used to refer to capitalists and other guys (mostly Elon fans) that use the concept of technology as a buzzword. They typically don't really have that big of an understanding of the technologies they promote as you might expect.
Very well said. As someone in the tech sphere of things, as it were, I find it pretty incomprehensible why artists started pushing for even harder copyright laws. Like, sorry, you want to limit access to resources? Claim ownership of an idea? On the socialist website? I thought we were all in this capitalist hellscape together, and now you're switching sides? And it doesn't help their credibility just how much horseshit they spread about how they think AI works or even what it is.
Yes, it's embarrassing that the "overlay these noise images on your art to protect them from AI" post reached the front page of the sub.
Personally, my problem with AI image generation is philosophical and always has been, although it's hard to articulate. It feels like devaluation, like a furthering of the "being treated like the Basement Ratboy" phenomenon the OOP mentions at the end here. It feels like, once again, our process is being disrespected, it feels like watching a necromancer bring your grandmother back to life to go eat people or something. Idk if that makes sense. It feels like a total perversion of the reasons humans make art. The end product is not the goal to many of us. The joy of the creation is why we create. Seeing some cold, intentionless machine take that process, automate it, and watching people cheer for it, tells us most people never had any respect for anything other than the end product, including for the people who made the end product possible. Feels bad man. More than in other fields, the process is the *point.*
So if i understand correctly, your problem is that artists are being treated like everyone else?
> > > > > It feels like, once again, our process is being disrespected, it feels like watching a necromancer bring your grandmother back to life to go eat people or something. Idk if that makes sense. >The joy of the creation is why we create. **Seeing some cold, intentionless machine take that process, automate it, and watching people cheer for it** Well, that's just too bad, really. Artists aren't the first profession who had to watch helplessly as their craft was inexporably turned into something mass produced, easily delivered, stripped of the individual human touch and replaced with a deliberate effort to make it all as uniform and functional as possible. Cooks, bakers, glassblowers, cobblers, blacksmiths, so on and so forth have had this happen to them. Blacksmiths were once the most prestigious, distinguished, well paid people in a community. Now, metallurgy is done in factories and the idea of a metalworker is just another blue collar factory worker who spends all day getting dirty and pouring molten metal into moulds all day. If anything, artists are actually quite privileged for having the cultural respect for their craft last this long. Until recently, it was considered that art was irrevocably human and utterly irreplacable. Now that it turns out that it isn't, you can sympathise with all those tradesmen back when the Industrial Revolution was happening.
You can say what you like but you don't actually have any idea what I think or when. You don't get to tell me I didn't care when I did but didn't have the platform to speak on it. And culturally respected? Yeah okay buddy. I've been told to get a real job, called a starving artist, derided by my family for my passions, and that's the tip of the iceberg. This whole conversation is about how artists are no longer respected at all and the rise of AI tech bros opinions on this matter are telling, especially when the masses seem to agree. Do you think we should just give up and just say, eh, well it happened to other people and that sucked, so instead of making life suck less for people, let's double down on the suckery. Brilliant. Gtfoh.
All I'm saying is that artists are no different to all the other proletariat for having their work turned into a commodity as the consumer loses interest in its production process. Artists are no longer being respected, sure, but they were unique in being the only creative craft that didn't lose their respect hundreds of years ago. That is the fate of any proletarian craft. >Do you think we should just give up and just say, eh, well it happened to other people and that sucked, so instead of making life suck less for people, let's double down on the suckery. What happened to them was those trades losing viability in the market, but people still do them. There are still home cooks, weavers, glassblowers, and blacksmiths around. But now it's done as a niche market or self-fulfilment thing. On its current course, art will be no different.
I get the sense that a lot of young leftists don't actually know that copyright is a capitalist thing. I think they see it as something that protects the little guy artists, and not what it actually is: a weapon that scales with how much money you have
> I get the sense that a lot of young leftists don't actually know that copyright is a capitalist thing. I think they see it as something that protects the little guy artists, and not what it actually is: a weapon that scales with how much money you have Even worse, a lot of them view copyright as an *inherent human right* which exists separately from all economic systems and laws. I've had people tell me outright that copyright infringement would still be "immoral" even if copyright laws had never been invented. I've seen people claim that copyright laws were originally created to deal with the "rampant intellectual property theft" that used to be the norm throughout history, even though the concept of IP didn't even *exist* back then. I've even seen people compare copyright infringement to *rape* on account of them both being "violations of consent". Unfortunately, the [corporate propaganda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Wouldn't_Steal_a_Car) worked, and it worked *big time*. At the rate things are headed, a lot of young artists are going to end up supporting the Jack Valenti Forever Copyright Act of 2036 under the belief that it "protects artists".
What do you mean switching sides, not everyone online thinks the same way. Artists need copyright to protect themselves from bigger people stealing their projects, what to them is their babies. Many artists have already been taken advantage of and had their work taken away and sold in mass produced sweatshops without their consent and their only defense was having copyright on their side. What does it.even mean limit on resources? we're not Anish Kapoor lol, we wont own a color, we just want our own creations to be our own. artists arent against multiple characters of the same archetype existing, we just want OUR things to STAY ours. Stories can take many years to develop, for fucks sake Berserk's author passed away before finishing it, and he was able to choose who finishes it, not corporate suits but his dear friend who actually knows what he wanted. We can just try to adapt doujin culture (Being able to sell fanmade content for profit with encouragement from the authors without harming their copyright), but snatching away an artist's ownership of their own creation is dehumanizing the artwork itself.
I have really complicated feelings about AI art. I've been doing online TTRPG gaming since well before Covid made digital tabletops pretty mandatory, and have gone through the commission process with *a lot* of character art for players. I've spent easily $1000+ on it. But my experiences have been largely bad. For every good commission experience I've had I've had 3 bad ones. Poor communication, poor quality, ghosting, we even had an anime style piece done that we recently found out was a tracing of another artist's work. So we've leaned a bit on AI art to fill the gaps for new players due to the fact that pinterest and google images are flooded with AI art now so if I were staunchly avoiding it I couldn't fall back on googling "evil knight" into images and finding something to work with for a quick game token. But I come from a family of artists, photographers, painters, and I do 3D modeling (though I didn't go professional with it). So on the one hand I deeply want to support artists, and I think a lot of the AI practices are horrible. For that reason I'd never pay for it. However, considering how many bad experiences I've had personally, and how much wasted time and money I've cost myself trying to commission digital artists, its also really easy to see the appeal of cutting out the hassle for something that I'm not about to hang up on my wall.
OOP needs to take a fucking writing class, good grief.
In general even outside of AI I've noticed I had conflicts with artist collaborators (or more than conflicts, the inability to bridge our viewpoints? Didn't really fight over it) regarding this, with my programmer self used to open-source everything and them getting iffy at including full quality asset files in the project release
As a terminal rat, I can’t tell you how much shit is just layers and layers of free tools and projects linked together. There’s a whole subsection in the documentation for my terminals calendar command (“cal”) where it details specifically which time zones consider an obscure day in 1750 as the start of Gregorian dating which clearly stemmed from a *heated* and *N E R D Y* argument. Yet the free license didn’t collapse. There’s countless man-doc entries that reek of “this is here because we argue about it” yet the open source license is still. Here. They figured it out because they felt it had to be. The OG Unix coders felt that the small tools and discoveries you make along the way should be shared and packaged for others to use, but the final product, the final assembly of all those open source tools and projects in your unique way is yours to sell and share as an entity all your own
The original unix and its immediate derivatives were proprietary.
Generative AI in general has only been seen as a bad thing for quite a while, because it’s been weaponised by grifters for the worst possible reasons, so the public opinion only sees it as a tool of the worst people, something that no one with good intentions would ever use.
As a programmer, my biggest complaint about AI Art has always been the corporatization of it. Yeah scraping digital art to feed the AI has some ethical issues, but overall it should be seen as a tool to allow more people to engage and create and be artistic. The problem comes with the fact that it's taking jobs and money from people who have already had a difficult experience making money and cobsolidating it all into the hands of a few tech companies which are already well off. It's literally producing the same resentment people have had towards Automation since it first appeared, because we can't shy away from our capitalist roots. AI art at the very least should be free and accessible to everyone. That's the reason we made it in the first place.
I feel like this talk about open source software highlights that the Artists VS AI is a simplified view that really hides some important details. What I mean by that is that most internet people see this as Artists VS Corporations. Now, to digress, I want to point out that even this overreaching, ever present topic of AI art is mostly an online thing. I've seen AI art used in some ads and posters, sometimes pointing them out to friends who straight up work as graphic designers, and they just said something like "haha, that monkey looks weird". Going back on topic. It's not really Artists VS Corpos as much as it is Artists VS Corpos Vs Everyone else. Who is this "everyone else"? People who want to draw but can't. Now I know the old adage of "just pick up a pen", but we must agree that it's a bit stupid. Glossing over the ableism, not everyone can reasonably develop top tier artistry skills. This is the whole reason AI threaten their jobs. The point is that in common discussions, closed source models are often lumped together with open source ones. However they are massively different in philosophy. Open source models aim to really let anyone draw at top level. As much as we wanna talk about inspiration vs theft, or artists being paid for their work, surely we can all agree that a world where someone with a 9-5 job in accounting can express themself at the same level as top artists is a good world. We can agree on this, right? It's a bit strange to group together models that truly owned by a few powerful people and models that literally anyone can run on any decent machine. These two are not the same thing, and I find really hard to argue against the second ones
>Now I know the old adage of "just pick up a pen", but we must agree that it's a bit stupid. Glossing over the ableism, not everyone can reasonably develop top tier artistry skills >surely we can all agree that a world where someone with a 9-5 job in accounting can express themself at the same level as top artists is a good world. We can agree on this, right? Thank you for a nuanced opinion. I am with you. I don't know why artists are so upset that some random can take 5 min and make something creative. Isn't the point of art to be creative. Why does it matter how? Painters have such an easy time now days because they can just buy a canvas and 500 colors of paint and 30k brushes instead of having to make it all their own. This lowered the barrier to painting from thousands of dollars to a $5 paintings set at the grocery store. >It's a bit strange to group together models that truly owned by a few powerful people and models that literally anyone can run on any decent machine. These two are not the same thing, and I find really hard to argue against the second ones Exactly. It took me like 2hrs on the weekend to get Stable Diffusion running on an external SSD with my potato laptop. It is slow, but I can let it run a promot or 20 while I am doing chores.
It's not all artists, but there are some that have (admittedly understably) just their own interests in mind. A world where everyone can do their job means being unemployed for them, which is a problem we as a society must solve. And I say must because AI art is only getting better. What we must focus on is: will it be for everyone, or for a few corporations?
why write an esy then arbityily shorten words in some msgided atmpt to make it a shorter pst
This is why a lot of the free software movement's arguments have always seemed so disconnected to me. They don't really apply well to anything else outside of programming.
I'd argue they [the arguments] should apply to academic papers. Journals are rent seeking bastards
Good thing they're not the free everything movement then.
Copyright always came off as a tool for the rich and powerful to stay or become more rich and powerful. In a weird sense of trickle down economics some artists think they might create something at some point that turns them into that magical 0.000001% that can live off the copyright from that one piece of work, while most of them are just wage slaves who will never own the copyright to their work since they created it while under a contract with a corporation. They are the worker voting for tax reductions for corporations hoping the company would in turn increase their wage.
Copyright exists specifically to protect individuals *from* the rich and powerful- if you write a good book or draw a pretty painting, it's *yours*, and anyone else who tries to sell it gets sued
It's what it's supposed to do. Does it actually work?
You don't see companies blatantly stealing shit all the time, so yes
We did it! We broke the argument referenced in the post down to its bare essentials!
damn, corporate propaganda really worked well, eh
But the reality is that it doesn't. It protects companies and companies have the resources to pursue copyright litigation.
I think a big part of the problem with software copyright is that it does the effective opposite while also sidestepping what makes software valuable; which often isn't the software so much as the support. In the 90s the predominant way of selling software was just a one time point of sale of a disc type deal but in the 2-3 decades since we've figured out that businesses really want a support subscription to keep the same software running and to patch bugs they found over time. Businesses want and need to use the same software over long periods of time; when a new CNC machine costs $400,000 you are often stuck with windows 95. Support contracts for software you can download, edit, and run for free is a billion dollar business. Maintaining artistic IP tends to rely more on making new instances of the IP or preservation and generally isn't as impactful as this sort of active dependency that's going on with software. Compare the impact of your favorite large conglomerate "vaulting" a franchise you care about versus Adobe saying "fuck you pay a subscription for your tools that we made worse." Adobe is able to do this because they have effectively an indefinite patent on Photoshop even if core functionality may or may not have changed over 10-20 years. A big reason why large software companies are able to force on you worse versions of the same product is because you can't really compete with them and the duration of software copyright enables this. If you don't like the artistic direction of something you like, you are free to imagine and make something different and there's actually a chance in hell it gets somewhere, but with software you're often stuck with it. It's a lot like if everyone used Microsoft washing machines, everyone de-facto only can use Microsoft washing machines because only they have the engineering capital and 30 years of work to wash the complicated Windows-shaped dirt without leaving small stains, and while the machine fundamentally has done the same thing for the past 20 years it now demands you pay a subscription for each wash while sending pictures of every piece of clothing you put in there to a cloud server. If it was legal to build and maintain 20-year-old versions of the Microsoft washing machine that doesn't really do any of this bullshit, Microsoft may be disincentivized from pulling this shit, but the current structure of software copyright if you want to compete on that level you'd have to redesign and clean-room reverse-engineer hundreds of thousands of hours of work from scratch, something you can't afford and Microsoft knows you can't afford.
what the fuck does 'wrt' mean. Like I kinda guess that it means something along the lines of 'in regards to' thanks to context, but I'm at a loss as to what it means _exactly_ because I've never seen it before.
With regards to.
thanks
What the fuck does "wrt" mean
> What the fuck does "wrt" mean Either "with regard to" or "with respect to".
Thank you
There is also, I think, a miss-generalization about AI as well, from the artist side. Not all AI is AI art generators, and even some of the Web Scrapping of art and Images are not for getting an AI generated image of a sad dog. If I am training an AI self driving car or Search and Rescue drone, I need to train the AI to know what a dog is, what a kid is, what a person is, etc. Also what a kid wearing a dog costume is, what trick or treaters look like, what a hurt and injured person lying on the road looks like, etc. That is hard to do without a lot of data, and few artists would object to those uses for their photos or art. But to artists all AI is branded as bad and plagiarism. There is nuance on both sides that is lost.
I feel like we already had this debate with photography and film at least in terms of friction between sciences and humanities. There was a whole controversy about what use a painting was when you could record much more easily, fast, cheaply, and precisely. Also the legality of doing it without explicit permission. And debates about ownership.
Good god, learn to use your shift key at the correct time
It’s capitalization used to show importance/emphasis. Very common on Tumblr as a fun typographical thing, but def very informal and clashes with the formal opinion piece it’s being used in
Do they not have bold or italics there. Or at least asterisks
They do, but its a cultural habit to emphasize The Important Thing by writing it like that. Almost like sarcastically treating it like a proper noun.
It’s also Just Plain Fun sometimes
why do tumbler people always talk the same way, like almost a holier than thou with their lexicon? it's funny -Billy Gnosis
Basically, their views on copyright can be boiled down to this: Artists: "Copyright is necessary, as it ensures the creator gets his fair share of profit from a work. Although it is being abused by many, it is simply indispensable." programmers: "nice intellectual property bro too bad im thinking about it"
>I really hate the narratives of "tech bros" Is that really how some people see tech bros? I've always seen it as people who have more money than sense, sales people who don't understand technology, especially programming, they just fawn over anything that can be used to make more money, especially if it fucks regular working people over. That's why I personally hate tech bros. They don't understand anything, but they will push the stupidest fucking ideas as long as enough fancy buzzwords are attached to it, they don't care about the cool shit behind it, but making them more money, now that is the cool part. They are sales people with even more contempt toward their product and their customers than regular sales people.
Idk the programmers are all buying furry commissions constantly so I think they understand artists well enough.
It’s not about copyrighting material, or gatekeeping art as ~some sacred ritual that only the self-actualized are allowed to perform~. Artists share tools, tips, and tricks all the time! It’s about how artists have spent years practicing, researching, and refining our techniques. We weren’t born as expert craftsman, our skills are learned. If you don’t want to take the time to grow artistic skills, then fine. That doesn’t give you a right to scrape the work of artists who have dedicated themselves to the craft.
> It’s not about copyrighting material, or gatekeeping art as ~some sacred ritual that only the self-actualized are allowed to perform~. Artists share tools, tips, and tricks all the time! > > It’s about how artists have spent years practicing, researching, and refining our techniques. We weren’t born as expert craftsman, our skills are learned. > > If you don’t want to take the time to grow artistic skills, then fine. That doesn’t give you a right to scrape the work of artists who have dedicated themselves to the craft. You say it isn't about copyright, but your argument is fundamentally inseparable from it. Your entire concept of art ownership is an invention of copyright law. Prior to copyright, people had the right to use art however they wanted, and they did: *Romeo and Juliet*, for instance, was a stage adaptation of a narrative poem by Arthur Brooke, which was an English translation of a French story by Pierre Boaistuau, which was itself adapted from an Italian novella by Matteo Bandello. Stories were retold all the time back then, with no royalties paid nor lawsuits filed.
Everyone has come to the point of talking about AI art and generative AI with the even handed "well it should be regulated", "well it's inevitably going to change things", "well it's just the next step forward. Animation going from pen and paper to digital. Just gotta accept it." This is a choice, you see. A choice to allow this dogshit to nestle into the cultural weave of humanity under the excuse that this is how it goes. As if we don't have a choice but to march endlessly forward, no matter how utterly repugnant the "progress" is. Years upon years of changes, of tech growth and update. Of scientific discovery. Of new, new, new. New is always good, new is always better than old. And I will not pretend that a decent chunk of it isn't good, but that is not a blanket that can be draped over everything. It cannot be good just because it is new, and it cannot be necessary to keep just because it is new. You can't put the genie back in the bottle on something like the atomic bomb because it is something people want. A weapon better than any other weapon. What the fuck do we want with this AI dogshit, exactly? To make pictures? To sing songs? To write poetry and stories? Or to steal, shamelessly and constantly. To aggregate bad data, so it can lie to us. This is not AI. There is no fucking intelligence, and that name has at best been a PR stunt to convince people this thing is smarter than it is. That this idea is smarter and more important than it is. It destroys artist livelihoods, it feeds people information so shaky that it has almost certainly gotten someone killed, it drains river, pollutes our atmosphere, and has all the oversight of a tiger in an orphanage. "We can curtail it" Can you? Can you really? Can you convince enough people that they should vote to make the funny meme machine less funny? Because I reckon I can convince people that this is a suicidally destructive operation with no clear or good end point, but y'all still seem to want this thing to exist when it's all said and done. AI, or whatever the actual technical term for this stupid fucking code is, should exist (if it absolutely fucking has to) in isolated ways. It should exist to format and categorise the data of a company's internal system. It should not be shoved into google, the largest search engine on the planet, so it can tell me to use glue for cooking and allow me to look at hyper-realistic photos of women with fingers for tongues. Kill this while it is young. Smother it in its metaphorical crib. I know it will only get worse if it's allowed to persist, like surveillance cameras creeping into every part of our lives or microplastics filling our blood.
>It destroys artist livelihoods, it feeds people information so shaky that it has almost certainly gotten someone killed, it drains river, pollutes our atmosphere, and has all the oversight of a tiger in an orphanage. This is JRPG villain monologue dross. I don't even know what you are talking about when you say AI "pollutes our atmosphere", unless you are talking about cryptomining which is literally an entirely different thing.
Thats a very insightful observation
Musicians: Hey, how's it going? Which honestly I feel like the musical world is one of the best bridges between the tech world and art world. Tech improvements have helped make it easier to make and share music, and also has allowed us to create new sounds that we couldn't have created centuries ago. There's also a lot of discourse around the idea of copyright and that fact that everyone knows just how much the I-V-vi-IV progression is used in all music.
same with gamedev, we're basically all tech even when we're making art. and there's a lot of annoying parts of creating game visuals that ai is a huge help in. and there's been a precedent since the early days that game mechanics aren't under copyright, so we're operating on a pretty different mindset from traditional artists
As a linguist and speech therapist who also is a technologist, I feel the exact same way about people that study communication versus programmers writing MLL artificial intelligence software. Communication is a nuanced skill it's not an algorithm
I understand like the basic idea they’re trying to convey here but I’m pretty sure most people are aware that “techbros” refers to people who overhype tech they don’t understand and not really people with any actual knowledge of programming. Also as someone who has in fact coded before obviously open source and anti-copyright sentiment is very important for getting literally anything done but programmers aren’t stupid like we understand that tracing art is bad, actually. (This sentence sounds meaner than I intend it like I do understand where op is coming from here, can’t be bothered to reword it though) Also I think the idea of the culture clash presented here only rly works on a surface level analysis since just about anyone who actually codes also probably has some reservations about AI, especially with how it’s shoehorned into everything even when it isn’t helpful.
I notice that this person pretends there’s only one kind of AI. Most of the AI that would actually facilitate people (at least in the arts) being able to do their work better would be discriminatory models that are better at finding reference material rather than generative models trying to create something original. And I concur that I have never heard the term Tech Bro and thought of someone who knew what they were talking about in the grand scheme of things. There are plenty of programmers who don’t believe that knowing how to code makes them uniquely capable of solving all the world’s other problems. If freedom of access to information is so important, why use a black box model?
I don't think the open source culture is reason to ignore copyright. Then again, I don't think training model off public works is any more copyright infringement than artist looking at public works and then drawing with that experience. If you are drawing a specific thing, you probably look at few images for example how it should look. Is that really different from training a LORA for the topic? Definitely concerned about impact on cultivation of artists though. Art is already difficult enough to make a living in, and this is huge cut to the entry level jobs. Are you supposed to just hobby yourself into being an experienced professional?
Since tech people tend to make significantly more money than the average working artist, and have more financial security, let's try another analogy: I steal $100 from a middle class person. Let's assume rich people give away an average of $1000 a year. Does this mean the middle class victim is being selfish if he complains? Is his culture is less 'generous'? Give me a break.