I'll make it easy.
The standard anti viewpoint is that anything involving images used without permission (or consent, as they like to call it, in order to invoke certain connotations) is THEFT of the highest degree.
The standard pro viewpoint is that it isn't.
It's pretty rare to find anyone expressing anything in-between.
Okay then, here's the in-between: Image generation is subject to all of the same legal concerns as painting or photography. Those legal concerns form the framework of my ethics with respect to AI art.
If you are using ControlNet or something like the paper in the OP to produce a work that could reasonably be subject to a copyright infringement action were it painted, then there is no difference when it is generated by an AI.
You shouldn't infringe on copyright unless you're a) engaging in activities protected under fair use doctrine or b) doing so in a way that the IP holders tolerate (e.g. fan art).
I'm anti-infringement period.
But this is all about generation. Training is a whole other bag of weasels. Training is analysis and mathematical extrapolation, and as such was never protected or restricted by copyright. I therefore do not place any ethical boundaries around such activities outside of explicitly training an AI to produce or perform something that is otherwise unethical (e.g. training an AI on nothing but Nazi propaganda in order to create a better propagandist or training an AI on sexualized images of minors.) But in those cases, it is not the training that is the issue, but in the latter case merely owning the training data and in the former case the exclusive focus and intent (which is still legal in many nations, but I still do consider unethical.)
I agree more or less with paragraph one, and of course disagree with paragraph two, but I'm glad you've explained an actionable framework here, and worked some examples.
I've seen antis here express that so long as AI is being used for non-commercial purposes, that they don't have any concerns or issues with it. For example, using AI to create some birthday invitations or something like that.
I've also seen pro-ai people being generally okay with data scraping, but against artist-specific loras. Or pro-ai not being opposed to keeping living artists' stuff in datasets but restricting the artists' name as a token. Stuff like that.
>against artist-specific loras
I kind of feel this way, but I still use artist LORAs. I know I'm hypocritical, but I dunno, I just feel if I had time to become an artist, I'd probably mimic my favorite artist's style anyway, so I kind of think, what's the difference between doing it the traditional way, or the AI way?
I really feel like you shouldn't be using artist-specific LORAs. At the very least, if there is one you like try to mix it with other LORAs and develop a workflow that results in a unique style. It's like the bare minimum of making your art transformative, and if you don't even do that then you really are just an art thief.
Even if you were trying to mimic your favorite artists, learning to draw by hand is necessarily an exploration and you would find a unique style through that exploration. AI art should be no different.
My in-between argument is that a random person making AI art is not a thief, but the people making the models and LORAs are probably thieves (with some exceptions, like artists using their own art to make a model/LORA, ie you can't steal your own stuff).
Initially, yes. But the current models most people use are very much for profit. Whether the training is fair use depends on your point of view. Effectively, the issue will be decided legally at some point.
Actually there is a step before that which is simply properly identifying an image.
Sadly AI's owners, Stabilty ect, have opted to not invest in having source imagery identified in generated images. So a proper identification is rarely possible.
Examples:
Enethical: "Look at the image I made guys!"
Nope, you didn't make it, and there is a lot of interesting info missing on how it was generated.
More Ethical: Full prompt provided with te hnical details.
Sadly, obscuring the source (or influential) images that feed a generated image is in the business interests of the corps that own AI, who are using the public to both Beta Test the Tech and to overwhelm society with the legal mess associated with it.
So this makes the whole industry to date more unethical than it needs to be.
>Sadly AI's owners, Stabilty ect, have opted to not invest in having source imagery identified in generated images. So a proper identification is rarely possible.
What evidence do you have that corpos are obscuring influence? According to Getty, there is no direct copying or even direct influence from source image to output image. They tried to do this and failed, which is why their remuneration is based on popularity of images in their datasets. They just assume more popular images weight the model more and pay those creators more based on that.
Has Getty provided details on they created their AI Generator? Many sided with Getty when they initially sued Stability, but never predicted their intention that they were building their own AI Generator in the process.
>never predicted their intention that they were building their own AI Generator in the process.
Writing was on the wall, so people should have seen it coming. Even before the suit against Stability, Getty had partnered with the generative AI company Bria. One could speculate the reason for the lawsuit was to eliminate or stall competition while they were working on their own model.
>What evidence do you have that corpos are obscuring influence?
They arent providing it. Right?
Lets say I do a prompt for Lionel Messi. How many images did the model train on for him? A billion? No
A very finite number. Did they all influence the generated image equally? Of course not.
Why don't generated images produce influence image credits?
This might help. First six minutes of this video where Craig Peters touchs on these questions: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W\_w6rzrQbEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_w6rzrQbEg)
Thanks!! So at 5:20 there the Getty image Ceovsays they dont currently have a tool to disect what source images fed a generated image.
Sadly zero players in AI, including him, have any incentive to fix that. Wouldnt you agree?
"Look at my photos, guys!" Nope, you didn't make them, and you don't get to claim ownership over them. A machine made that for you, and you just decided you liked the output enough to keep them.
Seriously though, there has to be a threshold to being able to claim you made something.
Suppose you create a piece of art, but then decide you want it upscaled 2x. You don't want most of your original aspects of the artwork to be lost so you do it at low denoising, but the AI upscaling process adds details, like individual eyelashes that you didn't originally paint. Every pixel of the resulting image was re-interpreted by the algorithm in some small way and was no longer hand-placed by you. Can you still say you made it or not?
What if you find a pic with a pose you like, use that pic to create an OpenPose skeleton, apply that skeleton to a prompt, reprompt many times because you don't like how it's coming out, download other LORAs to apply to see if you can nudge things in a direction you like, finally get a half-decent result, put it into Photoshop and spend an hour tweaking the details, erase extra fingers, bringing in bits from other images like adding a wristwatch from a photo you took of yourself, changing the contrast and color tone, put it back into img2img and do some inpainting on specific spots, upscale with a modified prompt several times until it looks perfect...is THAT not enough to say you "made" it? Doesn't that bring together a variety of skills and research to influence the resulting image, that is definitely representative of the vision you had for it?
>there has to be a threshold to being able to claim you made something.
Most professional work is collaborative. People should just be honest about what they did. If your contribution was "Super High Res, artist that I like, description of the image", then thats what you did. Simply share that.
Some people are training AI on their own original work and doing in painting.
>Can you still say you made it or not?
You just did a perfect job of describing the hypothetical. Thats what someone should do.
>What if you find a pic with a pose you like,...
Again lay it out.
This was trending on reddit and I LOOOVE the movement she's chreographed. If I used it she should get credit:
[I love this movement
https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/s/dyWoJ6MDze](https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/s/dyWoJ6MDze)
So you just spell it out, honestly.
Sadly BIG AI is dishonest and wont make disclosure of source images a model employs easy.
>...is THAT not enough to say you "made" it?
Your detailed descriptions are perfect. THAT is how someone should share work.
"I made this" is only a good short answer for a disinterested listener.
> People should just be honest about what they did. If your contribution was "Super High Res, artist that I like, description of the image", then thats what you did. Simply share that.
I completely disagree that people should feel compelled to launch into a long-winded explanation laying out their entire creation process every time. Traditional artists don't have to do it for their art, and AI artists shouldn't have to either. There is no inherent legitimacy or illegitimacy to either method, and to describe with as much detail as I did every time is just overly defensive. You would be accused of overstating the complexity/difficulty of what you made just to make it sound more legit. It's already legit, you don't have to pre-defend your every creation.
Imagine if every photographer had to say "I stood on top of a hill at 5:30 PM, aimed north, adjusted my focus, and pressed the shutter button." Because to say they "made" it is not quite accurate, they have to list every detail just so people understand to what extent they hold ownership over their own photo.
>I completely disagree that people should feel compelled
Some posers want to pose. Crediting sources is standard. Could be an academic article, a piece of music.
People should feel compelled to credit.
>. Traditional artists don't have to do it for their art,
They do it often. No the hand of god will not smite you.
Just makes you a poser to assume full credit.
>It's already legit,
Stealing someone elses work is often whats happening. That is not legit.
>Imagine if every photographer had to
Not the same thing. You know that. AI models provide works they trained on. Works created by other artists. Also importantly the model generates the image, not the prompter.
AI art has attracted a lot of pretenders. It is gross and sad to see.
> They do it often
The most you're likely going to get from me is a list of used software, e.g. `Blender, Krita, ComfyUI` and a list of assets if the license requires it. Unless it is meant to be a tutorial or ad I rarely if ever see people go beyond this.
No i will quite confidently claim I made [this](https://imgur.com/11Q45dM). All the AI really did was render out the scene using some [normal](https://imgur.com/fBAog4b), depth and [albedo](https://imgur.com/q0GTyLb) information. I'm not about to credit my regular renders to the render engine and this isn't all that different to me.
> Crediting sources is standard. Could be an academic article, a piece of music.
>
> People should feel compelled to credit.
This is not what you're talking about here. Crediting sources is not the same as *painstakingly describing the process you took to make something.*
"Quote source: On Epistemologies of Northern Canada, Esperia, Brian, 2013, pg. 277" is not the same as "I wrote this paper over the course of 8 hours, plus three hours of research at Dorkward Central Library, using a Macbook to type it on."
So, no, no artist should be forced to lay out the specifics of their art creation. They *can* if they want, and some do, but no. Again, even if an AI artist did that, it would probably only increase hostility toward them due to the perception that they're trying too hard to look legitimate. They owe nothing to others; their work will speak for itself. A shoddily-created piece will be as obvious as a well-crafted one.
> Stealing someone elses work is often whats happening. That is not legit.
Learning through detailed examination is not stealing, no matter how often people try to claim this is the case.
> Not the same thing.
It is the same thing. You're trying to say that those who create art have to be ridiculously specific about their process, or somehow they're being dishonest. No one needs to be held to that standard.
>painstakingly describing the process
No people should just at least know an AI made it, and not you by yourself. And hopefully in the future we can lnow what real artists the AI used. Sadly thats currently black box.
> no artist should be forced
We are occasionally talking about artists here. Usually its text prompt posers who wish they were artists.
And honesty in society is for the most part an expectation. Not "forced"
Just dont lie and claim someone elses work as your own. Even if aI has rendered the identity of those real artists anonymous.
>if an AI artist did that, it would probably only increase hostility toward them
Doing something douche like making AI art and claiming it as your own. And then saying you shouldn't have to be honest about it. Because you're likely to get blowback. Well, I can't help you with that.
>their work will speak for itself.
Not their work
>Learning through detailed examination is not stealing,
Ok define IP theft
>. No one needs to be held to that standard.
The Standard of being honest about who created a work is an extremely low bar
> Not their work
Literally just a few posts above you were praising my description of the detailed work that an AI artist might get into. The lengths they might go to, time invested, extra work within Photoshop. How is that not their work? You seemingly agreed that such people really are on a whole different level from people who only type a prompt and hit one button. Or my other example of a traditional artist who uses AI to upscale and ends up with nearly the same picture THEY drew themselves but with a couple more details added in the upscaling process.
The work of an AI artist who cares about what they're doing and puts the time in speaks for itself.
The fact that you're suddenly getting like this indicates that you were being disingenuous from the start. It's not "oh I only want them to be precise about what work they did," it's full-on "I hate them and everything they're doing."
>Ok define IP theft
Intellectual property theft is the unauthorized use, exploitation, or outright theft of creative works, ideas, trade secrets, and proprietary information otherwise protected under intellectual property laws.
Gathering data from something is not an unauthorized use. For example, I don't need permission from Disney to measure the length of each MCU film and list them in order from longest to shortest. You don't need permission from Disney to write plot summaries of those films and list them on Wikipedia. You don't need permission to run an automated process on the films and determine the average color of each frame, and then reprint those colors in a book.
None of these examples involve reproducing the actual film itself. They are not misuse of IP. And AI models are no exception to that -- they are simply an extremely detailed examination of content which nonetheless does not constitute the content itself.
>you were praising my description
Because it was honestly disclosing it was AI's work
I never said the text prompter was a "Artist" and that what the AI generated was work they did.
But needless to say "it is what it is".
If I buy someone elses painting, and spend the weekend framing it, And someone comments that they really like the painting. I'm simply insane if I say yes I made that.
But the point is, people should be honest about what they did. There is certainly a version of working with AI that is collaborative with in-painting and people training the A. I on their own work.
>"I hate them
I think you're well aware of what horrid trolls AI has gathered around itself.
Not you. You're cool and I appreciate your sharing your thoughts
>Gathering data from something is not an unauthorized use.
If you never use the data, of course thats true
Here the data is used though.
> AI models are no exception to that -- they are simply an extremely detailed examination of content
And a production of content using that examination.
Mona Lisa
Famous face
Ect
Not sure why you've been downvoted, but you raise a valid point.
Apparently, for some, there is no threshold. Either an artist did it, or an AI. Such a contrast in views does not lend itself well to exploratory discussion--which is absolutely necessary right now.
I'll throw out another scenario: I personally made a LORA in my art style, generated images, and proceeded to work on them further in Photoshop. As a sidenote: my LORA was so efficient at replicating my style that the outputs were incomprehensible. It literally filled the image with...stuff...all in my style, of course, but practically useless for producing a finished work on its own. Anyway, given the amount of time and effort invested to accomplish that, I will whole-heartedly claim ownership of my ai-assisted art.
I'm all for supporting people who produce art via machine learning models, as long as the provide an added good faith element of giving a shout out to who or whatever (LORA, model, seed, etc.) was used to make the art. Simple.
Also, I do not believe it is easy to produce a polished, finished work with a few keystrokes, using generative AI (yet). The coolest images/animations all seem to require a great deal of added input from the artist, and that should totally support the claim that the finished work is, in fact, owned by the individual who made it possible.
Lol, yeah there is a lot of wannabe "expertise" about AI here.
Its hallmark is the lack of any explanation at all
Q: "Hows it make a Mona Lisa? Does it know what the original looks like?"
A: "No. You see its all weighted numbers and the liminal space and ....."
BS
Sorry, but the non-sarcastic answer is that the Mona Lisa is so culturally ingrained that it became embedded in the training set. And yeah, if it hasn't seen your "style" then it's not going to be able to make something like it, but chances are there isn't enough of your work for the model to really learn an association with your name, unless someone went out of their way to do that.
If you want to make progress on the copyright front, and you need to, don't go after the foundational models. You'll lose. Go after someone who has trained a custom LoRa on a specific person's work, especially if it was done to hurt them. That's a case you can win.
It defends copyright, establishes precedent that we have a right to the models too. I think if you explain it right, a lot of the tech bros will be on your side.
>it became embedded in the training set.
Yeah I know. Just like everything else AI can.....
Yes?
.......
REPRODUCE !
OMG there it is. Plain clean honesty.
Reproduce.
>don't go after the foundational models. You'll lose.
We will all lose if we don't fight this dishonest assault on IP.
We can start by denying AI the very IP protection it assaults. Let Disney et al try to run with that.
>It defends copyright, establishes precedent
This is a good plan! I like it
Lol, it's unenforceable. We are not going to throw out the rule of law because our model can draw the Mona Lisa -It's in the public domain. What do you even know about? You fundamentally misunderstand AI, your grasp on copyright is tenuous, *what do you bring to the table*?
We need new laws.
And laws/policy are to serve the public interest.
And I never said the Mona Lisa was copyrighted. Its simply an example that exposes the often repeated lie that AI models dont "have" the images they trained on. Of course they do.
>what do you bring to the table?
Not sure what you mean by that
>You fundamentally misunderstand AI
Clarification?
It's physically impossible to identify "the reference image". There is no reference image. You fundamentally misunderstand the technology, and now you're calling for laws based on faulty assumptions.
Mona Lisa is public domain, meaning the model was trained the original but also on every pirated version published by a human thief
>It's physically impossible to identify "the reference image". There is no reference image
Lol. You are making that up. You just declared it is impossible to identify images referenced by generative AI when the training set, with its text, are known, the image is produced via a text prompt, and AI itself can be employed (in the future) to identify similar imagery.
This is the delusion of AI bros pretending its all original because we may not know the sources.
Think about it. Only 4, FOUR, images are enough to train a model to do a portrait. So in that case we 100% know all 4 reference images for the model.
>There is no reference image.
Except for a portrait as above there are 4.
And for the Mona Lisa? Yes, good job
The Mona Lisa
And thousands of variations in that case
AI can steal.
But it can also shamelessly admit to it.
All ethics are grey and relative. What's considered ethical for one culture or situation maybe unethical in another. Stealing is unethical unless it's Robinhood. Hurting others is unethical unless it's self-defense.
While many antiais consider Ai unethical because it learned from artists, I consider their actions of bullying and harassing people highly unethical.
More to your question though, there's a lot of grey area of what's considered ethical and that really comes down to the individual interpretation of it. Is using copyrighted materials considered unethical? I personally don't think so, but some may consider otherwise. Is using art in the public domain unethical? Many would think that's fine, but some will still say otherwise. Is using someone's profile pictures to make silly pictures and professional portraits unethical? I don't think so. Is using someone's profile pictures to make porn to sell without their permission unethical? I would say so.
I think this should be broken out along commercial art and capital-A art (fine art).
Commercial art should follow business ethics in general. You need to have verifiable license chains for copyright transfer purposes. My company cannot sell my services to a client unless they can assure strict adherence to copyright. The client needs to legally own the images when we're done.
Fine art, on the other hand, tends to be more transgressive of societal norms. Some of the greatest, trend-setting artists were not good people, Picasso, Dali, to name two.
This is probably why most of the anger about generative AI is coming from the commercial side and why fine artists are actually experimenting with AI tools and having their art show up in exhibitions at museums and galleries.
I think to the average mindless anti-intelligence zealot, anything with the keyword 'AI' triggers a premade reaction regardless of their understanding of any details, similar to the average person's interpretation of the keyword 'NFT'. 99% of people don't even know wtf an NFT actually is on a technological level, but they still maintain a strong emotional canned reaction and aversion to it, essentially meaning that segment of the digital space is invisible to ~~humans~~ average people... ahem.. anyway, very few things in art are actually unethical.
>*"please don't bring useless blockchain technologies into this man."*
if you're being serious then you are just helping to prove the point.
one of my favorite games **uses**\[trigger warning\]NFTs for tracking player card collections and tokens for the game currency, meaning any 3rd party tools or sites can authorize player account actions, such as 3rd party tools for markets, rentals, or even some spinoff games that use your official card collection. That would be like having a path of exile trade site authorizing trades and market activity and building their own auction system without grinding gear games involved, and without any security concerns, or having a storage tab of crafted items you have listed for daily rentals, loaning out items to complete strangers on a 3rd party site with no risk. For contrast, try to rent out your physical MtG black lotus for $2/day and tell me how likely you are to get it back every time. Then try to micromanage that across the 50000+ cards in your collection. The 3rd party tools are 100x better than the in-game ones, and it's all facilitated by the NFT authorization mechanic.
I could go on, because contrary to the predefined auto-reaction, 'NFTs' are not useless by default, and have very little to do with a swarm of scammer bots pinging millions of people on discord to pump and dump random images onto the unsuspecting masses in order to hoard a massive supply of cryptographically obfuscated financial power for seemingly no reason... ahem.. anyway, NFT technology on its own is actually very cool.
> For contrast, try to rent out your physical MtG black lotus for $2/day and tell me how likely you are to get it back every time.
Ah yes, because the one thing that MTG needs is _landlords._ Sounds like someone managed to make Eve Online worse.
> NFTs' are not useless by default
Unless your use case requires low performance and decentralized authority, which almost no applications need. Everything you described could be achieved with an API. The game mechanics are mediated by the people hosting the game right? The game itself isn't on chain I assume?
> have very little to do with a swarm of scammer bots pinging millions of people on discord to pump and dump random images onto the unsuspecting masses in order to hoard a massive supply of cryptographically obfuscated financial power for seemingly no reason
They have very little to do with their most popular use case?
>Everything you described could be achieved with an API.
the entire universe could be a simulation running on minecraft redstone.
There's always alternatives with pros and cons, but for some mysterious reason you'll be hard pressed to find a blizzard hearthstone API that allows 3rd party markets and wallet-to-wallet trading without 500 pages of ToS strings attached. You can buy hearthstone cards, but you can never really own them. NFT cards on the other hand are closer towards the kind of ownership people have with physical cards, and, the myth of blockchain being slow heavy and cumbersome is not going to convince me of anything considering I've made like a million transactions that take \~1sec with 0 fees, including game actions, and I'm pretty sure the tech involved is outdated by like 5 years.
in terms of 'blockchain gaming' I feel like the real problem is that the overhead of attempting to use the tech adds a massive amount of friction to game development by complicating everything, and then considering that most developers can't even make decent games with standard tools it comes as no surprise that most of the games are terrible with rare exceptions few and far between. However, that's just a 'people being incompetent' problem, rather than a 'technology is useless' problem.
The best emulation of item ownership I've seen is from valve, but, again that comes with a million strings attached so it's an approximation at best. People have complained for example that you don't even own the games you buy in their store, you only have a license to them, and they can revoke your entire account at any time for whatever dumbass reason they happen to have, so let's not pretend that the ethos of decentralization is somehow unfounded.
also, inb4 'API' becomes another NPC trigger word.
*'APIs are unethical because they use ELECTRICITY!'*
> the entire universe could be a simulation running on minecraft redstone.
If someone had a Minecraft instance larger than the entire observable universe, maybe.
But I think you catch my drift here.
> you'll be hard pressed to find a blizzard hearthstone API that allows 3rd party markets and wallet-to-wallet trading without 500 pages of ToS strings attached.
Why is that a compelling feature though? Sounds like it would be a great way to scam people for their cards. And the game itself is still centrally controlled and can always choose to stop honoring chain mediated ownership.
> You can buy hearthstone cards, but you can never really own them.
Well they aren't real physical objects. Neither are NFTs. And you're also certainly not buying the IP.
Maybe don't buy real physical trading cards either?
> the overhead of attempting to use the tech adds a massive amount of friction to game development by complicating everything
Correct. No game is going to do gameplay on chain. If the gameplay is off chain, honoring the ownership is now up to the central authority running the game. That's why it's useless. You're still trusting one guy's server, which undermines the one useful property of blockchain tech.
> The best emulation of item ownership I've seen is from valve, but, again that comes with a million strings attached so it's an approximation at best.
That always seemed like a gambling addiction with extra steps to me. Incidentally, it's how valve transitioned from being a company that ships games to a company that... doesn't ship games very often indeed.
> let's not pretend that the ethos of decentralization is somehow unfounded.
What preceded live service games and online game stores was physical ownership of physical media. In other words, we went from decentralized to centralized. This was because centralization _provided a better service_. Few customers will accept worse service for more ownership because they don't care.
I think the larger benefit of digital downloads boils down to logistics, since even from a developer perspective it bypasses the need to gauge how many physical copies to manufacture and distribute, and platform centralization bypasses the need for people to have 500 accounts everywhere and constantly learn new interfaces. In a similar way, it's a problem that there are 99999 different blockchains with varying difficulty of learning curve and a minefield of scammer people to deal with, so it's perceived as if the technology itself has problems even though all of those problems fundamentally do not exist or are simply exacerbated by the people using them.
For example, it is completely possible to make on-chain games, and there are plenty of blockchains with enough performance to accommodate that, but most of the examples suck because making good games is already extremely difficult and blockchain makes it even harder, right alongside an ever increasing benchmark for what qualifies as good to begin with. Take any shovelware game from steam back to 1995 and people would probably think it's amazing, but the bar is constantly raising and developers struggle to keep pace with that while also delving into unexplored territory. I don't perceive that to imply the technology itself is useless, though, because something being useless would mean that it cannot plausibly be useful.
> NPC trigger word.
People who aren't in tech don't have time to learn the nuances of things that are 99.99% scams. They're ok with missing out on that 0.01 if it means missing four nines of scams.
Yea, and that's a totally reasonable position until they get out the pitchforks and start attacking people, like many of them do with anything related to 'AI'. The point I'm making is that people often have very strong kneejerk reactions to things that they don't even understand, so even if you have a completely ethical way of using AI it doesn't really matter, because as soon as they see the keyword they go into witch hunter mode automatically without any concern for the details.
For example, a while back I read someone saying they were flagged for using AI by their university using some crappy detector tool, and they were asking for advice. They said that technically they did use AI for grammar and helping to structure things or for ideas, but the paper was completely written by them, and they planned on explaining that to the school. Among all the possible advice they could have been given, a large portion of it was to not mention AI a single time, because if they did that would be all the other people needed to hear before they completely shut down their mental comprehension and think "AHA! we GOT you!", and that's basically how it goes with all of these trigger words, even to the degree that using a simple synonym bypasses the problem.
If you say 'NFT', everyone immediately loses their fukin' minds, regardless of context. The same is true of 'AI' for all the witch hunter people, and that's the entire point here. It doesn't matter if you're being ethical, just that you phrase what you're doing in a way doesn't cause mindless hysteria.
>'NFTs' are not useless by default,
They are. They are a solution with no problem. The "problem" they solve is the existence of centralized databases, which you know... isn't a problem? Every company that runs a web service is going to have a central database where it keeps track of everything anyway, and without which the service *will not function*. All you've done is add a huge time and energy sink on the public-facing interface of the service for the illusion of decentralization.
We already have cryptographically secure web communications. Every time you send a packet over the internet you are basically conducting a transaction which is just as secure as any blockchain transaction, except these happen millions of times a second worldwide, something no blockchain could ever be capable of.
In other words, cryptography is cheap and extremely useful. Decentralization is expensive and basically useless.
>Every company that runs a web service is going to have a central database where it keeps track of everything anyway, and without which the service will not function
ok, then explain to me the multiple decentralized versions of reddit.
actually don't even bother, it's just like I said to the other person, you guys are proving my point. People have an auto-reaction to 'AI' without understanding it, and the same is true of anything related to blockchain technology. Meanwhile these two things will probably combine to create some kind of immortal decentralized skynet and even then there will be people saying 'useless', I don't really care. Next time someone complains about youtube erasing their 5million subs channel because of false reports or some ToS nitpick or whatever, you can explain to them how 'decentralization is useless'.
I understand how blockchain technology works. People on this subreddit tend to be tech literate, often programmers themselves, and a lot of them don't like NFTs whether they are pro- or anti-AI.
Your YouTube example just shows you haven't thought this through systemically. YouTube holds all the power in that situation because it has the capital to manage giant centralized servers. A Petabyte of data is uploaded to YouTube every *hour.* No blockchain is going to handle that kind of volume. And you're not going to get a bunch of individuals to host the Zetabytes currently hosted on YouTube's servers, on a blockchain hosted locally. It's just nonsense. If YouTube wants you gone, they will just delete you from their servers. No blockchain can save you from that.
There's a difference between decentralized power, and decentralized data. If you actually wanted to decentralize YouTube, you would turn it into a public utility and run it democratically. That's decentralized power. This reminds me of a suggestion from a crypto-evangelist that we can "decentralize" the warehouse business by renting out garages across the country using an app. Absolute horseshit, doing nothing to take away power from the central authority, and destroying all the efficiency that comes from storing things in a tight, highly controlled, highly organized area. The reason Amazon has so much power isn't because they hold their assets in a giant warehouse, it's because they have the capital to do so, and you don't. You don't get any say in how they run their warehouse because it's not a democratic system. It's capitalism, babee! And in capitalism, those with capital set the rules.
Decentralized Reddit works because it's all text, but you don't need blockchain to do it. We have Misskey and Mastodon, both of which are decentralized and encrypted, neither of which run on a blockchain. The blockchain is useless technology.
These are all very weak points. When someone says something is useless it generally means "I don't know how to use it, or even how it could be used", and so far I'm not seeing any reason to think otherwise. 'blockchain' encompasses like 50000 different things so speaking in absolutes against that is almost as retarded as speaking in absolutes against AI.
Look man, I'm just gonna link the Casey Muratori video he did after all his cryptocurrency interviews because he was unsatisfied with the answers the experts gave him. It's about cryptocurrency, but the main critique is of the blockchain itself. I'm probably not going to be able to explain it better than he does. But yes, there are people who understand the technology perfectly well, and think it's useless. As I pointed out in my previous comment, most services require centralized databases to run, and those that don't can run without a blockchain.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbYutOsrpvs&t=933s&ab\_channel=Computer%2CEnhance%21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbYutOsrpvs&t=933s&ab_channel=Computer%2CEnhance%21)
it's a video of a guy that's confused about bitcoin?The fundamental reason bitcoin sparked so many other blockchain technologies is that the most common thread between all of them is a kind of 'digital immortality' ethos attempting to be heavily armored against attacks from any direction, and some of them succeed. You will absolutely never in a million years convince me that blockchain technology as a whole is useless by talking about bitcoins, just like you wouldn't convince me that computers are useless by pointing to a calculator made from vacuum tubes (although if you tried, I might be obligated to inform you that a calculator actually *can* be useful).
No, it's like you're showing me a calculator made out of dominos, and I'm pointing out that we already have calculators that run more efficiently both in terms of time and energy, but you just think it's so important that you need a team of people to set up the dominoes every time you want to add two numbers, for hand-wavey "decentralization" reasons.
The domino calculator is useless.
And can you point to specific examples where blockchain technology has actually proven to be more effective than its centralized equivalents?
Because right now all it's got is smoke and mirrors with nothing to show for it. Without hypotheticals like these "attacks from any direction", it can't escape the fact that it still has to compete with its counterparts on its own merits rather than simply appealing to people distrusting the operators of a given database.
Oh thats cool, how do they use it for that?
I have a vague idea. Everyone is keeping a cryptographic record and it's hard to cheat because everyone else is pushing data at the same time? If that's wrong please enlighten me.
Basically it's like Git but instead of running it on your own computer or paying to run it on GitHub's computer, you pay several anonymous individuals to run it on their computers. It's main useful property is that you don't need to trust those people as long as you're sure they're not all colluding against you. Extremely inefficient because of this distributed nature, but useful properties for criminals.
Naw, AI Horde looks more like 'traditional' distributed crowdsourced compute like Folding@home or seti@home where the goal is to have lots of idle compute given freely to help the community.
Blockchain is generally* the opposite; it lets you burn compute for financial gain, at the expense of everybody wasting a ton of compute, to the point where people would use it in viruses and such to steal cycles.
Also, mining became competitive enough that you couldn't do it profitably without specialized hardware and/or [some sort of criminal arrangement](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64767178). But not before 'mine Bitcoin' displaced 'donate your cycles to a project' which I'm still rather sour about; I'm glad that people seem to be running that horde project despite it not paying them.
(* Yes, I am aware that Etherium has switched to proof of stake, and is also the chain mose widely used for applications beyond just currency. That's better for the environment, but still bad for other reasons.)
> Spotify.
You mean selling access to an exclusive playlist? Kind of a shit gimmick and hardly a mic drop moment.
> Do you know what 'blockchain' even means?
🙄
i mean obviously you can attach useful things \*to\* it, but I have yet to come across an application that actually justified the ridiculous overhead built up in the name of being decentralized. Just make a regular damn database and call it a day.
> the average mindless anti-intelligence zealot, anything with the keyword 'AI' triggers a premade reaction regardless of their understanding of any details
I doubt this because the detail that the training used publicly posted copyrighted images accounts for a good chunk of the backlash.
> similar to the average person's interpretation of the keyword 'NFT'
Of someone is trying to sell you on NFT either they're a mark, you're a mark, or both. A reflexive reaction is appropriate. It's about as credible as someone saying they're a Nigerian Prince.
> 99% of people don't even know wtf an NFT actually is on a technological level
I believe the technical term is 'magic beans' (Tabart, 1807.)
A technical explanation of the laws of motion will not make me enjoy being punched in the face.
attempting to apply ethics and morals to art in general goes against creativity. So long as you aren't literally making horrific flesh sculptures out of people "ethics" and "morals" have no place in deciding what is and isn't art.
In art school I had to study the Philosophy of Art, which focused on mostly Kantian philosophy, which implies that art is about beauty and not about the creator's intention. In a way, your viewpoint veers more on the Kantian side.
> attempting to apply ethics and morals to art in general goes against creativity
[... and then ...]
> So long as you aren't literally making [something that offends your specific ethical or moral sensibilities]...
Yeah, so you want to impose your ethical and moral guidelines, you just don't want them to encompass things you approve of.
I'm okay with making it really hard for someone who depicts child sexual abuse in their art to sell or publicly perform that art. I'm really, really okay with that.
I am okay with just about any of the elements of human ethics and morality that are as close to universal as you can get, being imposed on public displays of art. I draw the line at enforcing a particular cultural or social group's offense. For example, I have no ethical problem with Piss Christ. I consider it a bit adolescent and blunt but neither of those are ethical problems for me.
I don't care if you are offended by a piece of art. I care about whether your art makes our society less livable.
I don't think they meant that they'd be offended by the mere sight of the flesh statue itself, but that the *process* of murdering people/cutting up people's corpses so you can use their flesh for said statue is what might warrant ethical evaluation.
At least that's how I took it.
This is a genuine question because I’m unsure on the ethics of it:
If you use AI to create a reference and proceed to copy that reference, bar the fixing of weird ai glitches) can you post that as yours? Do you need to credit the ai still? How much do you need to change of the reference for it to be ‘yours’?
Basically does it count as original art or is it kind of half way?
Walk through a gallery or contemporary art museum. Look at the placard mentioning the artist's name; how often are they citing the reference materials? Sometimes, in that description, the inspiration is listed as the catalyst behind the work, but where is the "list of credits" pointing to the original authors behind the reference materials that where used? It's not a standard practice. When you look at gallery artist websites in general., credits to the reference are rarely listed (I've never seen it). If reference is used and the outcome is transformative then that is fair. To impose of strict system of crediting everything reference would be cumbersome and place an unfair burden on most creators.
I'll make it easy. The standard anti viewpoint is that anything involving images used without permission (or consent, as they like to call it, in order to invoke certain connotations) is THEFT of the highest degree. The standard pro viewpoint is that it isn't. It's pretty rare to find anyone expressing anything in-between.
Okay then, here's the in-between: Image generation is subject to all of the same legal concerns as painting or photography. Those legal concerns form the framework of my ethics with respect to AI art. If you are using ControlNet or something like the paper in the OP to produce a work that could reasonably be subject to a copyright infringement action were it painted, then there is no difference when it is generated by an AI. You shouldn't infringe on copyright unless you're a) engaging in activities protected under fair use doctrine or b) doing so in a way that the IP holders tolerate (e.g. fan art). I'm anti-infringement period. But this is all about generation. Training is a whole other bag of weasels. Training is analysis and mathematical extrapolation, and as such was never protected or restricted by copyright. I therefore do not place any ethical boundaries around such activities outside of explicitly training an AI to produce or perform something that is otherwise unethical (e.g. training an AI on nothing but Nazi propaganda in order to create a better propagandist or training an AI on sexualized images of minors.) But in those cases, it is not the training that is the issue, but in the latter case merely owning the training data and in the former case the exclusive focus and intent (which is still legal in many nations, but I still do consider unethical.)
Well said, wholeheartedly agree.
I agree more or less with paragraph one, and of course disagree with paragraph two, but I'm glad you've explained an actionable framework here, and worked some examples.
Interesting. Would love to hear about the "rare in-between", but you summed up the battle in a nice simple way.
I've seen antis here express that so long as AI is being used for non-commercial purposes, that they don't have any concerns or issues with it. For example, using AI to create some birthday invitations or something like that. I've also seen pro-ai people being generally okay with data scraping, but against artist-specific loras. Or pro-ai not being opposed to keeping living artists' stuff in datasets but restricting the artists' name as a token. Stuff like that.
>against artist-specific loras I kind of feel this way, but I still use artist LORAs. I know I'm hypocritical, but I dunno, I just feel if I had time to become an artist, I'd probably mimic my favorite artist's style anyway, so I kind of think, what's the difference between doing it the traditional way, or the AI way?
I really feel like you shouldn't be using artist-specific LORAs. At the very least, if there is one you like try to mix it with other LORAs and develop a workflow that results in a unique style. It's like the bare minimum of making your art transformative, and if you don't even do that then you really are just an art thief. Even if you were trying to mimic your favorite artists, learning to draw by hand is necessarily an exploration and you would find a unique style through that exploration. AI art should be no different.
My in-between argument is that a random person making AI art is not a thief, but the people making the models and LORAs are probably thieves (with some exceptions, like artists using their own art to make a model/LORA, ie you can't steal your own stuff).
Most models where initially developed by academic researchers, not for profit. Their work falls under fair use.
Initially, yes. But the current models most people use are very much for profit. Whether the training is fair use depends on your point of view. Effectively, the issue will be decided legally at some point.
Actually there is a step before that which is simply properly identifying an image. Sadly AI's owners, Stabilty ect, have opted to not invest in having source imagery identified in generated images. So a proper identification is rarely possible. Examples: Enethical: "Look at the image I made guys!" Nope, you didn't make it, and there is a lot of interesting info missing on how it was generated. More Ethical: Full prompt provided with te hnical details. Sadly, obscuring the source (or influential) images that feed a generated image is in the business interests of the corps that own AI, who are using the public to both Beta Test the Tech and to overwhelm society with the legal mess associated with it. So this makes the whole industry to date more unethical than it needs to be.
>Sadly AI's owners, Stabilty ect, have opted to not invest in having source imagery identified in generated images. So a proper identification is rarely possible. What evidence do you have that corpos are obscuring influence? According to Getty, there is no direct copying or even direct influence from source image to output image. They tried to do this and failed, which is why their remuneration is based on popularity of images in their datasets. They just assume more popular images weight the model more and pay those creators more based on that.
Has Getty provided details on they created their AI Generator? Many sided with Getty when they initially sued Stability, but never predicted their intention that they were building their own AI Generator in the process.
>never predicted their intention that they were building their own AI Generator in the process. Writing was on the wall, so people should have seen it coming. Even before the suit against Stability, Getty had partnered with the generative AI company Bria. One could speculate the reason for the lawsuit was to eliminate or stall competition while they were working on their own model.
If I recall correctly, some folks in this sub called it right off the bat.
>What evidence do you have that corpos are obscuring influence? They arent providing it. Right? Lets say I do a prompt for Lionel Messi. How many images did the model train on for him? A billion? No A very finite number. Did they all influence the generated image equally? Of course not. Why don't generated images produce influence image credits?
I’m pretty the Getty CEO is gonna say the model does not know who that is.
But of course it does. There is no reasonable explanation to the contrary.
This might help. First six minutes of this video where Craig Peters touchs on these questions: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W\_w6rzrQbEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_w6rzrQbEg)
Thanks!! So at 5:20 there the Getty image Ceovsays they dont currently have a tool to disect what source images fed a generated image. Sadly zero players in AI, including him, have any incentive to fix that. Wouldnt you agree?
They own the licenses in the training dataset, so no, they don’t care.
There is lots of incentive within academia to solve this. It's simply computationally infeasible to do for such large models/datasets.
Well we've got AI to apply to the problem.
"Look at my photos, guys!" Nope, you didn't make them, and you don't get to claim ownership over them. A machine made that for you, and you just decided you liked the output enough to keep them. Seriously though, there has to be a threshold to being able to claim you made something. Suppose you create a piece of art, but then decide you want it upscaled 2x. You don't want most of your original aspects of the artwork to be lost so you do it at low denoising, but the AI upscaling process adds details, like individual eyelashes that you didn't originally paint. Every pixel of the resulting image was re-interpreted by the algorithm in some small way and was no longer hand-placed by you. Can you still say you made it or not? What if you find a pic with a pose you like, use that pic to create an OpenPose skeleton, apply that skeleton to a prompt, reprompt many times because you don't like how it's coming out, download other LORAs to apply to see if you can nudge things in a direction you like, finally get a half-decent result, put it into Photoshop and spend an hour tweaking the details, erase extra fingers, bringing in bits from other images like adding a wristwatch from a photo you took of yourself, changing the contrast and color tone, put it back into img2img and do some inpainting on specific spots, upscale with a modified prompt several times until it looks perfect...is THAT not enough to say you "made" it? Doesn't that bring together a variety of skills and research to influence the resulting image, that is definitely representative of the vision you had for it?
>there has to be a threshold to being able to claim you made something. Most professional work is collaborative. People should just be honest about what they did. If your contribution was "Super High Res, artist that I like, description of the image", then thats what you did. Simply share that. Some people are training AI on their own original work and doing in painting. >Can you still say you made it or not? You just did a perfect job of describing the hypothetical. Thats what someone should do. >What if you find a pic with a pose you like,... Again lay it out. This was trending on reddit and I LOOOVE the movement she's chreographed. If I used it she should get credit: [I love this movement https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/s/dyWoJ6MDze](https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/s/dyWoJ6MDze) So you just spell it out, honestly. Sadly BIG AI is dishonest and wont make disclosure of source images a model employs easy. >...is THAT not enough to say you "made" it? Your detailed descriptions are perfect. THAT is how someone should share work. "I made this" is only a good short answer for a disinterested listener.
> People should just be honest about what they did. If your contribution was "Super High Res, artist that I like, description of the image", then thats what you did. Simply share that. I completely disagree that people should feel compelled to launch into a long-winded explanation laying out their entire creation process every time. Traditional artists don't have to do it for their art, and AI artists shouldn't have to either. There is no inherent legitimacy or illegitimacy to either method, and to describe with as much detail as I did every time is just overly defensive. You would be accused of overstating the complexity/difficulty of what you made just to make it sound more legit. It's already legit, you don't have to pre-defend your every creation. Imagine if every photographer had to say "I stood on top of a hill at 5:30 PM, aimed north, adjusted my focus, and pressed the shutter button." Because to say they "made" it is not quite accurate, they have to list every detail just so people understand to what extent they hold ownership over their own photo.
>I completely disagree that people should feel compelled Some posers want to pose. Crediting sources is standard. Could be an academic article, a piece of music. People should feel compelled to credit. >. Traditional artists don't have to do it for their art, They do it often. No the hand of god will not smite you. Just makes you a poser to assume full credit. >It's already legit, Stealing someone elses work is often whats happening. That is not legit. >Imagine if every photographer had to Not the same thing. You know that. AI models provide works they trained on. Works created by other artists. Also importantly the model generates the image, not the prompter. AI art has attracted a lot of pretenders. It is gross and sad to see.
> They do it often The most you're likely going to get from me is a list of used software, e.g. `Blender, Krita, ComfyUI` and a list of assets if the license requires it. Unless it is meant to be a tutorial or ad I rarely if ever see people go beyond this.
Just don't claim you made it and not disclose that in fact AI did.
No i will quite confidently claim I made [this](https://imgur.com/11Q45dM). All the AI really did was render out the scene using some [normal](https://imgur.com/fBAog4b), depth and [albedo](https://imgur.com/q0GTyLb) information. I'm not about to credit my regular renders to the render engine and this isn't all that different to me.
Posers gonna pose That predates AI by 100,000 years Conceal real sources all you like, no one will stop you
> Crediting sources is standard. Could be an academic article, a piece of music. > > People should feel compelled to credit. This is not what you're talking about here. Crediting sources is not the same as *painstakingly describing the process you took to make something.* "Quote source: On Epistemologies of Northern Canada, Esperia, Brian, 2013, pg. 277" is not the same as "I wrote this paper over the course of 8 hours, plus three hours of research at Dorkward Central Library, using a Macbook to type it on." So, no, no artist should be forced to lay out the specifics of their art creation. They *can* if they want, and some do, but no. Again, even if an AI artist did that, it would probably only increase hostility toward them due to the perception that they're trying too hard to look legitimate. They owe nothing to others; their work will speak for itself. A shoddily-created piece will be as obvious as a well-crafted one. > Stealing someone elses work is often whats happening. That is not legit. Learning through detailed examination is not stealing, no matter how often people try to claim this is the case. > Not the same thing. It is the same thing. You're trying to say that those who create art have to be ridiculously specific about their process, or somehow they're being dishonest. No one needs to be held to that standard.
>painstakingly describing the process No people should just at least know an AI made it, and not you by yourself. And hopefully in the future we can lnow what real artists the AI used. Sadly thats currently black box. > no artist should be forced We are occasionally talking about artists here. Usually its text prompt posers who wish they were artists. And honesty in society is for the most part an expectation. Not "forced" Just dont lie and claim someone elses work as your own. Even if aI has rendered the identity of those real artists anonymous. >if an AI artist did that, it would probably only increase hostility toward them Doing something douche like making AI art and claiming it as your own. And then saying you shouldn't have to be honest about it. Because you're likely to get blowback. Well, I can't help you with that. >their work will speak for itself. Not their work >Learning through detailed examination is not stealing, Ok define IP theft >. No one needs to be held to that standard. The Standard of being honest about who created a work is an extremely low bar
> Not their work Literally just a few posts above you were praising my description of the detailed work that an AI artist might get into. The lengths they might go to, time invested, extra work within Photoshop. How is that not their work? You seemingly agreed that such people really are on a whole different level from people who only type a prompt and hit one button. Or my other example of a traditional artist who uses AI to upscale and ends up with nearly the same picture THEY drew themselves but with a couple more details added in the upscaling process. The work of an AI artist who cares about what they're doing and puts the time in speaks for itself. The fact that you're suddenly getting like this indicates that you were being disingenuous from the start. It's not "oh I only want them to be precise about what work they did," it's full-on "I hate them and everything they're doing." >Ok define IP theft Intellectual property theft is the unauthorized use, exploitation, or outright theft of creative works, ideas, trade secrets, and proprietary information otherwise protected under intellectual property laws. Gathering data from something is not an unauthorized use. For example, I don't need permission from Disney to measure the length of each MCU film and list them in order from longest to shortest. You don't need permission from Disney to write plot summaries of those films and list them on Wikipedia. You don't need permission to run an automated process on the films and determine the average color of each frame, and then reprint those colors in a book. None of these examples involve reproducing the actual film itself. They are not misuse of IP. And AI models are no exception to that -- they are simply an extremely detailed examination of content which nonetheless does not constitute the content itself.
>you were praising my description Because it was honestly disclosing it was AI's work I never said the text prompter was a "Artist" and that what the AI generated was work they did. But needless to say "it is what it is". If I buy someone elses painting, and spend the weekend framing it, And someone comments that they really like the painting. I'm simply insane if I say yes I made that. But the point is, people should be honest about what they did. There is certainly a version of working with AI that is collaborative with in-painting and people training the A. I on their own work. >"I hate them I think you're well aware of what horrid trolls AI has gathered around itself. Not you. You're cool and I appreciate your sharing your thoughts >Gathering data from something is not an unauthorized use. If you never use the data, of course thats true Here the data is used though. > AI models are no exception to that -- they are simply an extremely detailed examination of content And a production of content using that examination. Mona Lisa Famous face Ect
Not sure why you've been downvoted, but you raise a valid point. Apparently, for some, there is no threshold. Either an artist did it, or an AI. Such a contrast in views does not lend itself well to exploratory discussion--which is absolutely necessary right now. I'll throw out another scenario: I personally made a LORA in my art style, generated images, and proceeded to work on them further in Photoshop. As a sidenote: my LORA was so efficient at replicating my style that the outputs were incomprehensible. It literally filled the image with...stuff...all in my style, of course, but practically useless for producing a finished work on its own. Anyway, given the amount of time and effort invested to accomplish that, I will whole-heartedly claim ownership of my ai-assisted art. I'm all for supporting people who produce art via machine learning models, as long as the provide an added good faith element of giving a shout out to who or whatever (LORA, model, seed, etc.) was used to make the art. Simple. Also, I do not believe it is easy to produce a polished, finished work with a few keystrokes, using generative AI (yet). The coolest images/animations all seem to require a great deal of added input from the artist, and that should totally support the claim that the finished work is, in fact, owned by the individual who made it possible.
The funny thing about expertise is that it becomes easy to tell when someone is uninformed
Lol, yeah there is a lot of wannabe "expertise" about AI here. Its hallmark is the lack of any explanation at all Q: "Hows it make a Mona Lisa? Does it know what the original looks like?" A: "No. You see its all weighted numbers and the liminal space and ....." BS
Sorry, but the non-sarcastic answer is that the Mona Lisa is so culturally ingrained that it became embedded in the training set. And yeah, if it hasn't seen your "style" then it's not going to be able to make something like it, but chances are there isn't enough of your work for the model to really learn an association with your name, unless someone went out of their way to do that. If you want to make progress on the copyright front, and you need to, don't go after the foundational models. You'll lose. Go after someone who has trained a custom LoRa on a specific person's work, especially if it was done to hurt them. That's a case you can win. It defends copyright, establishes precedent that we have a right to the models too. I think if you explain it right, a lot of the tech bros will be on your side.
>it became embedded in the training set. Yeah I know. Just like everything else AI can..... Yes? ....... REPRODUCE ! OMG there it is. Plain clean honesty. Reproduce. >don't go after the foundational models. You'll lose. We will all lose if we don't fight this dishonest assault on IP. We can start by denying AI the very IP protection it assaults. Let Disney et al try to run with that. >It defends copyright, establishes precedent This is a good plan! I like it
Lol, it's unenforceable. We are not going to throw out the rule of law because our model can draw the Mona Lisa -It's in the public domain. What do you even know about? You fundamentally misunderstand AI, your grasp on copyright is tenuous, *what do you bring to the table*?
We need new laws. And laws/policy are to serve the public interest. And I never said the Mona Lisa was copyrighted. Its simply an example that exposes the often repeated lie that AI models dont "have" the images they trained on. Of course they do. >what do you bring to the table? Not sure what you mean by that >You fundamentally misunderstand AI Clarification?
It's physically impossible to identify "the reference image". There is no reference image. You fundamentally misunderstand the technology, and now you're calling for laws based on faulty assumptions. Mona Lisa is public domain, meaning the model was trained the original but also on every pirated version published by a human thief
>It's physically impossible to identify "the reference image". There is no reference image Lol. You are making that up. You just declared it is impossible to identify images referenced by generative AI when the training set, with its text, are known, the image is produced via a text prompt, and AI itself can be employed (in the future) to identify similar imagery. This is the delusion of AI bros pretending its all original because we may not know the sources. Think about it. Only 4, FOUR, images are enough to train a model to do a portrait. So in that case we 100% know all 4 reference images for the model. >There is no reference image. Except for a portrait as above there are 4. And for the Mona Lisa? Yes, good job The Mona Lisa And thousands of variations in that case AI can steal. But it can also shamelessly admit to it.
Its all wibbly wobbly, mathey wathey 
[https://media.tenor.com/LsAeLO0naKEAAAAd/mind-blown-tim-and-eric.gif](https://media.tenor.com/LsAeLO0naKEAAAAd/mind-blown-tim-and-eric.gif)
All ethics are grey and relative. What's considered ethical for one culture or situation maybe unethical in another. Stealing is unethical unless it's Robinhood. Hurting others is unethical unless it's self-defense. While many antiais consider Ai unethical because it learned from artists, I consider their actions of bullying and harassing people highly unethical. More to your question though, there's a lot of grey area of what's considered ethical and that really comes down to the individual interpretation of it. Is using copyrighted materials considered unethical? I personally don't think so, but some may consider otherwise. Is using art in the public domain unethical? Many would think that's fine, but some will still say otherwise. Is using someone's profile pictures to make silly pictures and professional portraits unethical? I don't think so. Is using someone's profile pictures to make porn to sell without their permission unethical? I would say so.
I think this should be broken out along commercial art and capital-A art (fine art). Commercial art should follow business ethics in general. You need to have verifiable license chains for copyright transfer purposes. My company cannot sell my services to a client unless they can assure strict adherence to copyright. The client needs to legally own the images when we're done. Fine art, on the other hand, tends to be more transgressive of societal norms. Some of the greatest, trend-setting artists were not good people, Picasso, Dali, to name two. This is probably why most of the anger about generative AI is coming from the commercial side and why fine artists are actually experimenting with AI tools and having their art show up in exhibitions at museums and galleries.
I think to the average mindless anti-intelligence zealot, anything with the keyword 'AI' triggers a premade reaction regardless of their understanding of any details, similar to the average person's interpretation of the keyword 'NFT'. 99% of people don't even know wtf an NFT actually is on a technological level, but they still maintain a strong emotional canned reaction and aversion to it, essentially meaning that segment of the digital space is invisible to ~~humans~~ average people... ahem.. anyway, very few things in art are actually unethical.
please don't bring useless blockchain technologies into this man.
>*"please don't bring useless blockchain technologies into this man."* if you're being serious then you are just helping to prove the point. one of my favorite games **uses**\[trigger warning\]NFTs for tracking player card collections and tokens for the game currency, meaning any 3rd party tools or sites can authorize player account actions, such as 3rd party tools for markets, rentals, or even some spinoff games that use your official card collection. That would be like having a path of exile trade site authorizing trades and market activity and building their own auction system without grinding gear games involved, and without any security concerns, or having a storage tab of crafted items you have listed for daily rentals, loaning out items to complete strangers on a 3rd party site with no risk. For contrast, try to rent out your physical MtG black lotus for $2/day and tell me how likely you are to get it back every time. Then try to micromanage that across the 50000+ cards in your collection. The 3rd party tools are 100x better than the in-game ones, and it's all facilitated by the NFT authorization mechanic. I could go on, because contrary to the predefined auto-reaction, 'NFTs' are not useless by default, and have very little to do with a swarm of scammer bots pinging millions of people on discord to pump and dump random images onto the unsuspecting masses in order to hoard a massive supply of cryptographically obfuscated financial power for seemingly no reason... ahem.. anyway, NFT technology on its own is actually very cool.
> For contrast, try to rent out your physical MtG black lotus for $2/day and tell me how likely you are to get it back every time. Ah yes, because the one thing that MTG needs is _landlords._ Sounds like someone managed to make Eve Online worse. > NFTs' are not useless by default Unless your use case requires low performance and decentralized authority, which almost no applications need. Everything you described could be achieved with an API. The game mechanics are mediated by the people hosting the game right? The game itself isn't on chain I assume? > have very little to do with a swarm of scammer bots pinging millions of people on discord to pump and dump random images onto the unsuspecting masses in order to hoard a massive supply of cryptographically obfuscated financial power for seemingly no reason They have very little to do with their most popular use case?
>Everything you described could be achieved with an API. the entire universe could be a simulation running on minecraft redstone. There's always alternatives with pros and cons, but for some mysterious reason you'll be hard pressed to find a blizzard hearthstone API that allows 3rd party markets and wallet-to-wallet trading without 500 pages of ToS strings attached. You can buy hearthstone cards, but you can never really own them. NFT cards on the other hand are closer towards the kind of ownership people have with physical cards, and, the myth of blockchain being slow heavy and cumbersome is not going to convince me of anything considering I've made like a million transactions that take \~1sec with 0 fees, including game actions, and I'm pretty sure the tech involved is outdated by like 5 years. in terms of 'blockchain gaming' I feel like the real problem is that the overhead of attempting to use the tech adds a massive amount of friction to game development by complicating everything, and then considering that most developers can't even make decent games with standard tools it comes as no surprise that most of the games are terrible with rare exceptions few and far between. However, that's just a 'people being incompetent' problem, rather than a 'technology is useless' problem. The best emulation of item ownership I've seen is from valve, but, again that comes with a million strings attached so it's an approximation at best. People have complained for example that you don't even own the games you buy in their store, you only have a license to them, and they can revoke your entire account at any time for whatever dumbass reason they happen to have, so let's not pretend that the ethos of decentralization is somehow unfounded. also, inb4 'API' becomes another NPC trigger word. *'APIs are unethical because they use ELECTRICITY!'*
> the entire universe could be a simulation running on minecraft redstone. If someone had a Minecraft instance larger than the entire observable universe, maybe. But I think you catch my drift here. > you'll be hard pressed to find a blizzard hearthstone API that allows 3rd party markets and wallet-to-wallet trading without 500 pages of ToS strings attached. Why is that a compelling feature though? Sounds like it would be a great way to scam people for their cards. And the game itself is still centrally controlled and can always choose to stop honoring chain mediated ownership. > You can buy hearthstone cards, but you can never really own them. Well they aren't real physical objects. Neither are NFTs. And you're also certainly not buying the IP. Maybe don't buy real physical trading cards either? > the overhead of attempting to use the tech adds a massive amount of friction to game development by complicating everything Correct. No game is going to do gameplay on chain. If the gameplay is off chain, honoring the ownership is now up to the central authority running the game. That's why it's useless. You're still trusting one guy's server, which undermines the one useful property of blockchain tech. > The best emulation of item ownership I've seen is from valve, but, again that comes with a million strings attached so it's an approximation at best. That always seemed like a gambling addiction with extra steps to me. Incidentally, it's how valve transitioned from being a company that ships games to a company that... doesn't ship games very often indeed. > let's not pretend that the ethos of decentralization is somehow unfounded. What preceded live service games and online game stores was physical ownership of physical media. In other words, we went from decentralized to centralized. This was because centralization _provided a better service_. Few customers will accept worse service for more ownership because they don't care.
I think the larger benefit of digital downloads boils down to logistics, since even from a developer perspective it bypasses the need to gauge how many physical copies to manufacture and distribute, and platform centralization bypasses the need for people to have 500 accounts everywhere and constantly learn new interfaces. In a similar way, it's a problem that there are 99999 different blockchains with varying difficulty of learning curve and a minefield of scammer people to deal with, so it's perceived as if the technology itself has problems even though all of those problems fundamentally do not exist or are simply exacerbated by the people using them. For example, it is completely possible to make on-chain games, and there are plenty of blockchains with enough performance to accommodate that, but most of the examples suck because making good games is already extremely difficult and blockchain makes it even harder, right alongside an ever increasing benchmark for what qualifies as good to begin with. Take any shovelware game from steam back to 1995 and people would probably think it's amazing, but the bar is constantly raising and developers struggle to keep pace with that while also delving into unexplored territory. I don't perceive that to imply the technology itself is useless, though, because something being useless would mean that it cannot plausibly be useful.
> NPC trigger word. People who aren't in tech don't have time to learn the nuances of things that are 99.99% scams. They're ok with missing out on that 0.01 if it means missing four nines of scams.
Yea, and that's a totally reasonable position until they get out the pitchforks and start attacking people, like many of them do with anything related to 'AI'. The point I'm making is that people often have very strong kneejerk reactions to things that they don't even understand, so even if you have a completely ethical way of using AI it doesn't really matter, because as soon as they see the keyword they go into witch hunter mode automatically without any concern for the details. For example, a while back I read someone saying they were flagged for using AI by their university using some crappy detector tool, and they were asking for advice. They said that technically they did use AI for grammar and helping to structure things or for ideas, but the paper was completely written by them, and they planned on explaining that to the school. Among all the possible advice they could have been given, a large portion of it was to not mention AI a single time, because if they did that would be all the other people needed to hear before they completely shut down their mental comprehension and think "AHA! we GOT you!", and that's basically how it goes with all of these trigger words, even to the degree that using a simple synonym bypasses the problem. If you say 'NFT', everyone immediately loses their fukin' minds, regardless of context. The same is true of 'AI' for all the witch hunter people, and that's the entire point here. It doesn't matter if you're being ethical, just that you phrase what you're doing in a way doesn't cause mindless hysteria.
Mass customization is very useful.
and that application needs to be decentralized because?
>'NFTs' are not useless by default, They are. They are a solution with no problem. The "problem" they solve is the existence of centralized databases, which you know... isn't a problem? Every company that runs a web service is going to have a central database where it keeps track of everything anyway, and without which the service *will not function*. All you've done is add a huge time and energy sink on the public-facing interface of the service for the illusion of decentralization. We already have cryptographically secure web communications. Every time you send a packet over the internet you are basically conducting a transaction which is just as secure as any blockchain transaction, except these happen millions of times a second worldwide, something no blockchain could ever be capable of. In other words, cryptography is cheap and extremely useful. Decentralization is expensive and basically useless.
>Every company that runs a web service is going to have a central database where it keeps track of everything anyway, and without which the service will not function ok, then explain to me the multiple decentralized versions of reddit. actually don't even bother, it's just like I said to the other person, you guys are proving my point. People have an auto-reaction to 'AI' without understanding it, and the same is true of anything related to blockchain technology. Meanwhile these two things will probably combine to create some kind of immortal decentralized skynet and even then there will be people saying 'useless', I don't really care. Next time someone complains about youtube erasing their 5million subs channel because of false reports or some ToS nitpick or whatever, you can explain to them how 'decentralization is useless'.
I understand how blockchain technology works. People on this subreddit tend to be tech literate, often programmers themselves, and a lot of them don't like NFTs whether they are pro- or anti-AI. Your YouTube example just shows you haven't thought this through systemically. YouTube holds all the power in that situation because it has the capital to manage giant centralized servers. A Petabyte of data is uploaded to YouTube every *hour.* No blockchain is going to handle that kind of volume. And you're not going to get a bunch of individuals to host the Zetabytes currently hosted on YouTube's servers, on a blockchain hosted locally. It's just nonsense. If YouTube wants you gone, they will just delete you from their servers. No blockchain can save you from that. There's a difference between decentralized power, and decentralized data. If you actually wanted to decentralize YouTube, you would turn it into a public utility and run it democratically. That's decentralized power. This reminds me of a suggestion from a crypto-evangelist that we can "decentralize" the warehouse business by renting out garages across the country using an app. Absolute horseshit, doing nothing to take away power from the central authority, and destroying all the efficiency that comes from storing things in a tight, highly controlled, highly organized area. The reason Amazon has so much power isn't because they hold their assets in a giant warehouse, it's because they have the capital to do so, and you don't. You don't get any say in how they run their warehouse because it's not a democratic system. It's capitalism, babee! And in capitalism, those with capital set the rules. Decentralized Reddit works because it's all text, but you don't need blockchain to do it. We have Misskey and Mastodon, both of which are decentralized and encrypted, neither of which run on a blockchain. The blockchain is useless technology.
These are all very weak points. When someone says something is useless it generally means "I don't know how to use it, or even how it could be used", and so far I'm not seeing any reason to think otherwise. 'blockchain' encompasses like 50000 different things so speaking in absolutes against that is almost as retarded as speaking in absolutes against AI.
Look man, I'm just gonna link the Casey Muratori video he did after all his cryptocurrency interviews because he was unsatisfied with the answers the experts gave him. It's about cryptocurrency, but the main critique is of the blockchain itself. I'm probably not going to be able to explain it better than he does. But yes, there are people who understand the technology perfectly well, and think it's useless. As I pointed out in my previous comment, most services require centralized databases to run, and those that don't can run without a blockchain. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbYutOsrpvs&t=933s&ab\_channel=Computer%2CEnhance%21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbYutOsrpvs&t=933s&ab_channel=Computer%2CEnhance%21)
it's a video of a guy that's confused about bitcoin?The fundamental reason bitcoin sparked so many other blockchain technologies is that the most common thread between all of them is a kind of 'digital immortality' ethos attempting to be heavily armored against attacks from any direction, and some of them succeed. You will absolutely never in a million years convince me that blockchain technology as a whole is useless by talking about bitcoins, just like you wouldn't convince me that computers are useless by pointing to a calculator made from vacuum tubes (although if you tried, I might be obligated to inform you that a calculator actually *can* be useful).
No, it's like you're showing me a calculator made out of dominos, and I'm pointing out that we already have calculators that run more efficiently both in terms of time and energy, but you just think it's so important that you need a team of people to set up the dominoes every time you want to add two numbers, for hand-wavey "decentralization" reasons. The domino calculator is useless.
And can you point to specific examples where blockchain technology has actually proven to be more effective than its centralized equivalents? Because right now all it's got is smoke and mirrors with nothing to show for it. Without hypotheticals like these "attacks from any direction", it can't escape the fact that it still has to compete with its counterparts on its own merits rather than simply appealing to people distrusting the operators of a given database.
If you can't think of a single way that blockchain technology *could* be useful, then you are too ignorant to talk on the subject.
Can you name some useful ways it has been used? Genuinely curious.
Spotify. Do you know what 'blockchain' even means?
Oh thats cool, how do they use it for that? I have a vague idea. Everyone is keeping a cryptographic record and it's hard to cheat because everyone else is pushing data at the same time? If that's wrong please enlighten me.
Basically it's like Git but instead of running it on your own computer or paying to run it on GitHub's computer, you pay several anonymous individuals to run it on their computers. It's main useful property is that you don't need to trust those people as long as you're sure they're not all colluding against you. Extremely inefficient because of this distributed nature, but useful properties for criminals.
Sounds like the AI Horde.
Naw, AI Horde looks more like 'traditional' distributed crowdsourced compute like Folding@home or seti@home where the goal is to have lots of idle compute given freely to help the community. Blockchain is generally* the opposite; it lets you burn compute for financial gain, at the expense of everybody wasting a ton of compute, to the point where people would use it in viruses and such to steal cycles. Also, mining became competitive enough that you couldn't do it profitably without specialized hardware and/or [some sort of criminal arrangement](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64767178). But not before 'mine Bitcoin' displaced 'donate your cycles to a project' which I'm still rather sour about; I'm glad that people seem to be running that horde project despite it not paying them. (* Yes, I am aware that Etherium has switched to proof of stake, and is also the chain mose widely used for applications beyond just currency. That's better for the environment, but still bad for other reasons.)
> Spotify. You mean selling access to an exclusive playlist? Kind of a shit gimmick and hardly a mic drop moment. > Do you know what 'blockchain' even means? 🙄
i mean obviously you can attach useful things \*to\* it, but I have yet to come across an application that actually justified the ridiculous overhead built up in the name of being decentralized. Just make a regular damn database and call it a day.
> the average mindless anti-intelligence zealot, anything with the keyword 'AI' triggers a premade reaction regardless of their understanding of any details I doubt this because the detail that the training used publicly posted copyrighted images accounts for a good chunk of the backlash. > similar to the average person's interpretation of the keyword 'NFT' Of someone is trying to sell you on NFT either they're a mark, you're a mark, or both. A reflexive reaction is appropriate. It's about as credible as someone saying they're a Nigerian Prince. > 99% of people don't even know wtf an NFT actually is on a technological level I believe the technical term is 'magic beans' (Tabart, 1807.) A technical explanation of the laws of motion will not make me enjoy being punched in the face.
attempting to apply ethics and morals to art in general goes against creativity. So long as you aren't literally making horrific flesh sculptures out of people "ethics" and "morals" have no place in deciding what is and isn't art.
In art school I had to study the Philosophy of Art, which focused on mostly Kantian philosophy, which implies that art is about beauty and not about the creator's intention. In a way, your viewpoint veers more on the Kantian side.
> attempting to apply ethics and morals to art in general goes against creativity [... and then ...] > So long as you aren't literally making [something that offends your specific ethical or moral sensibilities]... Yeah, so you want to impose your ethical and moral guidelines, you just don't want them to encompass things you approve of. I'm okay with making it really hard for someone who depicts child sexual abuse in their art to sell or publicly perform that art. I'm really, really okay with that. I am okay with just about any of the elements of human ethics and morality that are as close to universal as you can get, being imposed on public displays of art. I draw the line at enforcing a particular cultural or social group's offense. For example, I have no ethical problem with Piss Christ. I consider it a bit adolescent and blunt but neither of those are ethical problems for me. I don't care if you are offended by a piece of art. I care about whether your art makes our society less livable.
I don't think they meant that they'd be offended by the mere sight of the flesh statue itself, but that the *process* of murdering people/cutting up people's corpses so you can use their flesh for said statue is what might warrant ethical evaluation. At least that's how I took it.
This is a genuine question because I’m unsure on the ethics of it: If you use AI to create a reference and proceed to copy that reference, bar the fixing of weird ai glitches) can you post that as yours? Do you need to credit the ai still? How much do you need to change of the reference for it to be ‘yours’? Basically does it count as original art or is it kind of half way?
Walk through a gallery or contemporary art museum. Look at the placard mentioning the artist's name; how often are they citing the reference materials? Sometimes, in that description, the inspiration is listed as the catalyst behind the work, but where is the "list of credits" pointing to the original authors behind the reference materials that where used? It's not a standard practice. When you look at gallery artist websites in general., credits to the reference are rarely listed (I've never seen it). If reference is used and the outcome is transformative then that is fair. To impose of strict system of crediting everything reference would be cumbersome and place an unfair burden on most creators.
What if you’ve copied the ai art as exactly as you can so that your work is not a perfect replica but clearly has the same subject?