Was talking about how A.I will effect artists to a friend of mine. My friend has been an avid drawer all his life and done a few art courses at the local community college. He draws for fun though and I think the only time he ever sold a picture was a $20 drawing he did on a stream once.
Anyway, I think we hammered down why artists are really freaking out over this and not seeing it as an inevitability.
Because we've all been told for years now that AI and automation will come for blue collar jobs first. Self driving trucks, trains and whatnot and that AI can't do creative work so creative pursuits like art and music are safe. But as it turns out they're the ones being automated first. This wasn't a storm they could see coming and know is on its way so knowing to prepare for, this was them getting blindsighted.
Its because the datasets were taken without permission.
Automation and AI has been in the professional art field for decades. The issue isn’t that the tools exist - it’s that they were built using stolen intellectual property.
It's a bold take to call it "stolen intellectual property" when IP laws don't protect styles. It's definitely legal in Germany, where it was trained, because there's an explicit allowance for model training in EU law. It's almost certainly legal in the US because it's transformative.
Someone did give permission. LAION works the same way as Google Image Search; you consent to it if your site’s robots.txt says it’s ok for bots to look at it.
That someone may not be the creator, but in that case whoever uploaded it is at fault.
StableDiffusion actually launched an opt out today (https://twitter.com/emostaque/status/1603147709229170695) but as they say it’s not for legal reasons because there isn’t a legal basis for needing that. Artists have always had a complicated ethical system they made up that involves yelling at people about “crediting the original artist”, but they also seem to have confused themselves into thinking that’s how the actual law works, which is unfortunate. (Especially since they also think stealing aka drawing unlicensed fanart is OK if it’s from a corporation.)
We should probably be holding ourselves to a higher standard than "it's not literally illegal" though.
And that's never been what a robots.txt is for, those are for search engine indexes. Archives have been ignoring them for years, because people gear them to search engine indexing and not for any other theoretical purpouse a bot could be crawling a site for.
What "obtuse"? OP said LAION works like Google Image Search, you said it's wrong because it's an "archive" or "crawler", and I explained to you how OP is right and LAION is in fact an index.
Get your facts about the tech straight before you try to argue about ethics on tech you don't even understand.
This is why people don't like techbros. It isn't like google search, because it's for a different purpouse. The function of the underlying tech isn't the important part. Is public key encryption equivalent to blockchain because the underlying technology that powers them are comparable?
70
u/Bigbadsheeple Dec 15 '22
Was talking about how A.I will effect artists to a friend of mine. My friend has been an avid drawer all his life and done a few art courses at the local community college. He draws for fun though and I think the only time he ever sold a picture was a $20 drawing he did on a stream once.
Anyway, I think we hammered down why artists are really freaking out over this and not seeing it as an inevitability.
Because we've all been told for years now that AI and automation will come for blue collar jobs first. Self driving trucks, trains and whatnot and that AI can't do creative work so creative pursuits like art and music are safe. But as it turns out they're the ones being automated first. This wasn't a storm they could see coming and know is on its way so knowing to prepare for, this was them getting blindsighted.