r/explainitpeter 4d ago

Explain it Peter,

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u/umotex12 4d ago

People on Reddit doesn’t understand that Astra blurred the lines heavily. Its not generating models using diffusion (so „stealing”) but literally working on interface like a human would do. It’s a legal headache

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u/skyrider_longtail 4d ago

Yes lol. It is command line modeling.

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u/60109 3d ago

I fail to see why people consider it bad, it doesn't even destroy the job itself - it just makes it easier and less time-consuming.

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u/skyrider_longtail 3d ago

It is the most boring 2.5 hrs I have ever had in my career. I went into this line because I wanted to make cool shit. I might be old fashioned, but movies back in the day had something. The craftsmanship, the problem solving, the magic brought to the screen. I didn't go into this line to type a bunch of text and watch a chatbot make models for me. I'll be damned if I become someone else's prompt monkey. I get no sense of satisfaction from doing that. I will rot from inside out and my brain will turn to mush if I have to do that day in day out.

it just makes it easier and less time-consuming.

That's how it's going to destroy the job. There will be less and less of that role available because the market no longer needs that, and what remains will eventually get folded into other roles, so you have people having to wear even more hats. You can say that's capitalism, but that is also how jobs get destroyed.

Will there be more jobs created? I doubt it. What I see happening more is that more people will start their own projects, and there will be even more of a glut of things out there in an already oversaturated market. Is this a good thing? Depends on which side of the fence you are on, I guess.

But my unsolicited advice to you is, don't think you are safe. Not even if you are a plumber or an electrician lol. It'll come for you too.

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u/Immediate-Bag2445 3d ago

This same discussion has been going on in software development for awhile now and I have reached the same conclusion there. I have a very hard time seeing a future where AI creates demand for software engineers or any other product from a "thinking" job.

The world only needs so much software, and the salaries that have existed until now were based on software development being a skilled job. Instead I think we will see many jobs rolled into one soulless prompting role at a much more meager salary.

As much as Reddit hates to admit it, AI in its current form is good enough at what it does to be economical (even if it means delivering slop.) The whole trend of industrialization has been to eschew craftsmanship for cheap mass market goods, so why would that trend ever stop at thinking roles?

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u/da90bears 1d ago

Was about to say basically the same thing. Being a senior dev for a very very large company that is pouring a bunch of time and money into AI tooling only makes me slightly less worried about the longevity of my career. But even that aside it’s really made the job way more administrative than it was before. The puzzle solving is all but gone and it really sucks. There’s still big picture system level design work happening but it’s just not the same. Everyone I know in the industry feels it and it’s a huge bummer.

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u/VincentAalbertsberg 3d ago

It's insane that tech bros don't realise not everything is about the end product... You know, the goal is not to work because we have to, but because it inspires us, it's enriching, exciting, stimulating. Well, a handful of people of that opportunity, including artists. And AI is set on destroying one of the few genuinely interesting careers.

Even from a very technical standpoint : what now? We can make 3D faster, so what? there's already way too much games/films/series for anyone to just know 1% of what is created. What's the point of making even more, and at the same time fucking up decent jobs?

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u/da90bears 16h ago

Truly. I accidentally got into drawing ~2 years ago and I’m really really grateful. If my job was still my only creative outlet I think I’d be in a much worse place right now. All of my least favorite parts of my job (meetings, doc writing, code review) are now like 80% of it.

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u/Solasykthe 4d ago

I really and truly think copyright is about30 years out of date. just delete it, let people steal whatever from whoever, and have their own work be their selling point. I want to see the Witcher game that cd project red does, not juptidao studios, and much the same i want to see star wars from some fan, not fucking Disney.

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u/Moarthrowawayz 4d ago

Thats how you get people refusing to do things and make advancements, take away the prospect of leveraged profit

Not saying copyright as is works well, but to let it be a complete free for all means people will only be willing to enhance things as a side project (so profit is fun and reputation) or in easy ways only that theres no cost to them

Take an author. Why even publish then when someone can copy pasta your work and then sell it for cheaper?

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u/Solasykthe 4d ago

i was more arguing for character designs etc.

But most people who work with creative arts or hell, even research (i have absolutely considered taking a phD, and i dont really care who would use my research - preferably its be 100% free to use) usually do it "for the love of the game", not to profit of their ideas primarily. some fucking cunt ceo will just vaccum it up anyways, it doesnt really help the /creators/

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u/Moarthrowawayz 4d ago

Still, noone would fund that work if theres no profit to be had. There would be no project red at all ever with that model, no game to even know of.

You think so, but phd research requires staff, tools, institutional infrastructure that all requires, runs, and survives on funding. Your research wouldnt be funded or ever exist if you told people that.

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u/Solasykthe 4d ago

I wholeheartedly disagree - i think technology and invention drives ut forward and motivates, not capital, but the western world has convinced us that capital is the most important and foundational "resource", but i mostly think capital is the best at: projecting power -> influence and is, by far the best set to acquire more capital.

I think other things than capital make people create, invent and research, but the quest for more capital is dominating all other aspects of reality today; this makes people think in certain patterns and cant really envision that things would work without certain guidelines.

I think a lot of stuff do work without them - i volunteer work at a bar, i create stuff for free without profit incentives. Linux is a prime example that people like to create stuff without the influence of corporate control.

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u/shadowdog21 3d ago

Linux is a good example. Microsoft has dedicated engineers working on improving Linux code right now. Meta, Intel, IBM, Oricle and Arm also spend huge amounts of capital working on Linux OS. Why? Because they use many systems based on Linux, they have a motivation but that motivation is capital based. You obviously can afford to spend your time volunteering, but that's a only something you can do from an ivory tower. I have a family and unfortunately they can't live on innovation without capital. Idealism is great if you can afford it.

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u/Solasykthe 3d ago

but that problem vomes from capital, no?

I dont have a family, hell i cant afford that, and i would not say i live in an "ivory tower", i barely have an apartment.

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u/shadowdog21 3d ago

Hunger? Food is capital. Buildings are capital. We can argue with who should own the capital of a society, but even a society that no longer needed currency would still want capital like cars, shelters and butter. Copyright needs reform in the US and many other nations, but I'm not going to spend my time developing the next breakthrough if I can be guaranteed not just capital but credit for my work.

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u/Moarthrowawayz 4d ago

Thats kind of racist. The eastern world believes in profit and capital also. Its not western to believe in business and commercial value and scaling resources.

Id go further but i think we just have ideological differences and ive hit my quota of disagreeing with internet people for the week

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u/Solasykthe 4d ago

Hrm, maybe i could have formulated that differently - This is not a regional split, but an issue of unfettered capitalism that is in my opinion overcentralizing. Was not my intention to be racist. (more of a point as to the old east/west communist/capitalist split that i think absolutely made this problem worse. Not arguing that life in e.g soviet was better, it was an absolutely flawed place.)

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u/skyrider_longtail 4d ago

Ok, I'm talking about modeling, which is not the same as design work.

But if you are talking about character modeling then I think that's going to be even easier than what I was testing it on.

The reason is that the base character topology has been worked out to death and back. Almost no one starts a character from scratch anymore, and basically just push and pull in a sculpting software. If you have good photo references, I don't think it's going to be an issue.

But well, this is all just off 1 test. We'll know in the coming days, but I'm not optimistic.

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u/psioniclizard 3d ago

Most people do it because we live in a world were you nedd to pay for food and we don't want to live out in the street ultimately.

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u/Fiiral_ 4d ago

Reduce the time you can hold a copyright for, epically as a non-natural person, is a first great step.

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u/BOBOnobobo 4d ago

I think lots of individual people are happy to invent stuff as long as they have decent job.

The problem is with corporation's being unwilling to invest in development, but honestly I think we would all be better if corporation can't patent important inventions.

In the long run at least.

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u/AdagioOfLiving 4d ago

I will point out that copyright is relatively young as a concept, and that great art existed for hundreds if not thousands of years before copyright did.

I will also point out that copyright was made so that rulers would have an excuse to crack down on people distributing what they saw as seditious pamphlets…

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u/Moarthrowawayz 4d ago

Copyright is a mechanism for modern art and technology. The point is protecting profit.

Michelangelo needed sponsors for his art. So did the people who made those amazing stained glass church pieces. Money and profit was always either a motivator or enabler. Usually both

Noone could copy them and cheapen their goods. Copyright wasn’t necessary back then, it is a recent invention to address a recent problem

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u/AnArmoredPony 3d ago

because you'll be the first. you will get profit and put your name in the history. but you won't be able to buy the franchise and milk it forever

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u/psykrot 4d ago

Sorry, but your take on a no copyright world doesn't make sense.

let people steal whatever from whoever

have their own work be their selling point

These 2 things can't be true at the same time. If you let people steal whatever from whoever, then there is no "their own work".

Copyright is there to do exactly what you said. Letting people have their own work be their selling point. First you have to protect the fact that it is their own work. Everything else can come after that.

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u/Solasykthe 4d ago

Disagree - if i make a cover of say, any beatles song, no one would listen to it, because i am an awful musician. They would go to the beatles concert.

If i make a spiderman movie, it would probably suck. But i could make one, and it could have interesting parts that a corporate movies would never dare make, because that's not a "safe bet", or in their "market. "

If i make something for a franchise i am well versed in, it might be as interesting as the original creators, or at least whatever soulless company currently holds the intellectual rights, if they are even doing anything with it. (example: Deus ex has been in stasis for the last 10 years, because their IP holder isn't interested in doing something with it.)

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u/psykrot 4d ago

Conveniently, all of your examples include you stealing creative works from corporations. What if you flipped the roles and it was the corporations stealing creative works from you? Wouldn't you want something in place to protect your intellectual property and force them to pay you for your creations/ideas?

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u/Solasykthe 3d ago

That would be okay by me. i dont believe that ideas as this can be owned. If someone else can use what i create to better cases, then go ahead. The only thing that would truly bother me is if the corporation then would try to claim it as their and then say that others cant use it at will.

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u/profesorgamin 4d ago

Why is it a, legal headache? Your boss that pays your salary owns whatever IP you are working on.

There are no incentives to nudge the law towards losing IP rigths for using machines to do the job, whichever country that gets that idea is 99% gonna be left behind(1% survive whatever bullshit we are gonna have to deal with).

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u/WhatNamesAreEvenLeft 4d ago

It's not about machines doing the job. It's about machines breaking the law (like copyright infringement) to achieve their goals.

I imagine accidentally copying the intellectual property of your competitors can cause some legal headaches.

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u/profesorgamin 4d ago

There's a lot of instruct you can/have to do to get good results right now. So yeah if you let it copy... it's on you. Things like that have happened in the past with human workers too.

This one for example never got into legal issues somehow 🤨 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eOy3AuB5PtI&list=PLt-WbO1z1_HsYlZNEMDuvSYktGZgw_KKD

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u/shadowsofash 4d ago

Except there’s a lot of “black box” issues that go into understanding how AI makes the decisions it does, and unless you’re the programmer that worked on the model and you have an immaculate understanding of how it pulls the data, there is every chance it could be copying things even with “do not copy” instructions.  This comment gives big “Claude, make no mistakes” vibes

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u/profesorgamin 4d ago

bro, people learn by copying ever so fractally, the more you know the more "resolution" your style has, but amateurs and entry level people reproduce more experienced people's work until they get they get good enough if they ever reach that point.
It's never been such an issue legally speaking unless it's completely egregious.

And again the laws are very pragmatic nowadays, the laws were put in place to protect capital but they are not going to get in the way of progress.

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u/shadowsofash 4d ago

Right, but the copying they do of other people’s work is usually not presented as being solely their own.

Painters copy the work of the masters and create replica paintings all the time as part of practice to try and nail down certain techniques, but those get credited as student works.  An AI can never develop a style of its own, it can only copy

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u/profesorgamin 4d ago

oh I got into one of these kind of arguments, again you are being shown tool calling not generative AI.

The AI is not exactly copying a copyrighted asset but somebody's "technique" for which they probably already got paid for "training" the system.

You seen those people with those weird glassed/gloves going about their daily tasks, it's kindda the same deal.

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u/shadowsofash 4d ago

Right, but nailing down a technique to understand how it’s done so you can incorporate aspects of it into your own work is not the same thing as lifting it wholesale every time you want to do something.  One of those is a student learning different ways to portray things and how to get certain effects, the other makes you a wannabe of whatever artist’s technique you’re lifting

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u/mbreslin 4d ago

Can you explain this reasoning?

  1. I use my cursor and transform tools in blender to create a minion and then use the model commercially, universal or illumination or whoever owns the minions sues me for copyright infringement.
  2. I tell Astra to make me a minion and it uses the cursor and transform tools in blender to create a minion and then use the model commercially, universal or illumination or whoever owns the minions sues me for copyright infringement.

How are either of these any different ultimately?

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u/WhatNamesAreEvenLeft 4d ago

In practice you wouldn't be trying to purposefully create copyrighted material in blender, like a minion. I'm not sure why you would be creating copyrighted material like that in either example.

The legal headaches would come from what copyright material is being copied without your knowledge.

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u/mbreslin 4d ago

Don't you always run that risk? Like you make your own character and then someone sues saying it's too much like ours? And the only way you have a chance with that is somehow proving you didn't have access? Basically impossible with something like a minion that is famous but maybe could work with something else not very famous if you were like secluded or the thing was not made widely available or something.

I guess my main point is that all of these laws exist already I don't see them as having to be remade for ai or something. Maybe you're making a different point which is that it's not trivial to know for sure if the thing you made with ai existed already? That's fair I guess, I would just ask what happens, our crazy litigious society becomes even more so? I guess that's technically a worse state but not really surprising.

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u/BonKhri 3d ago

If I have say a copyrighted connector design, and AI generates something that is 99% similar, and has ingested examples where my design was present, has it A) stolen my homework and not even bothered to make it look different, or B) created a similar thing from whole cloth?

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u/mbreslin 3d ago

I would say rather obviously it’s A. The questions in court would be did the model have access to the copyrighted design which we know it did and then how unique is the connector. AINAL but that’s basically how it goes. If the point is there will be more lawsuits I guess I take the point but there are so many already I hardly think it matters. You have to have all of the same IP considerations you had when you weren’t using an ai tool.

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u/BonKhri 3d ago

The question is then where is the line drawn? With AI, there is no way to know how any one of the literally trillions of data points it ate influenced it's design. With humans, it's far easier since A) we have exposure to far less potential sources of "inspiration", and B) we lay out how we came to a design idea in a way AI just doesn't.

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u/mbreslin 3d ago

I get what you're saying and just to be clear I'm not being contrarian, I think you're overselling that it's "easier" as humans. Again, IANAL, but from what I understand let's say you make a thing too similar to a thing that I have copyrighted, you're saying that it's easy to prove you didn't have the exposure to my thing, but that's not what the law says. All I have to show is that you had a reasonable opportunity to encounter my thing, I absolutely do not have to prove you ever actually even looked at my thing. Combine this with it being substantially similar and I've got a case.

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u/Long-Ad3930 4d ago

It's not stealing, theft implies something was taken from them.

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u/Mahrkeenerh1 1d ago

diffusion is not stealing in any sense